Seven Principles of Public Life

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2022 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I am grateful to be called to speak in this debate, Mr Twigg. As you know, I am Chair of the Committee on Standards. I have always thought that was a bit of an irony—I am certainly no saint, and I have never pretended to be. I was awarded the civility in public life award recently, and when I came back to the House that evening, some Conservative Members, including the then Justice Secretary, the right hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), said to me, “That is completely and utterly ironic. You are the most acerbic Member we have.” I said, “You’re mistaken—it is not the servility in public life award that I got.”

I want to talk about three things today: first, the independent adviser on the ministerial code; secondly, openness, which is just one of the seven principles of public life; and thirdly, the new code of conduct recommended by the Committee on Standards, which I chair.

I have always thought that the independent adviser on the ministerial code should be a statutory post. I think, as Lord Geidt himself suggested, that the independent adviser should be able to launch an investigation into any potential breach of the ministerial code without reference to the Prime Minister, and that should include, potentially, launching an investigation into a breach of the code of conduct by the Prime Minister. I note that most constitutions around the world, including South Africa’s, have a process for investigating the Prime Minister. We have sometimes helped to draft those constitutions, although not South Africa’s—that was done by the African National Congress. However, we have absolutely no process whatever, unless the House manages to launch something, which can be started only if the governing party supports it.

I think it is important that we have a fully independent adviser on the ministerial code, but I note that the now Prime Minister said during the leadership contest that she was not going to appoint another one, because she did not need one to know

“the difference between right and wrong”.

Let us leave whether she knows the difference between right and wrong to one side for a moment; she will need an independent adviser, and will legally have to have one, unless she is going to completely rewrite the ministerial code itself, because it says that potential breaches of the code will be addressed by the independent adviser on the ministerial code. Unless she is going to tear up the ministerial code and have no ministerial code at all, she is going to have to have an adviser—not least because the adviser not only does that bit, but also draws up the list of ministerial financial interests. That is the only thing that prevents corruption in ministerial office in the United Kingdom—the only thing.

Bizarrely, that list is published only occasionally. It is meant to be published every six months but, quite often in recent years, because we have not had a ministerial adviser, it has not been published for a year, 18 months or two years. That means that normally—not just occasionally—the list of ministerial interests is not even a correct list of Ministers. It is not a correct list of Ministers today, and it was not a correct list last week, the week before or for much of this year, last year or the year before. That is not transparency, so I think we need radical reform to improve the system. The list of ministerial interests should be published the moment a Minister has made a declaration to their permanent secretary; that should be in real time. It should be co-ordinated with what we publish in the House, so that any member of the public, at any time, can see in a single place all the financial and other interests that any Member of the House has.

That takes me to my second point, which is about openness in Government. As all Members will know, we are required, as Members of Parliament, to register any financial interests we have under a variety of different headings: ownership of land, payments we have received for work we have done, gifts we have received, hospitality, overseas trips and so on. There are various thresholds—£300 or £1,500, depending on whether it is an Electoral Commission-relevant gift. We have do that within 28 days.

Breaching that requirement is a breach of the code of conduct. I know that—I said I am no saint—because I managed to get this completely wrong. I completely forgot to register that I had gone to Poland with the British Council. I remembered to do so three years later, and I completely owned up without anyone ringing the Daily Mail. We have a proper rectification process when individual Members just get it wrong in an honest way. Roughly 25 Members end up going through that process every year, and that is perfectly sensible.

However, we have a clause in the code of conduct that says that some must register these things unless they have received them in their ministerial capacity. The former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel), and the former Foreign Secretary, now the Prime Minister, went to the premiere of the most recent James Bond film. They did not register that in the House, which they would have to have done within 28 days, and they said that that was because they went in a ministerial capacity. In the Standards Committee earlier this year, I asked a couple of other Ministers, who have now moved on, why someone would register going to a Bond premiere in their ministerial capacity. One of them said, “Well, that’s because James Bond exercises Executive functions.” Then one of them tried, “Well, actually James Bond works for MI5,” and I said, “It’s actually MI6, but don’t let that bother you.”

This is a nonsense, and it is a bigger nonsense than we think. The Government are theoretically committed to publish details of four different things every three months: travel, gifts, hospitality and meetings. There is not one Government publication, and each Department does that separately, but they are nearly always late. The worst offender is normally the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and the Cabinet Office is often the best performer. At the moment, if we add up all the days that Departments are late publishing this material, it is to the tune of 1,200 days. That means that if somebody went to an event last November, we would probably not know about it until next March or June, which could be after a general election or long after the moment when it would have helped the public to know what financial interests potentially influenced a Minister.

