MPs Staff: Employment Conditions

I beg to move,

That this House welcomes the Second Report of the Speaker’s Conference on the employment conditions of Members’ staff (HC 1714 of Session 2022–23), endorses its recommendations, recognises Members’ responsibilities as employers and the need to improve the working lives of Members’ staff and accordingly calls on the House of Commons Commission, IPSA and the political parties to address and implement the recommendations from the Speaker’s Conference.

I move this motion on behalf of my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker). He is at the funeral of Andrew Lee, who was a long-time Conservative party agent and activist. He was held in very high regard and had been an agent for many Members of this House. He was one of those characters we all know in our respective parties. He was the life and soul of our party, and our democracy is built on the shoulders of such people. They often do not get any focus or plaudits, but they do a huge amount to facilitate democracy in this country. My hon. Friend sends his apologies for not being here in person.

The second report of the Speaker’s Conference makes a series of recommendations designed to improve the working lives of Members’ staff and provide better support to Members as employers. The staff who work for us, as individual Members of Parliament, play a huge and valuable role not only in supporting our work here in Westminster but in working tirelessly for our constituents, often in very stressful situations.

The employment arrangements of Members’ staff are not a matter for the Government, but I welcome the conclusion that Members of this House should continue to employ their own staff directly. It is for each Member to determine how best to carry out their role, and the current employment model provides an important element of flexibility to Members to arrange their staff in the way that best suits each individual Member.

I am supportive of what the Leader of the House is bringing forward, but I must ask the following question. Many MPs do not have the training as employers to answer many questions and the staff development she is referring to is not natural to those of us who are not from that background. Does she agree that greater support to allow us to aid our staff development is imperative? That will allow staff to feel that there is a route to take to greater advancement. Does she agree that funding for that should be provided centrally, so that staff do not feel they are being scrutinised by the public for taking beneficial yet costly development courses?

I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising that important point. He will know that the report makes reference to ensuring that proper support, training and services are provided to enable individual Members to be the best employers they can be. My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne, whose name is also on this motion and who would be moving it were he here, has also done a huge amount of work to ensure that Members in future will be able to undertake training and get qualifications, which is tremendously important. It will help them in their work here and enable them to continue their career when they leave this place. It is a good use of budget, to enable us to be the best Members of Parliament that we can be.

I also welcome the recommendations on providing further help and support to Members and their staff in relation to employment matters. We need to ensure that all who work in Parliament are treated properly and fairly, and the package of measures announced in this report will deliver significant improvements. I particularly welcome the recommendations on improved mental health support for Members and their staff, and I know that colleagues in all parts of the House will do the same.

The report also makes a series of recommendations about the role of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. IPSA is rightly independent from both the Government and Parliament, but I note the constructive engagement that has taken place between the Speaker’s Conference and IPSA, and the formal response published by IPSA earlier this week, which sets out how it aims to address some of the challenges identified by the Conference that fall within its areas of responsibility. I am pleased to see progress on entitlements to sickness and parental leave for staff who move between Members, and I look forward to seeing proposals on greater support for Members and staff in relation to constituency offices in due course.

I think the recommendations on continuity of service are important, having seen the injustice in that area in respect of one of my members of staff. Will the Leader of the House advise on whether those measures will apply retrospectively to existing staff?

I am proposing this on behalf of my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne, but I shall certainly make sure that I can get the precise details to the hon. Gentleman. Much would depend on what is in an individual’s contract, as those will vary substantially depending on how they had worked here. I will endeavour to get an answer to him on that.

Finally, I would like to endorse the report’s conclusions about the valuable work of the Members’ Services Team. It provides expert advice and support to colleagues on a range of matters, but in particular it is a vital source of support on employment issues. The report rightly recognises the value of that support and highlights the importance of colleagues’ engaging with the team on any staffing issues that arise. I encourage any colleague with concerns about an employment issue to contact the team at the earliest opportunity, and I welcome the report’s recommendations to create a system of account managers to provide more direct support to Members in this area.

I particularly wish to thank Chris Sear, the director of the Members’ Services Team, who is retiring at the end of this month, after a long career in the House. The work that Chris has done to expand the services that provide assistance to Members of this House has been hugely welcome. He was instrumental and very helpful in conducting the largest Members’ survey ever done, which took place this year and was about what kinds of services and support people needed. I want to place on record the gratitude that colleagues have for him and his team.

I hope these measures carry the support of Members and I commend the motion to the House.

I call the shadow Deputy Leader of the House.

