Members of Parliament: Risk-based Exclusion

Debate between Thangam Debbonaire and Wendy Chamberlain

Monday 12th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

I want to start by thanking all colleagues and members of the Commission, the secretariat and House staff for all the work they have done to get us to this point. This is not a decision-making evening. This is an airing of the issues and a time for the questions that hon. and right hon. Friends, Members and colleagues quite rightly have. This is a good time for us to get through them. I have been noting down some of the questions that have already been raised, and if I do not cover them in my opening speech, I will also, with the leave of the House, be closing for the Opposition. I hope that the Leader of the House and I between us can cover the questions that Members rightly want answered.

I am grateful to the Standards Committee, which has done a thorough job and made some thoughtful, measured and considered recommendations. I would like to thank those colleagues and staff who responded to our consultation last year and earlier this year, and I would like to thank the trade unions and staff reps who also engaged with the consultation and consulted their members. All of that consultation and feedback has informed our revisions to the proposals, but as yet they are just that: proposals. We are here to listen.

The Leader of the House, the other Commissioners and I have worked closely and constructively and I am proud of the fact that we started out in a very different places—I am not completely sure that we are not still in different places—but we managed to find common ground on the specific area of risk management and mitigation. We have been studying and consulting on this issue for nearly a year now, and I have tried to talk to as many colleagues as possible, not just in my own party but in other parties as well. I have consulted colleagues—I have consulted the women’s parliamentary Labour party several times—as well as promoting the Commission’s consultation to Members, staff, House staff and members of the Lobby. I have also been trying to share the report that we are debating today. I regret that the report was published only a week ago, as I would have liked a longer period of time, but I am glad that we are now able to debate its contents. I hope that all Members who are contributing today have read it. If not, copies are available in the Vote Office.

I want to bring people with us on this process. I do not want the process simply to go through Parliament when it concerns something so serious as to be including but not confined to the possible temporary exclusion of a Member of Parliament. That is a serious business. Three important principles are at stake here. The first is democracy, which matters to every single one of us. Voters have a right to be represented once they have elected us and they get to decide who represents them in this place. Democracy matters. So, too, does the principle of British justice that a person is innocent until proven guilty, which is absolutely fundamental. Concerns have already been raised about whether Members will know the charges against them. Yes, they will, because this procedure can be triggered only if there is a live criminal justice investigation of a Member for a serious sexual or violent crime, so they will know because they would already have been investigated.

That is difficult to balance with the principle of safety at work for Members, for House staff, for Members’ staff, for visitors and for child visitors. We have tried hard to balance those principles, and we have fiercely debated, as I know others have, how we can make them balance. I do not know whether we have them all right, but we want to hear from colleagues about how we can make them better.

Some colleagues have said to me, “In any other workplace, including local government, a senior person being investigated by the police for a serious sexual or physically violent crime or harassment would at least prompt consideration of how to mitigate the risks while they await the outcome of that investigation.” That is not a presumption of guilt; it is an attempt, as any significant workplace does, to balance an accusation and the risks it may pose with the fact that a person has the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

I want to protect both of those principles in this place but, until now, we have relied on informal processes to deal with allegations. Those informal processes put the person who is confided in, whether they are a Whip or a friend, in an impossible position because, if there is no formal procedure in place, there is not much they can do if there has been no complaint and no allegation to the criminal justice system, because that would be, in effect, acting on a rumour rather than a formal complaint.

I am not saying that any of our processes are perfect. We all know from our case loads the many drawbacks that, in particular, women who are victims of rape go through with endless delays and difficult procedures. I do not think the criminal justice system is perfect, I do not think the independent complaints and grievance system is perfect and I do not think our party systems are perfect, but we are trying to find a way so that, when the House authorities know about a serious sexual crime, we no longer rely on a quiet word here and a nudge there, which does not feel right either for the complainant or for the person about whom a complaint is made.

I have already said that an MP will know if a complaint is made about them, because the process can be triggered only if there is a live criminal justice process, but I also do not want candidates to be put off coming to this place. Being an MP is an amazing privilege. It is an incredible job and an honour. I do not want journalists or staff to be put off coming to work here, and I do not want visitors to feel that this is not a safe place. I think we have to be an exemplar, not just the best we can scrape along with, and I think we are capable of being that exemplar. We have tested that in many different ways, and I think we are capable of doing it now.

