Members of Parliament: Risk-based Exclusion

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Monday 12th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

I completely agree with that point, but we are talking about a very narrow set of circumstances. This is not about asking people to make a judgment on whether someone has committed an offence, but about the risk that an individual poses to other people. Obviously we are talking about what happens on the estate, although it could be argued that such measures are pointless unless we are also tackling what, in this set of circumstances, happens off the estate. These are the issues that we will discuss this evening, and I thank the hon. Gentleman for being present to do that.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I understand that when all this was first being discussed there was a debate about whether the right time for intervention for the purpose of exclusion should be at the point of arrest or at the point of charge. Am I right in saying—having read the proposals—that the Commission envisages that in certain circumstances a Member who had been neither arrested nor charged with an offence could be excluded?

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Chris Bryant]

Well, no. The evidence given to the Standards Committee—if the hon. Member has time to read it, I urge him to do so—was that an awful lot of other workplaces do something similar and start considerably earlier than at charge. For instance, there are proper issues for a school, which is probably the only place where we would properly use the term “safeguarding”, and likewise for a youth service. For someone in the police, it is likely that the police would take far more precautionary action than we do, and far more than is even being suggested here. The bit that is different for us is that the scrutiny on us is acute. However, if we spoke to a teacher excluded from school at the point of arrest for a sexual or violent crime, they would say, “It may not have been on the front page of the Daily Mail, but everybody in my local community knows about it,” so there is enormous reputational risk.

One really important point that we must stress time and again is that, in any of these instances, this cannot involve a judgment as to whether somebody is innocent or guilty—that is absolutely the case—and our processes must guarantee the presumption of innocence all the way through to the end of a criminal justice process.

[Kevin Brennan]

My hon. Friend knows that I take a lot of stock from what he says on this subject, so I would be interested to know this. Is he completely content with the proposal before the House, particularly the aspect I found surprising, which is that it allows for the possibility of a Member to be excluded even prior to their arrest, basically on the word of a report from, for example, the Metropolitan police?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

Indeed, trust in the Metropolitan police is not high, and that is a problem for the House at the moment. I am aware of friends and colleagues who would like to make complaints to the police but feel that they would not be listened to properly. Vice versa, there are obviously Members of the House who do not feel that the Metropolitan police would deal with them fairly. I think it is a fair point about whether this should be before arrest, but my assumption has been that the moment of arrest, and certainly if somebody is interviewed under caution while under arrest as a suspect, is the point when, again on a proportionate basis—proportionate to the alleged offence, proportionate to the risk there might be perceived to be and proportionate to the stage at which we are—we may want to take action.

I worry that, if we do not do any of this, we will leave ourselves very exposed to further reputational risk for the House. That is my anxiety. The hon. Member for Bracknell raised the question of whether somebody could be excluded without the House voting on it. My anxiety about the House voting on the exclusion of a Member is that that will almost certainly look to the public as though the House has judged that that person, for want of a better term, is a wrong ’un. That is why if my best friend were in this process—if, for instance, they had been charged, and the House authorities thought there was a significant concern and wanted to take action, suggesting they should not come in—I would say to my best friend, “You should just not come in.” Then it would be entirely voluntary, and that would protect the reputation of the House. I think that would be in the best interests of the individual, and we would end up with a fair outcome for the complainant as well.

However, I think the House has to reserve the opportunity that we may be in a situation where somebody is absolutely adamant—saying, “There’s no way you’re preventing me from coming in”—and people may come to the conclusion of replying, “Sorry, but we think you are a genuine risk to other people on the parliamentary estate, and that now trumps anything else. Consequently, if you’re not prepared to accept this, then we will have to vote on it.” However, I think the likelihood of that happening more than once in decade is minimal. I slightly worry about doing a review, because I am not sure how long we would have to allow before we had enough cases to decide whether the review was actually valuable.