[Relevant document: First Report of the Administration Committee, Smoothing the cliff edge: supporting MPs at their point of departure from elected office, HC 209.]
2:30 pm
Sir Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the matter of Parliamentary services for Members.
Before I get to the substance of my speech, it is worth referring to the Administration Committee’s meeting earlier this week with officers of the parliamentary contributory pension fund—we regularly meet the House’s excellent Officers. The fund’s documentation is almost impenetrable to normal human beings. It is 284 pages long, and those who started reading it 10 years ago are about halfway through. The officers tried their best, but the upshot of our informative meeting was a joint letter from the chairmen of the 1922 committee and the parliamentary Labour party asking the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority for greater clarity on the technicalities of the McCloud judgment. That is how the Administration Committee makes progress on a weekly basis.
We are debating House services, and I will focus most of my remarks on the Administration Committee’s report, published yesterday, “Smoothing the cliff edge: supporting MPs at their point of departure from elected office.” Before I move into the substance of the report, it is important that I thank the Clerks who wrote the report and gathered the evidence. I have been a Select Committee Chair for 10 years, and it is remarkable that, wherever I go, I am always given the best Clerks. I said to my wife, “What is it about me that means I always get the best Clerks in the House of Commons?” And she said, “It’s because you require close management.” I am not sure that is entirely what I wanted to hear, but I have wonderful Clerks. All Clerks in this House serve us brilliantly, day in and day out.
I am alive to the public and media cry that we need better MPs. We have heard the cry in its various guises: “We need better MPs,” “All MPs are rubbish” and so on. When I was in business before coming to the House, I always welcomed conversations with colleagues who said, “We need to make this company more profitable.” That was not the end of the conversation but the beginning: “Okay, so we need to make the business more profitable. How will we do it?” If people genuinely want better MPs, that is the start of the conversation and we need to ask ourselves how we will do it. That is what the Administration Committee—we have members of the Committee in the Chamber today—set its mind to doing when we embarked on this report. The Committee started taking evidence about four months ago.
Most members of the Administration Committee have a business background, which is a hugely valuable resource. We learned and appreciated that Parliament is in a war for talent, and it is an employer like any other. If we want to attract some of the best and brightest 30 and 40-year-olds from their successful careers, we need to compete with business, academia, science, the arts, healthcare and education. All these wonderful careers are now not just nationally focused but internationally focused. These talented young people are working on not only a national stage but an international stage. We need to convince them that a vocation in Parliament is worth undertaking. That is now very difficult because, increasingly, a vocation in Parliament is linked to career jeopardy.
I speak to young people on both sides of the political divide—Labour and Conservative, and Scottish National party when I am up in Scotland—and they say, “That’s all very well, Charles, but we love what we do. We love to discuss politics and think about politics, but you would be mad to think that we will step out of our career to take part in politics.” I hear that too often.
As we move towards the 100-hours-a-week MP, where we expect Members of Parliament to focus every waking hour solely on their constituency, the gap between the career they have left, their vocation in Parliament and their future career—the difficulty of accessing and reintegrating with a career—becomes wider and wider. That is what we start to address in our report.
Mr Deputy Speaker, I spoke to you earlier while you were in the Chair. Every single Member is prepared to make sacrifices to serve their constituents. Some of those sacrifices are very large, and some of them are far too large. I look across at the shields on the Opposition side of the Chamber, which I know will soon be joined by another shield on the Government side of the Chamber.
We address that career cliff edge in this report. Wherever people come to Parliament from—Scotland, Wales or England; Labour or Conservative—they serve their constituents with diligence and with every ounce of energy, but there is a career cliff edge when they leave this place. Employers say, “It is all very well that you’ve been a Member of Parliament, but what skills do you have? What can you bring to our company? You are all very remote, aren’t you? That’s what we read in the newspapers.” We need to address that, because we want people who serve here to be able to take their amazing skills—I will address the skills that people secure in this place—to future employers.
