Committee on Standards and Committee of Privileges

Baroness Primarolo Excerpts

Monday 12th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

With the permission of the House, we will deal with motions 2, 3 and 4 together. I inform the House that Mr Speaker has selected the amendments to motion 2 in the names of Sir Alan Meale, Sir Paul Beresford and Natascha Engel. The amendments will be debated with the main motion and the questions necessary to dispose of the motion will be put at the end of the debate. We have approximately 45 minutes.

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Sir George Young)]

I beg to move, motion 2

That—

(1) The following new Standing Order be made, to have effect from the date specified in paragraph (6) of this order—

‘Committee on Standards

(1) There shall be a select committee, called the Committee on Standards—

(a) to oversee the work of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards; to examine the arrangements proposed by the Commissioner for the compilation, maintenance and accessibility of the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and any other registers of interest established by the House; to review from time to time the form and content of those registers; and to consider any specific complaints made in relation to the registering or declaring of interests referred to it by the Commissioner; and

(b) to consider any matter relating to the conduct of Members, including specific complaints in relation to alleged breaches in any code of conduct to which the House has agreed and which have been drawn to the committee’s attention by the Commissioner; and to recommend any modifications to such code of conduct as may from time to time appear to be necessary.

(2) The committee shall consist of ten Members, and at least two and no more than three lay members.

(3) Unless the House otherwise orders, each Member nominated to the committee shall continue to be a member of it for the remainder of the Parliament.

(4) The committee shall have power to appoint sub-committees consisting of no more than seven Members, and at least two lay members, and to refer to such sub-committees any of the matters referred to the committee.

(5) Lay members may take part in proceedings of the committee and of any sub-committee to which they are appointed and may ask questions of witnesses, but lay members may not move any motion or any amendment to any motion or draft report, and may not vote.

(6) The quorum of the committee shall be five members who are Members of this House, and the quorum of any sub-committee shall be three members who are Members of this House.

(7) The committee and any sub-committee may not proceed to business unless at least one lay member is present.

(8) The committee and any sub-committee shall have power—

(a) to send for persons, papers and records, to sit notwithstanding any adjournment of the House and to adjourn from place to place;

(b) subject to the provisions of paragraph (9) of this order, to report from time to time;

(c) to appoint legal advisers, and to appoint specialist advisers either to supply information which is not readily available or to elucidate matters of complexity within the committee’s order of reference.

(9) Any lay member present at a meeting at which a report has been agreed shall have the right to submit a paper setting out that lay member’s opinion on the report. The Committee shall not consider a motion that the Chair make a report to the House until it has ascertained whether any lay member present wishes to submit such a paper; and any such paper shall be appended to the report in question before it is made to the House.

(10) The committee shall have power to order the attendance of any Member before the committee or any sub-committee and to require that specific documents or records in the possession of a Member relating to its inquiries, or to the inquiries of a sub-committee or of the Commissioner, be laid before the committee or any sub-committee.

(11) The committee, or any sub-committee, shall have power to refer to unreported evidence of the former Committees on Standards and Privileges and to any documents circulated to any such committee.

(12) The committee shall have power to refuse to allow proceedings to which the public are admitted to be broadcast.

(13) The Attorney General, the Advocate General and the Solicitor General, being Members of the House, may attend the committee or any subcommittee, may take part in deliberations, may receive committee or subcommittee papers and may give such other assistance to the committee or sub-committee as may be appropriate, but shall not vote or make any motion or move any amendment or be counted in the quorum.’

(2) The following new Standing Order be made—

‘Lay members of the Committee on Standards: appointment, etc.

(1) Lay members shall be appointed to the Committee on Standards by a resolution of the House on a motion made under the provisions of this order and shall remain as lay members in accordance with the provisions of this order.

(2) No person may be first appointed as a lay member if that person is or has been a Member of this House or a Member of the House of Lords; and any person so appointed shall cease to be a lay member upon becoming a Member of this House or of the House of Lords.

(3) No person may be appointed as a lay member unless that person has been selected on the basis of a fair and open competition.

(4) A person appointed as a lay member may resign as a lay member by giving notice to the House of Commons Commission.

(5) A person appointed as a lay member shall be dismissed from that position only following a resolution of the House, after the House of Commons Commission has reported that it is satisfied that the person should cease to be a lay member; and any such report shall include a statement of the Commission’s reasons for its conclusion.

(6) Subject to the provisions of paragraphs (2), (4) and (5) of this order, a person appointed as a lay member shall continue as a lay member for the remainder of the Parliament in which that person was first appointed.

