Committee on Standards: Members’ Code of Conduct Review

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I will be as brief as I possibly can. First, I would like to thank the Chair of the Committee, the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), for the manner in which he chairs the Committee, for the way he presented the report, and for his diligence and the work he puts in to this Committee. It is a very arduous Committee, and it has a very heavy workload.

[Chris Bryant]

It was not meant to be.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

It is meant to be light duties, and I thought I could combine it with other things, but I have given up other things to stay on this Committee, because I think the work we are now doing on the revision of the code is so important.

I could touch on some of the points the hon. Gentleman made. I think he is right about the key being the transparency of conflicts of interests. We should not be denigrating people in this House who have outside interests. Some of them are unavoidable and some of them are by choice, but I firmly believe that this House is enriched by having people who stay on in Parliament, particularly later in their career, while involved with other interests. Being a senior barrister, for example, may take a Member away for weeks on end on very important cases, but having such people in this House means that we have such resources at our disposal much more readily than if these people felt they were squeezed out and were not welcome here. So I agree with him about the time point, and I agree with him about respectfulness.

I actually joined this Committee because I wanted to be involved in the revision of the code. This is ongoing work, and it has been going on for a very long time—since the previous commissioner first started work on the revision of the code. It is meant to happen every three years, but it has been delayed and delayed. So the report we are discussing actually incorporates the results of a great number of hours of work and thought.

The sad thing is that, if we just look at the Chamber today, we see there are a couple of handfuls of hon. Members here who are engaged with this debate. It has always been the biggest problem, in my view, that people only start engaging with the code when they are accused of something, they are worried about being accused of something or they are trying to steer clear of falling foul of the rules. There is not nearly enough discussion, reflection and understanding of why the code exists, of the principles and values behind the code, or indeed of how we should learn to talk about how we aspire to those principles.

I have always believed that the adjudication process is wanting. The compromise between handing the whole thing over to some independent judicial panel and leaving things as they are is to have an appeal akin to the independent expert panel that we have for the ICGS, but even that would have to be advised by a Member especially appointed for the purpose in serious and contested cases, to advise on how Parliament works and on the moral hazards of being a Member of Parliament.

I was mocked last week for suggesting that Members of Parliament need to learn more about this, but every profession in the world has training programmes to educate lawyers, doctors and other professional people on the moral hazards they will encounter in their career and how they should think about them. The General Medical Council website has a section on how to be a good doctor, and it sets out the principles. They are taught these things.

The problem we have in this House is that, culturally, we consider ourselves to be Members of a sovereign Parliament and to be beyond regulation and beyond question. Article 9 states that everything else is subsidiary to us. If anybody dares question us, well, we are elected, nobody dares gainsay us, and it is up to our voters. I am afraid no other profession in the country operates on that basis.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

My hon. Friend will know that the old military theorist Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of politics by other means. I have often turned that on its head: politics is war minus the shooting. There should be chivalry and absolute civility in the way we conduct ourselves. Although I agree with my hon. Friend, it is often missed that our profession is not like other professions. We are, in a sense, at war without weapons in here. We should remember that and make sure our code of conduct is appropriate to the task that faces us.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. The problem is that, when we sit in the Tea Room, we talk about rules; we do not talk about values and principles. People wonder what the rules mean and how to stay within them—“That is allowed, but this is not allowed.” We see it in financial regulation. When banks and financial services operate on the basis of what the rules are, they get around the rules. The rules are gamed, so they constantly have to adapt.

There is no discussion about whether something is a good and honourable thing to do, or whether it is something about which we should feel uncomfortable. The rules are meant to be a fallback. Actually, we should be talking to each other about why we are in politics, what our personal priorities are, what our personal morality is and how we navigate it.

I have very little time and there is much I could say, but I will not address all the proposals. Members complain about the code of conduct and about the commissioner, but this House voted for the code and the commissioner. This House is to blame for the system we have. If Members do not engage with the system at a moment like this, they have nobody to blame but themselves if they fall foul of it. To cry foul and say how it is all a fix and all a conspiracy does nobody any good.

On that point, because engagement tends to be low, the Committee will have to think much more about how we support those who are accused of falling foul of the code. I can think of cases—I will say no more than that—where if the individuals concerned had been taken aside by the right person and given the right advice, and if they had not run for their lawyers, got into a conflict with the commissioner and then questioned the whole system, their life would have turned out very different. Somehow, we need an independent system of support and advice—it cannot be the Whips—to make sure Members have the right advice.

