Parliamentary Commission for Administration and Health Service Commissioner for England

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Peter Bottomley

Monday 18th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) has spoken in a way that has interested the House. If I say that he has managed to say in 23 minutes what he might have said in three, I hope he will take that as a compliment.

The essential point of the second motion is that the pay of the parliamentary ombudsman should be set in advance. There is a lack of clarity about whether that will be done before the appointment is advertised. Today, if the motion goes through, I shall be voting for the first time in 36 years for something that I think is seriously wrong. It is wrong to advertise a post and then negotiate with the person who is chosen and reduce the pay after the appointment has been offered. That is wrong. One can understand why the Government might have done it, but that does not make it right. Controlling spending is necessary, but to do it after an appointment has been offered is wrong.

I could say that many more times, but the fact is that this decision is one thing the House has done that is equivalent to what happened when Elizabeth Filkin was chosen to be the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. Her number of days was reduced, her pay was reduced, her appointment should have been renewed because in those days it was not a non-renewable appointment, and in her last week this House agreed to pay her the £30,000 she had been underpaid during her years of service. If I may make a remark about a former holder of the office of Chair, when the former Speaker said in her memoirs that she did not approve of the commissioner or of some action, I thought that was wrong as well.

[Mr Jenkin]

I feel compelled to intervene on my hon. Friend because I do not think it is accurate to say that the Government cut the salary after the post had been advertised. They notified the House of Commons that they did not wish to pay as much as the existing salary and the recruitment panel was left in the invidious position of wondering how to advertise the post. The strong advice we received was that we should advertise a fixed salary, but the Government would not allow us to do so. We advertised based on the existing salary, but that was qualified and the candidates were informed during the recruitment process that it was subject to alteration. It was not a satisfactory process, however, so the spirit of what my hon. Friend is saying is absolutely right.

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[Sir Peter Bottomley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and I congratulate him and the Government business managers on finding a motion that could get through the House. The essential point remains however—I think I am right in saying this—that the salary negotiation took place after the person had been chosen, and that is wrong. Although I was not part of the process, I understand that the candidates were strong and that almost any of those who were well-qualified to be chosen could probably have decided to take the job at no pay if it had been advertised at no pay because it is an important position of public service to the people of this country and, indirectly, to improve the government of the country. The essential point is that we should never again start negotiating with someone who has been offered a job in competition by saying, “At what level will you do it?”

My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) referred to the UK Statistics Authority, whose report was published today. The report rightly says that its aims, with the Office for National Statistics, are respect—I do not think that aim has been met in this case—and working together to make a difference, which is true. Another of its aims is being proud of what has been done and always trying to do it better. In terms of trying to do things better I am not sure that, without a framework, it is correct for the Prime Minister and the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee to decide rates of pay. We need to have a framework and then we can say, “This is what it would appear to be—it should be up or down on that.”

I ought to have started by saying that I approve of the selection of Dame Julie Mellor and that I would have approved of the selection of any of those on the shortlist because I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex that any of those who got to the shortlist could have been appointed with honour and distinction. However, let me make a less important point. Motion 9, which is being taken with the lead motion, refers to the rate of pay which is

“subject to (a) any relevant increase for Permanent Secretaries recommended by the Senior Salaries Review Body and (b) after the end of the current pay freeze, 1 per cent. annual uprating in lieu of performance pay”,

and it goes on to things we have discussed already. I do not think those conditions are right. We ought to say that the rate of pay for someone holding that office should not change at all, as with Members of Parliament between general elections. We ought to say that, although there might be some inflation or even deflation, the rate of pay for someone holding a position that goes from appointment to a point at the end of service, or, as for us, from one general election to another, should remain the same. I do not think that 1% in lieu of performance pay dignifies the office, is necessary or makes sense, but that is not to be amended.

[Mr Jenkin]

I share my hon. Friend’s concern about this but the problem is the legislation, which allows the salary to be determined only in relation to that of a permanent secretary. That is why I invited my hon. Friend the Minister to give an assurance that we will, at the earliest opportunity I hope, update the legislation.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

I shall conclude my remarks by joining in the praise for Ann Abraham and the way she has fulfilled the job, and I look forward with anticipation to Dame Julie Mellor’s doing the same.

