Code of Conduct: Consultation

Committee on Standards

We now come to the Select Committee statement. Chris Bryant will speak on his subject for up to 10 minutes, during which no interventions may be taken. At the conclusion of his statement, I will call Members to put questions on the subject of the statement, and call Mr Bryant to respond to these in turn. The Front Benchers may take part in questioning. I call the Chair of the Committee on Standards.

I do not want to be too pious about it, but the House has a set of rules and seeks to enforce them, first, because all Members aspire to a set of values and principles, and because the public have a right to expect that all Members abide by the highest possible standards in public life. The Committee on Standards has been reviewing these rules for some time. It started doing so in both the 2015 and 2017 Parliaments, but the general elections cut short that work. We have continued to work on it during this Parliament and have had the benefit of some members who have been on the Committee much longer than I have, including some of the lay members, in putting together the report that we compiled last week.

Our report has recommendations that fall into two main sections: suggested changes to the substance of the rules; and questions about the process whereby the rules are enforced and adjudicated. On the substance, we are recommending the following: first, an outright ban on any Member acting as a paid parliamentary adviser, consultant or strategist, which was a recommendation of the 2018 Committee on Standards in Public Life report on Members’ outside interests; secondly, the introduction of a new requirement that a Member must have a written contract for any outside work that makes it explicit that their duties cannot include lobbying Ministers, Members or public officials, or providing advice about how to lobby or influence Parliament, and that their employer will give them an undertaking not to ask them to do so; and thirdly, clarification of the criteria for the “serious wrong” exemption in the lobbying rules, to make clearer the risks of conflicts of interest and to put an end to this being used as a loophole.

Next, we propose a doubling of the six-month limit on reward or consideration restrictions in the lobbying rules to 12 months. Members will still be able to release themselves immediately from the restrictions by repaying any sums received in the relevant period if they wish to do so. In order to encourage Members to seek expert advice before acting, the Committee proposes a new “safe harbour” provision whereby Members cannot be found in breach of the rules if they sought and followed the advice of the House of Commons Registrar. This ensures that Members who seek advice from the Registrar or the House officials and follow the rules accordingly cannot accidentally find themselves in breach of the code of conduct.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his statement, for his calm chairmanship of the Committee through a particularly difficult period, and for the consensual way that he chairs the Committee. Does he agree that it is really now time for some calm deliberation? Although this was a unanimously agreed report, by no means are all the proposals in it unanimously supported by all the members of the Committee. They are proposals for consultation, and he is right to invite evidence. Will he join me in drawing attention to the very useful summary of issues that is on the Committee’s website? Perhaps we should circulate that as a link to all Members.

Does the hon. Gentleman recall that we set out to try to simplify the code of conduct? Does he think we are succeeding in simplifying? Or, by adding more, are we perhaps being drawn dangerously into a zero-sum game, where rules beget rules and more rules beget more rules in an effort to try to clarify, and in fact making it more complicated? I particularly draw attention to section 8 of the report, on “Training, advice and promotion”. That is nothing to do with the enforcement of the code but is about promoting understanding of the purpose of the code and how we can more easily comply with the spirit of the code and avoid falling foul of the rules. What does he think we should do next to pursue that part of our thinking?

I am grateful for the work that the hon. Gentleman has done on the Committee. It is right that we take our time to get this right, rather than rush at it like a bull at a gate, because there could be all sorts of unintended consequences, including from some of the recommendations we have come up with. We are very happy to listen. We will be circulating the consultation document to all Members, which I hope will prompt lots more Members to take part in the consultation. The worst thing of all would be that we change the rules and then everyone says next September, “Oh, I did not know we were doing that.” We want to ensure that people can understand them.

On simplification, our rules are quite complex, and Members are caught by lots of different sets of rules, as we lay out in the report, including those of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority and the Electoral Commission. I am aware that sometimes Members are advised on the use of stationery by a House official, because it is a House responsibility, but that may not be the eventual decision of the commissioner. That is unfair to a Member, so that is why we are introducing the safe harbour provision, which would mean that if someone has taken advice and followed the advice, then fair do’s; they cannot be found guilty of breaching the rules. However, I spent last weekend reading the House of Representatives code of conduct. It is 467 pages long. I think we have done well that ours is not quite as long as theirs.

The report considers interests and voting, but only in the context of a Member’s financial interests and the policy generally. It does not consider whether Members should vote on motions directly relating to them, such as reports on breaches of the code of conduct itself. I am aware that there is a convention that Members should not vote, but that was breached last month by Mr Paterson. I thank the Chair and the Committee for their work in this regard, but can the hon. Gentleman advise me what consideration the Committee has given to putting that convention on a statutory footing within the code of conduct?

I am not sure whether the hon. Member means a statutory footing, as in putting it in a piece of statute law. It might be a relevant change to Standing Orders. If she wants to make that recommendation to our Committee, I am sure we would listen to it.

