(1 day, 4 hours ago)
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Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
I hope I speak for everyone in the House when I say that it is a special privilege to be elected to represent our constituents. The British people put their trust in each and every one of us to be their voice in this place. Our nation prides itself on a strong democracy, and the role of His Majesty’s loyal Opposition is critical to that. I remind hon. Members on the Government Benches that the relationship between Opposition and Government is symbiotic: the Opposition are here not merely to be a critic, but to subject a Government to scrutiny, which is a vital safeguard of public trust. Amplifying the voices of the British people, asking the questions that they want to see answered and offering an alternative vision for the United Kingdom are essential roles of an Opposition in a democracy. Government opaqueness is not conducive to such accountability.
The Prime Minister seems to agree. He said he would deliver
“a different way of working. One of openness, of collaboration and transparency in everything we do”.
However, Ministers have shown a complete disregard for Parliament, the ministerial code and the Nolan principles by refusing to submit themselves to scrutiny and by withholding information from Parliament without good reason. There are a number of levers put in our hands to help with scrutiny: written questions, oral questions, urgent questions and debates on the Floor of the House, including Adjournment debates such as this one. One further lever that Members can use to hold the Government to account and ensure transparency is writing letters directly to Ministers.
Now, Madam Deputy Speaker, I know that the Chancellor has had a busy week, but when I and my right hon. Friends wrote to her over 12 months ago, after last year’s Budget, to express our concerns about the rise in national insurance and how it would affect the Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire air ambulance, we did so out of a deep concern for what the policy would mean for those charities, which deliver crucial, lifesaving care and that support our NHS every day. Despite my office chasing that correspondence, and despite our raising it in the House repeatedly and raising it with members of the Procedure Committee, we have had no reply in over 12 months. I raised the matter as a point of order earlier this week, and it has now been acknowledged that the Chancellor has the letter and excuses for the lack of response have been made, but we have still not received a reply. But, after the Budget yesterday, I guess the answer to whether the Government will help air ambulances is no.
Madam Deputy Speaker, you might be thinking that this is one isolated error, but unfortunately that is not the case. A constituent of mine who has 15 years’ experience as a church warden in a village contacted me to outline the huge difference that a scheme would have on efforts to fund urgent repairs, and how removing it would harm this vital community asset. I sent my constituent’s correspondence to the Chancellor and asked for her comments on the concerns expressed. On 21 January I was informed that my correspondence had been transferred to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, yet despite chasing I received no response whatsoever. It is 323 days since I wrote to the Chancellor and 310 days since it was passed to the Culture Secretary—no response.
On 23 September 2024 I wrote to the then Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology regarding my constituent’s concerns about broadband speed in his village. On 4 December 2024—relatively quickly for this Government—I received a response, but my constituent saw potential errors in the response, so I wrote back to the Minister on 23 April 2025 to request that he look into these important matters. Again, despite chasing, I received no response until 20 November 2025, 211 days after that April letter, to confirm that the Department
“aim to respond within 20 working days”.
You could not make it up.
It does not stop there. I wrote to the Department for Business and Trade on 6 June about the UK bioethanol industry and received no response. I sent letters to the Department for Work and Pensions in July and August about my constituent’s dissatisfactory experience with and concerns about the Child Maintenance Service and received no response. I wrote to the Minister for Water and Flooding, the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice (Emma Hardy), on half of a parish council in my constituency that wished to invite the Minister to a meeting on 22 October. Now, I understand the pressures on a Minister’s diary, but I do not understand how we have reached 27 November and the Minister has not yet been courteous enough to respond. These instances are not anomalies; taking an inordinate amount of time to respond to Members has become the Government norm.
