Ministerial Statements

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House expects Ministers to make all important announcements relating to government policy to Parliament before they are made elsewhere on all occasions when Parliament is sitting; considers that information which forms all or part of such announcements should not be released to the press before such a statement is made to Parliament, as recommended in the First Report from the Procedure Committee, on Ministerial Statements, HC 602; and further considers that hon. Members who believe the protocol has been breached should first report this to the Speaker for his judgment and that in the case of a minor breach the Speaker may take appropriate steps but in more serious or more complex cases he would refer the matter to the Committee on Standards and Privileges for further investigation.

The motion is in my name and that of hon. Friends on both sides of the House, but primarily it is in the name of the Backbench Business Committee. Mr Speaker, the motion is in defence both of your advice to this House on many occasions and of the ministerial code.

On 20 July 2010, the Backbench Business Committee held its first debate on the Floor of the House. It chose ministerial statements as its subject because it is an issue that comes to the very heart of the effectiveness of this Chamber as part of Parliament holding the Executive of our great nation to account. We are probably all in agreement that whenever the House is sitting, Her Majesty’s Government should make announcements of policy first to this House. For those who are not familiar with every word, dot and comma of the 2010 ministerial code, as published by the Cabinet Office, let me remind them of what paragraph 9.1 says:

“When Parliament is in session, the most important announcements of Government policy should be made in the first instance, in Parliament.”

I am happy to report that Back Benchers and Front Benchers alike are unanimously agreed on the importance of those strictures.

[Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

Can my hon. Friend help me out, as a new Member? When he says “in session”, does he mean after Prayers, or is he referring to the period of Parliament when there is a 24-hour news cycle?

[Mr Hollobone]

That is a very good question. We will probably discuss that very point during the course of this debate. In my own humble opinion, I think that “in session” means when Parliament is sitting—by that I mean sitting days versus non-sitting days. When there is a sitting day, it is my view, and I suspect that of lots of hon. Members, that Her Majesty’s Government should be making announcements to Parliament first. That may require the Government to contain themselves so that they release that information on the Floor of the House in the afternoon rather than on the “Today” programme in the morning.

[Mr Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend accept from me that Governments in the past have always taken the phrase to mean when the House is not in recess?

[Mr Hollobone]

My right hon. Friend, whose reputation precedes him in so many ways, sums it up neatly in a pithy turn of phrase, which I was unable to do myself.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is particularly important for this Government to abide by the conventions that he has described, given that both he and I, having served in previous Parliaments, can remember countless occasions when we and our fellow Members of the parliamentary Conservative party stood to make points of order to remonstrate about the fact that Labour Ministers had continually broken these conventions?

[Mr Hollobone]

I do agree, although I am desperately trying to make my speech as non-partisan as possible because I believe that both major parties are to blame: when they have been in government, they have not behaved as they should.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman refers to “both major parties”, so perhaps he is not aware that some of the worst incidents in recent months have involved people such as the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, whose statements have been tweeted to The Guardian.

[Mr Hollobone]

That is a helpful intervention—I shall refer my remarks to all three major parties, if that is better.

All Governments, whether this Government, the previous Government or the one before that, have leaked information, and that is not how our great House of Commons ought to be treated.

[Mr Robert Syms (Poole) (Con)]

Can my hon. Friend name me any Government who have not leaked information to the press?

[Mr Hollobone]

No, I cannot. This increasingly has become standard practice, but it is fair to say that it has got worse over the past five, 10 or 15 years. I am sure, however, that it was prevalent before.

Today, we have a golden opportunity that is, in many ways, unique: for the first time, thanks to the Leader of the House and other Ministers of the Crown, we have the Backbench Business Committee, which has been able to bring this motion to the Floor of the House for resolution tonight. Although hon. Members in past decades will have been frustrated by how the Government of the day leaked information, this is the first time that the House has had the opportunity to do something about it.

[Stephen Mosley (City of Chester) (Con)]

I might be slightly naive but although there may be incidents of Governments leaking information, there are probably an awful lot more incidents of information being leaked without Ministers’ knowledge. We have to distinguish between deliberate leaking and the response to a leak that could be sensitive and might require a Minister to go to the press, on the radio or in front of the television cameras before making a statement to Parliament.

[Mr Hollobone]

My hon. Friend makes a good point but at the end of the day we have something called “ministerial responsibility” and the ministerial code.

Tonight’s motion allows us to draw a line in the sand. I am not naive enough to believe that it will stop all Government leaking completely, but were we to pass the motion, it would be an effective weapon in the House’s armoury against an over-mighty Executive. I want to praise the work of the Procedure Committee, led by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr Knight), which, after our debate on 20 July 2010, worked extremely hard on this issue and produced an excellent report and a series of first-class recommendations. Every word in the motion comes from the recommendations in that excellent report.

I shall quote from the summary of the Committee’s report—its first of the Session—which sums up the issue extremely well:

“Parliament should be at the centre of national debate. Too often details of important government statements appear in the press before they are made to Parliament. Such leaks adversely affect the ability of Members of Parliament to scrutinise the Government on behalf of their constituents. At present, it is the Ministerial Code that sets out the requirement that important announcements be made to Parliament first. However, the Ministerial Code is enforced by the Prime Minister and not by Parliament. We do not believe that it is acceptable for the Government to regulate itself in this way. The House must be responsible for holding Ministers to account when they fail to honour their obligations to Parliament. We therefore propose that the House should have its own protocol which states that the most important government announcements must be made to Parliament before they are made elsewhere.”