What is being proposed is an evidence-based risk assessment and management process, which has come about as a result of consultation. Again, I thank the Standards Committee because, after looking at our initial proposal, it concluded that, although a procedure is necessary, ours was drawn very narrowly in scope and that we should not only focus on the sanction of exclusion. I think it is important to be clear that a range of risk-mitigation responses is proposed by this document, of which exclusion is only one, and that it is only temporary until a criminal justice investigation is concluded.

Some colleagues have also said that they would like the independent complaints and grievance system to feed into this process. As the Leader of the House said, the system will be reviewed later this year. I encourage all colleagues to feed into that review. When we brought in the ICGS, workplace reps in particular, and others too, felt that confidentiality was important to the process, and that there should be a firewall around it. That is where we are at the moment and, until we have had the review, there is no mechanism for it to trigger this procedure.

The Standards Committee made recommendations to widen the scope on the range of mitigations, and we have incorporated a good deal of them in our current proposals, but I look forward to hearing more from my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant), the Chair of the Standards Committee, on where he and his Committee feel we could strengthen it still further.

Like the Leader of the House, I do not want to go into the detail of the proposal, but I will quickly summarise it. If the police feel there is something about which they need to notify the House authorities, whether at charge or arrest, I want there to be a proper process for the House authorities to deal with it, a process that we, as MPs, have considered, debated and voted for. Under the Commission’s proposal, a named group—and they are named in the proposal—of very senior, experienced House staff will consider the initial allegation and investigation that is sent to them, and it will consider whether or not a risk-assessment process is necessary. If the group considers it not to be necessary, the process would stop there; if it thinks it is necessary, based on the evidence supplied, it will then do a risk assessment and make a recommendation—I emphasise this—to a panel. There will be debates in this Chamber, and among colleagues who are not in this Chamber, about whether the panel proposed by the Commission is what they want, or not, but we are proposing a panel with two named Members and one external commissioner. Members, one from the Government party and one from His Majesty’s official Opposition, will outnumber the commissioner on the panel.

[Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)]

In some respects, I have an issue with describing it as a staff panel. It sounds to me like a risk assessment, and it sounds to me like exclusion is the final option when every other option has been considered. Can the shadow Leader of the House clarify that for me, please?

[Thangam Debbonaire]

The panel will be the decision-making body that comes after the four senior members of House staff have considered an investigation and the evidence; have done a risk-assessment process, which they will consult on with relevant external experts; and have then made a risk-mitigation plan, which they will then propose to the decision-making panel. I agree that we use the term “exclusion” too often when, actually, it is only one of many possible mitigations.

When the ICGS was introduced, people made a strong case for it to be confidential, so it will not feed into the process at the moment, but I remind all colleagues of the review later this year.

If this proposal is passed by the House, investigations will initially be assessed by a group of senior House staff and a mitigation plan proposed. The mitigation plan will then go to the decision-making panel, which will make a decision on behalf of us all. It is very important that MPs can be excluded only by other MPs, which is why we came up with this proposal. We have also responded to some people’s concern that we need an external voice. I am keen to hear from other Members about whether we have the right composition.

The mitigations could include exclusion. Before I came to this place, I worked with very violent offenders at different points in the process, usually pre-trial or pre-civil proceedings, and our aim was safety. At the same time as trying to achieve safety, we had the important principle, which Members have raised, of people being presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Standards

Debate between Thangam Debbonaire and Wendy Chamberlain

Tuesday 18th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

I thank the Leader of the House for tabling the motions. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) and his Committee for all the hard work that they have put into their inquiries and reports on standards over many months. I really would have liked to see all that work recognised in the motion today. After months of calling on the Leader of the House and her predecessors to implement the Standards Committee’s full recommendations, I am sure that the right hon. Lady will have imagined my initial excitement when I heard the words “Members’ code of conduct” during her recent business statement, but sadly that turned to some disappointment when I found that it did not include all the Committee’s work to strengthen standards in Parliament. I understand what the right hon. Lady has said, but I will come back to that shortly.

Let me now turn to the substance of our debate: the appeals process. Let me first place on the record my thanks and welcome for the work that Sir Ernest Ryder has done on the House’s current system for the Standards Committee. It has been helpful to have a well-respected external figure investigating whether or not our existing standards needed to be improved or strengthened. I know that the Committee made good use of Sir Ernest’s extensive experience when considering the important issues of fairness, natural justice and the right of appeal, and I note that he gave thoughtful and considered support to our standards system overall. I picked out the issues of fairness, natural justice and the right of appeal because I seem to remember those words being used in a debate on 3 or 4 November 2021 which, I am afraid, did not show the House in a good light. That is partly why we are here today.

