Bullying and Harassment of MPs’ Parliamentary Staff

Eddie Hughes Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. He has followed this closely, and he will recall that, during the working group’s investigations, it was clear that we needed to take things slowly and not to push for too much change too quickly, but it is also apparent that Parliament has come to value its progress and its modernisation of practices, and so on. We can now move much faster than was thought back in late 2017. It is right that people should undertake mandatory training, particularly if they will be employing staff who may be coming into their first job.

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend have a view as to why so few MPs have taken up this training opportunity? Thirty-four of 650 MPs, and 135 of 3,200 staff—these are tiny numbers.

[Andrea Leadsom]

I am glad my hon. Friend raises that point because, of course, the truth is that the training has been properly up and running for only the past couple of months. An awful lot of work went into procuring the training provider, as we needed to find a provider that could deal with the sheer volume of people who need to undertake the training. The training course itself was written specifically to be relevant to our working practices in Parliament.

I and a number of other people who are closely involved with the independent complaints procedure establishment went on the training only six or seven weeks ago to test it and to make sure it is entirely relevant and will be useful and welcomed. That has been done, so it is a bit unfair to say, “Well, why hasn’t everybody done it?” There genuinely is a capacity issue, but if all Whips were now to encourage Members to go on the Valuing Everyone training within the next six months, and all staff to undertake it within a year, it should be doable and would certainly be valuable.

I also believe that, with so many people working on the parliamentary estate, the centrally organised induction course that already exists should be made mandatory for all new starters and should be completed within three months of joining. No other major organisation would allow a new member of staff to come into such a huge and complex institution, let alone a building that is semi-falling down, without being compulsorily trained on things like health and safety, cyber-security and fire safety, let alone the behaviour code and how to raise a complaint or a grievance.

It would be easy to implement compulsory induction training, and the Director General and the Clerk of the House of Commons are keen to oversee that. It could be easily done by simply giving any new joiner a parliamentary pass that lasts for three months and is then renewed subject to their having completed the induction course.

As Leader of the House, I was proud to host visits from the Canadian and Australian Parliaments and to meet the Scottish Presiding Officer and the Llywydd of the Welsh Assembly to answer their questions on how we are determined to achieve culture change here in Westminster.

We should be ambitious to be a role model for all Parliaments around the world, confident in our determination always to treat everyone who works here or visits here with the dignity and respect they deserve.

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[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

I am sure none of us thought we would be surprised to read Gemma White’s report, given that there were reports of bullying and harassment of MPs’ staff in the press as far back as November 2017, but even though we knew there was a problem, the report has been no less shocking. It is shocking to know that in the place where I work, some staff have been and are still being subjected to an

“unacceptable risk of bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment, at work”

from their employers. Those employers are Members of Parliament, not some backstreet employer. They are people elected by this country to lead, not to have an attitude to staff that belongs to a bygone era.

No one reading the report could fail to be moved by the testimonies of those who have suffered at the hands of some of our colleagues. Like many others who have spoken today, I want to pay tribute to the former and current members of staff who have been brave enough to come forward and participate in this inquiry. I am sure that their stories were not easy to share, and I want to assure them that I and others will listen to what they have to say and do our best to put in place measures to ensure that those in the future do not go through what they have gone through. I want to read out the words of some of those members of staff. One talked about an MP who

“would intimidate, mock and undermine me every day”.

Another stated:

“After I resigned I suffered a breakdown which I have never recovered from”.

Another said:

“My entire sense of self was crushed, and by the end, I felt incapable and incompetent”.

No one should be made to feel that way when they go to work.

Grown men and women have been shouted at, sworn at, belittled and humiliated. Some have been relentlessly picked on, day in and day out, and worn down by the drip-drip nature of the abuse that they have suffered. Others have been the victims of unwanted sexual advances or banter. This is nothing short of sickening. It might not be something that many Members have personally been on the receiving end of, but we all know people who have received appalling treatment at the hands of their employer. These are people who wake up each morning with a knot in their stomach, or worse, because they do not know what they will face when they go into work. However, they know that what they will face will be unpleasant, harrowing and debilitating.