This is an important debate about the culture and working conditions in Parliament. As Members of this House and as employers of staff, we should ensure that all staff feel valued and respected, regardless of whether they are employed by Members directly or by the House authorities, in the Palace or in our constituency offices. Staff working across Parliament and the country are the backbone of our democracy and I give my personal thanks for their dedication. I am sure that sentiment is echoed across all Benches.

The issues of pay, recognition and ensuring a safe and respectful workplace are not new. They are long-standing issues on which we should always work hard, but it is important to recognise how much progress has been made. Thanks are due, in no small part, to the work of the parliamentary trade unions and the House authorities.

We support the recommendations outlined in the Speaker’s Conference report, which are a welcome step in the right direction. Crucially, there will be changes for Members’ staff concerning continuity of service that will mean improved maternity and paternity rights, enhanced rights regarding sick pay and better redundancy arrangements. Also, it is right that our HR functions, support and advice are available to our staff as well as to Members. That will enable staff to make informed choices about their employment.

On balance, the report concluded that MPs’ staff should remain under the direct employment of Members, complemented by the new HR service. It will also be good to reclassify staff training and costs to support the widest participation in career development. Together, these are good steps in the right direction and should help improve the working culture of our House.

The report’s primary purpose was not to focus on the conduct of Members and possible ways of redress, but that issue was partially covered. I welcome the role of the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme in dealing with incidents of poor behaviour by Members. The process appears to be improving and timescales to complete cases are said to be coming down, but will the Leader of the House address the following questions: will recommendations concerning HR and continuity of service be finalised by the general election? Are there plans to look further at the role of the ICGS and its processes? Is a future assessment point planned to monitor progress of the report?

I had not planned to speak in the debate, but as a member of the Speaker’s Conference I thought, at the last minute, it was important to come to the House to recognise the work of everyone involved in putting together the report. As the Leader of the House of Commons, my right hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt), acknowledged, we relied on many of the Speaker’s staff and other staff in the House of Commons to put the report together.

The report is an important piece of work, which I welcome and hope will be approved today. While we are making progress, it is important that we continue to look at our organisation and ways in which we can improve. The relationship between staff and employers is at the heart of what this place is about in delivering democracy and legislating for the benefit of the country.

To change a culture takes time, and to implement that change takes time, but I think that this is an important and fundamental step forward. There has been progress, but there is always more to do. Let us continue to do it. This is the second report. I put on the record, as a member of the Conference, my thanks to the Members’ Services Team and to Chris Sear, who was stalwart in supporting us. I, like many others I am sure, wish him well in his retirement.

I call the SNP spokesperson.

The SNP of course welcomes any proposals that aim to ensure best employment practice, and in this case to ensure that staff are part of an inclusive, respectful and fair working environment. I pay tribute to the work of the Speaker’s Conference and commend its recommendations. The high-profile incidents that in part sparked the report laid bare aspects of an inappropriate and unacceptable workplace culture that has run through this place, so with a renewed urgency the report undertook to ensure that current working practices and conditions of staff are fit for purpose, and that everyone who works in the parliamentary community feels supported and has uninhibited access to that support.

The contribution of MPs’ staff to this place is enormous—we all know that—and all too often it goes unseen. As part of its inquiry into culture, the report spoke of a “collective failure” of the House to recognise and reward hard-working staff. Constituency staff in particular were singled out as feeling neglected and detached from Westminster, going without much of the support and additional services made available to those working on the estate. That is unacceptable and must, and I hope will, change. We welcome the report’s recommendation to champion the work of MPs’ staff—that is, the work of those who enable everyone here to do their job. We wholeheartedly support the aims of the report to ensure parity of employment conditions and a more rewarding work culture across the wider parliamentary community.

We are also very much in favour of the proposed expansion of the Members’ Services Team, which over such a short time has already come to provide an invaluable and highly professional service. Having had to call on their help in the past, I know just how highly professional, helpful and sensitive to the issues they are. The recommendation of that team’s evolution to a Members and Members’ staff service is commendable. As small employers, MPs should of course have access to better human resources support, but staff should also have access to guidance and advice independent of their employing MP.

The report described Members’ staff as “uniquely vulnerable” and the current Members’ Services Team was found to be under-resourced. The report’s plan to incorporate a new restorative practice for workplace dispute resolution is a welcome recommendation that would help to create uniform procedures for MPs’ staff across this House. Inadequate provision of employee support, employer guidance and qualified HR experts directly impacts the experience of staff, so we are very supportive of the report’s recommendations to improve that, and to improve on the great work of the current team.

