Publication of Information about Complaints against Members

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

One of these three issues—ensuring that resources are available to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards—is vital. It is a tragedy and a disgrace to the House that we did not do this when Elizabeth Filkin was the commissioner. There is not enough time to go back over all that now, but the House does not have a very good or consistent record.

The question of whether lay members will have privilege should not be too difficult. Presumably, we extend privilege to the commissioner, so we ought to be able to extend it in the same way. I do not have a view on whether we should go for a sub-committee of Members only to deal with privilege issues. I shall not argue against the proposal on lay members, but I note that the provision that they cannot have been a Member of Parliament before would exclude someone such as Martin Bell who would be eminently qualified to be a lay member, but that might be the rough justice we will have. I suspect that if there were lay members, we could avoid hon. Members having the dilemma that he and I faced when we were members of the Privileges and Standards Committee and agreed, in one or two cases that we considered, to use the criminal burden of proof rather than the balance of probabilities. I think that we made a mistake; I think he acknowledged that in a book and I am perfectly willing to say now that we did make a mistake. Again, however, the reasons behind that are not for discussion today.

Paragraph 25 of the Privileges and Standards Committee’s HC 67 report says that the Committee had “read with some concern” the suggestion of the Committee on Standards in Public Life that

“MPs should be required to register positions of responsibility in voluntary or charitable organisations, even if unpaid, together with an indication of the amount of time spent on them.”

Bluntly, I would ask that Committee why not spend more time looking at what MPs do in our job rather than what we do with our spare time? In my time at Parliament, I have been a trustee of Christian Aid, chairman of the Church of England Children’s Society, a member of the council of Mind—previously the national association for mental health—and a member of the council of Nacro. I have also been involved with other, less nationally prominent, organisations. I do not think that I would have accepted the invitations to take those positions if I had thought that I would have to log the amount of time I spent going to and at meetings, and I doubt whether I would have taken on the position of being parliamentary warden of St Margaret’s at Westminster. There is a whole range of issues on which that Committee ought to wake up, and if it wants to take advice from me publicly or privately I shall offer it.

[Mr Jenkin]

Is not the corollary of that recommendation that an MP who went on a holiday to learn how to paint watercolours would have to fill in a form and register it because that would be time spent not as an MP but doing an unpaid extracurricular activity? Why not register everything we do not do for Parliament in our spare time?

[Peter Bottomley]

I think my hon. Friend makes the point that if we registered what we did not do we would probably have a longer list than if we registered what we did do. The key point is that the general aim of having transparency matters.

The first of the motions introduced by the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron) concerns publication. During my time in Parliament, there have been two or three cases in which I have been rather proud of my approach to them and the persistence I maintained. However, two of them ended up with accusations being made against me of being a paedophile, one of which was swallowed by a national newspaper, which published in 2 million copies a case against me. If a Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards took media attention as a basis for starting an investigation, I would object. As it happened, in that case, no other newspaper copied the allegation, and the first settled, at pretty heavy expense to it, and made a damages payment. I wish those events had not happened, but the case involved people whom I had upset. They were bad, mad or sad; I was bold and pretty decisive, and there ended up being a series of allegations against me.

In a second case, a constituent whom I had helped complained to the commissioner that I had taken obscene photographs of his children. The commissioner found that there was no case to look into, but if that person had gone to the papers and they had run the story as they normally would, under the current arrangements the commissioner would have had to look into it. We have to be aware of such dangers. We cannot legislate against all possibilities, but we have to be careful about saying that just because there has been media attention, the commissioner should get involved.

[Mr Charles Walker]

I hope that the person who made that allegation was investigated by the police and faced the full force of the law, because that is outrageous.

[Peter Bottomley]

That may be, but the issue is that it was done and that the people who do such things are not always thinking straight. That is not my problem. The issue is that the commissioner should be very careful about taking the decibels as a reason for launching an investigation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jenkin]

I wholly agree with that point, and it fits with the one I am trying to make, which is that their perspective is necessarily a different one, owing to civil servants’ long and distinguished experience. Very often—it has to be said—Parliament will have been, throughout their careers, perhaps a matter of great frustration to them, and they might well share the feeling of many others about how poorly the House has done its jobs in various ways over the years. I do not think, therefore, that they necessarily have the right perspective—they have one perspective, but it cannot be solely the right perspective. We have to take their recommendations gratefully and humbly, but add a wider perspective to them to give them life.

