That, notwithstanding the practice of this House relating to questions already decided in the same Session, this House:
(1) rescinds the resolution and order of 3 November 2021 relating to the Third Report of the Committee on Standards (HC 797) and the appointment of a new select committee;
(2) approves the Third Report of the Committee on Standards (HC 797); and
(3) notes that Mr Owen Paterson is no longer a Member of this House.
I have listened carefully to the views expressed since the debate and decision on 3 November, and I make it clear that Members of Parliament must uphold the highest standards in public life. We expect all Members to abide by the prevailing rules of conduct. Paid lobbying is wrong and Members found guilty of it should pay the necessary penalties. Our standards system must function robustly and fairly to support this so that it commands the confidence of Members and the general public.
The Government support the principle of an additional right to appeal in the standards system in the House of Commons and for that potential reform to be explored on a cross-party basis.
What happened a couple of weeks ago was an extraordinary failure of moral leadership and, for the first time, it has given rise in the minds of many to serious questions about the character of this Government. With hindsight, why did the Leader of the House and his right hon. Friends not recognise the brazen wrongdoing of their colleague?
I think the simple answer—[Interruption.] No, I think the heckle from the right hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) is unfair and unkind. It was simply that the tragedy that afflicted Mr Paterson coloured and clouded our judgment, and my judgment, incorrectly. It is as simple and as sad as that.
The Back-Bench amendment that we supported was intended to facilitate the exploration, on a cross-party basis, of the standards system, with a time-limited, ad hoc Committee. However, I regret that the amendment conflated an individual case with more general concerns. That was a mistake. Crucially, the amendment did not carry cross-party support, which is why we have changed our approach.
The Government fully recognise the role of the Committee on Standards in ensuring that the code of conduct reflects and fosters the highest standards of public life. I would like to thank all the Committee members and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards for their service. We await the Committee’s report on the code of conduct with interest. The Committee performs an important role in identifying opportunities to improve the standards system, and I note that the Chairman, the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), has made a recent, and helpful, commitment to commission a senior judicial figure to advise on possible changes to the process.
I assure all right hon. and hon. Members that I am always willing to discuss this matter further, and I hope to work with Opposition Members constructively on this issue. We all have the best interests of the House at heart and I hope that, setting aside the previous debate, we will work well together in the weeks ahead.
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for facilitating this debate. [Laughter.] On 3 November, he said that the concerns expressed about the individual case in question included:
“the lack of examination of witnesses”—
of whom there were 17—
“the interpretation of the rules relating to whistleblowing…the application of aggravating factors; and the absence of the right of appeal.”—[Official Report, 3 November 2021; Vol. 702, c. 939.]
With regard to the first three of those, what is my right hon. Friend’s current view in relation to that particular case?
First, the House will always have a debate when it wants to have a debate; that is how our procedures work. They are extremely straightforward and ensure that right hon. and hon. Members can come to this House and make objections, if they so wish, to have subjects debated on the Floor of the House—
I will not give way, because I am trying to answer my hon. Friend. I have already covered his point about last week’s debate: we made the mistake of conflating the two issues of the individual case with the general system, and that did not have cross-party support. That is why the Government have committed to working on a cross-party basis to find and grasp opportunities to improve the system. I will be listening carefully to the insights of Members during this debate. I commend the motion to the House.
Where to start, Mr Speaker? There must be many a Government MP scratching their head today and asking—with reference to the greatest pop star and songwriter of all time after Schubert—“How did I get here?” I am afraid the Leader of the House still seems to have no answer to David Byrne’s eternal question; allow me to assist. I could suggest a few good books on parliamentary process, or maybe a trip to the Table Office—the Leader of the House, the Prime Minister and perhaps even the Government Chief Whip could do with a bit of revision. I could point them towards some party planners in Bristol who could perhaps help them to learn the basics of how to turn some beer and some crisps into a festivity in a brewery.
When the Leader of the House opened the debate some 13 days ago on what should have been a straightforward motion to approve a Standards Committee report, like the one we now have before us, he used his lengthy speech from the Dispatch Box not really to move the motion but instead to propose a Back-Bench amendment that tore through his own motion and, more importantly, tore through the standards process right in the middle of a live case. The Leader of the House talks of conflation; as he sat down, was he fatigued? Were his fingers in his ears? I do not think so. Had he mastered the art of dozing off while appearing conscious? What explanation can there be for his plaintive lament the very next day, in the days after, and even today in his podcast, that it was a pity that the issues of changing the standards process and the live case had become conflated? It was literally him doing the conflating.
