Committee on Standards

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Before the debate begins, I think it would be helpful if I set out the procedure to be followed. The Leader of the House will move the motion. I will also allow enough time at the end of the debate to ensure that the Chair of the Committee on Standards has the opportunity to respond.

Members are, of course, free to consider and, if they wish, criticise the process that the House has set in place to consider Members’ conduct. However, there is a long tradition of not attacking individuals, such as Officers of the House, who are not here to defend themselves and do not have the ability to do so. They are doing the job that the House itself has set them to do. I remind the House that good temper and moderation are the characteristics of parliamentary language. Please let us keep calm, keep sensible and make sure the House has a debate in which we are respectful and tolerant to each other.

I inform the House that I have selected the amendment in the name of Dame Andrea Leadsom. Under the terms of the business motion agreed yesterday, the amendment will be moved formally at the end of the debate, but of course she will speak sooner.

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[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

If it is all right, I just want to respond directly to the point that has just been made. [Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

I would like to hear what the hon. Gentleman has got to say before we make a judgment.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Gentleman can intervene on me, but he cannot intervene on a point made by the hon. Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant)—

[Mr Speaker]

Let me help. It is not going to be direct; I think it is direct to the point that was made to you, Leader of the House. I think we can dance around on the head of a pin, but that is not going to be helpful in a very important debate today.

[Chris Bryant]

I just wanted to make a simple point, which is that we reviewed and read all the witness statements. Nobody asked to make an oral witness statement to us. It is perfectly normal in most workplaces in this country, as a retired High Court judge confirmed to me yesterday, for witness statements to be read and considered, and not necessarily for witnesses to be questioned or cross-examined. We did a perfectly normal, fair hearing for the right hon. Member for North Shropshire. We considered all the witness statements and we published them.

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[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. We only have an hour and a half to discuss this. This is the time that the Government gave us to discuss this matter. There is huge interest in this debate. Is there anything that you can do to encourage the Leader of the House to wind up his remarks?

[Mr Speaker]

I think the Leader of the House has just said that he is coming to his conclusion.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Thank you for your ruling, Mr Speaker. It is always a balance in this House as to whether one tries to answer as many questions as possible, which is, I think, the better way of conducting the debate.

A letter was sent to me yesterday by union representatives about the importance of maintaining independent and impartial investigations into misconduct. The standards system stands in contrast to the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme, which has an appeal panel, chaired by a High Court judge. That is for the very reason that all parties referred to the scheme must have total faith in it. It has been absolutely essential in achieving positive cultural change in this House precisely because of its rigorous, judicial processes, transparency of operation and evident commitment to natural justice and the right to appeal. The House should be proud of the ICGS system, and it owes a debt to my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire for its establishment. It is clear that we can learn many lessons from its operation, and I would encourage the Select Committee to look to the ICGS system, with its benefits of judicial experience, as an example of how a process of independent adjudication can be set up effectively.

In summary—I was expecting a “Hear, hear” for that, Mr Speaker, as I am coming to my conclusion—there are numerous problems with the operation of the standards system, a fact that has been highlighted by the concerns of Members across this House in this particular case and others. Given these concerns, I think that it is only right that consideration of this report be paused until our standards system can be reviewed. Therefore, I will support the amendment so that the new Committee can consider whether Members should have

“the same or similar rights as apply to those subject to investigations of alleged misconduct in other workplaces and professions, including the right of representation, examination of witnesses and appeal”,

and whether this case itself should continue through any reformed system recommended by the new Committee.

Members must act when we see a situation arise that we do not believe to be compatible with the principles of natural justice. This is about the process and not the individual case, but when considering this report how can one not consider the great sorrow that my right hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire has suffered? The suicide of his wife is a greater punishment than any House of Commons Committee could inflict. As we all know:

“The quality of mercy is not strained.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed:

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes”.

It is in this way that the House should consider this case and standards more widely. The system must provide justice tempered by mercy, for mercy is essential to justice.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Leader of the House appears to have spent this whole time supporting the amendment and has not actually moved the motion that he was meant to be moving.

[Mr Speaker]

I think the Leader of the House did move the motion, although I agree that it was a variation. I want the shadow Leader of the House to put the other case now. I call Thangam Debbonaire.

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[Ms Harriet Harman (Camberwell and Peckham) (Lab)]

I am regretful at rising to speak in this debate. Although we have political adversaries in the House, we are also all colleagues who work together in the same place. I have the utmost sympathy for the family tragedy that hit the right hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) and the greatest admiration for how he then took up the campaign for the prevention of suicide to help others. In the more than 20 years that we have been in the House together, he has shown me nothing but kindness and courtesy.

It is very much because we as MPs know and understand each other that the House recognised that we needed a complaints system that involved a strong measure of independence. We all recognise that the public want, and are entitled to, the highest standards from their elected representatives, and we are proud to claim that that is the case. We all recognise that the people who elect us want us to act in their interest and in the public interest, and that they want no conflict of interest to blur the issue of our private financial interest with our role as MPs.

