Privileges Committee Special Report

Debate between Jeremy Wright and Lia Nici

Monday 10th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

Yes, I understand entirely the point my right hon. Friend makes. But there are, of course, significant differences between the work done by the Committee and the work of a court. It comes back to the speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg), which I enjoyed too much to interrupt. It seemed to me that the point he was making about Lord Hoffmann also bears some scrutiny in this respect. Courts are decision-making bodies. The Privileges Committee is not a decision-making body. The House of Commons as a whole is the decision-making body. There is therefore a difference between the way the Privileges Committee operates and the way in which a court operates. Where I do agree with my right hon. Friend is that it is important to the integrity of the Committee’s investigation that Members of this House, having delegating authority to that Committee to do the work, do not seek to derail it while it happens. That does not mean that they are not entitled to criticise any conclusions that the Committee may reach, and nor is it inappropriate, as I have done myself, for a Member not to agree with the conclusions the Committee has reached.

[Lia Nici]

My right hon. and learned Friend is making a very interesting point. Does he not therefore think that there is some form of contempt when persons who had sight of the report and decided, before the report came to this House and was published, to leak it to a Guardian reporter?

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

I certainly do not think that material of that kind should be leaked to newspapers before it is discussed in this House. I have no knowledge of the facts of who did what, but I agree with my hon. Friend that there should be no leaking of that kind.

We can only, in the context of this debate, discuss the motion before us. If for nothing other than novelty’s sake, perhaps I should speak a little bit about the motion. The Committee makes a good argument that, given there is little material difference, either in process or in the potential consequences for a Member being investigated, between privilege cases on one hand and standards cases on the other, the protection that this House gives to the Privileges Committee and the Standards Committee in the exercise of their duties should be the same. That is a good point, but I think it is also worth noting that the motion does not quite achieve that equality. For standards matters, as is quoted in the special report, the code of conduct states that there must be no lobbying of members of the Committee. There is no mention in the code of conduct in that regard of intimidation, or of impugning the integrity of the Committee, as there is in this motion.

Two questions surely arise. First, should those additional considerations of intimidation and impugning the integrity of the Committee be included? Secondly, if so, should they not be included in relation to standards matters also? On the first, it should not really be necessary to say that intimidation is unacceptable, but it surely cannot be wrong to say it, so I completely support its inclusion in the motion.

As for impugning the integrity of the Committee, as I mentioned in an intervention on the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), it must be a possibility that the integrity of a future Committee—not, of course, this Committee or any previous Committee—could be impugned. The Committee cannot be invulnerable to challenge and criticism, if that criticism is merited. But were that to be the case, as Members of this House we have the right to raise our concerns in debates about the Committee’s recommendations and about any allegations about another Member’s integrity. Members of the Privileges Committee, or not, may well raise themselves the sorts of standards and privileges matters that should be the subject of separate investigations. With that clarity that the impugning of the Committee’s integrity, if any, is not appropriate while an inquiry is under way, again that seems to me a sensible inclusion.

On the second question, the position should surely be equivalent for standards and privileges. Although I fully subscribe to the view, expressed by many, that we really need to move on from this, I am afraid that on another day we will probably at least have to return to the question of whether we need to improve the language on the protections we offer to the Standards Committee, so that it can match this motion, which I hope the House will pass this evening. As others have said, I hope it will pass without a vote, but if it does not, I shall vote in favour of it.