Risk-based Exclusion

Justin Madders Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2024 Commons Chamber

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

I support the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain). I remind the Chamber that it is now almost 11 months since the proposals on risk-based exclusion were first debated here, and it seems as though we have had a lot of discussions outside about how to best protect everyone who works here. I think there is a general acceptance, constitutional issues aside, that something needs to be done, but there is a clear disagreement about the threshold for intervention.

It is clear that there is a need for a threshold for an assessment to take place. We are talking here about a threshold for an assessment, not a threshold for an exclusion, which is why I support the amendments providing that the threshold should be arrest, rather than charge. After all, if there has been enough evidence gathered to charge someone with a violent or sexual offence, in almost any other workplace there would not be any discussion about suspending that person; it would just happen, because most employers in this country believe providing a safe and secure place of work for their staff is a given. That is the place the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) has come from with his amendments.

In fact, I am of the view that in most workplaces suspension would happen automatically following arrest. However, the amendment I support does not go that far. It just says that arrest is the point at which we should begin to consider the risk to the people who work here, and that is the key point: we are thinking about the risk to the people who work here. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) eloquently put it, people do not just ring up the police and get someone arrested on a whim. There is an awful lot of investigatory work done before we get to that point.

This is about striking the right balance between ensuring people are able to work in a safe environment and ensuring that the people Members represent do not feel disenfranchised by virtue of a Member’s absence. On our constituents’ view, this is not just about how a Member represents them here; as we have said, there are lots of other things that can be done outside this Chamber to represent people. However, there is also the other side to this, which is about how a constituent would feel if they wanted support from their MP because they were working in a place that was not dealing with a sexual predator, and they were turning up to work anxious and fearful that they might bump into them—if, for whatever reason, the employer was not allowing anything to be done because the police had not formally charged the individual. I hope we can all see how that could put the victim in an impossible situation. How can we support our constituents to insist that the employer does the right thing if we do not insist on doing those things ourselves? If we cannot get our own House in order, how can we effectively challenge the worst employment practices out there? Should we not be aiming to be one of the best places for people to work? We cannot hope to recruit and retain the brightest and best in this country, if we have a working culture from another era. Of course, this is a very special place to work—it is a privilege to be here—but that does not mean we should have to put up with suboptimal standards in how we conduct ourselves. We should aim for a culture where everyone is respected and working conditions are among the best in the country, and when those standards slip we must ensure a robust and swift process is in place.

One of the objections to some of the amendments seems to be that Members should not be subject to the same rules and standards to which we hold other people. That is wrong in principle and feeds into the sense—which a lot of people have—that we are out of touch with the real world. I also feel there is some conflation, possibly deliberately, between the use of this procedure and the finding of guilt. I would never accept that an expulsion or exclusion equates to a finding of guilt. This process will not replace the role of a court and I believe that the risk assessment process and the adjudication panel that has been suggested would deal with this in a sensible and considered way, and we would have ample opportunity to weed out vexatious complaints, although for the reasons I have stated I do not think we would even get to that point.

What we are asking to be done is no different from what we ask of others outside this place. We are asking for the same standards to be applied here as in every other workplace. The original report on this stated clearly that flexibility is the key. Mitigations can be put in place that fall short of exclusion and there are lots of examples of that. My hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant) gave a number of measures that could be taken before we reach the last resort of exclusion. That is what any other workplace would do; it would assess the risk and take mitigating steps.

I am afraid we are into a very binary debate about whether this proposal means we should exclude or not. There are a number of different ways in which we can protect our staff without having to reach that point. This again shows that this place believes the rules do not apply to us in the same way that they apply to everyone else, that we do not value the victim’s voice, and that we do not believe people in here should have safe working environments and confidence that they can work in a safe environment. The public should look at us and think about whether we really do value the contribution of our staff, when we put them into these positions in the first place.

I will finish with the words of Dame Laura Cox, whose work started this whole process. She said that this place has a culture of

“deference, subservience, acquiescence and silence, in which bullying, harassment and sexual harassment have been able to thrive and have long been tolerated and concealed.”

We have made progress in dealing with that, but some of the arguments tonight show that some people just have not understood that we have more to do.