Registration of Members’ Financial Interests

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Monday 7th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)]

I begin by thanking members of the Standards and Privileges Committee, both past and present, for the work they have done to bring these two motions before the House. We have heard from Members about the need for common sense in our procedures. The motions are an attempt to introduce some consistency and common sense into our registration procedures. It is very easy for the House to set out general principles, but it is often quite tricky to bring forward the motions that put those principles into practice. In this case, the Committee has done a good job, and I support the proposals.

One of the motions deals with the registration of all-party groups. I must declare an interest as the chair of the all-party group on stroke and as secretary of the parliamentary friends of CAFOD—the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development—group.

It is interesting to look back on how the Committee’s consideration of these matters arose. Originally, there was a report on lobbying and all-party groups by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. The Committee rightly looked at his recommendations to work out how they could be put into practice and which it was most sensible to put into practice. Having looked back at the original suggestions, I am bound to say that some of them were unworkable.

The Committee has attempted to make the way in which assistance to groups is registered transparent and to prevent the register from increasing to such a volume that it is unusable or that it requires corrections every other day. Hence, it suggests that we stick to the current principle that benefits worth less than £1,500 in a calendar year are not registrable. The onus is put on consultancies that work with all-party groups to be transparent about their clients, either through a published list on their website or by making such a list available to people who ask for it. It also places requirements on charities.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

Perhaps this is a question that I should have asked the Deputy Leader of the House. How does the hon. Lady envisage the £1,500 limit working for people who give pro bono advice to parliamentary groups? Will they have to compute a value for that advice, or will it be taken on face value that it is not charged and therefore is not declarable?

[Helen Jones]

The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting question. It is quite easy to put a value on secretarial support and staff time. Pro bono advice is a more difficult area, and I cannot give him an answer on that off the top of my head. He is right to raise it, and it needs to be discussed, perhaps by the Standards and Privileges Committee and the Registrar of Members’ Interests.

I am grateful to the Committee for considering how charities should operate in this regard, and for making it clear that it does not want to put an insupportable burden on charities that work with all-party parliamentary groups. The Committee does ask charities to make available lists of commercial companies that have donated more than £5,000. That is a sensible proposal.

As we have heard, there are proposals on making websites available. There are also recommendations to align the rules relating to the Register of All-party Groups with the rules relating to the approved list, so that only groups that meet the criteria for inclusion on the approved list should be permitted to register. The Opposition believe that those suggestions are sensible and proportionate. They meet the requirement of transparency, while not imposing unnecessary burdens, particularly on charities.

The House tried in 2009 to deal with the registration of income from employment, when it decided that all income from other employment should be registered, whether or not it exceeded 1% of the parliamentary salary in any year. The then Standards and Privileges Committee said that the rule would probably have to be reviewed in this Parliament. In particular, it suggested that there be consideration of a de minimis rule. Members who were in the House at the time will remember that there was a debate on whether, for instance, a bottle of wine given to someone after a speaking engagement would become registrable as remuneration for employment. The then Chair of the Committee thought that it would, and the Minister replying thought that it would be counted as a gift or hospitality and therefore would be subject to the de minimis rule for gifts. That difference was not over the intention of the rule, but about how it would be interpreted in practice.

It is clear that the advice given to Members has led to the registration of things such as pots of honey and bunches of flowers. I do not believe that such things would be regarded by any of our constituents as remuneration for employment. Frankly, if anyone is working for a pot of honey, I dread to think how many employment laws are being broken in the process. I will not even try to enumerate them, because it is so long since I practised law.

I also think that the registration of such things is perceived as an insult to those who gave them, who simply thought that they were making a generous gesture or rewarding hospitality; they did not in any sense think that they were rewarding a Member of Parliament. It has been common for my constituents to load me with flowers—I am sure that other hon. Members are given flowers wherever they go. My constituents do not believe that they are paying my wages in doing so. They believe that they are making a kind and thoughtful gesture. That is how it should be dealt with.

The Committee has recommended that registration should apply only to payments of more than 0.1% of the parliamentary salary and of more than 1% of the parliamentary salary for multiple payments from a single source. There are Members who think that the registration threshold is still too low. I suggest that we will have to consider that in the future. I understand why the Committee made this recommendation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady; she is being very generous in giving way, and I do not want to prolong this debate. I have a feeling that the threshold may be too low, particularly as parliamentary salaries are likely to be frozen or have very small increases in the coming years, whereas the inflation on gifts will be 4% or 5%. The fiscal drag of bringing registration into the system will become greater and greater. If we are not careful, it will lead to the situation that she described of the register becoming too full to be used.

[Helen Jones]

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point.

I understand why the Committee made these recommendations: they are simple, easy to operate and do not need constant updating. I suggest that the House needs to let the rules bed in and then see how they are working. We have to get to a situation where what we register is what can reasonably be thought to influence hon. Members. I argue strongly that if anyone in this House can be influenced by the gift of a pencil, a pot of honey or a bag, they probably should not be here. I do not think that any of our constituents believes that we can be influenced by such things. We can look again at the operation of the rules over time, but for the moment, they are the sensible way forward. I thank the Committee for its work and I commend the motions to the House.