It has been a great pleasure to serve on my hon. Friend’s Committee. Does he agree that, for Members of Parliament, there is a difference between working here and working in a company? Generally, one leaves a company either because one has not performed well and is sacked or because one chooses to make a different career choice. Many people leave this place not because they have behaved improperly or because they did not do the work well, but because the general tide of national politics sees them go. We saw that in 2019, when many good Labour MPs lost their seats. That was not a reflection on them, just a reflection of the national tide. Is that not why we have a duty of care to these people?
Sir Charles Walker
My hon. Friend makes a fantastic point that gets to the crux of the report. I was going to say that he encapsulates the report in a short sentence, but it was a brief intervention of more like three sentences. I will address his points more directly in a moment.
We did not just sit down and write this report. I did not grab a pen, drag my colleagues into a room and say, “Let’s just write a report. Let’s put down on paper the first thing that pops into our heads.” No, we went out and consulted academics, leading headhunters, outplacement specialists, retired senior Army officers and senior officials from Sport England. We went out and talked to people who know how to transition people from one all-encompassing vocation or career to another, and they all said that the way an institution treats people at their point of departure impacts that institution’s ability to recruit bright and talented people. That is because people watch this place closely now—30, 40 and 50-year-olds watch closely—and they know what is going on here. We also took evidence from former colleagues, who, as my hon. Friend said, largely lost their seats through no fault of their own.
Although we have a wonderful parliamentary democracy in so many ways, it does not score highly when it comes to the way it treats departing Members, so the Committee came up with a number of key recommendations, and I will go through them briefly—our report is actually brilliantly short, and while many Select Committee reports are 200 pages, ours is a little more than 50.
First, Members of Parliament should be preparing to leave this place from the day they arrive. That is a really difficult thing to get your head around. When I was elected in Broxbourne and handed the envelope that the winning candidate gets, I went white with fear, but never once did it occur to me that I would ever leave this place. Now I have announced that I am going, and I am preparing for my departure, but I wish I had thought about it a little harder over the past 17 years.
I am lucky, because I am leaving voluntarily, from what is notionally a safe seat, although if we read Electoral Calculus at the moment, that may not be the case. The average tenure of a Member of Parliament is nine years, but this is an uncertain career and vocation. However, even if a Member of Parliament serves for just one Session —for two, three, four or five years—they build up a huge skillset: mediating, negotiating, communicating and dispute resolution, to name just four. The Committee’s report suggests that those skills are not just captured but accredited by top-flight universities—in a sense, they are micro-qualifications. In this busy and complicated world, those are just the types of skills that industry needs. Members of Parliament are brilliant at juggling a whole range of complex issues and seeing a way through quickly. I am talking not just about those at ministerial level, but about what we do day in, day out with competing interests in our constituencies. So there is the issue of micro-accreditation and micro-qualifications.
I thank my hon. Friend for such a powerful speech. He is reminding me of the medallions that my councillors wear—perhaps former mayors, aldermen or people who have served with distinction—and surely what he is talking about is similar to that. Many hundreds or thousands of people have those sorts of medallions.
Sir Charles Walker
That is exactly what I am talking about. It is a nice and kind thing to do, and there is nothing wrong with being nice and kind. Workplace recognition is a good thing. I received a lovely pen when I left my first substantive job. I received a lovely decanter from the 1922 committee to mark my 11 years of service to it. Is it going to change my life? It is not going to change my life at all. Is it something that I will enjoy and that, I hope, my family and children will enjoy? Yes, it is. I just wanted to put that into context.
Treating people well is important, and it will encourage good people to run for office. As I have said, I entirely concur with the idea that we need better Members of Parliament. I suppose I should not be surprised that, when the Committee and my wonderful colleagues on it went away and thought about how we could do that, they got criticised for having done it, but the people criticising them are the very ones saying that we need better Members of Parliament. Excellence in this place should be the norm, not the outlier.
Before my hon. Friend concludes, may I just put it on the record that I would like to think on both sides of the House there could be no better Member of Parliament than he has proved to be during his time here?
Sir Charles Walker
I absolutely thank my right hon. Friend for that. He and I have been friends since I got here, and that means a huge amount to me. I thank him.