Staff are already expressing their concern that the number of Members here today does not send out the right message about the importance that we should place on the way in which our staff are treated in this place. This has happened right here under our noses in these buildings, in the corridors and the offices. It is like something from a bygone era: staff feeling bullied and abused and, most importantly, feeling powerless to do anything about it. Talk to any member of staff and they will almost certainly know someone who has been involved in such issues. Unsurprisingly, that will have had a detrimental effect on them, with some becoming too anxious or ill to work. Some have been forced to resign, often following a period of sick leave, and some have been sacked. Some have left Parliament altogether with promising careers ruined while the perpetrators get off scot-free.

[Eddie Hughes]

I recognise so much of what the hon. Gentleman is saying. He used the word “banter”—he was referring to the report—so I googled it, and it seems to imply some sort of friendly, playful exchange. However, the impacts that he is describing are far from friendly and playful. We should get away from the idea that abuse can sometimes be acceptable because it is casual.

[Justin Madders]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. People may sometimes feel that they are being amusing or engaging in banter, but they have no idea of the effect that that is having on the individual. Many sexual harassment cases over the years will have the same characteristic. That is why training is important, because we all must understand that some of the things we say can have a negative effect on people.

This behaviour has been happening for a long time, and perpetrators have been getting away with it, enabling them to carry on the cycle of abuse with the next member of staff, a problem that we absolutely must end. It is unsurprising that one contributor to the report states that staff have come to believe that there has been

“general disregard for the dignity, wellbeing and employment rights of MPs’ staff”.

I agree with that, and Gemma White agrees with that. She concludes that

“bullying and harassment in MPs’ offices is widespread and cultural”,

and it would be impossible for anyone who reads her report to conclude otherwise.

As has already been said, a minority of Members are involved in this kind of activity, but it is important to say at this point that Gemma White explicitly stated:

“Some Members were the subject of contributions from a number of different contributors.”

In some cases, we are talking not about isolated incidents, but about the same MP repeating a pattern of abusive behaviour with successive members of staff. The fact that this is just a minority must not stop us treating the matter with the utmost urgency. If the same names keep cropping up in reports, without any acknowledgment of wrongdoing or any action to put things right, we know that something is not working.

The majority of us, of course, are perfectly able to be fair and reasonable employers, but that is not an excuse for a small number who behave inappropriately. People have got away with that for too long, because we have not had the right procedures in place. We must now collectively find a way to deal with the situation, or we will all be responsible for what goes on in this place.

There is no place for bullying and harassment in any workplace, but we should be the exemplar of best practice. We should be the place that people look to for positive behaviours. We should set the standards for others to emulate. If we cannot get our own house in order, how can we effectively challenge the employment practices of others? We are failing badly to get our own house in order, because we have here another publication with yet more cases of bullying and harassment, but we have not properly implemented the recommendations from the last one.

We must stop dragging our feet. We must at least implement changes to employment practices to give our staff the same protections that we would expect from every other employer and that we would expect our constituents to have. We must ensure that the necessary steps are taken so that staff can report incidents without any fear of reprisal or retribution, because many who took part in the inquiry were clear that they felt unable to raise a complaint against their MP because, until July of last year, those complaints had to be made directly to that MP. In many cases, they were complaining to the boss about the boss’s behaviour, so who could blame them for concluding that there would be literally no point in doing so because the same person being complained about would be the judge and jury over that particular complaint?

Staff now have access to an independent complaints and grievance scheme, but it is clear that, even though the new system is in place, they still do not have confidence that it would not be career suicide to refer complaints to it. Indeed, Gemma White concludes that, even now, it is

“unlikely that the majority of bullying and harassment suffered by MPs’ staff will be reported under the ICGS.”

We must consider that seriously today.

Staff are simply not convinced of the process’s independence, so it is vital that we move to a fully independent process in which MPs are not able to sit in judgment on their colleagues in any way, shape or form. No longer should an employer be a judge in his or her cause. It really is not good enough for the Commission to recommend the non-involvement of Members in determining bullying and harassment cases. We have to move away from it altogether.

It is not good enough that there is a complete lack of clarity on the sanctions that can be imposed on an MP. The Women and Equalities Committee heard at the beginning of this month, in evidence on a gender-sensitive Parliament, that sanctions against MPs appear to amount only to an informal quiet word with a dozen or so offenders. If that is all that happens, who can blame staff for feeling that there is not much point in going through the system?

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[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

I wish to begin by apologising for not bobbing earlier; I was enjoying the speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood) so much and reflecting upon it that I forgot to get to my feet. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), and I was obviously so engaged with what he was saying that I wanted to join in.