I do not think anyone in the House thinks it was the Minister’s idea to get us to this position, although he might have helped us out of a difficulty. I hope that he will say to ministerial colleagues that it would be better to get my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex, as Chairman of the Public Administration Committee, and others together to create a framework so that we avoid any possibility of dropping ourselves into such a mess again. I leave aside the fact that Dame Julie Mellor is female and that the House has a record of saying to people, “We’re going to change the terms of the job and a woman will do it.” There are other times when I may be more explicit about such things, but there is an opportunity to say here, with approval for Dame Julie Mellor and disapproval for the way we got ourselves into this fix, that we expect the Government to take on their responsibility and, with others, find a way of resolving it for the future.

Publication of Information about Complaints against Members

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Peter Bottomley

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

One of these three issues—ensuring that resources are available to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards—is vital. It is a tragedy and a disgrace to the House that we did not do this when Elizabeth Filkin was the commissioner. There is not enough time to go back over all that now, but the House does not have a very good or consistent record.

The question of whether lay members will have privilege should not be too difficult. Presumably, we extend privilege to the commissioner, so we ought to be able to extend it in the same way. I do not have a view on whether we should go for a sub-committee of Members only to deal with privilege issues. I shall not argue against the proposal on lay members, but I note that the provision that they cannot have been a Member of Parliament before would exclude someone such as Martin Bell who would be eminently qualified to be a lay member, but that might be the rough justice we will have. I suspect that if there were lay members, we could avoid hon. Members having the dilemma that he and I faced when we were members of the Privileges and Standards Committee and agreed, in one or two cases that we considered, to use the criminal burden of proof rather than the balance of probabilities. I think that we made a mistake; I think he acknowledged that in a book and I am perfectly willing to say now that we did make a mistake. Again, however, the reasons behind that are not for discussion today.

Paragraph 25 of the Privileges and Standards Committee’s HC 67 report says that the Committee had “read with some concern” the suggestion of the Committee on Standards in Public Life that

“MPs should be required to register positions of responsibility in voluntary or charitable organisations, even if unpaid, together with an indication of the amount of time spent on them.”

Bluntly, I would ask that Committee why not spend more time looking at what MPs do in our job rather than what we do with our spare time? In my time at Parliament, I have been a trustee of Christian Aid, chairman of the Church of England Children’s Society, a member of the council of Mind—previously the national association for mental health—and a member of the council of Nacro. I have also been involved with other, less nationally prominent, organisations. I do not think that I would have accepted the invitations to take those positions if I had thought that I would have to log the amount of time I spent going to and at meetings, and I doubt whether I would have taken on the position of being parliamentary warden of St Margaret’s at Westminster. There is a whole range of issues on which that Committee ought to wake up, and if it wants to take advice from me publicly or privately I shall offer it.

[Mr Jenkin]

Is not the corollary of that recommendation that an MP who went on a holiday to learn how to paint watercolours would have to fill in a form and register it because that would be time spent not as an MP but doing an unpaid extracurricular activity? Why not register everything we do not do for Parliament in our spare time?

[Peter Bottomley]

I think my hon. Friend makes the point that if we registered what we did not do we would probably have a longer list than if we registered what we did do. The key point is that the general aim of having transparency matters.

The first of the motions introduced by the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron) concerns publication. During my time in Parliament, there have been two or three cases in which I have been rather proud of my approach to them and the persistence I maintained. However, two of them ended up with accusations being made against me of being a paedophile, one of which was swallowed by a national newspaper, which published in 2 million copies a case against me. If a Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards took media attention as a basis for starting an investigation, I would object. As it happened, in that case, no other newspaper copied the allegation, and the first settled, at pretty heavy expense to it, and made a damages payment. I wish those events had not happened, but the case involved people whom I had upset. They were bad, mad or sad; I was bold and pretty decisive, and there ended up being a series of allegations against me.

In a second case, a constituent whom I had helped complained to the commissioner that I had taken obscene photographs of his children. The commissioner found that there was no case to look into, but if that person had gone to the papers and they had run the story as they normally would, under the current arrangements the commissioner would have had to look into it. We have to be aware of such dangers. We cannot legislate against all possibilities, but we have to be careful about saying that just because there has been media attention, the commissioner should get involved.

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[Mr Jenkin]

I wholly agree with that point, and it fits with the one I am trying to make, which is that their perspective is necessarily a different one, owing to civil servants’ long and distinguished experience. Very often—it has to be said—Parliament will have been, throughout their careers, perhaps a matter of great frustration to them, and they might well share the feeling of many others about how poorly the House has done its jobs in various ways over the years. I do not think, therefore, that they necessarily have the right perspective—they have one perspective, but it cannot be solely the right perspective. We have to take their recommendations gratefully and humbly, but add a wider perspective to them to give them life.

