Code of Conduct

Debate between Oliver Heald and Kevin Barron

Monday 12th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Barron]

I will come back to that, if I may, but I want to carry on citing what the commissioner said in the memorandum, which the Committee accepted. He continued:

“But the conduct would need to be so serious and so blatant as to make it imperative that the House be given the opportunity to consider the damage done to the reputation and integrity of the House of Commons as a whole or of its Members generally.”

The code does not seek to judge the behaviour as right or wrong—only the effect it has on the reputation and standing of the House. In my view, that is a hugely important thing to defend in our democracy, particularly after the events of the last four years.

Let me deal with other issues that we need to look at. The Government are currently consulting on proposals to allow the House to decide whether or not to permit the opening of a recall petition in cases where the House considers a Member’s conduct warrants it. Does that mean purely in respect of their public life, or does it mean in their private or personal life as well? I think that we stray into these issues with the amendment, which is why I think the House would be better to stand back from it and have a look at things in the round at a later stage. Without a provision such as the one I am proposing, the House risks being either ineffectual, because the code does not allow it to deal with behaviour that everyone agrees is reprehensible, or arbitrary because it takes action even though such behaviour is not covered by the code. That seems to be the intention. The alternative is that we end up relying on legal semantics to decide whether something is still “purely personal and private”, which is absolutely not how the code should operate.

As our report says, this is a provision for extreme circumstances. It does not invite the Committee or the House to judge a Member’s purely private and personal relationships and will not be used to do so. This is not to turn the House into a moral arbiter, but to allow it to protect the integrity of Parliament. It is a judgment on the effect of a Member’s conduct on that vital objective, not a judgment on the Member’s morals.

I cannot support the amendment, but I can suggest an alternative, more appropriate, way forward. The commissioner consults the Committee on certain matters. For example, if someone is referred to the police because the commissioner is concerned about a police investigation that might have implications for the criminal law, the commissioner comes to the Committee and provides evidence to show why the referral should take place. We are then asked either to agree it or reject it. Paragraph 104 of the guide to the rules also makes it clear that the Committee expects to be consulted before accepting an investigation of a complaint against a former Member, a complaint that goes back more than seven years, or one where a member has asked the commissioner to investigate allegations without being the subject of a specific complaint. With a self-referral, the commissioner has to come before the Committee and ask our permission for this to take place. The commissioner is currently consulting on revisions to the guide to the rules.

Let me say to the House and to those who tabled the amendment that I would be happy to ask the Committee to consider adding consideration of complaints relating to a Member’s private and personal life to the category of matters for which the commissioner should not accept investigation without first consulting the Committee.

[Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)]

In response to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash), I wonder whether the right hon. Gentleman would want to point out that the commissioner has tried in the new version to separate what are aspirations for us all to behave well from things that we really should not do. If my hon. Friend were to look at page 42 of the review of the code, he would see that paragraph 15 is now different because of the separation in part 2 of certain aspirational requirements of the code from those things that we really must not do, which appear in the later parts of the code. It is largely a stylistic matter. I wondered whether the right hon. Gentleman might want to make that point.

[Mr Barron]

Well, I thank the hon. Gentleman for the speech. He is a hard-working member of the Committee, as well as a member of other Committees that look into standards in public life. He is well worth listening to.