I can almost encapsulate the essence of my contribution in one or two sentences. I simply want to reach out to the staff who work on the estate or in offices around the country and say, “We are on your side. Clearly, bad things have happened. We understand and appreciate now, at least to some extent, the scale of the problem. And you do not need to fear that it will be limiting to your career or ‘career suicide’, to use the term used in the report, if you report terrible behaviour by your boss, who happens to be an MP.”

My hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield) said that being an MP is held in very low regard by members of the public, but there is an unusual double-edged sword here, because although the public in many ways do not respect the role of an MP, a lot of people hold the job in such reverence that it gives us power, which should be used appropriately. For example, there are 150,000 doctors in the country, and I guess that vacancies for doctors are probably coming up every day of every week, but there are only 650 MPs and the opportunity to become one does not come around very often. Therefore, many people—we encounter them on the estate all the time—treat us with a degree of reverence that is completely inappropriate. Initially, I was surprised and delighted by it, but now I am slightly embarrassed by it. So I can completely see that a small number of MPs might let that feeling of power go to their heads and exercise it in a completely inappropriate way when it comes to their staff or other people—and we see that in the report.

Let us remember that the number of people who contributed to the report—220 people—feels relatively small, given that we have heard that figure of 3,200 staff, but it says in the report that more than half those people had significant mental or physical illness as a result of the behaviour that they experienced. That is 110 people, just from that small sample, who have experienced totally dreadful behaviour. I do not see how we could be in a position to do anything but treat this issue urgently and get on and address it.

With regard to the training, I seem to have made a bit of a mistake: when I said that only 34 MPs and 135 members of staff had taken part in that training, I did not realise that the opportunity to take part came about relatively recently. I was reminded of the fact that when I became a councillor in 1999—as a young, I think, very well brought up lad—I went to the council and was totally shocked by the way councillors berated and belittled members of staff. I just could not understand how they could treat them so poorly, yet it felt like that was just the way that relationship worked: the councillors had the upper hand, and it was perfectly acceptable for them to be rude in public to staff at the council. That clearly was not acceptable, and fortunately, three years later, the council was placed in special measures and it became mandatory for councillors to attend training.

One problem we have with training is that those people who need it least are the people most likely to take it up. Those people in the council who actually would have benefited from the training were completely aghast and self-righteous—“Why should I be made to attend any training?”—but the Government said, “This is mandatory. You don’t get out of special measures unless you attend training,” so those who needed it were forced to have it and the council moved quickly to a much more comfortable position. I hope that we do not end up in a position where we need to make training mandatory, but that MPs just accept that we have a problem and that it would be a good idea if we sought to address it.

Personally, I still found it a shock coming here. I had run teams and managed budgets—all those sorts of skills that would be necessary to do a good job of running a team in Parliament—but I distinctly remember how completely overwhelmed I was in my first weeks as an MP. There was information coming from all directions; I was trying to understand parliamentary procedure; and emails were coming in by the hundreds and thousands. I felt almost a sense of panic. I just wanted to understand my role as an MP, and my role as a manager was secondary.

When I attended the parliamentary assessment board to get on the candidates list, that was not exactly the skillset being tested. The board wanted to know that someone was a committed Conservative, that they understood policy and that they could make a reasonable job of representing the Conservative party publicly; it was not so focused on whether someone could manage a budget and staff and handle HR procedures. It is therefore completely appropriate that we have a beefed-up HR department and that there is the opportunity for us all to access the excellent support that already exists but perhaps not at a scale that is appropriate for 650 MPs.

I have one other thing to say. I agreed with almost everything that the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) said, with one exception, which was when he said that we should not have tables saved for us in Portcullis House with something that says “Reserved for MPs”. I completely understand his point, but on an estate where meeting rooms are at an absolute premium and with 650 of us looking to have meetings perhaps two or three times a day, sometimes the only way that I find the space to have a meeting is to meet people in Portcullis House and sit at one of those tables. I do not feel in any way that that sets me at a level above; it is just a practical thing. Give us some more meeting rooms and I say, “Let’s have equal access to tea, coffee and cake in future.”

I wish to conclude where I began, by saying to the staff, “We are wholeheartedly on your side. Do not suffer. If you have any problems with your boss, come and talk to one of the people who have contributed to this debate, because we are on your side.” I have no doubt that the Leader of the House will make that apparent.