Having been a member of the Conference, I am delighted to be able to speak in this debate. The Conference has done some important work. We all know that this is a highly individual workplace, and that brings pressures, close and intense working, and a daily range of issues that are varied and challenging. We all know of personnel cases where things have gone wrong, so it was a very good idea to create the Speaker’s Conference, and all its members set off on our work knowing there was a problem to solve: that the working conditions of our teams, Members’ staff, could and must be improved.

We have had a very good process, and I thank the House staff for all that they did. In particular, I thank them for their research and for drawing interesting parallels between other Parliaments around the world. It is clear that some of these Parliaments have been on similar journeys to ourselves. It is hard enough to organise things on a national parliamentary basis, but to do so on an international parliamentary basis is particularly challenging.

I think back to a joint meeting with representatives from the Bundestag. The organisation was good: we had to fit in with multiple participants, co-ordinate between sittings and ensure good translation services. I know more about that meeting because I chaired it, but there were many other meetings as well. The way in which House Officers carried out their background research was particularly helpful. For example, there was a visit to my constituency office—among a number of other such visits—to see what happens in the more distant part of the parliamentary estate. We had a visit from the Director of Members’ Services, Mr Chris Sear. When he joined us in Harrogate, I made myself scarce by visiting some constituents, so he could talk to the team and find out what they were doing and all that they do to support people on a daily basis.

Throughout this process, I was aware that there had been some difficulty with gathering information. There was plenty of anecdotal information, but problems have been hard to quantify. That difficulty with information meant that, to keep perspective and proportionality in all that we did, we had to constantly remind those involved that the vast majority of MPs are good employers.

There was a focus on three areas: culture, community and behaviour. I will comment, if I may, on a couple of the more important decisions. The first was to keep MPs as employers of their teams and as the deciders of who is in their team. That is a very good thing. Any changes to that would have been difficult to implement and would, I am sure, have met significant resistance. It also became clear very quickly that the way that support is provided or accessed by Members’ staff is slightly haphazard, and that that could be improved.

My hon. Friend makes a valuable point. Both he and I are pretty experienced in the private sector in managing people; not everyone has that experience, but I believe that the HR services available to Members are excellent. Will he consider in a future Conference making it a requirement that Members undertake an HR exercise before they are allowed to recruit staff, who will be paid for by the taxpayer?

My right hon. Friend makes an extremely interesting point. The challenge is that when a Member starts here, the work starts immediately, and the period between an election and the workload starting is very brief. What she suggests could be practically difficult, but she is quite correct about possible lack of experience and how standard practices, although they may be difficult to deliver, are clearly the right thing to do. My right hon. Friend makes a very valuable point, which should be considered, because I do not think that this is the end of the process.

Members structure their officers differently. All my team have always been based in Harrogate and Knaresborough; I have never had a team member based in Westminster. London MPs have different needs, probably basing their teams on the parliamentary estate. Most Members will split their teams. A result of our work will be the creation of a series of templates to show new Members what success might look like—not to impose, but to guide—and the provision of more training when they arrive and are setting up their offices.

The absence of imposition is important, because we are all individuals with different needs and different backgrounds, so the political parties have a role to play in the training of new MPs, some of whom as my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) says, may have very limited experience, or even none, of being an employer. It is true that this is an individual workplace, but that has sometimes been used as an excuse for not looking hard enough at what happens here, or as a get-out-of-jail card for poor practice. That is not acceptable. We have a set of recommendations; we worked to make sure that they are practical, and there are many of them.

It was a great call by Mr Speaker to create the Conference. I again thank the House team for all their work to support us; they did a very good job. I can confirm to colleagues that, throughout, the Conference’s work was done in a constructive, collegiate, cross-party way. Our task now is to implement the findings of the Conference, but I do not think that this work, while positive, should be the only part of an initiative to improve standards in our public life and politics.

Since I became a Member of Parliament, eight current or former Labour MPs have been given custodial sentences, two Conservatives, one Liberal Democrat and one Scottish Nationalist. We have had by-elections caused by poor behaviour by colleagues from all parts of the House, and there have been cases of bad practice. A series of processes have been introduced in good faith to address problems, but I think it has become apparent that the House needs to do more work to both simplify and speed up the processes. Who is responsible for what? What happens when people are being investigated, and how does that work align with the Recall of MPs Act 2015? It is also for the political parties to recognise problems and act, though.