Privileges Committee Special Report

Karen Bradley Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

Briefly, I commend the motion on this serious matter, the wording of which was put forward by the Committee of Privileges. As the special report sets out, the Committee is

“in practice the only mechanism…which the House can use to defend itself in the face of a Minister misleading it.”

Unfortunately, throughout the inquiry into Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister and several of his close allies sought to discredit the Committee, the integrity of its members and the parliamentary process. Their actions did not affect the outcome of the inquiry—thank goodness—but that should not absolve those individuals of responsibility or scrutiny.

Senior politicians—one of them a Minister at the time, and others of them former Front Benchers—applied “unprecedented and co-ordinated pressure” on the Committee, as the report makes clear, and waged what can only be described as a campaign to disparage it. They took to Twitter, newspapers, radio and even their own TV shows to make their claims, and referred to the inquiry as a “witch hunt” and a “kangaroo court” not befitting a “banana republic”. Those are among the jaw-dropping comments listed in the annex to the report. Conservative Members might need to read the annex, because they do not seem familiar with some of those comments.

It is customary for the Privileges Committee to be chaired by a member of the Opposition, yet there were sustained efforts to undermine and question the impartiality of the Chair, who was appointed to the Committee by unanimous decision of the House. The pressure exerted on Conservative Committee members, who made up a majority of the Committee, was clearly intended to force their withdrawal or impede the conclusion of the inquiry.

[Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

The hon. Lady said it was customary for the Privileges Committee to be chaired by a member of the Opposition; actually, under Standing Orders, it has to be chaired by a member of the Opposition.

[Deidre Brock]

I thank the right hon. Lady for that clarification. I agree with her; she is quite right. The report also emphasises the significant personal impact that the campaign had on Members who were simply trying to perform their duties. They should not have been subject to such treatment.

It has hitherto been understood that Members should refrain from interfering in the work of the Privileges Committee, but that was ignored. Explicit protections are already in place for House of Commons standards cases involving alleged breaches of the code of conduct for MPs. When it comes to those cases, Members are prohibited from lobbying the Committee on Standards, the Independent Expert Panel or the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. It seems evident from this episode that those safeguards should also be applied to privileges cases.

The claims that the changes would restrict Members’ free speech are misguided. Members already have the right to object, to vote and to raise conflicts of interest regarding Committee appointments, as well as to vote against or amend referral motions, to provide evidence, to comment on procedure and to publicly discuss the final report after its publication.

--- Later in debate ---

[Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

I rise to speak in my capacity as Chair of the Procedure Committee. I have to start by apologising to my Clerk, who wrote a detailed technical note about the procedures involved in this motion. All the technical points that my Clerk made have been made already, so I will not detain the House with them, but I thank her for the work she did.

Instead, I will make some general points about what we do in this place and how I hope we might be able to start behaving in a slightly different way. I will start by referring to the point about Committees. We cannot cover every issue on the Floor of this House, and that is why we depute Members to serve on Committees, whether Select Committees, House Committees such as the Procedure Committee, or Bill Committees. We ask those Members to spend their time—they do take up significant amounts of their time—scrutinising legislation and looking at issues that have been raised with them.

The members of the Standards and Privileges Committees have the most difficult jobs of effectively having to police the behaviour of their own colleagues. They have personal reasons often for not wishing to be part of that, but they do it because this House has asked them to do it. We should always remember that point: they are serving because the House has asked them to serve; they are not serving through choice, and they are doing a difficult job. I will come on to the point that the hon. Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle) made about policing ourselves, because there is a real danger if we do not take this matter seriously.

When it comes to Select Committees that report, there is absolutely nothing to stop any Member from criticising a report once it has been published. In fact, Governments usually criticise such reports substantially in their responses. Select Committees expect their reports to be scrutinised and examined, and they expect criticism of them—that is the very nature of our parliamentary debate and democracy. Nobody is saying that, once a report has been published, Members cannot criticise it. The important point is that there are ways in which we can interact with Committees while they are doing their work. Those are set out clearly in the report.

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

The substantive part of the motion, paragraph (b)—that the Committee should have the same protection as the Standards Committee—is uncontroversial. What has become clear is that the way in which Members feel they have been impugned without a say, which makes paragraph (a) of the motion controversial. It might be best if the Leader of the House were to withdraw the motion and re-table it with just paragraph (b). We might then avoid the argument and Division that we are going to have.

[Karen Bradley]

I served with my right hon. Friend in the Whips Office and have enormous respect for him. The Committee proposed the motion. We asked the Committee to do its work, and it proposed the motion. There is nothing unparliamentary about what it has put forward and there is nothing that is not procedurally accurate in what it has done. I for one will back my colleagues, because I would ask them to back me on a motion about a report that I had put forward as a Select Committee Chair, and I would hope that they would do so.

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

As someone who has the privilege of serving on my right hon. Friend’s Procedure Committee, may I ask her whether she can recall a single occasion when the Procedure Committee has produced a report naming individuals without giving those individuals the opportunity first to present evidence? Is it not the problem that we have a report based not on evidence but on stuff that has been tweeted? As somebody who does not do tweets, I am ever more grateful that I do not.

[Karen Bradley]

My hon. Friend is a very assiduous member of the Procedure Committee. He is right that we would report evidence for an inquiry only if it had been given to us by a Member in good faith and they knew it was going to be reported, but in this case we are not talking about that; we are talking about evidence produced in the report that is in the public domain. It has not been gathered in any other way. Of course, the motion is not the report; it is about giving the members of the Privileges Committee the same protections as members of the Standards Committee. It is difficult to argue against that.

[Mark Jenkinson]

rose—

[Karen Bradley]

I will give way one further time and then continue to make my points.