This is what I want to conclude with. We will never in this place struggle to attract the shrill, the loud and the raucous. We will always be inundated with the practitioners of the clear thinking of the totally uninformed. That is what makes this Parliament so wonderful. There are those who believe there are simple solutions to complex problems. If there were, we would have found them, Mr Deputy Speaker. I promise you that we would have found them. There is always space for that, and at times I have been one of the raucous, the loud, the shrill and the emotional—I celebrate that. But we also need the thoughtful, the considered and the intellectually inquiring. Their numbers really are thinning, and we in this place have a duty to reach out to them.
We have a duty—not just to ourselves, but to future generations of Members of Parliament—to make this place the greatest Chamber with the greatest vocation someone can pursue in this country. A President came yesterday, welcomed by literally thousands of people, and he referred to our Parliament as the greatest in the world. I take great comfort from that, and I want to prove him right day in and day out.
Before I call Dame Maria Miller, may I too put something on the record? Many of you will not know this, but when I was a rookie Member of Parliament, I employed a young Charles Walker as my researcher. I knew then that he was a bright lad, and I was thrilled when he became a Member of Parliament. He has been an outstanding Chair of the Administration Committee. I salute your bravery, Charles, in the way you have promoted mental health issues at a time when it was a taboo. You have been remarkable. I am so proud of you.
On my very first day in Parliament, I decided to sit next to this blond-haired man whom I had never met before in my life. He stood up, and I will not repeat what he said to the assembled masses because it would embarrass him, but my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker) was entertaining, informed and, above all, principled right from the start. He has been a great colleague for the last 17 years, and we will miss him.
It is therefore a great privilege to follow my hon. Friend, who has clearly set out how parliamentary services must change to help our democracy, and particularly to recruit the brightest and the best to Parliament. I would like to take that one stage further and talk about how we can broaden the debate to consider how parliamentary services must work even harder to ensure that this place functions in a way that can protect our democracy into the future. We have already mentioned that amazing visit yesterday from Volodymyr Zelensky, who is fighting for democratic freedoms for his nation, and the way that he talked so affectionately about our own Parliament. It made me feel, even more than ever, that we cannot take these things for granted, even in western Europe. That is why I am so grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate, and to the staff of the Administration Committee for all the work they do in helping us with the running of this House.
I also pay tribute to those who sit in the Chair you sit in, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is easy in this place to come in, be important and talk about important things that happen to our constituents and to the nation, but very few people take the time to think about how this place runs, and how they can play their part in making it better. Too few come forward to sit in that Chair and do the sorts of things that you do, Mr Deputy Speaker, and that your colleagues do in the Speaker’s Office. It is important that we acknowledge that. It is always behind the scenes, but it is what makes one of the most important and central institutions of our democracy work. Probably the people sitting in front of you also have a bit of a role in that, but we won’t go there.
Thank you, Maria, for your very generous and kind words. I will make sure that Sir Lindsay hears them. Those thanks are on behalf of Sir Lindsay, his entire team, and the Clerks. Thank you very much for your generosity.
I was fascinated by the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller) about the transparency of this organisation, because in many ways it is not transparent. I rather suspect that she has been waiting a long time for the opportunity to say all those things. I am not sure that I agree with all of them, but her point that this place must have transparency was very clear. All of us on the Administration Committee feel frustration at times with the fact that when we do not agree with something, we let it be known, and the Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker), lets it be known, but then it happens anyway. That sometimes causes members of the Committee, and members of the Finance Committee, to think, “Why are we even serving on the Committee?” But you know what, Mr Deputy Speaker, that does not actually have anything to do with the report. The report, which the Chairman spoke about in so much detail, is entitled: “Smoothing the cliff edge: supporting MPs at their point of departure from elected office”.
A lot of praise has been heaped, quite rightly, on all the people who work here. At the risk of being accused of gross sycophancy, I am going to mention the Whips on both sides of the House. I think people outside this place think that all the Whips do is impose discipline, but that is not the case. What they do is partly HR with attitude, as a former Whip once put it. They are also, talking about my former career, the floor managers of this place. If it were not for the Whips—I am looking at Labour, Conservative and SNP Whips—people would not turn up on time and debates would not finish on time. Mr Speaker and Mr Deputy Speaker might try to arrange that, but they are in the Chair. It is the Whips who go scurrying around, making phone calls and sending messages to ensure that Ministers and shadow Ministers are there on time for the work to be done. I am only singling them out because they were not mentioned in all those marvellous comments that my hon. Friend—he should be right honourable—spoke about.