I understand that the Leader of the House might not hang on my every word, but why did he not heed the wise counsel of the Chair of the Standards Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant); of his own former Chief Whip, the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper); of the Father of the House, the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley); and of any number of others? We all warned the Leader of the House against the dangers of conflation. He was warned, yet conflate he did. He heeded none of the warnings as he led the Prime Minister’s men and women up to the top of the hill and then left them there.
Mr Speaker, standards matter. Scrutiny matters. An independent system to hold everyone in public life to account matters. Standards should not be seen or treated as an irksome bother that you get your mates to change when you are found out. Standards should not be seen as something to be feared, or something to be treated with such distain, incompetence and total absence of leadership, as we have seen from this sorry Government over this sorry affair. To anyone who really loves democracy, standards are the bedrock of everything we do—everything. Once more, it seems I have to remind the Leader of the House that the Nolan principles are selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and, finally, leadership.
For democracy to work—for it to be trusted—those values have to be not only integrated into our political system but celebrated and welcomed. No MP must be for hire—not one. Standards should be the guiding light of every day in this place; a frame around what we do; a filter to sift out what must not be done from what must be done; something we demand from ourselves and each other; and something we expect our staff to work to and to hold us to. When our constituents challenge us to live up to these standards, we should be proud that our democracy is working so well that they can do that. How have we got to the point where the Prime Minister has to clarify that the UK is not a corrupt country? How did we get here? How did we get here?!
Let us keep the upward trajectory, started in 1695—I would have thought that the right hon. Gentleman might have appreciated that, or that he did appreciate that—making our standards stronger, our systems of accountability more effective, not weakening them as the Government tried to do with, I am afraid to say, the assistance of the Leader of the House. I am glad that the Leader of the House recognises that it was a mistake, but I ask him again if he will apologise to this House.
I hope that this will be the last opportunity for this House to do the right thing and accept the report of the Committee on Standards on Owen Paterson. I trust that no Member of this House is thinking of doing anything other than supporting the motion that has been moved by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House. Passing this motion will be a step in the right direction, but it will not undo the damage that has been done by the vote of 3 November. Let us be clear: this is not a party political issue. Damage has been done to all Members of Parliament and to Parliament as a whole.
I read the report of the Committee on Standards into Owen Paterson. I believe that the conclusion was clear and fair: Owen Paterson broke the rules on paid advocacy. The attempt by right hon. and hon. Members of this House, aided and abetted by the Government under cover of reform of the process, effectively to clear his name was misplaced, ill-judged and just plain wrong.
I hope the hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I take no interventions. I wish to make my limited points.
In this place, we set rules for people through the laws that we pass. We expect people to obey those rules. We also set rules for our own behaviour as Members of Parliament and we have a right to expect each and every one of us to obey those rules. Sometimes mistakes will be made inadvertently, but the process of independent investigation and a Committee set up by this House with lay members should be able to differentiate those cases and to deal with them.
It has been suggested that, as a result of what happened on 3 November, the rules need to change. I do hope that the Government will be looking urgently and seriously at the 2018 proposals from the Committee on Standards in Public Life. I do not think that they quite reflect the motion that the Opposition are putting to the House tomorrow, but they do suggest a clarification and a tightening up of the rules on MPs’ outside interests. It would be a mistake to think that, because someone broke the rules, the rules were wrong. The rule on paid advocacy is a long-standing one. The problem came because there was an attempt to effectively let off a then Member of the House, and that flew in the face of the rules on paid advocacy and in the face of the processes established by this House.
It has also been suggested, as a result of what happened on 3 November, that there are questions about the role of MPs. We should not conflate or confuse those two issues. The first is about ensuring that no company or individual can gain an unfair advantage by paying a Member of Parliament to advocate on their behalf. That is a matter for the code of conduct of Members of this House and the rules of this House. The second is an issue of the service that MPs give to their constituents, and that is a matter for their electorate. Damage has been done to this House. We can start to repair that damage by accepting the report of the Committee on Standards, and I urge every Member of this House to support that motion.
Well, that worked out well, didn’t it? What an absolute and utter disaster. We have seen the Leader of the House standing there, with no apology, no contrition, and no ability to let it sink in just how bad things are. The last place that he wanted to be today was at the Dispatch Box doing exactly the opposite of what he did two weeks ago and saying everything that he did not say when he presented that motion. The Government were doing everything possible yesterday to get to 10 o’clock so that this debate would not be had, only to be holed by the hon. Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) with the word “object”—best laid plans and all that. What we have is another day of this, another day of headlines, and another day of examining Tory sleaze.