To check all these documents every year, we would have to look up 362 separate documents on the internet. On top of that, according to the last set of details provided by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, which came out in July and referred to October to December last year, two Foreign Office Ministers apparently never went on any overseas visits whatever. I simply do not believe that. Apparently, the then Foreign Secretary, now the Prime Minister, had only one meeting in the whole three months. I simply do not believe that, bearing in mind that the Business Secretary at the time had 154 meetings in the same period.

So I do not think that the transparency system is working. It is bunch of made-up material, it is completely incomprehensible to the ordinary member of the public and it is a complete failure of the Nolan principle of openness. That is why the Standards Committee has said that we should abolish the exemption allowing Ministers simply to record things through the ministerial route. We think that all Members of Parliament should be treated equally under the rules of the House. If someone has a financial interest it should be known within 28 days, with the same details provided by all Members of Parliament, and no exemptions for Ministers. It could be argued that it is even more important to know who is wining and dining Ministers, because they are the people making executive decisions. We should know that in real time.

Finally, the Standards Committee, which I chair, has produced a new code of conduct for the House. There are many areas where we just want to make the rules simpler, so that people do not make inadvertent errors. Of course, we should have high standards, but we do not want to have impossible standards that nobody would be expected to meet in any other line of work. We have tried to simplify the rules in many different ways. I urge Members to read our full report. We have some outstanding differences with the Government, but those should be resolved on the Floor of the House.

We have also said that we should restrict second jobs for Members. For instance, someone with a second job should have a contract that says what that person can and cannot do, so that they cannot engage in paid lobbying, as Owen Paterson did. We also said that a Member should not have a job where they sell their knowledge as an MP on the open market to businesses around the country, effectively as a political consultant. That is not on. The Government seem reluctant to bring that forward to the House. I gather there will be a debate next Wednesday, and I hope that we can resolve all of this swiftly and bring in rules for all Members of the House that are more stringent in some areas and simpler in others, so that all Members are treated equally.

It would be a massive mistake for the new Administration to start off with a row about standards. That is what brought down the previous Administration. I really hope the new Prime Minister will not go down that route again, and I know that many Conservative Members feel similarly. I hear that the Government intend to bring forward only the new provisions on introducing a right of appeal over standards issues. I think that would be a big mistake.

Finally—you will tell me that I have already said “finally”, Mr Twigg, but I used to do it in my sermons, and I do not see why I should stop now—when the motion to appoint the new Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Mr Daniel Greenberg, is brought forward, I am confident that the House will be enthusiastically supportive. Those who know him through several Committees he already works with in the House will know that he is absolutely cracking. He is clear, incisive, witty, intelligent and clever. He knows the law inside out and how Parliament and politics work. He will be a magnificent Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. I hope the Government will bring forward that measure very soon.

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate after so many brilliant contributions from my Labour colleagues. I hope the wide-angled camera that the parliamentary authorities use to broadcast this meeting will show that not a single Conservative Back-Bench MP has bothered to turn up. That is a shame. The Minister and her Parliamentary Private Secretary are rightly in their places, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say. Standards in public life should not be optional. Every one of us, regardless of party, should seek to uphold, celebrate and share them, and we should tell the story of why they matter, but someone needs to turn up to do that. I hope that people can see the empty chairs in this room and that they will ask why only Labour Back-Bench MPs were speaking in this debate. This issue does matter.

The standards spoken about so brilliantly by my hon. Friends, the Members for Liverpool, Wavertree (Paula Barker), for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater) and for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) are important. We could restrict those standards to selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. We could include others, as many people who have applied the principles of public life to their own organisations have done, such as duty and a requirement to uphold the law—that should be a given but, sadly, we have seen that that is not always so. Other principles are respect, equality and the importance of treating everyone equally, no matter who they are, who they fall in love with, where they come from, the colour of their skin or their religion. The principles, when taken together, are about how to be decent.