(7) A person first appointed as a lay member who has been a lay member for the remainder of one Parliament may be re-appointed by a resolution of the House in the subsequent Parliament, and the provisions of paragraph (3) of this order shall not apply to any such re-appointment. The period of re-appointment shall be specified in the resolution of the House for reappointment and shall not exceed two years from the dissolution of the Parliament in which the person was first appointed as a lay member, and a resolution under this paragraph shall cease to have effect on the dissolution of the Parliament in which the resolution of the House for reappointment was made.

(8) No person may be re-appointed as a lay member other than in accordance with the provisions of paragraph (7) of this order.

(9) No motion may be made under the provisions of this order unless—

(a) notice of the motion has been given at least two sitting days previously, and

(b) the motion is made on behalf of the House of Commons Commission by a Member of the Commission.

(10) The Speaker shall put the questions necessary to dispose of proceedings on motions made under the provisions of this order not later than one hour after the commencement of those proceedings.

(11) Business to which this order applies may be proceeded with at any hour, though opposed.’

(3) The following new Standing Order be made, to have effect from the date specified in paragraph (6) of this order—

‘Committee of Privileges

(1) There shall be a select committee, called the Committee of Privileges, to consider specific matters relating to privileges referred to it by the House.

(2) The committee shall consist of ten Members, of whom five shall be a quorum.

(3) Unless the House otherwise orders, each Member nominated to the committee shall continue to be a member of it for the remainder of the Parliament.

(4) The committee shall have power to appoint sub-committees consisting of no more than seven Members, of whom three shall be a quorum, and to refer to such sub-committees any of the matters referred to the committee.

(5) The committee and any sub-committee shall have power—

(a) to send for persons, papers and records, to sit notwithstanding any adjournment of the House, to adjourn from place to place and to report from time to time;

(b) to appoint legal advisers, and to appoint specialist advisers either to supply information which is not readily available or to elucidate matters of complexity within the committee’s order of reference.

(6) The committee shall have power to order the attendance of any Member before the committee and to require that specific documents or records in the possession of a Member relating to its inquiries be laid before the committee or any sub-committee.

(7) The committee shall have power to refer to unreported evidence of the former Committees on Standards and Privileges and to any documents circulated to any such committee.

(8) The committee shall have power to refuse to allow proceedings to which the public are admitted to be broadcast.

(9) The Attorney General, the Advocate General and the Solicitor General, being Members of the House, may attend the committee, may take part in deliberations, may receive committee papers and may give such other assistance to the committee as may be appropriate, but shall not vote or make any motion or move any amendment or be counted in the quorum.’

(4) From the date specified in paragraph (6) of this order—

(a) Standing Order No. 121 (Nomination of select committees) shall be amended, in line 12, by leaving out ‘the Committee on Standards and Privileges’ and inserting ‘the Committee of Privileges, the Committee on Standards’;

(b) Standing Order No. 149 (Committee on Standards and Privileges) shall be repealed;

(c) in Standing Order No. 150 (Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards), in each place where the words ‘Committee on Standards and Privileges’ occur, there shall be substituted the words ‘Committee on Standards’.

(5) From the date specified in paragraph (6) of this order, the Order of the House of 19 July 2010 (Liaison Committee (Membership)) shall be amended by leaving out ‘Standards and Privileges’ and inserting, at the appropriate place in alphabetical order, ‘Privileges’ and ‘Standards’.

(6) The date specified for the purposes of paragraphs (1) and (3) to (5) of this order is the first sitting day of the first month after the month in which the House agrees a resolution under Standing Order (Lay members of the Committee on Standards: appointment, etc.) appointing two or three lay members of the Committee on Standards.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

With this, we shall discuss amendments (b), (c) and (a) to motion 2, and motions 3 and 4 on pay for Chairs of Select Committees.

[Sir George Young]

On 2 December 2010, the House agreed, without Division, to a motion agreeing with the principle set out in the twelfth report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life that lay members should sit on the Select Committee on Standards and Privileges. The House invited the Select Committee on Procedure to bring forward proposals to implement that.

The Procedure Committee published its proposals in its sixth report of the current Session, which was published on 7 November last year. The Government, and I am sure the whole House, are very grateful to that Committee for its work. The motion draws extensively on the work of the Procedure Committee, and follows consultation with that Committee, the Standards and Privileges Committee and others. I am pleased to say that the Procedure Committee has written to confirm that it broadly accepts the approach that we propose to take, and the support of the Standards and Privileges Committee is apparent from the welcome decision of the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron) to add his name to the motion.

