Privileges Committee Special Report

Lia Nici Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I said that it amounted to a co-ordinated campaign, and it did. Every single one of those examples adds up, encouraging others—members of the public and other politicians—to take part. As I have mentioned, that was made worse by the fact that two of those mentioned as mounting the most vociferous attacks did so from the platform of their own TV shows. The named MPs accused the Committee of being a “kangaroo court” and the process of being a “witch hunt”. In reality, as they must know, that could not be further from the truth. The Committee detailed its processes in advance. It took every possible step to ensure fairness. It took legal advice from the right hon. Sir Ernest Ryder, from Speaker’s Counsel and from the Clerks of the House on how to

“apply the general principles of fairness, the rules of the House, and…procedural precedents”.

[Lia Nici (Great Grimsby) (Con)]

On the basis of fairness, does the hon. Lady believe it is fair that Members of this House were investigated and listed in a report without prior knowledge that that was going to happen?

[Thangam Debbonaire]

The Committee was open to the Members concerned making their representations to the Committee in the proper way, and they did not do so. The Committee published a report last summer setting out its intended processes, and Members could have taken part in a number of ways, which I will detail. It made further public comments on its workings when appropriate, and gave Mr Johnson further time to respond to the evidence and make his own submission. In short, the Committee did everything it possibly could to ensure fairness and transparency.

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[Ms Harman]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. If this work of the Privileges Committee is to be done in-house by Members of this House, this House must support them in that work. If the House is not prepared to do that, and it is open season on Members who are put forward for the Committee, we would very quickly find ourselves with an independent, outside process. Most Members of the House want us to keep the process in-house, but to do that we must all respect it.

[Lia Nici]

The right hon. and learned Lady talks about collusion and lobbying. Can she explain how it was that Guardian reporters were briefed before Privileges Committee reports were published for us in this place, and, if she knows who had sight of those reports, who was doing the collusion with those journalists?

[Ms Harman]

Again, this is very unfortunate. I say to the hon. Lady that hon. Members are given a task to do on behalf of the House. They do it to the best of their ability, with integrity, and they should be supported in doing that. Although the hon. Lady was very much against the outcome, which came about on the basis of the evidence, it is not acceptable then to criticise the process, except through the channels and in the ways that I have set out.

Our special report draws upon “Erskine May”. I invite hon. and right hon. Members to read paragraphs 15.14 and 15.16 of “Erskine May”, which make it crystal clear that it is not acceptable for a Member of this House to seek, by lobbying or arousing public hostility, to influence the decision of members of the Committee, or to undermine the Committee’s credibility and authority. All this is about protecting the House from being misled, by ensuring that there is a strong and fair Committee that will, on behalf of the House, undertake an inquiry, and that there are Members prepared to serve on the Committee and able to do that work without interference.

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[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.

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[Richard Fuller]

The hon. Lady makes a fair point, although I have two contentions with it. First, on the specifics, the point I was making is that the determination of whether that constitutes harm is put in a report by the people concerned, which then comes back here for us to support, so there is very little review. Secondly, an interesting underlying issue is that we are living through a period when harm is being interpreted differently. The way that people who are much younger than me appreciate how harm is done is different. The amount they are prepared to take on themselves—rather than to say, “Well, that’s just the way the world is,” and not to see it as harm—is much less than it was in my day. That might be a good thing or a bad thing, but it is different for different generations. That is another aspect of how to assess what is harmful, and we are going through such a fluid period that it is difficult.

But the hon. Lady is right: ultimately, I think we would agree, the message today, at the core of this, is to use temperate language. When I came back to the House in 2019, one thing I noticed was how much more coarse political discourse had become in just the two-year period that I was away. It was not just because of the divisions over Brexit or social media; it was also because we were tolerating it. We have a responsibility in this House to oppose that. That is why it is good when we talk across the divide in this House and find agreement, and why that Committee, in cross-party agreement among individuals, was something that we could rely on. The lesson is about using temperate language.

I share the concerns of my colleagues about some of the recommendations. Not only are they difficult to see working in practice, but there will be chilling effects on free speech. We will have to see whether that is the case. I am not defending what was said; I just worry that someone like me, who does not know the law or “Erskine May”, will feel that there are certain things that I may not be able to say, but which perhaps in the past I was —although there are perhaps ways to give reassurances on that.

[Lia Nici]

Does my hon. Friend not believe that there has already been a chilling effect? When we debated the fifth Privileges Committee report, some colleagues were too scared to come here and speak, because they were put under threat by other Members of the House. I was one of only four who dared to come out and express a different opinion, and ensure that we had a rounded debate.

[Richard Fuller]

I hear what my hon. Friend has said. I do not know whether people would say that, but that should clearly not happen in this House. All Members should have the right, and the willingness, to speak without fear or favour. But when I protest about that, I should equally defend that right for members of the Committee. They should be able to look at the issues that they wish to review without fear or favour.

My concern with the motion is that it is perhaps a little too overreaching in what it seeks to do, and is not well structured in its solution and remedies. It has opened up questions that probably need further investigation by other Committees, so that we can achieve something that ultimately provides all Members of this House with clarity on how they should behave and communicate with one another.