Code of Conduct: Consultation

Mark Francois Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Incidentally, I am not right honourable, but my hon. Friend makes an important point. I have a view about that; I am not sure whether it will end up being the settled view of the House. It seems illogical to me that two Members of the House, one of whom is a Minister, could be wined and dined at Wimbledon on a ticket that costs £2,500, then the Minister does not have to register that with the House and never has to register its value, even though they might be the Minister who makes decisions about tennis funding in the UK, whereas the Member who is not a Minister has to register it within 28 days. It seems perverse, and it is difficult for members of the public, who might want to see all the information about an individual MP in one place.

[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

May I refer the Chairman to paragraph 58 on page 19 of the report? I take the point he has made very clearly that these are proposals for consultation and could be changed. However, the paragraph says:

“We therefore support the addition to the Code of a rule similar to those adopted by the Welsh Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assembly, making it an investigable breach of the Code for a Member to subject anyone to unreasonable and excessive personal attack in any medium”,

which presumably includes the Chamber and Select Committees. [Interruption.] Well, if we read it literally, that is how we would interpret it.

Let me give the Chairman a quick scenario. In a Select Committee, a Member is pressing a witness, maybe about some Government procurement programme that has gone horribly wrong, and they are reluctant to answer. The member of the Committee, doing their job, presses them harder, and the witness says, “I’m sorry, but I regard your behaviour as an unreasonable and excessive personal attack, and if you continue this line of questioning I’m going to report you to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.” To take another example—this is important, Madam Deputy Speaker—Member A and Member B have a heated disagreement in the Chamber, and someone watching on television writes to the commissioner and says, “I think A made an excessive personal attack on B, and I want you to investigate it.”

The point is that this paragraph seriously impinges on article 9 of the Bill of Rights, if we take it literally, so here is my consultation submission early on: this is actually dangerous, and it should not appear in the final version.

[Chris Bryant]

I disagree with the right hon. Member’s interpretation of where we are going, not least because I think article IX is perfectly clear that no proceeding in Parliament should be impeached or questioned in a court of law or in any other place.

[Mr Francois]

But it would be by the commissioner.

[Chris Bryant]

No. That has the force of statute law—the Bill of Rights is statute law—and we are not intending to derogate from that in any way at all. The Chair of a Select Committee at the moment could perfectly well say to an hon. Member, if he or she thought that the hon. Member was being excessively or unreasonably rude or personal towards a witness, “Let’s tone that down a little bit, shall we?” I think it would be in the interests of the House and its reputation for the Select Committee Chair to say that, and it is perfectly within their powers now. Indeed, in the work we have been doing in the Privileges Committee, we have been looking at how witnesses should be treated.

It may be that this rule is not perfectly worded as it is now. None the less—and, again, this is me on a personal level—it just seems odd that we would want to argue that we have to continue the right to make unreasonable and excessive personal attacks on others, especially when we are using the reputation of the letters “MP” behind it.