On the issue of natural justice and a fair hearing, as I have said several times recently, all Members of the House, because of article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1689, are treated differently from every other citizen in the country. I welcome the consultation, but in regard to paragraphs 196, 243 and 244 of the report, will the Chairman accept that there must be full and proper consultation before any judicial figure is appointed, and therefore before his or her report comes about? Otherwise, we will have a prejudgment on the question of fairness, article 6 and all that goes with it and the issue of a fair trial with Members. The person in question must be approved by the House by resolution, and the House must not be bounced.

No, I disagree with the hon. Member. There is an issue about appeals, but it is not as simple as he would like to have us suppose. At the moment, a Member who has been found in breach of the rules by the commissioner can effectively appeal to our Committee. They can appeal on any basis whatever—no formal ground of appeal needs to be advanced. We might go to a more formal process, but that might limit a Member’s right to appeal; they might be allowed to appeal only on certain fixed grounds, as happens in most other appellate bodies. Members might think that that ended up leaving them in a worse position, rather than a better one. It is for our Committee to decide who we appoint to advise us. That is the standard way in which every Select Committee of the House works. If the person we are thinking of and are trying to secure ends up taking up the post, I am sure the hon. Member will be happy with the appointment.

I noted that in presenting the report, the Chair of the Committee suggested that it would be useful to have a debate on the issue early in the new year. I wonder if the Leader of the House could give us clarification about whether the Government are intending to provide time for that or whether it is anticipated that the Chair of the Committee will have to apply to the Backbench Business Committee for such a debate. If that is the case, I ask the Chair of the Committee to do so, so we can facilitate that if the Government provide us with time.

To be honest, I think the debate should be in Government time for the simple reason that, when we eventually get to a set of motions, they will have to be tabled by the Government. It would make far more sense for it to take place in Government time rather than Backbench Business time. I note that, thus far, there have been moments when the Government have been very involved in the debate and others when they have wanted to withdraw. I ask the Leader of the House whether it is possible to have a debate in Government time early in the new year. The whole Committee would be grateful for that.

I have to say that I disagree with the last remark of the Chair of the Committee, because it is clearly a House matter, so it would be better coming from the Backbench Business Committee.

I certainly welcome the proposal that the advice given is firm advice, even if the advice is wrong and is acted on. That would be a sensible safeguard.

The one area about which I am concerned is the right of appeal. I think there should be an independent right of appeal at the end of the process. In 95% or 98% of referrals, when the Committee makes its decision, the Member accepts it and we move forward, but on the rare occasions when the Member feels badly done by, there should be, as in other organisations, a right of appeal to a completely independent organisation. I wonder whether the Chair of the Committee would take that view on board in the consultation, because it is probably the only bit that I disagree with.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for agreeing with nearly all of it. Personally, and I think this is true for the rest of the Committee, I do not have a final fixed view on how we should implement appeals. The issue will arise, however, that one of the available sanctions is suspension from the House—or expulsion, for that matter—and historically, it has been the House’s view that that has to be a decision of the House rather than of any separate body. That is why, even in ICGS cases on sexual harassment and bullying, where there is an appeals process and the whole process goes through an independent expert panel, the final decision is none the less taken in the House. The hon. Gentleman knows—I think he voted for my amendment—that the motion comes straight from the IEP to the House and is voted through without amendment or debate. That is my only caveat to what he has said about appeals.

I thank my right hon. Friend for the work that he and his Committee are doing to uphold Parliament’s reputation. At present, Ministers do not have to declare gifts or hospitality received in their ministerial capacity, whereas we MPs are required to. Will he comment on that distinction, which appears perverse to most of our constituents?

Incidentally, I am not right honourable, but my hon. Friend makes an important point. I have a view about that; I am not sure whether it will end up being the settled view of the House. It seems illogical to me that two Members of the House, one of whom is a Minister, could be wined and dined at Wimbledon on a ticket that costs £2,500, then the Minister does not have to register that with the House and never has to register its value, even though they might be the Minister who makes decisions about tennis funding in the UK, whereas the Member who is not a Minister has to register it within 28 days. It seems perverse, and it is difficult for members of the public, who might want to see all the information about an individual MP in one place.

May I refer the Chairman to paragraph 58 on page 19 of the report? I take the point he has made very clearly that these are proposals for consultation and could be changed. However, the paragraph says:

“We therefore support the addition to the Code of a rule similar to those adopted by the Welsh Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assembly, making it an investigable breach of the Code for a Member to subject anyone to unreasonable and excessive personal attack in any medium”,

which presumably includes the Chamber and Select Committees. [Interruption.] Well, if we read it literally, that is how we would interpret it.

Let me give the Chairman a quick scenario. In a Select Committee, a Member is pressing a witness, maybe about some Government procurement programme that has gone horribly wrong, and they are reluctant to answer. The member of the Committee, doing their job, presses them harder, and the witness says, “I’m sorry, but I regard your behaviour as an unreasonable and excessive personal attack, and if you continue this line of questioning I’m going to report you to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.” To take another example—this is important, Madam Deputy Speaker—Member A and Member B have a heated disagreement in the Chamber, and someone watching on television writes to the commissioner and says, “I think A made an excessive personal attack on B, and I want you to investigate it.”

The point is that this paragraph seriously impinges on article 9 of the Bill of Rights, if we take it literally, so here is my consultation submission early on: this is actually dangerous, and it should not appear in the final version.