Sir Charles Walker
My hon. Friend is raucous and wonderful, but he also does himself a great disservice. He is an expert in technology and has a background in radio. The Committee works so much better for having someone who knows not just how to plug in a PC, but how turn it on.
This is turning into a mutual admiration society, but what is wrong with that occasionally, Mr Deputy Speaker? It is all about friendship, too. That is important in this place.
It is true, and I raised this point with my hon. Friend when he gave his excellent and passionate speech, that we have a duty of care to one another generally in society—there is such a thing as society—and we have a duty of care to Members of Parliament. I was there, I think, for all the evidence sessions—correct me if I am wrong—but reading the report again, drawn up by excellent Clerks, one becomes aware of how distraught and empty people are when they leave here in an involuntary way. Sometimes people leave voluntarily, as my hon. Friend is doing, as in any other organisation. Sometimes they leave because they have performed so badly here that the electorate decide to get rid of them. But more often than not they leave simply because of a national swing which is no fault of the individual Member of Parliament.
There is a rather lovely quote in the report:
“For some Members, coming to terms with their departure, whether through choice or not, could be similar to the grieving process. Dame Jane Roberts told us how ‘That loss…is akin to grief. That is true about all work but…leaving Parliament involves an intensity of emotion that does not often apply to other jobs’. She noted in her research how the majority of those that she had interviewed ‘had grieved the loss of political office in some way, often intensely. In adjusting to a very different life, most had experienced a sense of dislocation. They had initially struggled to find a new narrative about who they were and what they did, and a number had struggled to find employment.’”
It is not that these people are unemployable, as I sometimes say, or that they came here only because they could not get a job anywhere else; it is that if they have dedicated their life to a political ideal or to helping others, they will be emotionally invested in this place. Because of that investment, the movement away—the wrench—is as extreme as a torn muscle or worse, or the bereavement of losing a close relative.
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech about the impact on departing Members. Does he share my concern that that impact, which he is describing so eloquently, may also be a massive disincentive for right-minded people to stand for election? As my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker) has been saying, we need to attract the brightest and the best to this place, but such people generally do not want to set themselves up to fail, or to be in an environment where they may end up being treated in not the most respectful way.
I agree with my right hon. Friend, up to a point. I would argue that the problem is not one of people coming to this place, because they came to this place knowing that it was a risk. You do not become a Member of Parliament thinking you are here as of right. What concerns me more is that people who come here should think that they will be treated decently and that their staff will be treated decently, and that means being treated with kindness and compassion.
That brings me back to something that impressed me hugely. The duty of care is a great principle in English law: “Neither through action nor through inaction should someone cause someone else to be damaged.” We heard about it from members of the armed forces who gave evidence to the Committee.
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Secondly, Members of Parliament must have access to ongoing career advice while they are here, and to outplacement services before, during and after their point of departure. That is absolutely critical. When I say “point of departure”, I do not mean the ballot box—I do not mean just those MPs who lose at the ballot box in a general election. I mean that all Members of Parliament need access to good, ongoing career advice and outplacement services. Again, the Committee did not make that up; it is what all the expert witnesses told us. They said, “You need to support people out of one workplace into another.”
Thirdly—there is no way of dodging this for an easy life, and I do not want an easy life—there should be better financial support for those leaving Parliament. Winding up a parliamentary office with tens of thousands of bits of casework does not take a couple of months; it can take many months. The way we financially support leaving Members is, again, an area where we score really badly. We score really badly against the Scottish Parliament. We score really badly against the Senedd in Wales. We score badly against almost every major, mature western democracy.
