Standards: Code of Conduct and Guide to the Rules

Debate between Thangam Debbonaire and Andrea Leadsom

Monday 12th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

I start by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) and his cross-party Committee for all the hard work that they put into their comprehensive and far-reaching inquiry into the operation of the code of conduct for MPs. They worked diligently, thoughtfully and cross-party with their external members. They came up with sound proposals, consulted carefully and revised their proposals further. It then fell to the Government to table the motion—I will come back to that. I also thank the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and her team for all their dedication to making sure that rules are understood and, when not adhered to, thoroughly and fairly investigated. I also thank them for their recent review.

Since 1695, as my hon. Friend once told me, Parliament has had rules against lobbying and taking payments for conferring or attempting to confer benefits on an individual, business or organisation. Until 2015, those rules only ever got stronger, which is the right and only reasonable direction that the public would expect. When a respected Select Committee does its job—consults, revises and employs independent judicial expertise—and makes its recommendations, my view is that that should be respected fully by the Government. So it is bittersweet to be debating the Government’s eventual motion today. After months of many of us calling for the full set of recommendations to be implemented as recommended, the Government have tabled a motion, but in the process they have ditched crucial elements that would have strengthened parliamentary standards still further. I am dismayed but hardly surprised, because this is, unfortunately, a Government with form.

Let us remember how, just over a year ago, the Tories took an approach to standards taken by no Government before them. The then MP Owen Paterson had been found absolutely bang to rights, having taken a large amount of money for a large amount of access to benefit the company who paid for him. Most importantly, the Commissioner for Standards and the Standards Committee had investigated the claims carefully, reviewed the evidence, considered every angle and concluded a sanction. That is the backdrop to the motion: a Government who, within the past 12 months and roughly three weeks, did that to their system of standards—and there was more to come.

The Government, led by the then Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg)—I have notified him of my intention to mention him—along with many others in the Cabinet and on the Government Benches, tabled and supported a motion as recommended, but in name only. The then Leader of the House spoke for 40 minutes in support not of the motion in his name but of the amendment in the name of his predecessor, the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom). In so doing, he simultaneously tabled a motion and undermined the standards system and the case in hand by trying to introduce a new process.

[Dame Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

Does the hon. Member accept that the amendment tabled was designed to set up a Select Committee to look exactly at the problems that we are debating? That was its intention.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I thank the right hon. Lady for that intervention. It may have been the amendment’s intention in the abstract, but, by introducing it during that process, the Government undermined that existing, living process. Their case when approaching matters of standards is affected even now by that decision to propose a motion and then basically speak in support of one undermining it in the middle of a live process.