On the question of adding lay members to a Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron), who moved the motion, gave examples of where lay members have been added to other committees. However, those are not parliamentary committees and are not, for example, subject to the question of privilege, and it is on parliamentary privilege that I wish to make three brief points. First, there are members of the judiciary and senior figures in public life who have served elsewhere in public life who are either careless of the question of parliamentary privilege or actually could not care less about parliamentary privilege.

The word “privilege” carries certain overtones. At one stage before the election, it went out to the Conservative party that we should not use that word, because it would be misunderstood and seem to relate to the then Leader of the Opposition’s education. In fact, every Parliament in the world of any distinction enjoys some measure of privilege or immunity in order that those Members can do their job. The reason we had the Bill of Rights in 1689 was to enable the House to function, and we still need those privileges, that protection and those immunities. We hold those immunities not for ourselves and the protection of our own persons or private interests, and not to protect us from the criminal law if we commit criminal offences—as we have just discovered in a recent case—but so that we can advance the interests of the country freely and without fear or favour. These are the people’s privileges. I urge the Procedure Committee, as it considers this matter, to accept the advice of the Clerk of the House. Let me, for the second day on the trot, quote from a note from the Clerk. Referring to the role of lay members on the Committee, he made it clear that he did not comment on the merits of the proposal itself, which I personally welcome, but he also said:

“It is not clear to me that their participation in decision-making by voting is in fact covered by parliamentary privilege. At the very least the matter is questionable and therefore may be justiciable.”

Until that matter has been comprehensively and categorically resolved, it would be sensible for the Procedure Committee to recommend that if the Standards and Privileges Committee is to have lay members, they should not be voting members.

I imagine that it would be extremely hard for the Standards and Privileges Committee to ignore the advice of the lay members, particularly if they are as eminent as I hope they will be. I very much hope that one of them will be a retired judge, for example. I think that it would greatly assist the functioning of the Committee to receive more legal advice, so that it could interpret the byzantine rules and regulations and be navigated through difficult, contentious issues of evidence and fairness. After all, that is what the Committee is about. It would be very difficult to ignore the advice of a retired judge, whether he had a vote or not.

Secondly, I should be interested to know how often votes take place on the Committee. Never? I see a shaking head.

[Peter Bottomley]

Not never, but not frequently.

[Mr Jenkin]

My hon. Friend says “Not never, but not frequently”, and I observed the right hon. Member for Rother Valley shaking his head.

It would be awful if decisions were split on some of the contentious cases that we are discussing. The voting is not really relevant, and I think that it can be set aside until the question of the privileges of the House has been resolved.

We keep running up against the question of privilege. The arrest of my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) led to a protracted argument about it. The case relating to privilege has just been resolved—I recognise that other cases are sub judice under the criminal law, so I will not comment on them—but resolving it took months. If we had had a more watchful Privileges Committee entirely devoted to the question, we could have forestalled all that. More to the point, if we got on with the parliamentary privileges Bill that everyone agrees we need, we could put the question of privileges on a much less contentious and disputed footing.

That is my third point. When will we have a parliamentary privileges Bill, so that we can resolve some of these issues? Australia has enacted such a Bill, as have other Commonwealth countries. It is time that we stopped resting on the 1689 Act, which is increasingly irrelevant in this information age whose media are so different from those of the past. Parliamentary privilege has to contend with many issues that were not conceived in those days. It is time we updated the Bill of Rights with a parliamentary privileges Act, and I hope that the Procedure Committee will consider that.

I also think that we should have a Select Committee on parliamentary privilege, separate from the Standards and Privileges Committee. As soon as a big issue arises, what happens? Following the arrest of my hon. Friend, it was immediately agreed—somewhat insultingly—that the existing Committee was not up to the job, and that much grander and more important panjandrums would have to be placed on a separate Committee to consider the issue of privileges. I think we had better recognise that the two functions are different. The fact that lay members will be involved with one aspect of the work of the Standards and Privileges Committee and not the other underlines the fact that there are two separate functions, and that they should be undertaken by two separate Committees. I very much hope that that will be one of the Procedure Committee’s recommendations.