On closing, I wish to draw attention to a particular piece of evidence that the Committee received. It has not had much attention, but I feel that it is by far the most useful thing that we have received. It is a response to our original issues and questions paper from Dr Claire Foster-Gilbert of the Westminster Abbey Institute. She was addressing the first question, “What values, attitudes and behaviours should the Code of Conduct for MPs seek to encourage or discourage?” She notes that the code reads as a document that first began as a response to financial misconduct. She said:

“It is cast as a regulatory instrument, which implies it is a set of rules which can be kept or broken.”

It is now a mixture of rules, guidance and principles. She points out that no one can perfectly embody those principles; that would be impossible. Let us take, for example, selflessness, to which the hon. Member for Rhondda referred. Nobody can be totally selfless, least of all in politics. Our efforts in that regard can never be completely successful. Dr Foster-Gilbert points out:

“For MPs, faced with difficult choices on a daily basis, the task is to learn how to retain their integrity and behave selflessly, even while making those choices”—

about power, about competition with others, and about competition of ideas.

I will wind up now, but I really recommend that people read this particular piece of evidence, because our next inquiry will be much more about training and promotion of the code. People bridle against training, but we need to engage people in the conversation about what the code is for much more than we do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) on the way he introduced it and on the body of work that he and his Committee have done. It is a fantastic document and a very useful signpost to the type of work we need to do to improve our code of conduct across the House. Our standards and code of conduct are our rules; they are in effect an interface with the electorate we serve. That is how people understand our work; they are the rules that electors appreciate and respect about how we do our work. It is imperative that, when we look at the rules, we manage to take into account what the electors expect of us as Members of Parliament.

The hon. Member for Rhondda was right that our code of conduct and standards have never been so much in the heat of public light and open to such inspection and even controversy. I congratulate the Committee on dealing with the issue in the heat that has been turned on it just now. I suppose we know exactly the moment, day and time when all this changed dramatically. It was about 2 o’clock on Wednesday 3 November when the Leader of the House got to his feet to approve the third report of the Committee on Standards. Of course, he had no intention of approving that particular report. In fact, he did most everything he could to undermine and neuter what was included in the report. We heard things like, “It was an unfair process.” He referred to the lack of examination of witnesses, the lack of an investigatory panel, the length of time taken and, critically, the absence of a right of appeal. It was the first time in history—certainly the first time in my 21 years in this House—that the Government had in effect attempted to overturn a recommendation of the Standards Committee.

More than that, the Leader of House supported an amendment that would have established a Select Committee to revise and review our Standing Orders, undermining and potentially wrecking the very essence of the Standards Committee and its work. This Committee would have had a Government Chair with a Government majority. To call it a kangaroo court would be a massive disrespect to Skippy the bush kangaroo and all his antipodean colleagues. It was a bizarre and clumsy attempt to get Owen Paterson off the hook and, even worse, in the days that followed there were sustained and appalling attacks on the Commissioner for Standards herself. The public hated it and they were appalled at what was going on in this House. It was no wonder that two days later the Leader of the House came scurrying back to the House to have the proposal reviewed and overturned.

What the Leader of the House did that day was to open a Pandora’s box of sleaze, corruption and double standards. It was just sitting there undisturbed since the 1990s and the days of “Back to my place” and cash for questions. The Government should have known not to tamper with it because this box was marked with a skull and crossbones with the very clear message, “Under no circumstances open”. But not only did they open it they took a crowbar to it, and out it all came in a spewing noxious torrent—the whole slurry of cash for access, paid advocacy, cash for honours, cash for questions, second jobs and PPE contracts for their pals. As they tried to put the lid back on, it erupted again, but this time it was like the ark in Indiana Jones when the contents ascended in a hellish mass obliterating everyone in its wake. Parties at No.10, cakes at No.10, do as I say, not as I do, DJs in the basement, birthday cakes, wine and cheese, police investigations, civil servants, and now we even discover that the Prime Minister’s chief of policy has just resigned because of the awful comment about Jimmy Savile that was made by the Prime Minister himself. How the Leader of the House must wish that he had a time machine to go back to that hour and minute on 3 November and that his plan with the Chief Whip to save their pal had been overturned.

The Standards Committee has had to pick this up. It has done well. I do not have time to go over all the details, but I want to pick up on a couple of points that the hon. Member for Rhondda highlighted. The first is the proposal on appeals. The hon. Gentleman has given us a number of options. I exhort him to stick to the status quo. It is right that the commissioner investigates and the Committee considers. That has been the principle at the heart of this, and I urge him to continue with it. I do not think we should reward the Government for what they tried to do by having any sort of look at appeals, and I hope the hon. Gentleman sticks to that.