What has happened in those 13 days since the Leader of the House was last at the Dispatch Box? We know that public trust in this Government is now at an all-time low. Their inboxes have been swamped by messages from furious constituents demanding to know what they are going to do about all of this. Day after day, we have been waking up to endless Tory sleaze stories in the national newspapers. Companies are now dispensing with the services of Tory MPs in these lucrative second jobs because of the stink that has been created by all of this, and the Tories have lost their lead in the opinion polls. Things could not actually be worse for them. They would face losing their seats if a general election were called tomorrow, and they have the Leader of the House to thank for their current sorry predicament.
This little plan to save their pal was hatched between the Leader of the House and the Government Chief Whip, and backed enthusiastically by the Prime Minister. The Leader of the House is supposed to be the clever one. It is he who has the Eton education and the millions in the Cayman Islands. This is all on him, and he is responsible for this mess. Let us remind ourselves of what he said 13 days ago. He was so passionate in his defence of his good friend Owen Paterson that he even invoked one of his favourite Latin phrases. “Let justice be done though the heavens fall,” he extolled in this House in an almost Atticus Finch-like defence of his good friend—his good friend unfairly maligned and maltreated by this House—who had just pocketed a cool half a million pounds and been found to have broken our rules in a consistent and egregious manner. Now the Leader of the House is here doing the exact opposite. If he had even any sense of dignity, if he had a smidgeon of self-respect, he would be long gone. People do not usually survive something like this. They do not survive a story lasting 13 days. He has defied the laws of political science and it is amazing that we find him at the Dispatch Box today.
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Then came the Government’s screeching U-turn, which the Leader of the House announced the next day at business questions. What followed was yet more chaos. The amended motion is still in place. The motion before us today should have gone through last night but was blocked by a single voice, for reasons that remain a mystery to me but that we may hear shortly. Now, here we are, debating this motion.
When the Leader of the House was asked at business questions how the sham Committee that was included in the messed-up motion, with a named Chair—quite inappropriate—would operate with no funding or cross-party support, I seem to recall that he waved his hands at me and tried to imply that we had not been listening to his words. But we had, and answer came there none.
Absurdly, the Government then resisted the motion suggested by my hon. Friend the Chair of the Standards Committee, as they resisted the urging from me and, no doubt, from others. They could have laid that motion there and then, last Monday, to rectify the mess that they had not just made but quite improperly whipped for, given that this is a House matter.
The motion finally appeared among the remaining orders last night, on a “nod or nothing” basis. I confess, Mr Speaker, that even I was surprised by the chaos last night, as it descended into Chamber farce. I really thought that the Government, having admitted their mistake and squirrelled away the remedy in a late-night, no-debate motion, would surely have made sure that no one was going to mess it up for them again. But oh how wrong I was. To continue the Talking Heads references, this is not my beautiful House. This Government cannot sweep this under the rug. The Leader of the House has now apologised in his podcast, but will he also apologise to the House for the damage that has been done to the reputation of Parliament by this sorry affair?
Yesterday, the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy rightly sent an apology to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards—the independent standards commissioner—for his outrageous comments when sent out on the morning media round to be the Government apologist for bad behaviour. Which hapless Minister are they going to send out next time? Will it once again be the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who was also sent out to describe all this as a
“Westminster storm in a teacup”?
If it is a Westminster storm in a teacup, it must be a very big teacup, because here we are—
I also ask the Leader of the House: when will the Government bring forward, or respond to, the 2018 recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life on MPs’ outside interests? If he has read that report, which I am sure he has, will he be backing Labour’s motion tomorrow? That motion is based on the part of the standards report on banning MPs from taking political strategy, analyst and consultancy jobs—I got the wording slightly wrong there, but, basically, we are talking about paid directorships and lobbying jobs that MPs should not be doing. The Government must accept the recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which was set up after a different Tory scandal, to strengthen the system. They must support the current inquiry into the MPs’ code of conduct, which our Standards Committee is in the middle of and, in fact, shortly to report on. The Government should only ever be in the business of updating and strengthening our system. We should never be content for the public to look at us wearily and conclude, thanks to the cynical actions of a very few, that we do not have standards, when we do.
Finally, we should never have been put in this position, but we were by those on the Government Benches, and now they cannot even clear up after themselves. We can now, today—and I hope that we do—end this particular sorry mess of a motion and take it off the books by voting through the one in front of us, mercifully unamended, as it should have been 13 days ago, if only the Leader of the House had been listening.
Let us remind ourselves what we are actually doing today. We are rescinding a Committee that the Government whipped in order to achieve a kangaroo court Committee of corruption that had a Tory majority and a Tory Chair. They did not like the result of our existing Standards Committee, so not only did they set aside its finding, they actually decided to replace the Committee itself. They are so arrogant and have such a sense of entitlement that they thought they would get away with it, and they would have got away with it if it was not for those pesky constituents.