Independent Complaints and Grievance Policy

Debate between Mark Harper and Rachel Maclean

Wednesday 28th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

I hear what my hon. Friend says. I do not entirely agree with him, but I do not wish to deviate from this debate into a wider discussion of standards.

My final point is about training and culture. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire made a sensible point about MPs’ backgrounds, but I wish to pick up on his slightly prejudicial comment that assumed that everybody on the Government Benches has a privileged background, which is entirely not true. I will not bore him with the fact that I was the first person in my family to go to university, my father was a labourer and we had certainly not had any Members of Parliament in the family before—I just want to challenge the hon. Gentleman’s prejudices—but he made a sensible point: MPs have a very varied set of backgrounds. Some have run their own businesses and employed significant numbers of people. Some, like me, have worked in a business for others, and I have experience of managing teams. Others will come to the House having never managed anybody before in their lives.

Members obviously come to the House at a variety of ages and with a variety of other experiences. We are all then plunged into employing members of staff. As the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), said, Members come to the House with the very best of intentions but often do not have the required skills. We therefore need to improve the training on how to employ and manage people and on the expectations that we set. We also need to provide HR support not only proactively, so that Members are better trained and supported, but so that we have somebody to ask questions if there are challenging issues that we are not comfortable dealing with. That would be valuable.

I welcome the recommendation that training should be part of the induction process for new Members. I do not think there is a massive gap between the position of the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex. I think that everybody should go through the training, but the challenge is that we can mandate that everyone goes to a training course and physically turns up at the room, but we cannot mandate that they will listen attentively and change their behaviour after doing so. It seems to me that the people who are least likely to go to the training are probably those most in need of it.

As the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire said, the challenge is to persuade people that they should go on the training course, listen and change their behaviour. The proposals to which the hon. Lady referred on publicising whether people had been on the training course, so that there is peer pressure and people feel they should go and so that the staff they might wish to hire put pressure on them, are a good idea. Nevertheless, for new MPs, it should be part of the standard set of training that every Member undertakes, so that we set the expectations correctly.

That leads me to the second part of my final point, which is about the culture of this place. I have listened to the debates we have had on this issue over the past few months and thought about my own working career. I was perhaps fortunate to work for two businesses that took management and how they treated their people very seriously. I went on training courses on how to manage people and set expectations and on what was expected. Staff members were empowered to speak up, and it was recognised that speaking up on a whole range of issues—whether how we ran the business or how people behaved—was the right thing to do. That set the right sort of culture, which is not always the case.

I have thought through some of the comments that have been made over the past few months. Examples of behaviour have been given and people have said things like, “That sort of behaviour was acceptable a few years ago, but things seem to have changed.” I thought back to when I started my working after leaving university, which is tragically a lot longer ago than I care to remember, in 1991. I thought through some of the specific examples we have read about, and whether they involved Members of this House or people outside it, we heard people say, “This sort of behaviour used to be acceptable.”

I was thinking back to when I started work 27 years ago, and I concluded that, actually, those sorts of things were not acceptable. The difference between then and more recently is that people used to get away with behaving like that. What has changed is not that certain behaviours are no longer acceptable—actually they never were acceptable—but that people cannot get away with them now, and that is right and an improvement. What we are trying to deliver with the training and the change of culture is that everybody accepts not only that those sorts of behaviour are not acceptable, but that no one will let people get away with them.

[Rachel Maclean]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Harper]

If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I am just going to conclude.

If the report of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House does nothing else but that and changes the culture, it will have taken us a huge step forward. I am very happy to support the motion and to commend it to the House.

Balancing the Public Finances

Debate between Mark Harper and Rachel Maclean

Tuesday 11th July 2017 Westminster Hall

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. I commend my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) for securing this much-needed debate and for his excellent points.

I want to focus my comments on one issue only: income inequality, which the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) referred to. Almost a year ago today, the Prime Minister gave a statement on the steps of Downing Street in which she focused on her aim to make Britain a country that works for everyone by tackling deep-rooted injustices such as income inequality. That is one of the most pernicious issues facing our country, and it lies at the heart of our Prime Minister’s vision for our country. In this Parliament, we are setting out the meaningful ways in which we will effect change.

One thing that came up time and again in my election hustings, and I am sure those of other hon. Members, was the idea of taxing the rich more to pay for all the things on which Opposition Members propose to spend money. In fact, the Leader of the Opposition has proposed that as a highly desirable option, which he thinks would lead to lower inequality in our country. However, far from having the desired effect, would that not have precisely the opposite effect?

Is it not a fact that, under the Conservative Government, the people who pay the highest taxes in actual and relative terms are the rich? In 2016-17, the richest 1% in our country are set to pay 27% of all income tax revenue, a higher proportion than under the Labour Government. The richest 5% will pay 38% of total tax. I welcome that. Never let it be said that the Conservatives shy away from taxing the rich. We do tax them, but we do it in a way that delivers real income to the Exchequer. Labour Members—if they were here—would do it in a way that damages the economy, hurts businesses and jobs, and results in tax hikes for ordinary hard-working people, including my constituents in Redditch. Is it not a fact that, under the Conservatives, people on lower incomes are paying less tax than they did in all the years of the Labour Government?

[Mr Harper]

I will be very brief, but I cannot let what the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) said go unchallenged, which is why he did not give way to me. Over the years that the Conservatives have been in power, income inequality has reduced. The country has become more equal, not less. That does not support Opposition Members’ arguments, which is why they do not want to hear it, but it is a fact of which Government Members should be very proud.

[Rachel Maclean]

I thank my right hon. Friend—he has managed to make my speech a bit shorter.

I will focus on the lower paid, hard-working earners. For 2017 to 2018, the personal allowance is being raised to £11,500, which means that the amount of tax-free income someone can earn will be more than 75% higher than in 2010. That means more money in people’s pockets to cope with the cost of living, because taking people out of tax has the same effect as giving them a pay rise. We have discussed the importance of giving pay rises to everybody, which I welcome. People are keeping more of what they earn.

I reiterate my right hon. Friend’s comment that income inequality is in fact at a 30-year low. It continues to fall, and we want to see it go further. It is the Conservatives who are on the side of the lowest paid—we have taken them out of tax. We are on the side of those earning the minimum wage, and we are boosting their incomes with the national living wage. We are on the side of hard-working people, and we are stabilising the economy so that it creates jobs for people, and they can go to work and earn a decent living. It is the Conservatives who believe in fairness, because we have delivered the lowest levels of income inequality for 30 years, giving people a sense that our country works for everyone.