Sir Ernest proposed that there should be a right of appeal against both the findings of the Standards Committee and any sanctions that it imposed or recommended. It seems wholly sensible that such an appeal should be to an independent body with judicial expertise, and that leads us inevitably to the Independent Expert Panel. I am assured that its chair, the right hon. Sir Stephen Irwin, has said that the panel should be able to take on this role, and that it should be able to manage the workload without expanding the current panel size of eight. I am grateful to him for that confirmation. I assure the Leader of the House that she has my support on the motions, and that they will be supported by the Opposition.

However, let me turn to the slightly wider but related issue of standards in general and, in particular, standards and ethics in parliamentary and governmental life. It was the well-respected former Cabinet Secretary Lord O’Donnell who said recently, “It’s always best to look at reasons why your predecessor fell and fix that.” Unfortunately, however—and I say this with disappointment and sadness, because it affects all of us in this place—everything we have heard from the current Prime Minister, not just during her leadership campaign but in the context of her lack of action since taking office, suggests so far that we are in for more of the same when it comes to trashing standards. I wanted to believe that that was not so, but the Prime Minister even refused to say that she would appoint an independent ethics adviser after the previous two had resigned—admittedly, under the previous Prime Minister—in despair.

I am glad that the Leader of the House has said that the Government are committed to appointing one, but I want to see some urgency. It would be reassuring for the House and for the country if the Prime Minister could commit to appointing that much-needed ethics advisor.

On parliamentary standards specifically, there should have been a lot more in the motion—namely, the rest of the recommendations, in my view. I thank the Leader of the House for her update, and she has been extremely co-operative with me and my office on this, but again we need some urgency to repair the damage that has been done by some—not all—on the Government side to the public’s view of how we conduct ourselves in this place and the surrounding neighbourhood.

In response to my questioning on this at business questions last Thursday, the Leader of the House said:

“It is not that we are not doing them”.—[Official Report, 13 October 2022; Vol. 720, c. 260.]

I absolutely believe her, but does this mean that the Government will bring forward a motion to cover all the Standards Committee’s recommendations? I get that sense from what she has said, and I would like to know that that is the general direction of travel, but if not, why not? Can she tell us which ones the Government like and which ones they do not? I would be grateful if she could give us a much more specific timeframe for when they will be brought forward.

I welcome the assurances that the Leader of the House has given, but when it comes to parliamentary standards and the Tories, I think she probably understands why the public are feeling a lack of trust. Unfortunately, it is the party that refused to fix a loophole that let one Member off the hook for a particular misdemeanour. It is the party that was prepared to change the rules retrospectively seemingly to support cash for access but not to stop sexual harassment.

I do not kid myself that there was ever a golden age when the public saw us all as completely trustworthy and the holders of the highest standards, even though I believe that most of us in this House absolutely are. However, the public need to—and at times have been able to—trust the system of standards enforcement and sanctions around our general principles. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda once told me, there have been rules on how MPs should behave honourably since 1695. Since that time, the rules have only ever gone in one direction, which is to be strengthened—that is, until some Conservative Members unfortunately sought to drag them backwards during the Owen Patterson affair, which showed all too clearly that we have, in Conservative Members, some people who seem to be willing to change the rules retrospectively if they or their mates get caught.

Until we see a motion on the Order Paper covering all the Standards Committee’s recommendations—or some form of them—we can only assume or guess that the Government have apprehensions about bringing them forward. Banning MPs from doing paid consultancy work and increasing the transparency of Members’ interests are measures that Labour has long been calling for, and I believe that there is cross-party support for them. I have referred to the Owen Paterson affair with good reason, because that was the place where some of those concerns grew really strong.

We will of course support the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain). It seems a great pity that they needed to be put into writing, but evidently they did—

[Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)]

indicated assent.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I see that the hon. Member is nodding. I support the amendment and the motions, but I want to put on the record that if we were in government and I were at the other Dispatch Box, I would want to enact the Standards Committee’s recommendations as soon as possible.

In that vein, can I urge the Leader of the House to bring forward a further motion to do the work that she has referred to? She will find that she has support from this side for any co-operative and collaborative work that she wishes to do, and even for any critical or difficult work. We stand ready to work with her. This is not a matter that should be party political, although I have made some party political points because unfortunately it has been shown to be so in the past year. I will support the motions and the amendments, and I commend the report and the inquiries of the Standards Committee to all right hon. and hon. Members.