On the question of adding lay members to a Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron), who moved the motion, gave examples of where lay members have been added to other committees. However, those are not parliamentary committees and are not, for example, subject to the question of privilege, and it is on parliamentary privilege that I wish to make three brief points. First, there are members of the judiciary and senior figures in public life who have served elsewhere in public life who are either careless of the question of parliamentary privilege or actually could not care less about parliamentary privilege.

The word “privilege” carries certain overtones. At one stage before the election, it went out to the Conservative party that we should not use that word, because it would be misunderstood and seem to relate to the then Leader of the Opposition’s education. In fact, every Parliament in the world of any distinction enjoys some measure of privilege or immunity in order that those Members can do their job. The reason we had the Bill of Rights in 1689 was to enable the House to function, and we still need those privileges, that protection and those immunities. We hold those immunities not for ourselves and the protection of our own persons or private interests, and not to protect us from the criminal law if we commit criminal offences—as we have just discovered in a recent case—but so that we can advance the interests of the country freely and without fear or favour. These are the people’s privileges. I urge the Procedure Committee, as it considers this matter, to accept the advice of the Clerk of the House. Let me, for the second day on the trot, quote from a note from the Clerk. Referring to the role of lay members on the Committee, he made it clear that he did not comment on the merits of the proposal itself, which I personally welcome, but he also said:

“It is not clear to me that their participation in decision-making by voting is in fact covered by parliamentary privilege. At the very least the matter is questionable and therefore may be justiciable.”

Until that matter has been comprehensively and categorically resolved, it would be sensible for the Procedure Committee to recommend that if the Standards and Privileges Committee is to have lay members, they should not be voting members.

I imagine that it would be extremely hard for the Standards and Privileges Committee to ignore the advice of the lay members, particularly if they are as eminent as I hope they will be. I very much hope that one of them will be a retired judge, for example. I think that it would greatly assist the functioning of the Committee to receive more legal advice, so that it could interpret the byzantine rules and regulations and be navigated through difficult, contentious issues of evidence and fairness. After all, that is what the Committee is about. It would be very difficult to ignore the advice of a retired judge, whether he had a vote or not.

Secondly, I should be interested to know how often votes take place on the Committee. Never? I see a shaking head.

[Peter Bottomley]

Not never, but not frequently.

[Mr Jenkin]

My hon. Friend says “Not never, but not frequently”, and I observed the right hon. Member for Rother Valley shaking his head.

It would be awful if decisions were split on some of the contentious cases that we are discussing. The voting is not really relevant, and I think that it can be set aside until the question of the privileges of the House has been resolved.

We keep running up against the question of privilege. The arrest of my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) led to a protracted argument about it. The case relating to privilege has just been resolved—I recognise that other cases are sub judice under the criminal law, so I will not comment on them—but resolving it took months. If we had had a more watchful Privileges Committee entirely devoted to the question, we could have forestalled all that. More to the point, if we got on with the parliamentary privileges Bill that everyone agrees we need, we could put the question of privileges on a much less contentious and disputed footing.

That is my third point. When will we have a parliamentary privileges Bill, so that we can resolve some of these issues? Australia has enacted such a Bill, as have other Commonwealth countries. It is time that we stopped resting on the 1689 Act, which is increasingly irrelevant in this information age whose media are so different from those of the past. Parliamentary privilege has to contend with many issues that were not conceived in those days. It is time we updated the Bill of Rights with a parliamentary privileges Act, and I hope that the Procedure Committee will consider that.

I also think that we should have a Select Committee on parliamentary privilege, separate from the Standards and Privileges Committee. As soon as a big issue arises, what happens? Following the arrest of my hon. Friend, it was immediately agreed—somewhat insultingly—that the existing Committee was not up to the job, and that much grander and more important panjandrums would have to be placed on a separate Committee to consider the issue of privileges. I think we had better recognise that the two functions are different. The fact that lay members will be involved with one aspect of the work of the Standards and Privileges Committee and not the other underlines the fact that there are two separate functions, and that they should be undertaken by two separate Committees. I very much hope that that will be one of the Procedure Committee’s recommendations.