Most disappointing, however, is the fact that the responses received, despite taking so long, are too often completely unrelated to the matters raised and questions asked. On 11 June I wrote to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care about the statutory scheme for rebate pricing for drug manufacturers to highlight serious concerns raised with me about potential impacts on a local business. I asked for clarity on three matters in three perfectly clear questions, and 156 days later I received a response from a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, although none of the questions I asked were answered or addressed in any proper way. Not only did I wait 156 days to receive a response; I waited 156 days to receive a response that did not answer my questions. These examples clearly demonstrate that the service this Government and Ministers are providing to MPs, and therefore to our constituents, is simply not good enough. Correspondence is not being lost in the system; it is wilfully neglected.
When responses do arrive, they should be accurate. When I asked the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care at oral questions why he had not delivered on his commitment to deliver the RSV vaccine to the over-80s this winter, he told me, “We have”, when, in fact, the Government had not, with the actual expansion not happening for winter 2025. I then raised a point of order, followed by a named day question, to which a Minister responded by redefining “delivered” to mean accepting the advice of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation—stretching credulity—all while admitting:
“The RSV programme could not be expanded ahead of this winter.”
This linguistic gymnastics is Kafkaesque.
What other options are available to us? I understand the pressures that Departments face, but there are many Ministers to answer these questions, not to mention an army of civil servants. I again refer to the ministerial code, which clearly states:
“Ministers should, where possible, provide full and timely responses to written parliamentary questions, ministerial correspondence and select committee reports.”
With that in mind, earlier this month I ended up submitting 16 written parliamentary questions to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care just to ask when he planned to respond to 16 of my named day questions, which should have been answered in three sitting days but were all overdue—in some cases by up to two weeks. In what can only be described as a farcical situation, I submitted a written question asking when the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care planned to respond to a written question, which itself asked when the Secretary of State planned to respond to another written question, which was then finally responded to. It is with regret that I must inform hon. Members that I have 11 further written parliamentary questions that remain unanswered and overdue. The oldest was due for an answer by 14 October, which I have still not received.
I lament that the Nolan principles of openness and accountability have sunk to such depths under this Government that I am required to submit so many follow-up questions, but it was not always like this. Some 92% of ordinary written questions and 88% of named day questions were replied to on time in the 2023-24 Session under the Conservatives. Another lever open to us is the urgent question, yet that is just another question to which the Government do not respond with answers.
The most recent and most glaring example of the Government failing to uphold their obligations to be transparent and accountable to Parliament and the public is the appointment of David Kogan as chair of the Independent Football Regulator. As the ministerial code makes clear, Ministers are responsible for ensuring that no conflict arises between their public duties and private interests. As the Commissioner for Public Appointments has made clear, the Culture Secretary breached the appointments code by not declaring her conflict of interest before signing off on Kogan as the Government’s preferred candidate, having received undeclared donations from Kogan for her leadership campaign in 2020.
Despite that, the Prime Minister still felt it was appropriate to also sign off on Kogan’s appointment and to clear the Culture Secretary of any wrongdoing. It is clear that the Prime Minister was in no position to do so, having also received donations from Kogan for his leadership campaign—the very same conflict of interest as the Culture Secretary—and supposedly having recused himself from any involvement in the appointment process.
When somebody is given a part-time job for £130,000 a year, and that person is giving money to the person appointing him, it is clearly in the public interest to know how much money that person has given the person appointing him—the Prime Minister or other Ministers. Despite there being an urgent question in the House on this, the Prime Minister has still not declared how much money Mr Kogan or his businesses gave. The Prime Minister says that rule makers cannot be rule breakers, so why are Ministers refusing to confirm that no current Minister has a criminal conviction? Surely the public have a right to know.
How can we get around the Government’s obfuscation? It is shameful that in order to get answers to our questions, we must resort to submitting numerous freedom of information requests to public bodies to get the details on the issues we are concerned about because written questions have not been answered.
I will give an example. After the strategic defence review in 2025, I submitted a written parliamentary question to the Secretary of State for Defence to ask which industry bodies, defence industry companies, media organisations and other non-government bodies or people were given access to the review ahead of its publication, and at what times. Because they did not answer the question, I submitted an FOI request. I did not receive a timely response to that. I therefore had to go back to where I started and submitted a written question on 1 September, asking when the Department planned to respond to the FOI request. I finally received a grossly belated response on 16 September—yet it was dated 9 September—from the Secretary of State. That reply was incomplete and I have had to submit another FOI request to get the rest of the information.
