Committee on Standards and Committee of Privileges

Debate between Angela Eagle and Oliver Heald

Monday 12th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

The Opposition support the principle that lay members should sit on a newly constituted Committee on Standards. We also understand and support the pragmatic solution of splitting the current Committee in two to avoid the complications and uncertainty that could arise if non-MPs were to sit on the Privileges Committee.

When the issue was first considered at the end of last year, we did not seek to divide the House on the approach suggested. Although it is not directly analogous because all MPs are elected—and therefore ultimately accountable to their constituents—the principle of appointing lay members to a standards Committee is widely adopted in other areas of public life. For example, both the Bar Council and the General Medical Council have lay members.

On the other hand, the Press Complaints Commission also has lay members, and given the mess that it now finds itself in, perhaps we should take this opportunity to remind ourselves that lay membership of any committee is not in itself a complete answer to the challenges of upholding the standards of conduct and behaviour expected of any particular group of people, be they lawyers, doctors, MPs or—dare I say it—journalists. Undoubtedly, however, the presence of lay members should reassure the public that the Standards Committee is not some kind of cosy stitch-up but is there to deliver a rigorous and robust process that is fair to all and therefore credible. That is obviously in the public interest.

I congratulate the Procedure Committee on its work on this issue since the House’s resolution last year and on bringing this change about. I note, however, that the Government have ignored the Committee’s recommendation to give the House a further opportunity to vote on the principle of lay membership. Although the Opposition are in favour of the principle, it is noticeable that in evidence to the Procedure Committee a number of Members raised concerns about the appointment of lay members. Those Members included, from the Government Benches, the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) and the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin).

In its report, the Procedure Committee states that

“it is right to register our concern at the level of unease felt by many Members about the House’s decision of 2 December. It may well be that, having considered the examination of the practical and privilege implications as set out in our report, the House may wish to reconsider its view of the principle of adding lay members to the Committee on Standards and Privileges.”

Will the Leader of the House explain why the Government have chosen not to tackle this unease head-on and do as the Procedure Committee suggested? Perhaps it is because of the decision to split the current Committee, but I would like to hear the Government’s explanation for their decision not to have a further vote on the principle itself.

We support the appointment of lay members to the Standards Committee. The Procedure Committee has found that the appointment of lay members is not completely without precedent—it cites a 1933 committee on the future government of India. I must say, however, that that is a rather particular example and not one likely to be replicated any time soon. It must not be assumed that simply appointing lay members to the Standards Committee will do the trick. It is clearly not a panacea.

Moreover, how lay members should take part in Committee proceedings needs to be clearly defined. This the Procedure Committee has done. It has recommended that Members of the House make up the majority of the new Standards Committee—after all, it will be a Committee of the House—and the proposals outlined in the proposed new Standing Orders, which adopt the recommendations of the Procedure Committee, suggest appointing at least two but no more than three lay members. That strikes a sensible balance.

We also agree with the proposed powers of lay members as outlined in the motion. The Standards Committee will be a Committee of the House, and the Members of Parliament who serve on it will be able to do so first and foremost because they successfully stood for election. Therefore, they are ultimately accountable to their constituents for their actions, as are all of us, and following the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, they submit themselves to that judgment every five years. Lay members of the Committee will not be elected but will be appointed, and they will not have to justify their actions at the ballot box.

The Procedure Committee therefore had to consider how that difference could best be accommodated in the day-to-day workings of the Committee. It considered two options: whether members of the Committee should have full voting rights or whether they should be appointed with more limited rights. In its impressive survey of the history of Committees of the House and the operation of committees in Parliaments around the Commonwealth, the Procedure Committee came across few examples of lay members voting. In its survey of the Commonwealth, only the New South Wales Legislative Assembly had given lay members of a Committee voting rights. But that practice, confined to one Committee in New South Wales, has now ceased.

To give lay members voting rights would also raise difficult questions of privilege, as the Leader of the House pointed out. He also pointed out that the Procedure Committee outlined the issues, as set out in the evidence of the parliamentary Clerk to the Procedure Committee. For those reasons, like the Government, we support the second option, which would mean that lay members could fully participate in the Committee by questioning witnesses but could not vote.

The proposed new Standing Orders require the Committee to publish any paper from a lay member setting out that lay member’s opinion on the report. We recognise that a balance has to be struck if lay members of the Committee are not to have voting rights. Nevertheless, we recognise the concerns raised by some Members, including the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex, about the publication of dissenting reports. I note that the right for a lay member to publish a dissenting report was described in the Government’s weekend spin on our proceedings today as a “golden share”, which is a nicer name for a veto. Perhaps the Leader of the House could let us know in more detail how he sees that power working.

Amendment (b) suggests that ex-Members should be eligible for selection as lay members after only five years out of the House. That seems like a way of ensuring that lay members are not quite lay members and runs the risk of undermining the credibility that the reforms will bring about. Amendment (c) suggests that the membership of the soon-to-be-separated Standards and Privileges Committee should be the same. That runs the risk of undermining the separation, and we believe that the membership of these important Committees could easily be different and certainly should not be made the same by changing the Standing Orders.

I do not want to spend too much time intruding on the debate between the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee and the Leader of the House, but her amendment raises an extremely important issue about the number of days allocated to her Committee. That is one of those issues that will rumble on. Suffice it to say that I have considerable sympathy with what she says.

We support the other proposals in the proposed new Standing Orders. They are a welcome advance designed to improve public confidence, but they are not a panacea. The PCC, for example, had lay members, and that did not make the body effective or ensure that the organisation retained public confidence. Public confidence in Parliament, as the Leader of the House said, was significantly damaged by the expenses scandal. The appointment of lay members will not in itself restore that confidence, but it is one of many steps taken since then to repair the damage done.

I have been a Member of the House for 20 years, and I believe that, overwhelmingly, Members are committed to public service, strive to serve their constituents and seek at all times to uphold the Nolan principles.

[Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)]

The hon. Lady mentioned the Nolan principles. I am a member of that committee, in its latest guise, and I wonder whether she agrees that over the years the Committee on Standards in Public Life has done some useful work in scoping out the code of conduct and the work of the commissioner as a fully independent investigator, for example, and of course in proposing lay membership.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

I am more than happy to agree with the interjection that the hon. Gentleman made just as I was about to finish my remarks. The Nolan committee clearly has a lot to be proud of for how it has developed the code of conduct—we will have a debate on that later. It has done a great deal to codify and put in good order the standards that should be expected of every single Member of the House.

As I was just about to say, the Opposition support the proposed new Standing Orders and will not seek to divide the House.

Code of Conduct

Debate between Angela Eagle and Oliver Heald

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.