Let me put this into perspective. Since I announced I was leaving, I have had—possibly this is a slightly made-up number, because I have not kept a close record—511 conversations with people who know that I am leaving. Two of those were extremely positive: “Oh my word, Charles, you’re leaving. You’re going to be a huge success at whatever you do.” The other 509 have been, “Oh my word, what the hell are you going to do when you leave? What can you do?” It will be no surprise to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, because you know these two people, that the two positive conversations were with my mother and my wife. The other 509 were with people who are quite worried for my future welfare. It is that difficult. I am smiling, but I am making a serious point.
Although I cannot prove this, I suspect that some, although by no means all, long-serving Members of Parliament would love to leave, but are frightened and put off leaving because of the financial uncertainty—the financial cliff edge—and the career cliff edge they will face if they do go. With perhaps six months’ resettlement grant and some outplacement advice and career advice, we could actually free up seats, which would be to the benefit of those who want to leave and certainly to the benefit of their constituents.
The Committee’s fourth key recommendation—it makes me extremely sad that we had to make it—is to do with the security of Members of Parliament. In most cases, when you leave this place the personal risk to you—I mean you, Mr Deputy Speaker, as well as me and all colleagues in this place—diminishes very quickly. However, for some it does not. In the past, as soon as someone ceased to be a Member of Parliament, responsibility for their security was handed to his or her local police force. That is not ideal. We took some powerful evidence in private from Members of Parliament and ex-Members of Parliament who faced an ongoing and real risk. I was really pleased that we had the head of House security before us, and we are definitely going to do something on this issue—and we need to.
Fifthly and finally—there are more recommendations after five, but this is the final one in my speech—we need to give MPs better advice throughout each Parliament about Dissolution, winding up their offices, the expectations placed on them, the expectations they can place on the House, and the support services they will be able to access. All those things need to be thought about. I know we do not like to think about leaving, but we must have the opportunity to think about it and to understand what is expected of us and what we can expect of the House. Provision for that needs to be updated on a six-month basis and regularly notified to not just Members of Parliament but their office managers.
I want to touch on something briefly. There was a sentence in the report—I think the shadow Leader of the House knows where I am going with this, because I can see her smiling—suggesting that Members of Parliament should receive a medallion from the Speaker in recognition of their service to democracy. This has been positioned as a medal of the type that changes one’s name or means one gets letters after one’s name, but that is not what we are suggesting; this is about workplace recognition. A decade ago, I was awarded the president’s medal by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. It gives me no standing anywhere, and it does not mean that I get to the front of the queue anywhere. It gives me huge personal pleasure and satisfaction to know that the royal college recognised my contribution to mental health, and I may just wear it if I am invited to one of its events. That is what I meant, and what the report and my colleagues on the Committee meant, about a medallion of service. It is something that we could be presented with by the Speaker, and that would mean something to us.
The last two Speakers of this House were appointed at times of crisis, which is an interesting thing to reflect on. Our current Speaker—I will not refer to the previous one—was recruited to the role in the midst of a behavioural and cultural crisis in this place. I think that our Mr Speaker’s focus on security, culture and behaviour change has been exemplary, and led to a rapid change in a way that many people would not have foreseen. We also saw the way that the Speaker and staff rapidly changed the way our Parliament worked during the coronavirus pandemic, and the way that Mr Speaker has changed attitudes towards the security of Members of Parliament. We know that individuals in the Chair you are sitting in, Mr Deputy Speaker, can change the way this place works, but I suggest that we cannot rely on individuals alone, not least because we have had some recent Speakers who have not been entirely unflawed characters. We have to think about the governance of the institution, and the way it creates the right framework for the running of this important place.
The services provided by Parliament are crucial to MPs being effective. We are elected to come here, to scrutinise, and to get things done for the people we represent. We do that with the support of the House of Commons; we cannot do it ourselves. There is an army of literally thousands of people, from cleaners to Clerks, police to chefs, and subject experts in the Library to dedicated constituency staff, who are all there to help us be effective. Being effective MPs requires the right services to be in place—not just the same services that were there 40 years ago, but the right services for today. Even the most time-poor manager of a small business ensures that they have the right services in place for their business, and that is why this debate is important.
