Bullying and Harassment of MPs’ Parliamentary Staff

Debate between Patrick Grady and Jamie Stone

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom), the former Leader of the House, and I acknowledge the significant amount of work she has done to drive this forward.

I pass on the apologies of my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), who is travelling with the Scottish Affairs Committee. He, too, has been part of the process for some considerable time.

Most of all, on behalf of the SNP, our parliamentary group and our parliamentary and constituency staff, I thank Gemma White for her thorough and challenging report, which marks an important milestone on the journey towards culture change in this place. It is welcome that the Government have made time for this debate and for the motion on the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme so soon after the report’s publication.

I also thank, in particular, Emily Cunningham from the SNP’s central staff. She has been on several of the workstreams as a staff representative and has helped to inform a lot of this.

I will briefly address the report, which we are happy to endorse, and what it means in terms of culture change and the professionalisation of Parliament, with some best practices from elsewhere. As the opening speakers have said, the report makes for sobering but not necessarily surprising reading. It is important to note, as the Leader of the House did, that Gemma White says

“there are very many MPs who are good employers and who treat their staff with the dignity and respect that they deserve”.

We should also not be blind to the occasional possibility of vexatious or malicious complaints—we are in a high-pressured, high-profile environment—but overall the report presents a picture of a culture that badly and urgently needs to change. Sadly, it contains accounts of behaviours that many of us will have heard about and perhaps some of us will have witnessed. Bullying, harassment, and a toxic culture of insecurity and under- mining have been found to be commonplace, and they are all perhaps manifestations of deeper-rooted cultures and behaviours associated with the abuse of power.

As the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) hinted at, eventually that can become embedded and it becomes a form of learned and normalised behaviour that others either pick up or openly embrace. Challenges arise from the fact that we work in a particularly fast-paced, rapidly changing environment, where employment can be precarious and opportunities for advancement can be limited. When it comes, advancement can be massive, involving significant leaps in responsibility. So this is a huge challenge that requires each and every one of us to go back to the start and question our own behaviours and assumptions.

[Jamie Stone]

The hon. Gentleman is correct in what he is saying, but there is a greyer area at the edge of this issue. He has outlined the obvious cases of shouting, bullying and so on, but I would also argue that when an MP asks a member of staff to babysit a child or go to the MP’s flat to wait for the gas man to come that, too, is an abuse of that member of staff.

[Patrick Grady]

The hon. Gentleman is touching on an important issue—these little grey areas where relationships can become very close, because of the intense environment, and we ask for things that perhaps we would ask a friend to do, but not necessarily a paid member of staff. It is important that boundaries are established, and some of this is covered in that Valuing Everyone training. I will say a little more about that later, but I cannot recommend that training highly enough. The former Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire, will be pleased to hear that a significant number of the Scottish National party group took part in that training last Thursday, coincidentally just as this report was being published, and everybody came away with things to think about and having found it a very worthwhile experience.

As well as the Valuing Everyone training on respect, dignity and understanding boundaries, there is definitely a need for further training on employment best practice. It is worth thinking about when and how some of that training takes place. There is a role for the political parties to play here, even at the candidate selection stage. Doing what we are doing now, sitting on the Green Benches and standing to make speeches is the most visible part of the job, but it is a tiny part of what is involved in the work of a Member of Parliament. People putting themselves forward for election—and I count myself in this—do not necessarily realise everything that comes with the elected responsibility. So at the selection stage prospective candidates have to be fully aware of the responsibilities they will be taking on as employers and the standards that they will be expected to adhere to. There is also perhaps a more formal role for returning officers to play during that nomination stage or shortly after the election. Then, as the hon. Member for Rhondda said, very early in the MP induction process the advice and support on being an effective employer must be available.

That is why the proposal on a fully resourced human resources department is crucial to all of this, and we warmly welcome it. The system would probably be better sitting under the auspices of the House or the Commission. If it was to be somehow independent, it should be clearly so, even if staff continue to be funded through the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. This is not what IPSA has been set up for and I do not think it is fair to IPSA, let alone to the people who would have to live with the consequences of it.

