Privileges Committee Special Report

Debate between Karen Bradley and Deidre Brock

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.