Seven Principles of Public Life

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2022 Westminster Hall

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate after so many brilliant contributions from my Labour colleagues. I hope the wide-angled camera that the parliamentary authorities use to broadcast this meeting will show that not a single Conservative Back-Bench MP has bothered to turn up. That is a shame. The Minister and her Parliamentary Private Secretary are rightly in their places, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say. Standards in public life should not be optional. Every one of us, regardless of party, should seek to uphold, celebrate and share them, and we should tell the story of why they matter, but someone needs to turn up to do that. I hope that people can see the empty chairs in this room and that they will ask why only Labour Back-Bench MPs were speaking in this debate. This issue does matter.

The standards spoken about so brilliantly by my hon. Friends, the Members for Liverpool, Wavertree (Paula Barker), for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater) and for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) are important. We could restrict those standards to selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. We could include others, as many people who have applied the principles of public life to their own organisations have done, such as duty and a requirement to uphold the law—that should be a given but, sadly, we have seen that that is not always so. Other principles are respect, equality and the importance of treating everyone equally, no matter who they are, who they fall in love with, where they come from, the colour of their skin or their religion. The principles, when taken together, are about how to be decent.

I sometimes get things wrong; I sometimes make mistakes. The system should be broad and confident enough to allow us—if we make an honest mistake, because of innovation or because we get something wrong—to put our hands up, apologise and learn that lesson. That is an informed, sensible and confident system. What we have at the moment is a broken system. It is important that we deal with it. It is not broken because of neglect. It is broken because of deliberate decisions to break it. That is dangerous, because it puts us on a path to a place where standards do not matter and are not upheld. It suggests that we are all the same, and that every Member of Parliament—regardless of their party—is somehow in the mud, somehow on the take and somehow unfairly representing their constituents. There are brilliant MPs in every party; there are a lot of good, decent Conservative MPs who would probably want to be here. We need to make sure that this debate is conducted against those high principles and in a language that reflects the political body we are seeking to create. That is the spirit of what I want to say.

The context in which this debate is being held is important, and my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree set it out really well. We are here because the last Administration sought to break many of those standards, sought to evade scrutiny and sought to excuse and protect those who had broken the standards, the system and the principles that we seek to uphold. That gives us a choice, because people care about those standards.

If we were to do a taste test on the streets of Plymouth or in any other constituency and to ask people to name the seven principles of public life, I am not certain that every member of the public would be able to name them all, but they would all give it a good go, and the words we would get back would reflect the overall sentiment of the principles. That is what we should be aiming at, because what we have seen over the past year should scare each and every one of us—no matter whether we are in government or in opposition, aspiring to be in government. This issue matters.

Yesterday, I hosted a group of young care leavers from Plymouth at an event with Barnardo’s. They talked about their experience of being in care, and I am enormously proud of them for the way they travelled from Plymouth—many of them leaving it for the first time—to come to Parliament. One of them asked me, “Why would anyone take notice of us? Why does it matter?” I explained the job of Members of Parliament, and they said, “Aren’t they all corrupt?” That is not an unreasonable question for a young person who has been confronted by years and years of the news coverage that we have had. I am so proud of those young people for telling their story about being in care, but we need to make sure that our day-to-day business here speaks to a place that every young person can look at and aspire to be in and whose principles they can aspire to follow.

That means changing the rules that we have. I do not see a reason why MPs have second jobs. The declarations of who has a second job includes many of the MPs in the south-west near to me. When I at how many hours or days a week they spend doing a second job, I think that is one or two days a week that they are not doing the job that they were elected to do and that they are paid very handsomely to do. What are we getting? Are taxpayers getting a rebate? Are they getting a refund? What influence, decisions and information is being shared? There should be no second jobs, except for those who are keeping up a medical licence or the ability to write a book.

I understand why some people do not want to be in Parliament, because I do not think it is a safe place to work. I say that because I worked in professional workplaces until my election, and I did not doubt that any of those private sector workplaces were safe. People were able to come to work and be safe. I do not always believe that Parliament is a safe place to work, especially for many of our staff. Young people, often not paid very much, are in an atmosphere full of alcohol, where power has a currency all by itself. When we talk about standards in public life, they are not amorphous, blobby things. They are not foggy things that we are trying to catch. They are lived experience for people. We must make this place a safe place for everybody to work. There is a big distinction between the Parliament that I turned up to as a young researcher in 2000 with brown hair and the Parliament that I turned up to with grey hair when I got elected.

[Chris Bryant]

It was grey back then—there is nothing wrong with grey.

--- Later in debate ---

[Luke Pollard]

It was brown—I have picture evidence.

None the less, progress has been made in those 20 years. We should not dismiss the fact that MPs of both parties have sought to make change to make this place a better one. However, it is not yet a safe enough place for everyone to work, and it needs to be. That is the reason why the seven principles of public life should not exist on a dusty bookshelf; we should live and breathe them. More than that, they should be visible to everyone in this place. Far from being points of shame, or a tick-list to see what someone has got wrong, they should be a source of pride and strength for us all in this place. We should display them around the building. The refurbished parliamentary building should welcome Members and guests with a celebration of those principles, built into the fabric of the building, just as today’s Parliament highlights the many old dudes in wigs who once ruled Britain hundreds of years ago. We should make them visible to everyone.

Making them modern must also make them personal. If I am lucky enough to be returned as the Member of Parliament for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport after the next election, one of the changes that I would like to see is that when we come to swear in, we should not just swear an Oath to the Queen—to God, if we have one—or affirm; I think we should also swear to uphold the principles of public life. If each and every one of us, in our own voice, says those words, lists the seven principles of public life and affirms or swears to uphold them when we are in office, then they are not just a tick box or a document that we have been given as part of the corporate brochure—the new starter’s handbook. They are something that each and every one of us has said and made personal. That matters because if it is personal, it is more likely to be upheld by every individual.

I think we are at a crossroads in our democracy. At a crossroads, taking the right turn is not inevitable. Many places can take the wrong turn, and as we are seeing around the world, where rights are under attack, where democracy is being eroded, where misinformation is sometimes more believed than accurate information, it is not inevitable that we win this fight, that standards win. That only happens when we make the case for it, when people are persuaded by it and when there is no other option but to uphold those standards.

So I hope the Minister will take the Opposition’s suggestions seriously, and make actual changes to the way this place functions—changes not designed to catch people out, but to celebrate those standards and make them something that each and every one of us aspires to make sure we uphold through our activities. When we go into schools and talk about our role as Members of Parliament, I think people see an MP who is proud of their job. They see an MP wanting to share the hope of changing the community for the better. Talking about their politics, their values, every single MP would probably make a case for good practice—for best practice and for hope. Why are we so different when we leave those schools and come to this place, that we find it so easy to qualify and avoid those standards? Why do we find it so easy to protect the people who break those rules? If every Member of Parliament decides today to stop protecting the people who make this place unsafe, to stop protecting the people who break the rules, we will get a Parliament that is better and we will have something that those young kids can be proud of.