A new-form HR department also leads on to the recommendation that MPs be required to adopt and follow employment practices and procedures aligned to best practice found in the public sector and elsewhere. We also fully support the recommendation that former members of staff be allowed to access the independent complaints and grievance scheme, and will support the motion to implement that following this debate.

As I said, underlying any structural and procedural changes that are put in place must be a wider cultural change. Politics and political considerations should never be allowed to take precedence over principles of dignity and respect. That means that Members of Parliament and staff must be active in calling out and working to eradicate unacceptable behaviour. It comes through in the training that I mentioned that as Members we all have a duty to recognise our privilege and power and not abuse it. When complaints are made, staff and MPs should be properly supported. Nothing should discourage staff members from coming forward through the proper channels if they have concerns about their own experiences or those of others. We must work towards creating an environment in which everyone feels empowered to speak out if they feel they are being affected by bullying or harassment, and in which everyone in the parliamentary community feels that they work in a safe, comfortable and professional environment, supported by a robust system of human resources and a complaints and grievance procedure.

It was not strictly part of the remit of either Gemma White or Laura Cox, but perhaps we need to look a bit deeper into where some of these practices and behaviours have come from and how they are perpetuated. We work in a building that was designed to promote power and hierarchy—to establish a culture of “them and us”. In previous debates, we have heard new Members of Parliament speak of how on their election they felt intimidated by signs on toilets and tea rooms that say “Members only”. That was certainly my experience back in 2015, and it sometimes still is today. Quite why a staircase or a toilet is only for the use of Members of Parliament is somewhat beyond me. I know that moves are afoot to drive some change in that regard.

Once upon a time, I worked as a researcher in the Scottish Parliament. Although by no means was everything perfect there, there was an openness and transparency that undoubtedly shaped a different culture of tolerance and respect. In Portcullis House and on the Terrace, we still have tables that are clearly marked as for Members only. As the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) will know, in the Scottish Parliament canteen one will see Cabinet Secretaries sitting down next to the team from the mail room and special advisers sitting next to the cleaning staff. There is no sense of deference and no sense of particular entitlement based on obscure notions of seniority or grading.

[Jamie Stone]

I am always terribly glad when a colleague makes a good advert for the way we did things in Holyrood. That level society is a reflection of the fact that in Scotland we ourselves are all Jock Tamson’s bairns.

[Patrick Grady]

Absolutely. That is not to say that everything there is perfect—I do not pretend for a minute that everything is perfect—but when the Scottish Parliament was set up 20 years ago, it was designed with a completely different culture in mind, and that has led to very noticeable differences.

Here at Westminster, we work hours that push everyone to the limits of tolerance. Massive uncertainties, even on quiet days such as this, as to exactly when things are going to finish only contributes to the stress and tensions. Perhaps it would help if we had fixed times for voting and if we were not locked into crowded rooms to vote, which again promotes hierarchy and literally divides us. None of it is massively surprising. Another report that ought to be factored into this discussion is Professor Sarah Childs’ “The Good Parliament”, which is in many ways about driving a wider cultural change. Perhaps if more of her recommendations were put in place, that would go a long way towards driving that change forward. None of these reports should be left to sit on the shelf; we all have a responsibility to drive them forward.

This is not and should not be a comfortable debate for any of us. Nobody is in a position to claim the moral high ground; if the dignity of any individual member of staff has been violated, in some way we are all diminished by that. Perhaps, on reflection, some of us will recognise our own behaviours, although hopefully not the more extreme examples and hopefully not things that are intentional. In the heat of the moment, in a stressful situation, we can forget our privilege and project our frustrations on to a member of staff or on to colleagues who are not really the cause of a problem. That is something I have taken away from the Valuing Everyone training which, as I said, I cannot recommend highly enough.

Since many of these accusations and reports of bullying, harassment and unacceptable behaviours first began to surface, there has been a strong and commendable consensus throughout this process. In the SNP, we want to continue to be part of that consensus, and I assure the House that we will happily support any and all efforts to implement the recommendations of the White report, and anything that we can do to drive change of the toxic and outdated culture and practices that are experienced in this place.