Registration of Members’ Financial Interests

Simon Hughes Excerpts

Monday 7th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Heath]

It is because there is a danger of the situation looking completely ridiculous that the right hon. Member for Rother Valley and his Committee have come up with the proposed changes. There clearly is a gradation. If the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) were, in response to his speaking at an event for The Spectator, given several cases of Chateau d’quem, it might well be considered that that would have an effect on his judgment, whether he consumed them or not—but a half bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale might not be considered to have the same effect.

There is a need for common sense. That is precisely why the right hon. Gentleman has come forward with the proposal for a sensible de minimis requirement worth about the £65 mark. Most people can judge whether what they have received is likely to be in that region. Judging from my experience, I am very rarely given a token that comes to anything like that value. I think that if I were given something of more than that value, it would suggest that I was involved in paid employment of some kind—doing it for some remuneration—and that it should be declared. One must use a level of common sense.

I do not want this debate to become merely an insight into the life of a constituency MP. The purpose of the register is to provide information about any material benefit that a Member receives and which might reasonably be thought by others to influence his or her conduct in the House. The trivial nature of these registrations and the effort and expense involved in registering them does nothing, I would suggest, to contribute to the purpose of the register. I welcome the Committee’s proposal to introduce a sensible de minimis threshold of 0.1% of a Member’s salary, which currently works out at about £65. That is a sensible compromise between ensuring clarity and accountability while not over-encumbering the register with things that are frankly of little or no concern to any reasonable member of the public.

Turning to the rules on all-party groups, this motion implements recommendations made by the Committee in July 2009. I will not repeat the details of the rule changes, which the right hon. Member for Rother Valley has already outlined to the House. The Government welcome these proposed changes. The House will be aware of the valuable work that is done by all-party groups on a vast range of issues—for example, the armed forces, the BBC, beer and cider, clean water, underground space and shipbuilding. There can scarcely be a country in the world, nor—as the right hon. Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst) told a debate in Westminster Hall last week—a condition of the human body that is not covered by an all-party group. As the House will be aware, some groups are campaigning bodies, some are concerned with building relationships with other countries, and some are essentially social groups. The examples that I have here suggest that the parliamentary choir and the rugby club might fall into the latter group, although I have my doubts as to whether they do not also, to an extent, have a campaigning purpose.

I would not wish for one moment to frustrate the work of these groups or to place unnecessary obstacles in their way. However, it is important for the House to have robust registration requirements in place in order to protect its reputation, the reputations of hon. Members, and those of the groups themselves.

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

Although the recommendations are entirely worthy and should be supported, the one issue that remains—the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron) may be able to reflect on it when he winds up—is that groups often appear to be overlapping or duplicating, and we are always spawning more groups than we can manage properly to attend or service. Might it be possible, informally if not formally, for the registrar to ensure, when somebody seeks to register a group, that the activity is not already covered somewhere else, so that we do not end up duplicating activities?

[Mr Heath]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that comment. He is absolutely right to say that there is a degree of overlap and proliferation among all-party groups. It would certainly be helpful if the registrar were able to give guidance on where there is any likely overlap. I would not be happy for the registrar to be in a position to veto the formation of a new all-party group that might have a different view or complexion as regards a particular matter, but knowing that somebody already deals with a specific subject might be helpful at an early stage in a group’s formation in order to prevent duplication.

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[Robert Halfon]

I look forward to it, and I had a feeling that that was the case from the e-mail that my hon. Friend sent me. Because he is counter-intuitive on so many issues, I urge him to be counter-intuitive on this one and not to go along with the tide of taking the soft way on Islamism.

I received a letter from the Serjeant at Arms today informing me that iEngage has not yet been issued with a parliamentary pass. I am grateful to her and her office for their prompt and professional response on the matter, but at the same time, there is still some confusion in the House records, as the register of APPGs on the parliamentary website on Friday 4 February, last week—I have it here—was still indicating that iEngage’s head of research, Shenaz Bunglawala, had been granted a Commons pass in her capacity as the secretariat to the all-party group on Islamophobia.