I support the Committee in its option on second jobs. I would prefer to see a written contract for a second job, but I can live with the proposal that a contract detailing duties and an undertaking that these duties cannot include lobbying Ministers is right. The main thing that irks, frustrates and consumes our constituents like nothing else is the veracity of the things that are said in this House. This is now the new frontline in our standards, and it has to be addressed. Members of the public now believe that a Minister or Member of Parliament can say anything in this House, regardless of its relationship to fact and actuality—

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Pete Wishart]

I do not have time to give way to the hon. Gentleman, as I have to leave time for the Front Benchers.

I know that this is precarious territory, and the hon. Member for Rhondda has outlined a number of the difficulties, but this is something that we have to resolve. We cannot have a situation where Ministers can say practically anything and expect to be believed but if anyone challenges it, they end up with the prospect of being flung out of the House. That cannot go on. I want to end by congratulating the Committee. This is a great report and we have a good basis for going forward. I hope that this debate has helped the hon. Gentleman in forming his view when considering the final report.

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

This has been an excellent debate, and I find myself observing that every speaker has brought some light to it. Even if I have not agreed with every word, I have appreciated the spirit in which it has been conducted. It is always a great pleasure to take part in any debate introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). As well as demonstrating his intelligence and his ability to get to the nub of an argument, he is also incredibly poetic as he speaks. It has been a great pleasure to take part in the debate, and I congratulate him and all the Committee members—it is great to see so many here—on their very hard work on something that matters so much.

Virtually everyone here seems to agree that standards matter. They are a fundamental cornerstone of our democracy. We may disagree about the wording, and we may debate these issues, but I echo what the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) said about needing more of us in here debating them. It matters so much that many Members seem to get engaged in the process only when they fall foul of it, but standards really do matter and they should be something that we aspire to. It has been a long review, with the Committee looking at the code twice.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

Given that it is just a fact that people do not come to debates such as these, what is the alternative? Do we need to have a proactive engagement policy, rather like the way we introduce new Members to the House now?

[Thangam Debbonaire]

The Committee has made recommendations about more engagement and more training, and we are going to have to work really hard at that. It behoves all of us here today who clearly do believe in the system to also be the ambassadors for the system. We have to be the ambassadors for it in all its glory.

Others have spoken about the backdrop to the debate and about what happened with the former Member for North Shropshire, so I have cut all that from my speech. I just want to highlight a couple of key points. I have written to the Committee in full with a response to all its recommendations. That is winging its way to my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda and his Committee even as we speak. There are so many recommendations that I strongly support, including those on clarity, on training, on finding more ways to engage colleagues and on ensuring that the independence of the Standards Commissioner and the Standards Committee is maintained. This will help to restore and buttress trust in our Parliament, which is so important.

A key recommendation is that there should be an outright ban on second jobs as parliamentary advisers. That is Labour policy and I definitely agree that there should be an outright ban on any Member acting as a paid parliamentary adviser, consultant or strategist— whatever we call it. This has been a recommendation since 2018 from the Committee on Standards in Public Life. It is long overdue, and I strongly support it. Similarly, there is a recommendation for a contract for outside work with explicit statements. I take the point made by the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mark Fletcher) about the difficulty with contracts, but I still think that it is a difficulty we should push through with. This would help to dispel the misconception that MPs are for hire in any way. It is our constituents we are here to serve, not outside interests, so I strongly support that recommendation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The speed of registration is a very fair point, but it is a governmental rather than a parliamentary matter. In terms of the actual declaration, it could give a misleading impression that a Minister, particularly one in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, was attending a constant round of entertainments that were, in fact, entirely in the course of their public duties. That would be very different from a Member of Parliament who had no obligation and was purely attending, if at the same events, for his or her own pleasure.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

The Leader of the House has not been in opposition, but if he was the Opposition spokesman, he would have the same obligation to attend the same event, but would be subject to the House of Commons rules rather than the ministerial ones. What is the difference?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Being in opposition is different from being in government. We have a separation between Ministers and Parliament. The separation of powers is an important constitutional principle.

I will move on to the question of the work undertaken by MPs outside Parliament and how that could, or should, be limited. The Government value the work of the Standards Committee and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards in applying the conduct rules that the House has endorsed. That is why we support the work being undertaken to

“introduce robust new measures to empower the standards system in Parliament”.

It is evident that, further to the 17 November resolution of the House, there is cross-party support for reforms of the rules on outside interests.

The Government remain firmly of the view that, as the Committee on Standards in Public Life recommended in 2018, Members should be banned from accepting any paid work to provide services as a parliamentary strategist, adviser or consultant. There seems to be widespread consensus on that point. The Committee has collected a wide range of evidence from expert witnesses, including the Committee on Standards in Public Life, to consider how reasonable limits on outside work could be defined. As we have discovered during this debate, that is a knotty question without a simple or straightforward answer.