I sometimes get things wrong; I sometimes make mistakes. The system should be broad and confident enough to allow us—if we make an honest mistake, because of innovation or because we get something wrong—to put our hands up, apologise and learn that lesson. That is an informed, sensible and confident system. What we have at the moment is a broken system. It is important that we deal with it. It is not broken because of neglect. It is broken because of deliberate decisions to break it. That is dangerous, because it puts us on a path to a place where standards do not matter and are not upheld. It suggests that we are all the same, and that every Member of Parliament—regardless of their party—is somehow in the mud, somehow on the take and somehow unfairly representing their constituents. There are brilliant MPs in every party; there are a lot of good, decent Conservative MPs who would probably want to be here. We need to make sure that this debate is conducted against those high principles and in a language that reflects the political body we are seeking to create. That is the spirit of what I want to say.

The context in which this debate is being held is important, and my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree set it out really well. We are here because the last Administration sought to break many of those standards, sought to evade scrutiny and sought to excuse and protect those who had broken the standards, the system and the principles that we seek to uphold. That gives us a choice, because people care about those standards.

If we were to do a taste test on the streets of Plymouth or in any other constituency and to ask people to name the seven principles of public life, I am not certain that every member of the public would be able to name them all, but they would all give it a good go, and the words we would get back would reflect the overall sentiment of the principles. That is what we should be aiming at, because what we have seen over the past year should scare each and every one of us—no matter whether we are in government or in opposition, aspiring to be in government. This issue matters.

Yesterday, I hosted a group of young care leavers from Plymouth at an event with Barnardo’s. They talked about their experience of being in care, and I am enormously proud of them for the way they travelled from Plymouth—many of them leaving it for the first time—to come to Parliament. One of them asked me, “Why would anyone take notice of us? Why does it matter?” I explained the job of Members of Parliament, and they said, “Aren’t they all corrupt?” That is not an unreasonable question for a young person who has been confronted by years and years of the news coverage that we have had. I am so proud of those young people for telling their story about being in care, but we need to make sure that our day-to-day business here speaks to a place that every young person can look at and aspire to be in and whose principles they can aspire to follow.

That means changing the rules that we have. I do not see a reason why MPs have second jobs. The declarations of who has a second job includes many of the MPs in the south-west near to me. When I at how many hours or days a week they spend doing a second job, I think that is one or two days a week that they are not doing the job that they were elected to do and that they are paid very handsomely to do. What are we getting? Are taxpayers getting a rebate? Are they getting a refund? What influence, decisions and information is being shared? There should be no second jobs, except for those who are keeping up a medical licence or the ability to write a book.

I understand why some people do not want to be in Parliament, because I do not think it is a safe place to work. I say that because I worked in professional workplaces until my election, and I did not doubt that any of those private sector workplaces were safe. People were able to come to work and be safe. I do not always believe that Parliament is a safe place to work, especially for many of our staff. Young people, often not paid very much, are in an atmosphere full of alcohol, where power has a currency all by itself. When we talk about standards in public life, they are not amorphous, blobby things. They are not foggy things that we are trying to catch. They are lived experience for people. We must make this place a safe place for everybody to work. There is a big distinction between the Parliament that I turned up to as a young researcher in 2000 with brown hair and the Parliament that I turned up to with grey hair when I got elected.

[Chris Bryant]

It was grey back then—there is nothing wrong with grey.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Mrs Heather Wheeler)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I am grateful for the opportunity to debate this important and timely topic. I particularly thank the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Paula Barker) for requesting the debate and express my gratitude to the hon. and right hon. Members present for their active participation.

The standards to which public servants in the United Kingdom, including those who serve in political life, are appropriately held are highly regarded across the world. The bedrock of those standards is formed, as we have heard many hon. Members say, by the seven principles of public life established by Lord Nolan in 1995. The principles— selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership—are woven into the codes of conduct for Members of the House and those in the other place. They are also central to the ministerial code, which sets the standards of behaviour expected of those who serve in Her Majesty’s Government. The seven principles, as we have heard, apply much more widely, such as to civil servants, those in local government and across public life.

Today’s contributions have made clear the importance of the seven principles to all of us. They form a touchstone to which we return and a benchmark against which we judge our actions. When we make those judgments, there will, of course, be times when we fall short. We cannot be complacent about that. Applying and upholding the principles is not a passive undertaking. It requires collective vigilance, self-assessment and willingness to learn and be held to account. That can be uncomfortable, but it is essential.

