Members of Parliament: Risk-based Exclusion

Before we start the debate, I wish to say something about references to other Members. This issue understandably generates strong feelings, but may I remind the House of the words of Erskine May?

“Good temper and moderation are the characteristics of parliamentary language.”

That means, among other things, that it is not orderly to criticise the conduct of a Member, unless the motion debated directly addresses that conduct. This motion does not do so, and so such criticism would not be orderly.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the House of Commons Commission Report, Risk-based exclusion of MPs: consultation response and proposals, HC 1396.

I welcome the opportunity for the House to consider the publication of the House of Commons Commission report on risk-based exclusion of MPs, and for all right hon. and hon. Members to see and discuss the proposals. It is important for all Members to have a chance to express their views on the proposals. Hon. Members from all parts of the House have requested such an opportunity, including the Chairs of the Liaison Committee, the Standards Committee and the Procedure Committee.

I will also close the debate, so I will keep my opening remarks brief. Hon. Members will have seen the details in the papers provided by the House, so I do not intend to outline the scheme in detail. It has been consulted upon, and I and other Commission members want to hear colleagues’ views today. However, I want to set the scene, not so much for our sake as for the public’s sake.

Seeing this debate and thinking about events in the media and swirling around outside the Chamber, the people of the United Kingdom may be thinking, “Why the heck are the talking about themselves again today?” In comparison to many issues we could be debating at this hour, what happens on the parliamentary estate may seem rather irrelevant, but as well as making legislation to make the laws of the land, we also make the laws that govern this place.

No Committee or the work it undertakes in the service of the House happens without the permission of the House; no standards framework or Standing Order is born without the House giving consent; and no process an hon. Member is subjected to can be done without the will of the House. This is House business—it is important, which is why we have made time for it. For Parliament to be effective, it must be as good as it can be, so from time to time we need to hold debates such as this one to formulate these narrow points of process. The process in front of us today is so narrow that it may well never be used, but it is still important. However, there are other matters that rarely get an airing and are just as relevant to this, and arguably more important.

When I met the Standards Committee recently, its members suggested there were more than a dozen different bodies that oversee the conduct of Members. There is the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards; the Committee on Standards, upon referral by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards; the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme, which as Members will know is subject to a review; the Independent Expert Panel, upon referral by the commissioner; the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority; Mr Speaker and his deputies, relating to conduct in the Chamber; the Committee of Privileges, upon referral by the House; the Electoral Commission; the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, covering Ministers, peers, special advisers and senior civil servants; the Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests; the Committee on Standards in Public Life; and internal party mechanisms for investigation. I could go on, but I will spare the House.

My right hon. Friend makes the very important point that there are lots of bodies, but there is no body that can suspend a Member from this House without a vote of this House. The constitutional problem with the proposals before us today is that they would allow a suspension by bureaucracy, rather than the democracy of this House.

I expect many Members will focus on that point, and it is a trade-off. I reassure my right hon. Friend that no rule that we will make in this place will be arrived at without the consent and the will of the House. It is we who govern ourselves, and that is why we are having this debate and have made time for it today. He makes an important point of principle that will sway many Members, but there will be other Members who will be more concerned with confidentiality. These are the points that we should discuss this afternoon, and I thank my right hon. Friend for being here today to do precisely that.

The Leader of the House knows that I am very fond of her, and I understand why she has brought these matters before the House for consideration, but I am always minded that people are innocent until proven guilty. Looking from the outside in, it seems as if these proposals say, “You are guilty; now prove your innocence.” Surely that is entirely against the law of the land?

I completely agree with that point, but we are talking about a very narrow set of circumstances. This is not about asking people to make a judgment on whether someone has committed an offence, but about the risk that an individual poses to other people. Obviously we are talking about what happens on the estate, although it could be argued that such measures are pointless unless we are also tackling what, in this set of circumstances, happens off the estate. These are the issues that we will discuss this evening, and I thank the hon. Gentleman for being present to do that.

I understand that when all this was first being discussed there was a debate about whether the right time for intervention for the purpose of exclusion should be at the point of arrest or at the point of charge. Am I right in saying—having read the proposals—that the Commission envisages that in certain circumstances a Member who had been neither arrested nor charged with an offence could be excluded?

When, at the time of the Commission’s original proposals, there was a debate about arrest or charge, we decided that that was not relevant. This is about a set of circumstances in which a Member wishes to attend and there is evidence that that individual would be a harm to other people on the estate. That is the set of circumstances that the Commission was asked to consider. It could apply to a variety of cases. Although these proposals are limited to violent or sexual offences, this is not about an allegation made against an individual; it is about the risk assessment made of that individual. I believe that the details of the process involved accompany the papers that have been made available to Members.

