Standards: Code of Conduct and Guide to the Rules

Rosie Winterton Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Relevant Documents: First Report of the Committee on Standards, New Code of Conduct and Guide to the Rules: promoting appropriate values, attitudes and behaviour in Parliament, HC 227; Third Report of the Committee on Standards, New Guide to the Rules: final proposals, HC 544, and the Government Response, HC 709.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I inform the House that I have selected amendments (a) and (b) as listed on the Order Paper. I shall call Chris Bryant to move his amendments at the end of the debate.

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[Penny Mordaunt]

As I have outlined in my speech, the new guidance has been put in place and will come into effect this spring. By the time the Committee wants the reforms we are voting on today to come into effect, Whitehall will be back up to what it is supposed to be doing now, and I think a few months after then, as we head into summer, we should have a system in place that will enable us to report at the same timeframes as MPs’ interests. Then we can potentially look at moving to having just one system rather than separate reporting by each ministerial Department. Those are the conversations I have had with the propriety and ethics team.

The effectiveness of our standards system and the code of conduct rests on its commanding the confidence of both the public and Members on a cross-party basis. Approval of the proposed reforms and strengthening of the rules will represent an important step towards restoring and strengthening trust in our democratic institutions. We support the work being done to undertake and introduce measures to empower the standards system in Parliament, and I am committed to continuing conversations both within Government and with parliamentary colleagues to continue to bring forward any further improvements proposed by the Committee on a cross-party basis.

I assure the House that my door is always open to discuss these matters with all Members. I hope that hon. Members will approve the reforms in the main motion, which I commend to the House. I thank the Committee for its work.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the shadow Leader of the House.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call Sir Bernard Jenkin.

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[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

My hon. Friend touches on a key change, which is that in the serious cases that come to the Committee on Standards, the commissioner will now present her findings, but will not present a conclusion. It will be for the Committee to adjudicate on the conclusion, and then for the subject of the inquiry to appeal that conclusion on various grounds to an Independent Expert Panel. That is a significant improvement, and it should significantly reduce the anxiety that Members felt about the system before.

There are only two other points I wish to make about the areas of contention. First, I argued very strongly for the changes to the descriptors of the seven principles of public life, because the bald descriptors of the seven principles on the Committee on Standards in Public Life website are difficult to translate into what we actually do as MPs. For example, selflessness—how do you become an MP if you are completely selfless? You have to advance your own interests. How do you have influence as an MP, unless you advance your own interests and you advance your publicity? Navigating selflessness as a Member of Parliament is a complicated business, and to anybody who says that it is easy to apply the seven principles of public life to all our activities, I say no. We are navigating a difficult landscape where we are constantly beset by conflicting values that we have to reconcile, and the idea is that these revised descriptors will help inform the conversation.

The idea that these descriptors will have a chilling effect on the free speech of Members is a nonsense, because the descriptors themselves have no force in the rules whatever. They simply are there for information and conversation and to help Members to think about how we apply the seven principles of public life. Indeed, any Member who has fallen foul of the rules who could argue in front of the commissioner, “Here are the seven principles of public life, and here are the descriptors, and I felt I was following these principles”, would certainly have a mitigation, in that they had thought about the principles they were seeking to uphold, but nevertheless had fallen foul of the rules. These descriptors are completely innocuous. They are designed to help Members, and I cannot for the life of me understand why the Government have decided to object to them. I do not understand the argument that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House has presented.

We did not argue long and hard over the question of the declaration of ministerial interests. We would not be having this conversation if we had the situation described by my right hon. Friend, with timely, publicly accessible and regular declarations of ministerial interests on a par with the declarations that Members—non-Ministers —have to make as a matter of course in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I wish that we were not in this situation.

I have listened carefully to what my right hon. Friend has said, and I will listen further to the debate. I hope she is saying that this will be sorted out and that, in response to my earlier intervention, we will finish up with a member of the public being able to see on one register all the interests relating to that Member of Parliament, whether a Minister or not. I quite understand the anxiety about dual adjudication of the code and of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. We do not want to get into a situation where—I do not think this is accurate, by the way—there is anxiety that the Parliamentary Commissioner will somehow be adjudicating on matters that are strictly for the ministerial code.

I will listen to this debate. I have added my name to the relevant amendment, but I may well conclude that if the Government need the time to sort this out, we should give them that time, and this would not be some dereliction or watering down of standards. I appreciate that the shadow Leader of the House has to make her points on behalf of the official Opposition, for perhaps not entirely selfless reasons. However, as long as we finish up with both sets of interests being declared within 30 days and the ability to have them all in one place on one website, so that any member of the public or journalist can see exactly what interests are being declared in the name of that Member, we would be in a much better place. I wish we could do that by agreement rather than by dividing the House, but I do not know that we can.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the SNP spokesperson.

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[Dame Andrea Leadsom]

That—I say this slightly tongue in cheek—was the point of the amendment that was tabled last year, but nevertheless that did not happen during the debate on standards that took place then. It seems to me that we need something like the Straw Committee, which, back in the day, reviewed the way in which the processes of the House worked much more fundamentally than this review.

The one development that I genuinely think has been brilliant is the new appeals process. It was essential and has been a long time coming, and I hope it will get the balance right between just punishing MPs and trying to change the culture in this place and give people fairness.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the Chair of the Standards Committee.

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[Chris Bryant]

I have heard the argument, “Oh, we go to lots of events that we don’t really enjoy”, but let me put this case to the hon. Member—it is not a real case, but it is a perfectly possible case. Let us say that Formula 1 invited three MPs: the shadow Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Minister; the Minister; and the Chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. The event was at the weekend and the value of the hospitality was about £2,000. The shadow Minister would have to declare it. They might not particularly like Formula 1— They might be going because it is part of their work in that role. I personally cannot imagine anything worse than going to a Formula 1 event—[Interruption.] I can see that the hon. Gentleman agrees.

The Chair of the Select Committee would also have to register the Formula 1 weekend. They would have to register who had paid for it and how much it was worth, which is an important part of judging whether it might be of such a scale that it could influence a person’s decision making. Furthermore, those two people would not then subsequently be able to lobby on behalf of Formula 1. That is a really important part of the rules of the House. However, the Minister merely tells the permanent secretary that they have been on this weekend and does not register the value, and it appears many months later, even though the Minister might be the person who is making executive decisions that affect Formula 1. That is our fundamental problem.

What we have at the moment is a lesser degree of transparency and openness for Ministers who make decisions than for Back Benchers who do not make decisions. The Leader of the House has been very helpful on many of these issues and I do not have a big beef with her, although she is still yet to visit the Rhondda tunnel, but if I am honest, her arguments sounded a bit like Augustine of Hippo saying, “Make me chaste and continent, but not yet.”

There is no reason why we cannot do this. I have heard Ministers promise many things over the years—indeed, I might have promised a couple of things that never came to pass myself when I was a Minister. The easiest way for the House and for Parliament to deal with this is to go back now to the system that we used to have, then if the Government come back to us in six months’ time having sorted out ministerial transparency, they can have the exemption back. All MPs should be treated equally under the rules, just as every member of our society should be treated equally under the law, and that is why I urge all right hon. and hon. Members to support the two amendments I have tabled.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I do not wish to curb debate at all, but this debate has to finish in about 40 minutes and I want to give the Leader of the House a good amount of time to respond. I ask colleagues to bear that in mind.