The Committee goes on to recommend:

“Such a protocol must be enforced if it is to be effective. We recommend that complaints by Members that the protocol has been breached should be made to the Speaker. Where a case is not clear-cut, or when the alleged leak is particularly serious, the Speaker should be able to refer the matter to the Committee on Standards and Privileges for an in-depth investigation.”

I agree with every word of the Procedure Committee’s recommendations, which sum up the issue extremely well.

Mr Speaker, on your first election to your high office, you said that

“when Ministers have key policy statements to make, the House must be the first to hear them, and they should not be released beforehand.”—[Official Report, 24 June 2009; Vol. 494, c. 797.]

You could not, Sir, have been clearer. I commend you on the large number of urgent questions that you have accepted, tabled by Back Benchers and Front Benchers alike, holding the Government to account when they have not properly released information to this House first. However, it was your predecessor, Betty Boothroyd—Speaker Boothroyd, as she then was—who said in her farewell address:

“This is the chief forum of the nation—today, tomorrow and, I hope, for ever.”—[Official Report, 26 July 2000; Vol. 354, c. 1114.]

This is our chance to say: are we going to hold Her Majesty’s Government to account for the principle, which they uphold in their own ministerial code, that it is this Chamber, where the elected representatives of the British people are gathered together, that should be the first place to hear of major new Government policy initiatives? Should it be “The Andrew Marr Show” on Sunday, the “Today” programme on Radio 4 in the morning or ITV’s “Daybreak”; or should it be the Chamber of the House of Commons? Would it not be wonderful to see the Public Gallery full of journalists eagerly anticipating the Government’s latest policy announcement, made here first, on the Floor of the House? Instead of which, under this coalition Government, the bad practices of the Blair Government and the Government before them are being increasingly enhanced, such that hon. Members are often the last to hear of new Government policy initiatives, not the first. When our constituents contact us to ask, “What’s the Government initiative on this?”, we are often the last to know, so we cannot respond.

However, it would also be an effective tool against the over-mighty arm of the Executive if the ordinary representatives of the people—not unelected and unaccountable journalists, hard working and well intentioned as they may be, but we the people gathered here in this tremendously prestigious place—were the first to have a go at putting questions to the Ministers of the Crown. We have the honour to represent our constituents. We can use this opportunity tonight, by passing this simple motion, to say to the Government: “Uphold your own ministerial code and let the people’s representatives know first whenever any new major Government policy announcement is made.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hollobone]

With the leave of the House, and on behalf of the Backbench Business Committee, I want to thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have attended and contributed to this afternoon’s debate over the past two and a half hours. In addition to the speeches made by me, the Leader of the House and the shadow Leader of the House, there were nine Back-Bench speeches and some 47 interventions. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) reminded us that we live in a world with the insatiable beast of 24-hour rolling news and that Government announcements often were not sensitive, but he was worried that Mr Speaker might be drawn into party political warfare.

My right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr Knight) said that the Government’s response to the Procedure Committee’s report was highly unsatisfactory, but pointed out quite fairly that there were further recommendations in the report that we are not debating tonight. He also stressed that one of the problems with the ministerial code is that it is up to the judgment of the Prime Minister and that Parliament has no role in enforcing it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr Syms) accused me of harking back to a mythical golden age and quoted Neville Chamberlain on his return from Germany, saying “Peace for our time.” My hon. Friend also said that we need “to live in the real world—a world with 24-hour news”. He was worried that the protocol would not work.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming), who has the privilege of serving on both the Backbench Business Committee and the Procedure Committee, urged Ministers to toe the line while visibly crossing the line himself.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford), who is a member of the Standards and Privileges Committee, was unhappy that the Committee had not been involved in the preparation of this motion and said that the debate was too early. He was also worried that the Chamber would get clogged up with lots of minor Government statements on all sorts of different subjects.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson), who, I believe, is a Government Parliamentary Private Secretary, said that it was difficult to decide what would be and would not be important as far as Government statements were concerned. He accused those who tabled the motion of not recognising the realities of the present-day news media.

My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), who serves on the Procedure Committee, placed the debate into an historical context, going back to Queen Elizabeth I. He reminded us that the ministerial code says that the Government have a duty to restore trust in politics, but he also said that a resolution of this House is substantial, solid and dignified, in contrast to the ministerial code, which is merely a lot of waffle around the main theme that Ministers remain Ministers almost whatever they do so long as they enjoy the confidence of the Prime Minister.

In complete contrast, my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) accused me and the House of being suffused with self-serving piety. I commend him for his forthright honesty in saying that the ministerial code, in his view, was a complete load of rubbish that ought to be torn up and that the Government should be quite open in making their news announcements to the public first without coming to this Chamber. I commend my hon. Friend for his honest approach; I condemn those Members of this House who pretend that this Chamber is where important news ought to be announced while routinely leaking that information to the press.

Finally, we had a contribution from the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty), who reminded us of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, who resigned for leaking details of his Budget statement. The hon. Gentleman also made a very good point in answer to those who are worried that the Chamber will be clogged up with large number of oral statements about policy announcements: written ministerial statements are perfectly acceptable.

This has been a very well-informed, enthusiastic and interesting debate. For my part, this is not about Conservative versus Labour or Government versus Opposition. It is about this House of Commons, as one part of the Houses of Parliament, holding Her Majesty’s Government to account for their decisions and announcements. I leave hon. Members with one thought before we divide: do we want this Chamber to be the centre of the political life of the nation, or should we surrender to the 24-hour news media?

Question put.