It is apparent that successive generations of parliament-arians have obtained relevant experience through outside work. It is also clear that several parliamentarians continue to use that expertise to make valuable contributions to other areas of public life. First and foremost, however, we are here to represent our constituents and any work outside this place must not come at the expense of their interests. It is sensible that our rules reflect that Members must always prioritise their parliamentary work and serve the electorate who returned them to this place and who will, of course, judge them.

The existing rules require Members to declare their outside interests and positions, but do not explicitly prevent the holding of certain positions, notwithstanding the proposed limits on accepting any paid work to provide services as a parliamentary strategist, adviser or consultant. To go beyond MPs’ central practice of declaration and instead place limits on Members undertaking a much broader range of activity through the application of hard thresholds of time or money would represent a substantive change to the definition of an MP’s role.

As such, there is a question as to whether it would be constitutional to make such adjustments through the Members’ code, or whether legislation would be required. It would arguably be a change to the conditions of membership of this House of similar significance to the provisions set out in the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975, which provides that those who hold certain offices cannot be Members of this House.

More widely, in order for the standards system to operate effectively, it is essential that it is both robust and fair and also compatible with the constitutional principles that have ensured that this place works at its best. Parliament sits at the heart of our constitutional arrangements and it is of utmost importance that Members are able to participate without artificial impediments in debates on contentious issues that are of great import to the electorate. The compatibility of the standards system with the core principles and concepts of fairness and natural justice needs to be considered with care, so I welcome the appointment of the right hon. Sir Ernest Ryder to conduct a review of fairness and natural justice in the standards system.

Throughout the debate, right hon. and hon. Members made a number of interesting and important speeches, which I am confident the Standards Committee will consider carefully. It is through a shared understanding of the constitutional framework in which we operate, as well as formal rules, that we will ensure that our standards system commands the confidence both of the public and of Members on a cross-party basis. I therefore hope that when the Committee publishes its final proposals, they will form the basis for further discussion and final conclusions.

[Chris Bryant]

I am grateful to all those who contributed to the debate and look forward to seeing the Government’s written submission when it comes. Of course, I hope the Leader of the House will come to give evidence to the Committee as well. We are interested in hearing from slightly more Members than were able to attend this afternoon, although I understand that lots of Members have constituency responsibilities and need to get to their constituencies, some of which, like mine, are even further away than Somerset.

It seems to me that we need to work through a few issues, one of which is whether we have specific descriptors for the Nolan principles. The Committee on Standards in Public Life—which, of course, originally came up with the Nolan principles—has advocated that, reviewed our version and was supportive of it. We also need to look at the question of respect, or respectfulness, and how that plays out. I have listened to lots of Members on that.

There may be a knotty problem that we still need to resolve in respect of whether Ministers should be treated differently. I remember the Leader of the House coming to our Committee and saying that he did not really believe that the separation of powers was an important principle, but I noticed that today he said it is—we sometimes choose our arguments according to the day of the week. My important principle is that all MPs should be treated fairly and equally under the rules. It would be for the benefit of most Ministers if all Members were treated exactly the same and had to declare everything in the same way.

It would be in the interests of the public if the House was able to make our current register much more readable and accessible. It is strange that we have to go to TheyWorkForYou to find out the history of our register of interests. We cannot go through the parliamentary system without looking at 20 different documents. If someone wants to look at ministerial registers, they have to look, every year, at 122 online documents. I just do not think that, in the end, that does us any favours as a House.

I repeat the point that I made earlier about the issue of telling the truth and lying. The Leader of the House used precisely the right word: it is a knotty one. Like many of the issues we on the Committee face, these issues are not susceptible to very simple answers. I get very cross and abandon my piety when people try to present—[Interruption.] Yes, I have often abandoned my piety; that is a good point. I get cross when people try to pretend that some of these issues are clear cut; they are not.

Finally, the House has heard from three other Committee members, and we work hard on all these issues, but the lay members bring to the Committee a fascinating outside look. Many of them are from professional backgrounds of which we know nothing and that makes for a much more effective Committee, so I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom), who set it up in that way.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the Committee on Standards’ Review of the Code of Conduct for Members of Parliament.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is there a means by which you could draw to the attention of the SNP spokesman, the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), that Mr Speaker made a statement in which he explained

“there are means by which accusations of lying may be brought before the House”?—[Official Report, 2 February 2022; Vol. 708, c. 266.]

I do not think the SNP spokesman has read that statement or understood it.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point of order. He has rather achieved what he set out to achieve, and he has continued the debate.