[Simon Hughes]

To follow up on what the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) said, I am sure that the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) has done his research and understands that I remain an officer of that group. I will therefore seek to catch your eye, Mr Deputy Speaker, because it is important that the latter’s comments, which are his opinion, are not necessarily regarded as factually and objectively accurate. I am very happy to engage in the debate, but there are certainly at least two sides to the story, if not more.

[Robert Halfon]

My later remarks will show that I am not just giving an opinion, I am giving hard facts. I urge my right hon. Friend, who is a progressive individual, to look at the organisation in question properly and support progressive Islamic groups that do not hold the views that iEngage holds. We should judge organisations by the company they keep. Just as he would condemn somebody who spent their time supporting fascism, even if they did not commit fascist acts, he should not support Islamist groups that support extremism.

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[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Order. You may wish to raise the issue, but you cannot. We must stick to the motion. I am trying to be as helpful as I can, but we are being tested. Please, if you can relate the matter directly to the motion, do that, then we can continue, rather than drawing other Members into a subject that we should not be discussing tonight.

[Simon Hughes]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I remain an officer of the group, and there is an issue about who should comprise the secretariat. There will be a meeting for colleagues in both Houses to discuss the matter, which will be reviewed. I hope that that will be an appropriate forum for discussing the way in which the group will be looked after, and that we can take the subject away from the wider debate to an appropriate place for people who have an interest.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

I welcome the point of clarification, which certainly clarifies matters to the House. I thank the right hon. Gentleman.

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[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I commend the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) for bringing an important matter to the attention of the House. I am sure that many will want to pursue the issues that he raised in many different places, not least the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes). I want to correct the hon. Gentleman on just one word that he used. He referred inadvertently to the all-party parliamentary group “for” Islamophobia, but I think it is the all-party group “on” Islamophobia. Sometimes even prepositions are important.

I confess that motion 2 is on the Order Paper perhaps because several right hon. and hon. Members think that I got the matter wrong when I was a Minister. I see the Leader of the House winking at me now, possibly because he agrees that I got it wrong. I commend my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron) for his stewardship of the Standards and Privileges Committee. The hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) said earlier how important it is that my right hon. Friend is not only a long-standing Member of the House but a long-standing member of that Committee, and that that is an important element in his work. For that matter, he was also the Chair of another Select Committee.

The answer that we have come up with in the motion is, I believe, the wrong answer. I do not intend to press it to a Division, but I believe that we have the wrong answer, and I shall explain why. There is no great problem with the rules as they are currently drafted. The Leader of the House and the Deputy Leader of the House disagree with me, as they did when I was a Minister, but I believe that they have presented the nature of the problem wrongly.

The Deputy Leader of the House was absolutely right about the entry of the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson). There was no need for her to record the receipt of Girlguiding centenary merchandise, flower festival flowers and all the rest of it. Nor was it necessary for the Leader of the House himself to record that he was presented with a bottle of 2008 Beaujolais Villages valued at approximately £10—incidentally, it can be bought in most places in Rhondda for about £6.50—after he spoke at Bishop Wordsworth’s Church of England grammar school for boys for 45 minutes. If that was honestly the advice that hon. Members were given by the registrar, I think it was inappropriate advice.

A distinction should be made to identify clearly those cases in which a reasonable person would think that somebody was being given remuneration for providing a service, and in none of those cases would it seem to a reasonable person that somebody was being remunerated. I would use this rule: if I had not been given that bottle of wine, pen or whatever, would I still have made the speech? Would I still have opened the Girlguiding centre or whatever? The honest truth is yes, I would. It would not have made the blindest difference to me. That is the rule that a reasonable person would follow. I know the registrar, I have always followed her advice and I respect her enormously, but she might have used a legalistic understanding of the rules that would not in all honesty be followed by any of our constituents.

Let us imagine for the moment that the registrar is right and that all those cases should have been registered. Has it done any great harm that they have been registered? I do not believe it has done any harm to anybody. There is a greater sense of transparency, and I do not think that that is a problem. However, let us say for argument’s sake that we should not make a distinction between gifts and remuneration. There is an argument for that. It could be argued that any gift we receive for doing something—after speaking at a meal, for example—whether to the value of £400, £500 or whatever should be considered in exactly the same way. However, that is not the proposition before us this evening. The proposition is that a gift should be registered if it has a value in excess of 1% of salary, and that remuneration should be registered if it has a value in excess of one tenth of 1%. [Interruption.] I think that the Chairman of the Standards and Privileges Committee is disagreeing with me. If he wants to intervene, I am happy to give way—but he does not. I can see an argument for not making a distinction at all and for having exactly the same level for gifts and remuneration. However, I cannot see an argument for introducing a new concept at £65.

