Privileges

The Leader of the House has tabled a motion on a matter of privilege that I have agreed should take precedence today. To move the motion, I call Mr Paul Maynard.

I beg to move,

That this House—

(i) approves the First Report from the Committee of Privileges (HC 1490); and

(ii) endorses the conclusions of the Committee in respect of the conduct of Mr Dominic Cummings that the evidence sought by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee from Mr Cummings was relevant to its inquiry and that his refusal to attend constituted a significant interference with the work of that Committee; concludes that Mr Cummings committed a contempt both by his refusal to obey the Committee’s order to attend it and by his subsequent refusal to obey the House’s Order of 7 June 2018; and therefore formally admonishes him for his conduct.

In a week of constitutional innovation, we have one more, whereby I am standing in for the Leader of the House, who sends her apologies. I understand that she has been in touch with the Chairs of the Committee of Privileges and the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee to explain the reason for her absence.

The House deeply respects the work of Select Committees across the House. They do incredibly important work on behalf of all the peoples of the United Kingdom, and the Government remains a strong supporter of the Select Committee system. In accordance with traditional practice, the Leader of the House brought forward motions on Thursday 7 June and Thursday 28 June 2018 to raise the activities of Dominic Cummings as a matter of privilege following his refusal to obey the DCMS Committee’s order to attend and his subsequent refusal to obey the House’s order of 7 June 2018.

It is vital to the work of Select Committees that they can obtain full and accurate evidence from witnesses as part of their inquiries. I thank the members of the Committee of Privileges for undertaking the report and the members of the DCMS Committee for their work on behalf of Parliament. The report from the Privileges Committee concluded that it accepted the DCMS Committee’s view that the evidence it sought from Mr Cummings was relevant to its inquiry and that his refusal to appear constituted a significant interference with its work. The report states that Mr Cummings committed a contempt both by his initial refusal to obey the DCMS Committee’s order to attend and by his subsequent refusal to obey the House’s order. The Committee recommended that the House admonish Mr Cummings for his contempt, and it is for the House to determine whether to endorse these conclusions.

Mr Cummings has raised questions about the enforceability of the House’s powers and those of its Committee’s to secure evidence. I know that the Committee of Privileges intends to consider this matter further, and we await its conclusions, but today’s debate underlines the right of Select Committees to undertake their duties as assigned to them by the House. The Government have full respect for the privileges of the House of Commons and will continue to uphold them. They are crucial to the independence of Parliament and the strength of our democracy. I therefore commend the motion to the House.

Before the debate gets under way, I want to say one thing. From experience, I am clear in my own mind—and I am reinforced in my view by the specialist advice of the Clerks—that the focus of this motion is narrow. The Minister rightly stuck to its proper focus. This is not an occasion—I repeat not an occasion—for airing all the arguments about the conduct of the referendum campaign, Vote Leave, tactics used, fake news, and so on. That is not for today—I repeat not for today. This is about the rights of this House and the appearance and non-appearance of witnesses, the issue of compliance with the express wishes of the House and the issue of consequences for violation of our rights. If people have got speeches prepared in which they want to rehearse again all the arguments about the referendum campaign, I suggest the speedy and liberal application of the blue pencil. It is not required; indeed, it is required not to happen. We must not play games with the House’s procedures. I am extremely grateful to the Minister who moved the motion.

I thank the Deputy Leader of the House for presenting the motion, and note that the Leader of the House is occupied with important matters elsewhere. I also thank the Committee of Privileges, chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), for all its work in producing the report.

This is not the first Committee report on the conduct of Mr Dominic Cummings. On 5 June 2018, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee published a special report stating that it had first invited, then ordered Mr Cummings to give oral evidence as part of its inquiry into fake news, and that he had failed to comply with that order. On 7 June 2018, the House resolved that Mr Cummings should

“give an undertaking to the Committee, no later than 6pm on 11 June 2018, to appear before that Committee at a time on or before 20 June 2018.”—[Official Report, 7 June 2018; Vol. 642, c. 492.]

However, on 20 June 2018 the Chair of the DCMS Committee, the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), reported to the House that Mr Cummings had failed to comply with the order of 7 June. The Leader of the House tabled a motion on 28 June that the matter be referred to the Committee of Privileges, and the House supported it.

In the annex to the report, on page 11, the Committee of Privileges helpfully set out the procedure that it would follow in inviting Mr Cummings to provide the DCMS Committee with oral and written evidence, so he has benefited from due process. It made a number of recommendations, and accepted the view of the DCMS Committee that the evidence that it sought from Mr Cummings was relevant to its inquiry and that his refusal to attend constituted a significant interference with its work. The Committee of Privileges

rejected Mr Cummings’s argument as to why he did not appear before the DCMS Committee. He had been offered a series of dates for a hearing, and had not supplied any evidence that suggested he was at significant risk of prosecution. The report states :

I thank the Deputy Leader of the House for his statement. I also thank the Leader of the House for giving me notice that she would be unable to attend the Chamber today, and for the words that the Deputy Leader of the House read out on behalf of the Government. I thank my fellow members of the DCMS Committee, and I thank the Chair of the Privileges Committee and her colleagues for their investigation.