Trust in our democracy is all important, but it is fragile. The reputation of the House is easily damaged and, when damaged, hard to restore, as we discovered not only in the lobbying scandal, but in the expenses scandal. How we deal with this issue will reflect on the House as a whole and on each of us individually. I hope that Members on both sides are clear that this is House business, not Government business, and therefore the vote should not be whipped, much though the Whips will try.

We made these rules on lobbying; we need to enforce them. No one foisted the process on us; we initiated it and decided it. Where there are criticisms about the rules that we decided on, changes can be proposed, but as the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) said, they must have an all-party basis to go forward with integrity. That is the way we should do things.

What we must not do is make the rules and then decide to set them aside when we have misgivings about the outcome. I will oppose the amendment and support the motion, and I urge right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House to do the same.

[Mr Speaker]

I call Sir William Cash. Sir William, you have only three minutes. I am sorry about that.

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[Hon. Members]

You wish!

[Mr Speaker]

I think we’ll move on. [Laughter.]

[Chris Bryant]

I think he got the easier job.

I have not done any radio or television interviews on this matter because, as Chair of the Committee, I am a servant of the House. I thank the Commissioner and the Committee. In particular, I wish the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Allan Dorans) well, because he is very ill at the moment. I hope that he will be back with us soon. It is inappropriate for people to comment on absences from the Committee when they do not understand why members might be absent.

I am painfully conscious that the right hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) lost his wife in tragic circumstances in June 2020. I wish to express my sincere condolences to him. I have known suicide in my family, as he knows, and I have performed many funerals for suicides. I know the grief, the anguish, and often the guilt that is associated. The last year must have been very distressing for him, and the Committee took those circumstances fully into account when considering his conduct.

I will address the charges, the process, the sanction and the amendment. The charges are very serious. The Member repeatedly, over a sustained period, lobbied officials and Ministers on behalf of his paying clients, Randox and Lynn’s Country Foods, from whom he was receiving more than £9,000 a month, as he still is. He pursued their commercial interests. When they could not get meetings with officials and Ministers, he used his privileged position as a Member of Parliament to secure them. Providing privileged access is a valuable service.

The Member promoted what he called “Randox’s superior technology”. He wanted the Government to use Randox’s calibration system. He repeatedly used his taxpayer-funded parliamentary office for commercial meetings. That is paid lobbying. In some shape or form, it has been banned since 1695 and expressly so since cash for questions, which brought this House into terrible disrepute in the 1990s. One Conservative Member described it to me as a “catalogue of bad behaviour”. I have yet to meet a Conservative MP who has not said to me, “He clearly broke the rules.” I think that includes the Leader of the House.

The Member says that he was raising serious wrongs, but he did not say so at the time. If they were truly serious, one might have expected him to write articles or do media interviews, as he was perfectly entitled to do. He did not. He did the one thing that he was banned from doing: lobby Ministers time and again in a way that conferred a direct benefit on his paying clients. That is expressly forbidden. It is a corrupt practice.

On the process, the Member has had a fair hearing. We had legal advice from Speaker’s Counsel throughout. As one former High Court judge said to me yesterday,

“the procedure is consistent with natural justice and similar or identical to workplaces up and down the country.”

We on the Committee spent many hours reviewing the evidence in this case without fear or favour. The Member had prior notice of the charges and the evidence against him at every stage. He had his legal advisers with him. The Committee invited him to make his appeal against the commissioner’s findings in writing and in person, and I hope he would confirm that we gave him every opportunity to make his case to us and that the session was conducted respectfully and fairly. I think he is nodding.

The Member has said that his witnesses should have been interviewed. Natural justice requires that witnesses be heard, but that does not necessarily mean that they must be heard orally or cross-examined. We did what many courts and tribunals do every day of the week: we reviewed all the witness statements, took them into consideration and published them in full.

The Member claims that the commissioner had made up her mind before she sent her memorandum. That is completely to misunderstand the process. As the commissioner has done in every other case, she started an investigation and invited the Member to meet her and/or to submit evidence. Once she had completed her investigation and, by definition, found on a preliminary basis that there had been a breach of the rules, she submitted a memorandum to him for his comments, and then to the Committee. That is when we heard his appeal, in writing and in person.

I turn to the sanction. As the Committee says in the report:

“Each of Mr Paterson’s several instances of paid advocacy would merit a suspension of several days, but the fact that he has repeatedly failed to perceive his conflict of interest and used his privileged position as a Member of Parliament to secure benefits for two companies for whom he was a paid consultant, is even more concerning. He has brought the House into disrepute.”

A Conservative colleague whom I respect a great deal said to me on Monday that justice should always be tempered by mercy. I agree. But justice also demands no special favours.