[Simon Hughes]

The hon. Gentleman might have just answered my point. To people reading and listening, talking in money terms is as relevant as percentages and tenths of percentages. Out there, people just want to know how much money we are getting or what the monetary value is.

[Chris Bryant]

That is another good point. To be honest, I think it makes more sense to have a fixed amount. The old rule used to be £125 for registration. At the moment, the limit is zero, but if the motion is passed tonight, it will move to something in the region of £65 or £66. I would prefer the number to be fixed, so that it is perfectly intelligible to every member of the public.

We all use a layer of common sense. I am chair of the all-party group on Russia. As hon. Members might know, I have adopted a very hawkish attitude towards the Russian Federation. I believe that there are many abuses in Russia and, as chair of the all-party group, I have tried to advance that argument. Now, I must confess that I was given a bottle of vodka by the Russian embassy at Christmas. I did not believe it to be a remuneration for the questions I had asked or the tenor of the debate I had conducted in the House, so I did not even bother to ask the registrar whether I should have registered that bottle of vodka. I have always been a bit suspicious about some gifts so, as it happens, I have not even opened that bottle of vodka, which is still sitting precisely where I put it when it arrived. I suspect that I will probably not get any more bottles of vodka from the Russian embassy.

If one pursued the Deputy Leader of the House’s logic, one could argue that if a Member is invited to dinner by an embassy and, somehow or other, they speak at that dinner—whether or not they are actually the speaker at the dinner—that is remuneration. However, I just do not think that that meets the common-sense test. I honestly believe that the proposition before us this evening is the wrong proposition. I can see an argument for perfect equality between gifts and remuneration, but I cannot see the argument for what is before us this evening.

Finally, on all-party groups, I agree with the hon. Member for Harlow in that when I became the chair of the all-party group on Russia, a large number of people suddenly started ringing me offering to work in the secretariat. I am sure that some did so with perfectly good intentions; I am also sure that some did so with not-so-pure intentions, because they wanted to grind an axe in relation to Britain’s attitude towards Russia. The more that all-party groups can assert some genuine independence, the better. That is why the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that it is important to look at the process for providing an all-party group with a secretariat.

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[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

I welcome this short debate, and I thank the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron) for his work and that of his Committee. I also thank the Leader of the House, who started the work on this subject earlier. I support both the motions. I made my first point during an intervention on the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). It was that, in due course, we might want to talk about payments in sums rather than percentages, for the sake of greater transparency. I am happy that we are starting where we are, however. The proposal will create a reasonable division between the more substantial gift and the single gift—the bottle of wine, the pair of socks—given as what the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) described as a courteous thank you. I had visions of her making a kind of royal procession round Warrington with her arms full of flowers—all, I am sure, gratefully given and received. Also, we should not over-regulate. There is a balance to be struck, and we seem to be going in the right direction.

I want to make two further points, about all-party groups. The first follows the theme pursued by my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr Syms). I, too, have always felt that there was a danger that these groups could proliferate. We can sign up 20 people relatively easily, but getting them to come to meetings is a wholly different ball game. Of course it is right that there should be an all-party group with an interest in Russia. It is a very important country for us to take an interest in, and elections are held to decide who the officers of that group will be. For example, I am a member of various all-party groups, and I have served as an officer in many of them. I am a member of the all-party parliamentary group on Ukraine, which is next to Russia. It is a very big, important country—the second largest European country—and we have a duty to take an interest in such a developing democracy. It is relevant not only to democratic issues but to energy issues and the like. There are all kinds of different all-party groups.