We are not here today as a consequence of a rush of blood to the head and the “at whim” decision of a parliamentary Committee to order a private citizen to give evidence in front of us. Today we are at the end of a process that has run for the best part of 10 months, from the Committee’s first attempts to invite a witness to attend to the process of its ordering that witness to attend, to that being reported to the House and the House also ordering him to attend, and then to the matter being referred to the Committee of Privileges for it to investigate.

I am pleased that that Committee has agreed with the statement in our report that we were within our rights to call the witness, and that the witness should have attended. The witness himself, Mr Cummings, was critical of our Committee’s inquiry, of other witnesses who had attended, and of the evidence that they had given. Our main reason for wishing him to attend was so that he could respond to the allegations made by other witnesses. That is an important part of the inquiry, and also demonstrates the Committee’s desire to hear all sides of the story. We are frustrated in that process when witnesses refuse to confirm dates, put up spurious reasons why they cannot attend, and then, in correspondence with the Committee, seek to behave in a way that is contemptuous of its work and, therefore, of the work of the House.

This is the heart of the matter. The report states that many of Mr Cummings’s communications were highly inappropriate, including some outside the House. He did not do himself any favours in that respect. I personally wanted to hear what he had to say, and I honestly believe that many members of the Committee had open minds and wanted their questions to be answered. Is it not also true that we asked very probing questions when it came to the other side of the debate? We questioned Christopher Wylie very closely about his desire to hawk information to Vote Leave.

Indeed. The questions that we wished to put to Mr Cummings were highly relevant to our inquiry. They were also highly relevant to evidence presented by other people, including representatives of organisations that had worked with him in his capacity as director of Vote Leave. I think that we should have had an opportunity to put those questions, as a relevant part of our inquiry and the work of the Committee. As the Committee of Privileges says in its report, it cannot be for individuals to seek to interfere with the work of a parliamentary Committee. We should regard that as a very serious matter.

I understand the point that my hon. Friend is making, but is there not also an issue of consistency? I am told that Mark Zuckerberg also declined to give evidence to the Committee during the same inquiry. Moreover, it is quite common for Ministers to decline to give evidence to inquiries, including Ministers in some of the devolved Administrations and Assemblies. I think that the point my hon. Friend is making should be applied consistently and across the board to all potential witnesses, and that we should not fall into the trap of singling out one individual.

I do not believe that we are singling out one individual in this case. It is highly unusual for anyone to behave in the way in which Dominic Cummings behaved towards the Committee. My right hon. Friend is right in saying that we issued an invitation to Mark Zuckerberg, but that is all that we could do. We did not issue a summons or an order for him to appear, because we do not have the jurisdictional powers to do so. He is not a UK national, and is not resident in the UK. We can only issue summonses of that sort to foreign nationals if they happen to be in this country. We said that we would do that, but obviously we do not have an opportunity to do it. So the circumstances in that case are very different.

On the day that we issued the order for Dominic Cummings to appear before the Committee, we also issued an order to Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, and he chose to accept. The personal circumstances of Mr Nix at the time, in terms of the investigations of him and his former company, gave far greater reason for him not to attend than Dominic Cummings, who was not under personal investigation at all at that stage. There were no reasons in law why he should not appear. The normal sub judice rules that protect witnesses from incriminating themselves did not apply in his case. The Committee sought legal advice in that regard. I think that, when we have gone through a thorough process and there are no particular grounds for a witness not to appear, if the Committee and the House believe that it is important for that witness to appear, he should do so.

I agree with what my hon. Friend said about the privileges of Ministers, but the rules of the House in that regard are very different from those applying to private citizens.

Will my hon. Friend confirm, then, that it is his view that it is illegitimate for Ministers ever to claim that they cannot give evidence to a Committee because legal proceedings on a particular issue are under way?

The House does have rules relating to matters that are before UK courts and may prevent witnesses from giving evidence, but I agree with the principle that my hon. Friend has cited. I do not believe that Ministers should claim special privileges in order not to give evidence to a Committee, but they do have a different status. I do not think that that different status should give any individual in the country an opportunity to ignore an order from a Committee or a summons to appear before Parliament simply because they happen to take exception to the idea that Ministers have special privileges that they do not have—as, indeed, do Members of the House of Lords.

I want to pick up the point about consistency. It is not just my hon. Friend’s Select Committee that may have problems with calling witnesses—important witnesses—to take part in inquiries. The Women and Equalities Committee is currently going through a similar process, but we are only one month into requesting an individual to appear before us. Does my hon. Friend agree that it might be helpful if there were more explicit guidelines on the process to be followed, so that it could take place more speedily? I certainly would not want my inquiry on non- disclosure agreements to drag on for a further 10 months.

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. There needs to be more clarity about the process—clarity within the rules as they stand, and more clarity on what the powers of the House are. We have ancient powers, which in modern law cannot be enforced, and they have not been replaced with anything more suitable.

As Chair of a Select Committee, I am sure that my hon. Friend will have shared my experience that the difficulty in getting witnesses to appear is not necessarily around private citizens, who are usually very willing to appear before a Select Committee; it is around encouraging ministerial colleagues, on occasion, and public officials to come before Select Committees. That is where the resistance is. Does my hon. Friend agree that there should be at least an equivalence of rules regarding the appearance of private citizens and elected individuals and publicly accountable individuals before Select Committees? We have not got that balance right yet.