Standards: Code of Conduct and Guide to the Rules

Michael Fabricant Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)]

I take the point that the hon. Lady makes, but will she not accept that the Opposition deliberately sought to conflate the two issues of Owen Paterson’s guilt and that of procedure? I voted against the procedure; I was not voting on whether Owen Paterson was guilty or not.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I cannot answer for the hon. Gentleman’s decision-making process, but I note considerable dissent in various parts of the House.

Concluding that an existing structure and process had delivered an undesirable outcome, the Government seem to have believed that the structure and the outcome must be at fault, not the person involved, and decided to change the process when it was nearly complete to try to get a different outcome. I am afraid that that is the backdrop. The resulting vote caused chaos.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

The former Leader of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom), might want to speak before me, Madam Deputy Speaker, but that is at your discretion. Thank you very much for calling me to speak.

It is important that the House understands that the Committee on Standards recognises what a huge amount of anxiety and tension the regulation of standards in the House of Commons can cause. The vast majority of Members strive—I was going to say “manfully”, but womanfully as well—to uphold the seven principles of public life and our standards, and to observe the rules. When I first joined the Committee, I was struck by how different the conversation is within the Committee from the conversation outside. I have argued forcefully that we need a much more intensive engagement and understanding between the Committee and Members so that the conversations in the Tea Room about what our code of conduct means are supportive and constructive, rather than fearful and about “How do I just stay out of trouble?” I am afraid that quite a lot of the conversation is about that.

The shadow Leader of the House would acknowledge that something that came out of last year’s debacle was the appeals process. The main contention at the time was that there was not a sufficient appeals process. There was a form of appeal, but when we had it reviewed by a retired judge, Sir Ernest Ryder, who looked at our processes and their compliance with article 6 of the European convention on human rights, it was found that our system could be made substantially better by introducing a completely separate appeal process. Had that appeal process existed last year, I do not think the debacle would have happened.

[Michael Fabricant]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I will, but I do not want to detain the House for long.

[Michael Fabricant]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I totally agree with what he says. It was the appeals process that many of us objected to and, additionally, the fact that the commissioner gave her view on that case before the inquiry had begun. As it happened, I agreed with her view, but it is not for a judge to state it beforehand. That was, I think, the objection of most of us.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

My hon. Friend touches on a key change, which is that in the serious cases that come to the Committee on Standards, the commissioner will now present her findings, but will not present a conclusion. It will be for the Committee to adjudicate on the conclusion, and then for the subject of the inquiry to appeal that conclusion on various grounds to an Independent Expert Panel. That is a significant improvement, and it should significantly reduce the anxiety that Members felt about the system before.

There are only two other points I wish to make about the areas of contention. First, I argued very strongly for the changes to the descriptors of the seven principles of public life, because the bald descriptors of the seven principles on the Committee on Standards in Public Life website are difficult to translate into what we actually do as MPs. For example, selflessness—how do you become an MP if you are completely selfless? You have to advance your own interests. How do you have influence as an MP, unless you advance your own interests and you advance your publicity? Navigating selflessness as a Member of Parliament is a complicated business, and to anybody who says that it is easy to apply the seven principles of public life to all our activities, I say no. We are navigating a difficult landscape where we are constantly beset by conflicting values that we have to reconcile, and the idea is that these revised descriptors will help inform the conversation.

The idea that these descriptors will have a chilling effect on the free speech of Members is a nonsense, because the descriptors themselves have no force in the rules whatever. They simply are there for information and conversation and to help Members to think about how we apply the seven principles of public life. Indeed, any Member who has fallen foul of the rules who could argue in front of the commissioner, “Here are the seven principles of public life, and here are the descriptors, and I felt I was following these principles”, would certainly have a mitigation, in that they had thought about the principles they were seeking to uphold, but nevertheless had fallen foul of the rules. These descriptors are completely innocuous. They are designed to help Members, and I cannot for the life of me understand why the Government have decided to object to them. I do not understand the argument that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House has presented.

We did not argue long and hard over the question of the declaration of ministerial interests. We would not be having this conversation if we had the situation described by my right hon. Friend, with timely, publicly accessible and regular declarations of ministerial interests on a par with the declarations that Members—non-Ministers —have to make as a matter of course in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I wish that we were not in this situation.

I have listened carefully to what my right hon. Friend has said, and I will listen further to the debate. I hope she is saying that this will be sorted out and that, in response to my earlier intervention, we will finish up with a member of the public being able to see on one register all the interests relating to that Member of Parliament, whether a Minister or not. I quite understand the anxiety about dual adjudication of the code and of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. We do not want to get into a situation where—I do not think this is accurate, by the way—there is anxiety that the Parliamentary Commissioner will somehow be adjudicating on matters that are strictly for the ministerial code.

I will listen to this debate. I have added my name to the relevant amendment, but I may well conclude that if the Government need the time to sort this out, we should give them that time, and this would not be some dereliction or watering down of standards. I appreciate that the shadow Leader of the House has to make her points on behalf of the official Opposition, for perhaps not entirely selfless reasons. However, as long as we finish up with both sets of interests being declared within 30 days and the ability to have them all in one place on one website, so that any member of the public or journalist can see exactly what interests are being declared in the name of that Member, we would be in a much better place. I wish we could do that by agreement rather than by dividing the House, but I do not know that we can.