Secondly, on the subject raised by the hon. Memberfor Harlow (Robert Halfon), we have had an all-party group to deal with anti-Semitism for many years, and rightly so, because it is a plague and a scourge on our country. It is therefore unsurprising that there is now a newly formed group on Islamophobia. The hon. Member for Rhondda rightly pointed out that it is a group “on” Islamophobia, not a group “for” it. Islamophobia is also a scourge. The Prime Minister spoke about it only this weekend in his speech in Munich. Whatever we might think about the tenor and balance of that speech, this is a real issue in many of our constituencies. I see the shadow Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), nodding. His city, as well as mine, has seen faith-based prejudices that are directed at other faiths, and there are other prejudices that we also need to counter.

All the proposals in the motion are reasonable.

“The contact details of the group’s registered contact”

should be made public, so that there can be an accountable person.

“Any relevant gainful occupation of staff to the group who hold a parliamentary pass”

should be publicised, so that if any pass holder is paid by someone else, we would know who they are.

“The source and extent of any financial benefit (e.g. donations) and the source and nature of any non-financial material benefit (e.g. provision of goods or services) received by the group from a single source outside Parliament”

above a certain amount will have to be publicised, so that people will know exactly where the servicing is funded from. That is absolutely right. The hon. Member for Rhondda made the perfectly good point that, because these groups have a certain status, and because they can use parliamentary logos such as the portcullis, there is an interest in being associated with them. The Chairman of the Committee also knows that very well.

Lastly, the website address should be publicised. The rules are much more explicit than in the past, so if a consultancy or a for-profit organisation is acting as the secretariat, we must know what the consultancy is and what it does—it must supply the information. Similarly, if it is a charity or a not-for-profit organisation, the rules are explicit that it

“must agree to make available on request a list citing any commercial company which has donated either as a single sum or cumulatively more than £5,000 in the course of the 12 months prior to the month in which the request is made”.

We will have a much better system: I do not think it will be perfect, but it will be much better.

Given your clear rulings earlier, Mr Deputy Speaker, I hope I have already made a helpful intervention to calm the House. A group has been set up—properly—on Islamophobia. In a meeting at which I was not present, a secretariat was appointed. I had agreed to be elected as an officer; other officers have now resigned. The secretariat has been a controversial issue and there are campaigns on both sides of the argument. My office has been in touch with that of my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow to ask for information to back up what he is saying, although I have not yet received it. I will be happy to receive it. There will be a meeting for all colleagues who wish to come. I have no prejudice in favour or against a particular organisation being the secretariat, and I now regard it as my duty to try to proceed carefully and with consensus, but I am not going to allow myself to be bullied into having or not having a particular organisation because it might have some views that are difficult for others to accept.

All parties are debating how to manage organisations that deal in these difficult areas of faith-based issues, which apply in your constituency, Mr Deputy Speaker, as in mine. Some people think we should go to meetings or events with people whose views we may disagree with or who might have more extreme views than we would normally tolerate. I have been to some such events. I attended a Global Peace and Unity event last year in order to speak on behalf of my party, and a Minister attended to speak on behalf of the Government. The co-chairman of the Conservative party was asked not to go, because it was not thought that a Conservative representative would be appropriate. These sort of debates will carry on.

We have to take advice and to act in the best interests of Parliament and the wider community. All I hope I can do is to assure those who take an interest in our proceedings that agreement to tonight’s motions will lead to better procedures. All-party groups will not lack controversy, just as our debates on the Floor of the House do not lack it. It is right that there is a place for controversial issues to be discussed, but I hope that they will be discussed on the basis of facts and an understanding of the severity of some of the issues dealt with by all-party groups. I hope that this debate has pointed people in the right direction. I hope that the last group I mentioned will know where it will go next—legitimately, properly and appropriately. More generally, I hope that people will understand that we have processes for these issues and that the processes are good ones.

Finally, my understanding, like that of many colleagues who have been involved with these matters, is that all pass holders are security checked for this House. Whatever their status, all staff and anybody who comes in must be checked, and not just by the House authorities, as the matter is then referred outside. That provides the protection. I assume that any colleague who has any worries about any pass holder in any organisation will follow the appropriate procedures, which are well known to Members. The inquiries must be made. Passes have been removed if people have held them inappropriately; and people have been prevented from being here if it is inappropriate for them to work here. We have to assume that the authorities continue to do a good job. We have not had problems regularly in the past. I trust the authorities to be vigilant; that is what we pay them to do. I think they serve us well in doing that.