Independent Complaints and Grievance Policy

Rachel Maclean Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart]

I agree. The kitemark suggestion is perhaps slightly different from what was eventually agreed, but of course I accept that, and it is a welcome addition to the report.

As you can probably sense, Mr Speaker, this is an important report, and it was certainly worth spending all those 100 hours on it over the past few months. I see it as being more than just a report of this House; it could be a blueprint for complex workplaces across the country. It could be the start of a permanent change in the culture of this place. There is no going back.

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

I am fascinated by the hon. Gentleman’s remarks about training and agree with about 99% of what he says. Will he comment further on how often people should renew training once it has been taken? Workplaces and legislation can change fast, and what was considered acceptable maybe 10 years or 15 years ago is no longer accepted, so I would be interested in his comments.

[Pete Wishart]

I am very grateful to the hon. Lady, because the working group did not consider that. She is right that, such is the fast-changing nature of the workplace environment, people should be required to redo the training, because innovations do happen. I am looking around at colleagues from the working group and I cannot see any real objection to that suggestion, so the Leader of the House might consider it as we move forward and as the report evolves.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

I hear what my hon. Friend says. I do not entirely agree with him, but I do not wish to deviate from this debate into a wider discussion of standards.

My final point is about training and culture. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire made a sensible point about MPs’ backgrounds, but I wish to pick up on his slightly prejudicial comment that assumed that everybody on the Government Benches has a privileged background, which is entirely not true. I will not bore him with the fact that I was the first person in my family to go to university, my father was a labourer and we had certainly not had any Members of Parliament in the family before—I just want to challenge the hon. Gentleman’s prejudices—but he made a sensible point: MPs have a very varied set of backgrounds. Some have run their own businesses and employed significant numbers of people. Some, like me, have worked in a business for others, and I have experience of managing teams. Others will come to the House having never managed anybody before in their lives.

Members obviously come to the House at a variety of ages and with a variety of other experiences. We are all then plunged into employing members of staff. As the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), said, Members come to the House with the very best of intentions but often do not have the required skills. We therefore need to improve the training on how to employ and manage people and on the expectations that we set. We also need to provide HR support not only proactively, so that Members are better trained and supported, but so that we have somebody to ask questions if there are challenging issues that we are not comfortable dealing with. That would be valuable.

I welcome the recommendation that training should be part of the induction process for new Members. I do not think there is a massive gap between the position of the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex. I think that everybody should go through the training, but the challenge is that we can mandate that everyone goes to a training course and physically turns up at the room, but we cannot mandate that they will listen attentively and change their behaviour after doing so. It seems to me that the people who are least likely to go to the training are probably those most in need of it.

As the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire said, the challenge is to persuade people that they should go on the training course, listen and change their behaviour. The proposals to which the hon. Lady referred on publicising whether people had been on the training course, so that there is peer pressure and people feel they should go and so that the staff they might wish to hire put pressure on them, are a good idea. Nevertheless, for new MPs, it should be part of the standard set of training that every Member undertakes, so that we set the expectations correctly.

That leads me to the second part of my final point, which is about the culture of this place. I have listened to the debates we have had on this issue over the past few months and thought about my own working career. I was perhaps fortunate to work for two businesses that took management and how they treated their people very seriously. I went on training courses on how to manage people and set expectations and on what was expected. Staff members were empowered to speak up, and it was recognised that speaking up on a whole range of issues—whether how we ran the business or how people behaved—was the right thing to do. That set the right sort of culture, which is not always the case.

I have thought through some of the comments that have been made over the past few months. Examples of behaviour have been given and people have said things like, “That sort of behaviour was acceptable a few years ago, but things seem to have changed.” I thought back to when I started my working after leaving university, which is tragically a lot longer ago than I care to remember, in 1991. I thought through some of the specific examples we have read about, and whether they involved Members of this House or people outside it, we heard people say, “This sort of behaviour used to be acceptable.”

I was thinking back to when I started work 27 years ago, and I concluded that, actually, those sorts of things were not acceptable. The difference between then and more recently is that people used to get away with behaving like that. What has changed is not that certain behaviours are no longer acceptable—actually they never were acceptable—but that people cannot get away with them now, and that is right and an improvement. What we are trying to deliver with the training and the change of culture is that everybody accepts not only that those sorts of behaviour are not acceptable, but that no one will let people get away with them.

[Rachel Maclean]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Harper]

If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I am just going to conclude.

If the report of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House does nothing else but that and changes the culture, it will have taken us a huge step forward. I am very happy to support the motion and to commend it to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)]

It is a great privilege and pleasure to contribute to this debate, and to follow the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Sir Kevin Barron) and all the others who have spoken on this very important topic.

Having been very lucky to be elected chair of the all-party parliamentary group on women in Parliament, I am very interested in this debate, because of course we all support women entering Parliament and want to encourage and see more of it. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) and my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) for what they have done to further this cause on the Conservative Benches. I know that there are many champions of women in all parts of the House. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) talked about the issues of patriarchy in this place. We ought to be proud, however, that we have a number of incredibly competent women in this House—I see them sitting in all parts of the Chamber—who are more than capable of holding their own despite the patriarchy. It is also important that we signal to people who wish to enter this place that they are going to be welcomed when they get here.

I want to touch on the issue of culture. My experience comes from running my own business. I do not come from an exalted or privileged background; I got here through hard work in starting my own business and experiencing many failures and setbacks. It is a bit of a misconception that everyone who runs their own business, or works in a business, is somehow privileged. In the process, I learned about managing teams. The main thing that I learned, from a very trusted mentor, was that culture eats strategy for breakfast. It is about the culture and the leadership. We can have as many reports, processes or training schemes as we want, but if that is not followed through, and lived and breathed by deeds not words, I am afraid that we might as well all give up and go home.

We have seen a fantastic response to this issue. I pay tribute to the Leader of the House and all the others who have played their part and thank them very much. This is such a long-standing issue that addressing it is long overdue. It is a credit to all involved that the bull has now been taken by the horns. I really do hope that this can percolate upwards to the very highest level. All political leaders in all parts of this House absolutely need to live and breathe it.

The reason this is so important is that our staff are very vulnerable. They are, relatively speaking—perhaps not all of them, but some of them—quite young. They do not come here with a lot of experience of other workplaces. For some, this is the first place that they have worked. With a young woman and perhaps an older man, or any man, there is a very sensitive issue of gender imbalance. It can be very difficult for a young woman, or a young man, in their first job to tackle that—to have the confidence to raise it and know that it will be taken seriously. The root of the matter—I am really grateful for the consideration that has been given to this point—is power and the abuse of power, and how easily that can be very detrimental to young people who are vulnerable because they are working in this unique workplace and supporting us in our challenging duties.

Leadership is absolutely critical and essential. I hope that we can all play our part by holding our colleagues to account, however we do it. The issue of training also needs to be taken forward. It is not enough to train just once.

I have the great delight of having two psychology degrees, and I worked in HR for many years. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean, I have had a lot of training—I actually was the person giving the training—on how to manage staff. It is one thing to ask people to change, but change is painful. There are people in this House who have been behaving in certain ways, possibly for decades. Change is difficult, and it is really hard to make organisational change stick. We need to pay close attention to that.

We need to be united in our determination to drive this through, for the benefit of all the people who work here and all the people who are looking to us to be examples. I end by again expressing my gratitude for the work that has been done, which I hope will lead to positive change.