We have an incredibly complicated standards landscape with myriad bodies providing oversight of Members’ conduct, yet barely a week goes by without something happening that calls into question our adherence to the rules. We seem to remain in a permanent swamp of complaints, cases and concerns, and the need for professionalism and the need to build trust have never been greater. It is therefore vital that, as well as examining the minutiae of schemes and reports, we focus on the principles that should govern our behaviour and culture, and, crucially, the duty of care that we have to one another in this place, as well as our duty to protect the good functioning of democracy.

In November 2022, the Commission launched

“a consultation on excluding Members charged with violent or sexual offences from the Parliamentary estate until any such cases are concluded”.

That is a very narrow and specific subject for consultation. There seems to have been a heck of lot of mission creep since then, does there not?

As my hon. Friend will know, the original proposal that was put together and issued for consultation by the Commission has been altered, which is why we wanted to hold this debate: the spirit in which it was initiated was a wish to listen to Members’ concerns. There is no point in the Commission presenting proposals, whether they have been widely consulted on or not, if they are not acceptable to the House. There are strong and important points of principle here, some of which have already been raised this evening and are at the heart of how we operate as a Parliament. There are also concerns about how to deal with some very difficult situations which, as I am sure my hon. Friend will recognise, present difficulties to the House authorities and to Members on the estate as well as our staff. The reason we are having the debate is that this is genuinely open, and I hope we can air these issues and make some progress on the scheme.

As a House of Commons Commissioner, I think it important that we hear of Members’ concerns. This is about ensuring that everyone’s views are heard. Given how many Members there are in this place, the number who took part in the consultation was fairly small, so we need to hear from more of them—and does the Commission not also have a duty of care to the thousands of members of staff who work on the estate?

I agree with my hon. Friend, and thank her for the work that she has done. We have an obligation to members of staff on the estate, and we have an obligation to Members to ensure that matters are treated confidentially. We also have an obligation to ensure that our principles and the minutiae of our schemes are compatible with fairness and natural justice.

Will those accused have an adequate opportunity to present their own defence, and will they be informed of what the offence is?

The answer is yes, in both cases. The scheme does not sit in isolation. In circumstances such as this, there tends to be a conversation with the Member concerned and with the Whips Office, and the Member may remove himself or herself from the estate on a voluntary basis. This will apply in a tiny number of cases, and the motivation for it is not just a duty of care to colleagues and members of staff on the estate, but ensuring that an individual who is trying, in what we all know are very difficult circumstances, to keep matters confidential is not put in a position that could make the situation a great deal worse. These are very difficult, complicated matters, and it is good that we are discussing them this evening.

When we decide rules and processes in this place, it is important that we stick with them. We as individuals cannot outsource consideration of such matters to other individuals or Committees, or pretend that the problems do not exist. We cannot shirk our responsibility to find solutions to them, or turn a blind eye when we see wrong being done. The letter of the law requires the spirit of the law to be followed as well, and trust will not be built without a commitment from all of us.

With that in mind, I am taking forward two new pieces of work that are relevant to the matter we are discussing this evening. First, I recommended to the Commission that we get someone to take a look at the entire standards landscape. Was it fit for purpose? Was it something of which we could be proud? The Chair of the Standards Committee, the hon. Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant), is engaged in that work, and I know that he wants to look at the whole landscape. I, as Leader of the House of Commons, am bringing someone in to advise me on these matters, which I hope will provide us with an additional sense check on the quality of what we do, the culture of our unique community, and its alignment to justice, fairness and good practice. I will make the findings available to the Commission, the Standards Committee and others with an interest in these matters.

In order to assess the risk, the body of experts—whether they are democrats or Members of this House in all different forms—is surely the key. That is why my right hon. Friend’s inquiry is very welcome, but it all hinges on who the experts are. Is she going to tell us a bit about that in her comments?

Nobody has been appointed to those roles. I understand that, on points of principle that have already been mentioned, many Members feel strongly that it should be Members of this House who form the panel. Others take a different view. These are the matters that we need to discuss, but I can tell my hon. Friend that no one has been appointed to those roles.

I was not planning to take part in this debate, but I was reading through the notes and my concern—returning to the point made by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—is that we are in a difficult and delicate area. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House talks about confidentiality, and the key to all this is process. It is about how it will actually work, not what we might wish it to be. Of course we have a duty of care to staff and to each other; I hope that that is a given. Working within that, we need to remember the reputational damage that has been done in previous cases. The police have done this themselves, where individuals who subsequently died lost their reputations unfairly because of allegations that turned out to be wrong and unjust. My concern is that we are trespassing slowly into the criminal code, which is not perfect. We have to be really careful here, because reputational damage is the end for Members of Parliament. Their reputation often cannot be regained, and their character is all. How do we protect that if people are going to be sent away? How can they not do the work in their constituencies and still retain their reputation as Members of Parliament? These are important issues.