It is important that we discuss these things to explore whether parliamentary services are delivering in a way that helps MPs to be effective, and delivering for the way that we need Parliament to run. Effective MPs are not just a good thing in their own right; effective MPs help to build trust in the House of Commons; they help to build trust in Parliament and so they help to build trust in democracy. It could not be more important, particularly for those who believe that we have a responsibility to strengthen democracy in our time here.
Let us also remember that the staff of this place, whether they are extremely specialised, highly intellectual people drafting bits of legislation, the people who keep us safe as we enter this place or the people who service our meals when we are here late into the night, choose to be here. They choose to be in Parliament, not because it is just another place to work but because they want to be part of the democratic function of this country—what makes it so special.
Like much of Parliament, the provision of services is organised through Committees, predominately the Administration Committee, which my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne chairs incredibly well. Unlike other Committees, these are House Committees and, for the most part, they are advisory. When members of the Committee, including a number of Members present, raise issues around how this place is run or that they would like to see done differently, such as the quality of the wi-fi, the availability of mobile phone chargers in the Tea Room, as I was reminded a few minutes ago, or concerns about the perimeter security, these concerns can be voiced and they will be heard. However, we have absolutely no power whatsoever to get any action taken. We only usually get action taken because of the vivacious character of our Chair. That cannot be enough; things need to be more structured than that. Only the Commission has oversight of all these issues and can take action—a Commission, I remind everybody, that has no process to elect its members.
When it comes to planning ahead and the issues that the administration might want to consider because there are problems on the horizon, we have no ability to do that effectively either. The Administration Committee is strictly limited in what it can do. Of course, when it comes to the provision of services, the Procedure Committee and our Finance Committee are also crucial, but there is no structure in place for these Committees to work together. For example, if we have something like the uncertainty of sitting hours, which can go late into the night, there is no way of viewing how that might affect members of staff who are employed to run the services in this place.
The Leader of the House has been clear in her vision, such as in her recent speech to the Institute for Government, that the House of Commons should be the best legislature in the world. I could not agree more with her sentiment, but to achieve that not just noble but essential ambition, our parliamentary services also need to be the best in the world. They need to fit into that vision of a modern workplace, with modern procedures, adequate finance and accountability, and an ability to plan for the future and to respond to events. We have made huge strides under Mr Speaker’s leadership, but I am concerned that our governance and structures have changed very little, that they are not as good as they should be and that we need to look at them more. Indeed, some experts would say that the governance of the House of Commons is opaque, lacks accountability and is complex to understand. Those are not the attributes of an organisation that I would like to work for. To make provision for parliamentary services for MPs to be their most effective, Parliament needs to look at these things in detail. It needs to look at the governance and structures of how we can be a trusted institution into the future that reflects an organisation not of yesterday, but of tomorrow.
There are some notable examples, of which I am sure other Members will be aware, of where the inability to change things and evolve the way we work have received the full glare of publicity. Not least of them is the recent example of where we tried to set up a nursery in this place, which took three debates, two papers and a lot of behind-the-scenes work. Some of the hon. and right hon. Members involved have been in this place even longer than I have, and they still could not work out how we could effect that change. That is a salutary lesson; it shows that we cannot evolve services to meet the needs of Members. The result will be that we cannot attract the right Members to this place. We cannot then expect this place to be the world-class legislature that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House would like it to be.
How do we make sure that parliamentary services are effective, and are what our MPs, and our democracy, really need? Some straightforward changes could easily be made that would make a real difference. It would be quite a revolution if we ensured that House Committees could work together and take a common look at how this place is run. We should evolve their role from a “take note” or advisory role, to a strategic one of the sort that Select Committees perhaps already have, so that they do not merely rubber-stamp decisions after the event, which, as colleagues on the Administration Committee will remember, was what happened in the case of the removal of the trees in the atrium of Portcullis House.
We should make the House Committees, which are fundamental to how the place runs, accountable through elections. They are the last area of Parliament in which Members are not elected to posts. We are appointed to our posts, and that simply does not pass the sniff test. We need to change that; the way that people gain positions on those Committees should be similar to the way that Select Committee members gain theirs. That would increase accountability. Our meetings are already transparent, but let us look at ways of opening them up even more, if they are so fundamental to democracy.
