Code of Conduct and Modernisation Committee

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Alberto Costa

Thursday 25th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Alberto Costa (South Leicestershire) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I welcome you to your new position. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Telford (Shaun Davies) on an excellent and very detailed maiden speech. No doubt he will represent his constituents very successfully.

I am the only Member in the Chamber today who served on both the Standards Committee and the Privileges Committee in the 2019 Parliament; all of the other MPs, bar one, are no longer in the Chamber. The amount of work that we had to deal with in the last Parliament was substantial, onerous and unprecedented. As such, I welcome the comments that the Leader of the House has made and broadly support the motions that she has brought before the House. However, I would like to make a couple of points that I hope she will take in the spirit of assistance in which they are intended.

In the time allocated to me, I will briefly turn first to the motion on curbing some elements of second jobs as they relate to parliamentary advice. The Leader of the House may not be aware of the background to that proposal and where it first came from. In November 2021 the Standards Committee published a report—the fourth of the Session—and annex 7 of that report contained comments made by the then Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. The Committee—myself and my colleagues —thoroughly looked at the matter on a cross-party basis and concluded that we probably wanted to recommend the banning of paid parliamentary advice or consultancy.

We looked at the wording in the House of Lords, because that is the wording that the then commissioner first looked at. That wording is broadly identical to the wording that we currently have, so in our May 2022 report we came forward with the proposal that the banning of paid parliamentary advice should align with the House of Lords code. My question to the Leader of the House is this: is it her intention to ensure that the code in the other place is amended, so that we do not have an oddity where, for instance, a Labour peer could carry on with the activities that she proposes to ban, but an MP in this House would be unable to do so? That was not the objective of the Standards Committee when we first made our proposal, so it would be very helpful if, in her summing up, she could confirm that the appropriate mirrored changes will be made in the House of Lords.

I will now turn briefly to the other, much more substantial motion. I am sorry that there is a time limit, because I had many things to say about this motion, but given that I have a very short period of time in which to speak, I will restrict my comments. As the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) touched on, we as a House should remember that the Standards Committee is unlike any other Select Committee of the House of Commons, because half of its members are lay members—people who are not Members of Parliament. The total membership of 14 means that, if we take out the Chair from voting, the lay members have a substantive jurisdiction on that Committee. Many of those lay members will undoubtedly be watching this debate.

I cannot believe that it is the Government’s intention to create a Committee that will be looking at standards—even at a strategic level—that excludes lay members. When the Leader of the House was on the Opposition Benches, she was a strong believer in having lay members on the Committee, so will she look again carefully at her proposal, not only taking into account the balance of political parties but, importantly, ensuring that this new Committee has lay member representation, at least when it is discussing standards issues? My proposal is that the seven current lay members of the Standards Committee could elect one from among their number to sit on that Committee.

The other points I wanted to make were made by the shadow Leader of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), and I do not propose to rehearse them again. Suffice it to say that the Leader of the House said that the Chair of the Standards Committee, the Chair of the Administration Committee and so on would be guested on to the Committee, but if the Committee is to be an effective body that can deliver change, as she hopes, we must ensure that these people are not simply guested but that experience and knowledge is somehow brought in, perhaps with ex officio members instead of full voting members. I suggest she looks again at that proposal, and perhaps makes some welcome comments at the end.

To conclude, the proposal is a welcome one, but I urge the Leader of the House to look carefully at bringing lay members on to the Committee.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call Chris Murray to make his maiden speech.