Is this not the kind of wasteful and inefficient use of time in Government Departments and the civil service that our constituents want rooting out? Why should Members need to submit an FOI request to get an answer to their written question and then submit a written question about that very FOI request in order to get the answer that the Department clearly had all along? I am sure that Ministers are very busy, so how is that a good use of their time, or indeed Members’ time? How does it reassure Members that the principles declared as important within the ministerial code are being taken seriously? It clearly does not.
Ministers have developed a habit of announcing policy to the media instead of to this House in order to avoid scrutiny. I appreciate, Madam Deputy Speaker, your many attempts, and those of Mr Speaker and other Deputy Speakers, to stop this. I asked a named day question on 11 November about the maternity and neonatal taskforce, which the Secretary of State promised an update on in June. I asked who is on the taskforce and how many times it has met. I have still not received an answer, but fortunately I read the answer in the New Statesman on the weekend, because the relevant Minister in the Lords made an announcement at a public event with the answer, which is that the taskforce has not met but will do in January, and that the people on it have not been decided yet. Why are the Government announcing the answers to questions in public and to the media but not in the House?
We all have a duty in this House to answer questions and address the issues that face our constituents. These are not isolated examples; these are my experiences as one MP among 650 in this House, and I know that this is happening to many colleagues. I can only image the scale of evasion of accountability across the House. On the steps of Downing Street, the Prime Minister promised to
“restore service and respect to politics”.
Yet when Ministers are not firefighting reports of tax avoidance or criminal convictions, they are tap dancing around parliamentary questions and feeding policy announcements out to favoured journalists, instead of announcing them to this House and the public first.
Let me be clear: accountability is not a courtesy, and it is not optional. When Members ask questions and submit letters, we are doing so on behalf of our constituents. Ministers may regard swerving, stonewalling and spin as shrewd tactics, but they are not. It is an affront to this House and to the British people we represent. It is high time that this Government lived up to their own lofty rhetoric and started giving us answers. The public deserve a lot better.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Chris Ward)
I thank the hon. Member for bringing forward this debate. I know that she has raised these matters before a number of times in the House—
Chris Ward
I am listening. I am pleased that she has secured this debate. I could see her frustration throughout. I will come to her specific points shortly, but by way of introduction I will set out the Government’s position.
As the hon. Lady said, the Prime Minister made it clear that the Government are committed to restoring trust, accountability and transparency in politics, and to ensuring that those of us who have the enormous privilege of serving in public office are held to the highest standards. As the Prime Minister himself wrote in his foreword to the updated and strengthened ministerial code,
“Restoring trust in politics is the great test of our era. The British people have lost faith in its ability to change their lives for the better.”
It is worth remembering briefly why the Prime Minister felt it necessary to write those words and why trust in politics is at such a critical moment, as the hon. Lady said. Frankly, the events of the last Parliament cast a long shadow over this issue—particularly partygate, which resulted in a Prime Minister being fined for breaching laws that he introduced, and being found to have deliberately misled the House at this Dispatch Box. That is unprecedented, and it has proved deeply corrosive of public trust.
Those events were compounded by the former Prime Minister’s complete disregard for the role of the independent adviser on ministerial standards. Two independent ministerial advisers resigned because they lost faith in his upholding even basic standards. In contrast, I do not accept the hon. Lady’s assertion about how this Government are approaching the matter. This Prime Minister is determined to repair the breach in public trust and to rebuild it, and to ensure that government is once again in the service of working people.
Dr Johnson
I understand what the Minister is trying to say with his whataboutery, and his “Somebody else might have done it first,” but the point is that his Government are in government, and they are not delivering on their promises. The ministerial code already requires Ministers to be open and transparent, and to answer the questions, and they are not doing that. A tightened-up ministerial code will not be worth the paper it is written, given that the current one is not being adhered to.