Scrutiny of the House of Commons Commission should be firmly in the remit of the House Committees. Just as Select Committees scrutinise Government, House Committees should scrutinise the Commission. That would be a very simple change of our role, but it might increase transparency about how the Commission runs, so that more Members can understand it, and can understand how decisions are taken. For too long it has felt as though the House of Commons is run from behind closed doors. Perhaps it is easier that way; that is what I have been told when I have asked why that is. There are concerns that scrutiny will undermine trust in this organisation. My argument is that a lack of scrutiny has already done that job for us, so let us have that change.
We cannot continue to rely on individuals, rather than governance, structures and systems, to ensure that this place is run well. I am told that it is Members who decide, when it comes to the running of this House, but I am afraid that those are hollow words to me when I think back to the debacle over the establishment of a nursery in this place. “It is for Members to decide!” No, it really was not, because there was no way for us to crystallise the decision and ensure action.
As a result of this debate, I hope that people not just in this Chamber, or listening in Parliament, but from outside start to call loudly for the changes that I have outlined. It has taken a year to get this debate, so I can already feel that this is not necessarily a debate that people in this place want to have. The issue is important because we need to support MPs, so that they can be their most effective. We need this to be a modern workplace, where both MPs and their staff can function at their best. We must attract a diverse cross-section of society to stand for election. We will not do that unless this place works better, and we have to start taking that far more seriously.
This is an odd place. We want to get people of the finest ability to work here and there are many different types of people who come here. My hon. Friend talks about the loud and the raucous. Occasionally, it is rather nice to be loud and raucous in this place. When I first became an MP—I joined at the same time as you, Mr Deputy Speaker—I remember standing up in the Chamber and giving one or two earnest speeches and asking one or two earnest questions. A marvellous former Member of Parliament in the Press Gallery, Matthew Parris, then a sketch writer for The Times, said, “Michael, why are you like this in the Chamber? You must never forget that this place is theatre. Be theatrical, make your points. Be yourself.” And since I have done that, I have never been promoted! [Laughter.] No, no, I have. It is important that people should be themselves, but we have to be able to attract them in the first place.
Nick de Bois, a former Member of Parliament, told us:
“Sensitivity is lacking in the whole process.”
We heard evidence of people turning up and being told that they had to clear their office within two weeks. We know why—they have been replaced, and the House authorities have to decide how to deal with the House’s property—but when someone loses their seat after being here for many years, being expected to clear their office is a huge burden when they are grieving over the loss of a lifestyle.
What about staff? We heard evidence from staff who were completely at a loss as to whether they would be able to get a job with another MP. Colleagues already know all this, but it is worth saying. You never know: somebody might read Hansard. Many years ago, a former Chief Whip—a great friend of mine who is now in another place, with whom I had dinner last night, as it happens—said to me, absolutely rightly, “Michael, if you want to keep a secret, say it in a speech in this place and it’ll still be a secret.”
Assuming that somebody will actually read this speech, however, let me say in case people do not realise it that it is Members of Parliament who choose their staff. Members’ staff are imbued with huge trust: trust that they will keep constituents’ secrets and trust in how they help Members. What if there is a big change? In 2019, there were staff who had worked really hard for Labour Members, and it would have been difficult for them to get a job with a Conservative MP. We have a duty of care to them, as well as to Members of Parliament.
One Member said:
“You come out of an election when you are losing the thing that you have given your life to, for however many years. I have taken that as an experience of how I would not want to treat my employees today. It was an experience of what not to do rather than what to do. You immediately had your pass removed. You had to be escorted everywhere, whether it is around that centre or around the building. At moments, it felt like you were a criminal.”
Nick de Bois said that there is
“a huge gap that…the party needs to address”.
I think it is a gap that the House of Commons needs to address. He also said that
“you are cut off overnight. Your phone stops ringing pretty quickly”—
actually, to me that would be a relief. He went on to say:
“Friends are there, but there is not the support that some colleagues need.”