I shall try to answer as many of the points and questions raised in the debate as I can. The Government have been considering the “Standards Matter 2” report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life alongside Nigel Boardman’s report on the use of supply chain finance in Government. As set out in the written statement on 15 July 2022, a number of changes have been made in response to those reports. For example, in June 2022, new guidance was issued on the declaration and management of outside interests in the civil service. The Government have also implemented Nigel Boardman’s recommendations on Government contracts and the use of supply chain finance in Government. In May 2022, reforms were made to the role and remit of the Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests in response to recommendations by the Committee on Standards in Public Life.

The Government are also taking action to improve the enforcement of the business appointment rules. Mechanisms are now in place for breaches of the rules to be taken into account in the award of honours. Agreement on a similar approach is also being sought with the independent House of Lords Appointment Commission. The Government are now considering how to implement the same approach in relation to public appointments. Alongside this, the Government are considering consequences for prospective employers, including through the procurement process. Work on further reforms continues and will be informed by the new Prime Minister.

Please be in no doubt that the Government remain fully committed to ensuring that all Ministers, including the Prime Minister, are held to account for maintaining high standards of behaviour and behaving in a way that upholds the highest standards of propriety, as the public rightly expect. The ministerial code lays that out. In the absence of an independent adviser, permanent secretaries carry out the process of reviewing Ministers’ interests, advised by the Cabinet Office. Correcting the points from the right hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) and the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson), it is actually the duty of the permanent secretary to carry out that work in the absence of the independent adviser.

The Prime Minister is currently dealing with a number of pressing issues, as Members might imagine, and has not been in post long enough to turn her attention to this matter yet. However, it is important and she will do so as quickly as she is able. We have heard many Members quoting the Prime Minister, from the hustings and so on, as saying that she is not appointing an independent adviser.

[Chris Bryant]

One of the difficulties of it all being done by the permanent secretary is that if—let us say, for the sake of argument—a Secretary of State was accused by a permanent secretary of bullying them, how then could the Government Minister simply turn to the permanent secretary for advice on adherence or otherwise to the ministerial code? That is why we need an independent adviser on the ministerial code. It cannot simply be reporting to permanent secretaries. Under the system the Minister has just outlined, there is no means for any of this becoming public. Permanent secretaries cannot publish it. The only person who can publish it is the independent adviser on the ministerial code.

[Mrs Wheeler]

The head of the civil service can take the role of looking after issues like that when there is a clash between a senior Government Minister and their permanent secretary. The Prime Minister said that she was “not necessarily saying” that she would not appoint an independent adviser, but that

“the leadership needs to take responsibility. You cannot outsource ethics to an adviser. We need ethics running through the Government. The culture of organisations starts at the top and that’s what’s important to me.”

In response to the right hon. Member for Rhondda, again, the appointment of the next independent adviser and the terms of their appointment are matters for the new Prime Minister. In the light of the resignation of the former independent adviser and the comments made by Lord Geidt and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee at the time, the Government felt it was right to reflect and consider the way in which that independent adviser’s role was delivered, particularly given the increased scrutiny of the role. The independent adviser is a personal adviser to the Prime Minister, and it is an appointment on a five-year term. It is therefore right that the appointment is made by the new Prime Minister, and that some time is allowed for the Prime Minister to consider next steps in this key role. It is for the Prime Minister to confirm how this function will be undertaken and to consider the available options.

[Chris Bryant]

Will the Minister allow me to intervene again?

[Mrs Wheeler]

Very briefly.

[Chris Bryant]

I am not right honourable, by the way—[Interruption.] It is an outrage, I know—the country can hardly continue.

This is an important point; when will we see the first list of ministerial financial interests published for this new Government?

[Mrs Wheeler]

I am afraid the hon. Gentleman will have to wait and see. The handling of interests in the interim—the process of managing interests—continues in line with the ministerial code. The code sets out that the permanent secretary in each Department can provide advice to Ministers, and plays a role in scrutinising interests. The Cabinet Office also provides that advice, and the Government’s publication of transparency information also continues unaffected. Interestingly, the hon. Gentleman mentioned 362 pieces of transparency; in fact, there have been 4,568 transparency releases on the gov.uk platform since the pandemic was declared—more than 10 times the number the hon. Gentleman mentioned.

[Chris Bryant]

I was referring to the ministerial transparency documents. In order to find out what financial interests Ministers have, we have to look at more than 300 documents; it should be one document, so that everybody can look at it easily.