Code of Conduct

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Monday 12th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

We welcome the review of the code of conduct by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and the report by the Committee on Standards and Privileges commenting on the draft code and the changes that the commissioner has suggested. May I also say at the outset that Labour supports the changes that he has suggested for all-party groups?

As the Committee notes, the code was last revised in 2005 and several areas of it could be usefully clarified, so there is much that we welcome in the review. It is sensible that the code of conduct has remained one of high-level principles, rather than detailed rules. As the chairman of Standards for England noted in his consultation response, there is a danger that having a set of rules

“which is too tightly defined can lead to a complexity which makes understanding of the rules too difficult to grasp which is therefore counter-productive”.

We welcome the fact the commissioner has rejected such an overly prescriptive rules-based approach. There is much that we can welcome in the report, so rather than go into great detail about that, I wish to concentrate on areas where we have some concerns, one of which has been pointed out by the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker).

Labour Members believe that the existing code of conduct is working well. That is not only a tribute to the work done by my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron) and his Committee, but it is reflected in the responses to the consultation, which did not throw up any major concerns with the status quo. Therefore, any suggestion that the code should be extended into areas not currently covered would need to be backed up by a convincing argument.

In his consultation, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards asked:

“Should the scope of the Code extend to some aspects of a Member’s private and personal life? If so, how should that be expressed in the Code?”

The parliamentary Labour party’s response to the consultation said no to that, as we feared that it would turn the code of conduct into a code of morals. That remains our view, and we are puzzled by the commissioner’s recommendation on this point. The proposed revision to the code states:

“the Code does not seek to regulate the conduct of Members in their purely private and personal lives”.

We agree with that approach, because the code should not seek to do that. However, the proposed new code would go on to state:

“unless such conduct significantly damages the reputation and integrity of the House of Commons as a whole or of its Members generally.”

That is the point that we have all been wrestling with in the debate.

That extension appears to suggest that we, as Members of this House, are entitled to a private life—we are all human, so we are entitled to one under article 8 and the Human Rights Act 1998—unless the commissioner rules that we are not. As the Leader of the House pointed out in his response to the consultation,

“extending the scope of the Code explicitly to cover Members’ private and personal lives could, as you note in the consultation paper, lead to their human rights being infringed.”

What threshold would result in the code coming into action? We are not told. The commissioner’s response to the consultation says that it would be “extremely limited circumstances” that are

“so serious and so blatant”.

However, he gives no further indication of what those might be. Such comments cause further confusion, rather than illuminate what the new situation might be. He gives no clues as to what he thinks those circumstances should be.

So what are these “extremely limited circumstances”? Some attempts have been made in the debate to define them, but those have been unsatisfactory. I am sure if we stood on Westminster bridge and canvassed the views of those who passed by, we would find as many views on what those circumstances should be as people we spoke to. The current commissioner may take a narrow view of what constitute his “extremely limited circumstances”, but his successor may take a more or less narrow view. This is an unsatisfactory situation. The Leader of the House noted in his response to the consultation that we should be

“wary of extending the Code to deal with a purely hypothetical eventuality.”

I agree with that.

As I said at the outset, the existing code is working well. What was needed was tweaking and clarification, not mission creep. Most of the proposed changes to the code are sensible and can easily be supported.

[Oliver Heald]

I rather agree with what my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) was saying earlier. I do not think there is any intention to extend the scope of the code here. The existing code, before the amendments, did not apply to private conduct, but there was a general provision that no Member must act in a way that brought the House into disrepute. This is about clarifying what those two provisions mean in the amended code. I would have thought that that was something that should happen, even if the hon. Lady is not happy with the exact wording.

[Ms Eagle]

The hon. Gentleman makes a particular point, but I do not think that what the commissioner has suggested is clear either and that is what we are struggling with at the moment. I may be alone in this, but I did not think that we faced a problem that needed the kind of revision that has got us into the confusing situation we are now in.

Members of Parliament are rightly accountable in the courts of law and under the code, as are people in other walks of life. But unlike lawyers, general practitioners or people in any of the other professions, Members of Parliament are accountable at the ballot box for their actions and they are accountable to their political party. The electorate are entitled to make a judgment about a Member’s private life, and about how effectively they pursue their constituency duty and how they treat their constituents—that is how democracy works—but I trust the common sense of the British people to make such judgments; we should leave judgments about morals to them.