These are the precedents that we considered: Patrick Mercer was suspended for six months; the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) for 30 days; Jonathan Sayeed for 14 days; and George Galloway for 18 days. When Geoffrey Robinson failed to provide proper responses to the commissioner and Committee, he was suspended for a month. This case is just as serious because it involved at least 14 instances. It was a pattern of behaviour, and the Member has said time and again over the last week that he would do the same again tomorrow. If the House were therefore to vote down or water down the sanction, or to carry the amendment, it would be endorsing his action. We would be dismantling the rule on paid advocacy, which has been around in some shape or form since 1695. I am afraid that the public would think of us as the Parliament that licensed cash for questions.

Let me turn to the amendment. I have worked with the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) on many things; I think she is very wrong today. It is the very definition of injustice that one should change the rules or the process at the very last moment, and to do so for a named individual. That is what the amendment does. Retrospective legislation to favour or damage an individual because they are a friend or a foe is immoral and the polar opposite of the rule of law. That is why, as the Leader of the House knows, I spoke and voted with Conservative Members when we were considering a retrospective motion to subject the hon. Member for Delyn (Rob Roberts) to a recall petition. The amendment should fail on that basis alone—it is the opposite of due process.

The amendment purports to set up an appeal process, but an appellate body must be independent and every single member of the body will be parti pris, by definition. They will have been whipped and taken a view today. They will almost certainly have voted. The proposed Chair, by agreeing to have his name put forward, is already not independent. I point out gently to the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire that it was her motion as Leader of the House on 7 January 2019 that set up the Standards Committee in its present form. At that time, she said that

“a greater element of independence was required, and that having seven lay members and seven parliamentary Members on the Standards Committee…provides the right balance—having the memory and the corporate understanding of being in this place, while at the same time ensuring that we can benefit from the experience and knowledge of independent lay members.”—[Official Report, 7 January 2019; Vol. 652, c. 128.]

The body she proposes today will have no independent members—no independence.

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[Mr Speaker]

Can I just say before people vote: please, take your time going into the Lobbies. I am going to extend the vote, just because of the nature of where we are at the moment.

Amendment proposed: (a), leave out from “this House” to the end and insert:

“(1) notes the Third Report of the Committee on Standards (HC 797);

(2) notes concerns expressed about potential defects in the standards system and therefore declines to consider the report at this time;

(3) and resolves:

(a) that a Select Committee be appointed to consider and make recommendations by 3 February 2022 on the following matters:

(i) whether the current standards system should give Members of Parliament the same or similar rights as apply to those subject to investigations of alleged misconduct in other workplaces and professions, including the right of representation, examination of witnesses and appeal;

(ii) the extent to which the procedures under Standing Order Nos 149, 149(A) and 150 should be made consistent with the principles of natural justice;

(iii) whether the case against Mr Owen Paterson should be reviewed or whether the Third Report of the Committee on Standards (HC 797) should be reconsidered by the House;

(iv) and such other matters as appear to the Committee to be connected with the matters set out above,

and calls on the Government to bring forward a motion to give effect to any recommendations of the Committee within five sitting days of the publication of the Committee’s report;

(b) That the Committee consist of nine Members;

(c) That Mr John Whittingdale be Chair of the Committee and be given a casting vote in the event of a tie;

(d) That the Committee shall consist of eight other backbench members; to be nominated by parties in the proportion of four Conservative, three Labour and one SNP; nominations shall be submitted to the Committee of Selection no later than 15 November, after that date motions for nomination can be made notwithstanding any gaps in membership, and any motion made in the House on behalf of the Committee of Selection by the Chair or another member of the Committee shall be treated as having been made in pursuance of Standing Order No.121(2) for the purposes of Standing Order No.15(1)(c);

(e) That the Committee have power to send for persons, papers and records, to sit notwithstanding any adjournment of the House; to adjourn from place to place, to report from time to time, to appoint legal advisers, and to appoint specialist advisers either to supply information which is not readily available or to elucidate matters of complexity within the Committee’s order of reference.”—(Dame Andrea Leadsom.)

Question put, That the amendment be made.

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[Hon. Members]

Shame!

[Mr Speaker]

Order. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) needs to be calm a minute while I do the next part of the script. [Interruption.] You might find it shameful, but I think I am in charge.

Main Question, as amended, put.

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[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker—

[Mr Speaker]

Just to let people know, I am not going to continue the debate. We have been through the debate, but I think that this might be a point of clarification, and I am happy to accept it in that light.

[Chris Bryant]

It is a very simple one, Mr Speaker. I do not want to delay the House. Some people have asked whether the Standards Committee continues to exist. It does, and we will be meeting on Tuesday morning. I will still be its Chair.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I do not believe that any hon. Member is truly honourable if they serve on this new Committee. Therefore I want my constituents to know that no Member of Parliament serves on this corrupt Committee in my name.

[Mr Speaker]

As I have said, we are not going to go through all the Members in the debate.