Standards

Graham Allen Excerpts

Thursday 8th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Barron]

Yes. That relates to the preceding case the Standards Committee dealt with, which has not been debated in this House. I was very surprised indeed, because we have had a memorandum of understanding with IPSA since 2010. If it is felt that this House should take action against a Member—only this House can do that—the case will initially go to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and then to our Committee, which will produce a report and make recommendations. IPSA has never approached us on such an issue in any of the past four years. If any UK organisation knows about Members’ expenses post 2009-10, it is IPSA, so I was not particularly happy about that.

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the all-party groups, so many of which have secretariats from outside this place, are the next big scandal waiting to happen, and that the only way to clean up the situation is for Members themselves to take responsibility for the groups by funding them and, if they care about the issues so much, using their own resources to make sure the process is clean? The Mercer case could be the first of many, if we are not careful.

[Kevin Barron]

The Standards Committee did not know that this would come up when we started looking at all-party groups. The right and proper time to discuss those matters will be during next Tuesday’s debate.

The Committee on Standards has been critical of media stings in the past, but the case under discussion was not one in which a Member was misrepresented or had made a single error. It was a sustained course of conduct, not an ill-advised response to a single “fishing” incident.

There has been some confusion over the respective roles of the Committee and the commissioner. The commissioner is a finder of fact. She investigates and presents her findings to the Committee, and sometimes those findings include advice on the interpretation of the rules. The Committee entirely agreed with the commissioner’s conclusion that Mr Mercer’s actions had inflicted significant reputational damage on the House and its Members. The commissioner does not have a role in recommending a penalty. It is for the Committee to decide on the recommended penalty, and MPs and lay members play a full part in that discussion.

In this case, the Committee took into account the gravity of the offence and the penalties given in similar cases in the past. In fact, there are very few similar cases, and in most of them the Members concerned were no longer in Parliament by the time the Committee’s investigations were over. There is very little we can do about ex-Members.

As our minutes show, the Committee seriously considered an even heavier penalty than the one on which we eventually agreed. It is disappointing when colleagues say that the Committee overturned the views of the independent Commissioner for Standards and suggest that there are fundamental disagreements between the Committee and the commissioner, because that is not the case. Clearly, no system is beyond improvement. Indeed, the Committee will itself hold an inquiry into how the House’s disciplinary process could be improved, and the commissioner will contribute to that process as fully as possible. However, public confidence is not helped when Members of Parliament attack the integrity of the system rather than try to understand the Committee’s work, or when they claim that the Committee has overturned the commissioner’s findings, without appreciating the complexities of individual cases.

I do not want to go into this in great detail, but on 8 April my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), who sadly is not in his place, asked an urgent question and said that the Committee’s proceedings should be open

“so that people can see on what basis the Committee overturns the views of the independent Commissioner for Standards”. —[Official Report, 8 April 2014; Vol. 579, c. 124.]

There are three pages in that report that clearly explain our decision in relation to that of the commissioner. I advise Members of the House to read our Committee’s proceedings before dashing to the media to grab a few headlines.

I would have more sympathy with Members’ calls for reform to increase public trust if the proposals of the Committee on Standards and Privileges, made in December 2012, to update the code of conduct and the guide to the rules had been debated in the House. We are still waiting for that to happen.