[Mark Jenkinson]

I agree with the substantive point about the Privileges Committee being given the same protection as the Standards Committee, but you referred to evidence in the report, and I have been quite clear that that “evidence” was taken out of context in some cases—not least mine.

[Karen Bradley]

My hon. Friend will have the opportunity to make that point during the debate. I would also pick him up on having made a slight technical error in what he said. He said “you”, which refers to Madam Deputy Speaker. I suggest that when we make an inadvertent technical error around our procedures, the most appropriate thing to do at that stage is to apologise and move on. That is the point here. Things have been said by some in the public domain that could have constituted criticism and an attempt to influence the Committee, and that is not allowed in our procedures.

There are ways in which Committees can be approached. My hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash)—my next-door neighbour—did exactly that on 22 July last year, when he tabled an early-day motion, signed by four other Members, in which he criticised the Committee and what it was doing. That was perfectly parliamentary. He was able to do that and did nothing wrong in tabling that early-day motion.

We cannot start on the slope of allowing Members to try to influence all sorts of Committees, be that the Procedure Committee, the Work and Pensions Committee, the Committee on Standards in Public Life or whatever. We have our procedures in place to enable Members to interact with Committees. They can make representations to Committees, they can vote on the membership of Committees, and they can vote on the motions and the terms of reference. That is all available, and then, when the report is published, they can say whatever they wish about that, because it is in the public domain. That is the technical difference.

[Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

rose—

[Karen Bradley]

I will allow one further intervention. I did say only one earlier, but I will allow my hon. Friend.

[Dr Johnson]

My right hon. Friend, with her expertise on the Procedure Committee, clearly has much more experience in procedures than I do. Could she help me? The Privileges Committee has produced interim information on how it was to proceed with the difficult task it had been given. There will be Members who wish to agree with that process and those who wish perhaps to agree with and criticise the process. She suggested that a Member could table an early-day motion. Are there other ways in which that can be done in Parliament? Most specifically, is she suggesting that the Committee cannot be criticised outside Parliament on Twitter and on social media?

[Karen Bradley]

What I am saying is that, as right hon. and hon. Members we have a duty to protect and work with our friends who are doing this difficult work. There are many ways in which Members can interact with a Committee as it carries out such work: they can make representations; they can probably raise points of order on the Floor of the House; they can table early-day motions and all manner of other motions—and they are parliamentary ways. They are not through the general media or Twitter or other ways.

[Dr Johnson]

rose—

[Karen Bradley]

I will give way a final time.

[Dr Johnson]

Just to clarify, is my right hon. Friend saying that if asked in general by perhaps a journalist for one’s opinion on such things, one should not give an opinion because one should leave it to the parliamentary process?

[Karen Bradley]

Yes, absolutely—that is exactly the point. The Standards Committee and the Privileges Committee in particular have specific provisions in “Erskine May”, and the members of those Committees cannot answer back—they have no right to do so—so until a Committee has reported, it is not parliamentary to make such comments. I gently say that if this happened inadvertently because Members did not know—this is a very technical point—I am sure that an apology, saying just that there was no intention to influence the Committee, would be appreciated.

I turn to my final point, which, actually, the hon. Member for Wallasey started to make, which is about policing ourselves. I would very much like us to get back to having motions on House business going through on the nod. The moment we started to whip House business put us on a very slippery slope, because the House will make decisions and the House needs to support Members. I hope that we can go back to those things going through on the nod, with us trusting our colleagues to police us.

We did not do things well when it came to our expenses. We policed our own expenses, and look at what happened as a result of that. I strongly suggest that nobody in the House wants us to get to a position where an outside body, third parties and non-Members start to police us. If we want to continue policing ourselves, we need to have faith in the system we have, and we need to support those right hon. and hon. Members who are doing their very best to do their job.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)]

It is a privilege to speak in this debate. I will try not to take too long or to repeat things that have already been said.

It is a great shame that the debate on the Privileges Committee’s fifth report, on Boris Johnson, became largely a debate about the integrity and standing of the Committee itself, rather than just the behaviour of Boris Johnson, which was the subject of the report. I can understand why many Members saw it as such, but it is important to establish in this debate that it is possible and legitimate to be in disagreement with some of the Committee’s conclusions, yet still respect and uphold the Committee’s authority and integrity. I say that because that is exactly the position I took in relation to that report. It must be legitimate to do that if the position is—as it is—that the Committee makes recommendations to the whole House, and the whole House then decides whether to accept them.

The report that we are debating today is entirely about the Privileges Committee’s authority and integrity, and about how that should be upheld. Just as criticism of the Committee’s conclusions can be perfectly legitimate, and just as it is not right to say that any criticism of it is an attack on its authority, so it is not right to say that all attacks on the Committee must be allowable as exercises of free speech. We recognise, do we not, that free speech is sometimes properly restricted in the interests of broader freedoms? That is exactly what we are considering here.

The Committee’s special report makes the strong point that there are legitimate opportunities for Members to oppose a referral of a matter to the Committee in the first place—as has been observed, in the case of Boris Johnson nobody did, not even Boris Johnson. The Committee is also right to say that criticism of its conclusions is perfectly valid, as is a decision not to support those conclusions. What is not valid is to attack or to seek to influence or undermine a Committee that this House has charged with an inquiry while that inquiry is ongoing.

[Karen Bradley]

My right hon. and learned Friend allows me to make a point that I have just considered as we have been debating. If this was a criminal trial, it would be sub judice and Members of Parliament would not be allowed to comment on it. Perhaps we should think of the Committee as something analogous to that—a quasi-judicial progress in which Members can complete their work without influence from other Members, while proper processes are still available for Members to make representations.

[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.