Bring in points-based honours to end donor rows, says sleaze tsar

THE anti-corruption tsar has called for a points-based honours system, to sever the perceived link between political donations and peerages.

John Penrose proposes an overhaul of the regime so that peerages, titles and other awards are clearly distributed based on “talent, ability and hard work” rather than “who you knew, where you went to school or how much you donated to a political party”.

Mr Penrose’s intervention follows sleaze claims over an alleged link between donations to the Conservatives and peerages.

The MP, made the anti-corruption champion in 2019, described the current system as “murky and old-fashioned”, calling for it to be replaced with an annual “UK talent list” in which published criteria would be used to score candidates for honours.

“It wouldn’t include points for donations to any political party, so it would be crystal-clear that anyone getting an honour had earned it for something else, and their donations couldn’t have made a difference,” he said.

The proposal forms part of Poverty Trapped, a policy paper being published by Mr Penrose this week. It also warns that childcare is “some of the least-affordable in the developed world” and calls for an independent review of regulations leading to higher costs in the sector.

The review should be tasked with “designing out costs” to below the average of developed countries, “while still delivering a safe and enriching level of service”, Mr Penrose writes. Officials are examining the possibility of changing current rules so staff can supervise more children.

Setting out how a points-based honours system would work, he states: “The top teachers, for example, might be the ones who had successfully run Britain’s largest or most-improved schools for the longest time.

“The top businesspeople could be those who had either run the largest or fastest-growing companies for many years, or the entrepreneurs who had created the most wealth from scratch.

“Once the new and fairer scoring system was in place and the UK Talent List was public, the top few names in each area would become Lords and Ladies.

The slightly-larger next group below them would become Knights and Dames. The still-larger group below them would get OBEs, CBEs or MBEs.