Before turning to the provisions of the motions, I will remind the House briefly of the background to the proposals. I need hardly remind Members that the expenses scandal rocked public faith in the House to its foundations. One part of that crisis lay in the House’s approach to disciplining Members, which, as the Committee on Standards in Public Life observed, did not command full public confidence. As Chair of the Standards and Privileges Committee at the time when the Committee on Standards in Public Life inquired into these matters, I said that the then Standards and Privileges Committee:

“would be very happy to consider having outside members sitting on the Standards and Privileges Committee…particularly to assist us in coming to judgments where people may feel at the moment we are possibly too lenient.”

The Committee on Standards in Public Life recommended in November 2009 that

“there should be at least two lay Members who have never been Parliamentarians on the Standards and Privileges Committee”,

who

“should be chosen through the official public appointments process and formally approved by the House”.

The House endorsed that recommendation after its debate on 2 December 2010. I will not attempt to summarise all that was said on that day, but the most powerful case was made by the right hon. Member for Rother Valley. He said:

“Lay members provide the public with reassurance that the Committees are not cosy gentlemen’s clubs, where deals are stitched up and scandals are hushed up. They can also bring valuable outside experience and expertise with them.”—[Official Report, 2 December 2010; Vol. 519, c. 999.]

He referred to the lay members of the Speaker’s Committee for the Independent Parliament Standards Authority. As a member of that committee, I can assure the House that the contribution of lay members is invaluable.

I have already referred to the specific recommendation of the Committee on Standards in Public Life that lay members should never have been parliamentarians. That is reflected in the motion, which also mirrors the statutory definition of lay members used for the Speaker’s Committee on IPSA.

Amendment (b), tabled by the hon. Member for Mansfield (Sir Alan Meale), runs contrary to the letter and, more importantly, the spirit of the Kelly recommendations. I invite him to consider whether it would really enhance the credibility of the House’s disciplinary procedures to appoint as a lay member a former hon. Member who left the House in 2005. I fear that that might be portrayed not as a fresh start but as a return to the bad old days, and of course public perception is part of the issue that we are seeking to address. I urge him not to move his amendment and invite the House to reject it if it comes to a vote.

Of course, there is a difference between agreement in principle that a change should take place and agreement on how it will operate in practice. A number of significant issues have been raised about lay membership of a Select Committee, and I will explain briefly how those issues have been tackled in the motions.

The first issue, identified by the Procedure Committee, was that although there had been no suggestion that lay members were appropriate for the consideration of privilege matters, there was no straightforward way to exclude them from such business within the structure of a single Committee. The solution proposed by that Committee, which the main motion today incorporates, was to create two separate Committees, one on standards and one on privileges. That is actually a reversion to the position that existed until 1995.

As the Procedure Committee recommended, provision has been made in motions 3 and 4 for the Chair of the Committee on Standards to inherit the pay now received by the Chair of the Committee on Standards and Privileges. The Government have also made it clear in their response that the Chair of the Committee on Standards, like that of the current Committee, should be drawn from the Opposition Benches. In accordance with the current arrangements, that does not need to be set out in Standing Orders.

Our intention today is not to change the composition of the Committees. The two Committees may have a common membership, and they may choose to elect the same Chair. Even if that is not the case, the Committee of Privileges is likely to meet less often and will be able to consider only matters referred to it. In those circumstances, and following the precedent of the Committee on Members’ Expenses, pay for the Chair of the Committee of Privileges is unlikely to be appropriate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. I inform the House that there are 18 minutes left before the debate expires. I think I saw four Members standing. I do not want to set a time limit, so I hope that each Member will make a brief contribution, enabling all four to participate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Lorely Burt?

[Lorely Burt (Solihull) (LD)]

I just want to speak briefly to the amendment standing in my name on the revised code of conduct—

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. The hon. Lady is speaking to the wrong group of amendments. I have her down to speak in the next debate; that is why I hesitated when I called her.

--- Later in debate ---

[Natascha Engel (North East Derbyshire) (Lab)]

I rise briefly to say that I shall not press my amendment (a), simply because I do not want to detain the House further on Back-Bench business when we are discussing important matters of standards and privileges. However, I will pursue the matter through the Procedure Committee —the Chairman is in the Chamber and will have heard my intervention in this debate—as long as the Leader of the House does not think that the matter rests here, because it does not.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I call Lorely Burt.

[Lorely Burt]

Regarding the amendment standing in my name and that of others on the revised code of conduct—

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. We are not on the code of conduct yet; we are on the motions relating to the pay for Chairs of Select Committees and amendments to Standing Orders about standards and privileges. The code of conduct is the next business, and I will definitely call the hon. Lady at the right time—unless she wants to speak in this debate.

[Lorely Burt]

indicated dissent.