Chris Ward
I will come to that, because enforcement of the code is one of the key points that I want to get to, along with how the Prime Minister is trying to address standards, and the problems that we experienced in the last Parliament. That is why he issued the updated, strengthened code, which includes the seven principles of public life—the Nolan principles that the hon. Lady referred to, and which this House debated just a few weeks ago. Those principles are front and centre of the new code, and make it clear that public service is a privilege that comes with responsibility.
Among the Nolan principles, first articulated some 30 years ago and highly relevant to today’s debate, is openness:
“Holders of public office should act and take decisions in an open and transparent manner.”
There is also accountability. Holders of public office should be accountable for their decisions, including in this place. Another of the principles is honesty:
“Holders of public office should be truthful.”
I know the Prime Minister well. I know that he cares deeply about those principles. It is why he has spent his life in public service, and he is determined that this Government will uphold them.
The ministerial code includes a strengthened role for the independent adviser on ministerial standards. That role is no longer sidelined; it is now central to assuring accountability. Crucially, the independent adviser can now initiate his own investigations without the Prime Minister’s permission, which is an important step forward. I am also proud that this Government introduced the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, or the Hillsborough law, which will establish a duty of candour across public bodies and help ensure accountability across all authorities.
This Government have delivered on a manifesto commitment to establish an ethics and integrity commission, which will help drive up progress on standards. The ministerial code also includes strengthened principles on the acceptance of gifts and hospitality by Government Ministers, an issue that the hon. Lady has raised in this House previously. The Cabinet Office has also published a revised and strengthened code on public appointments, which will make that process faster and more transparent.
Dr Johnson
Does the Minister understand that £130,000 for a part-time job is a damn sight more than most of my constituents—in fact, almost all of my constituents—are getting, and that if the Prime Minister has appointed somebody or signed off on someone’s appointment, having received money from the person he is appointing, the public will want to know how much that person and their businesses may have given him?
Chris Ward
I was going to come to that. The hon. Lady has raised that point before, including on Monday.
Chris Ward
I am going to, if she lets me. This is a matter for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport predominantly. The Culture Secretary made a statement to this House on the matter. All donations from Mr Kogan were made in line with the rules, and we are perfectly transparent on that. The Prime Minister asked the independent adviser to look at the matter, and at the Prime Minister’s role in it. Again, I contrast that with the behaviour of the last Government. The adviser was satisfied with the Prime Minister’s response, and said that the disclosures made by the Prime Minister were an important demonstration of the Prime Minister’s
“commitment to transparency and to ensuring that…necessary steps”
were taken to improve the process underlying standards in public life. Again, that is a contrast.
I also point out that the Prime Minister stands at this Dispatch Box every week at Prime Minister’s questions. Hon. Members have had ample opportunity to ask that question, and they have chosen not to do so. There was no moving away from this; the process has been transparent. Everything was published in line with the rules, and there is ample opportunity to question both the Prime Minister and the Culture Secretary about this. I hope that answers the hon. Lady’s point. Returning to other actions—
Chris Ward
I will make a little progress, if the hon. Lady does not mind.
The Government have taken action to improve openness and transparency, and we recognise the importance of accountability, particularly in this place. Ministers take their obligations seriously and, as I say, the Prime Minister and the independent adviser are committed to upholding both the spirit and letter of the code. That is why, during the Government’s first year in office, there were 190 oral statements across 168 sitting days—more than one per day. That is more than in the whole of the previous parliamentary Session. The Prime Minister has made nine statements to this House, including one earlier this week, and the Foreign Office has made 30 statements. As of this Monday, I am told that there have been 228 oral statements this Session—you will have been there for many of them, Madam Deputy Speaker—and over 1,000 written statements. I merely point that out to show that the Government do come to this House and make statements.
On parliamentary questions and letters, which the hon. Lady spoke about at length, I agree that it is important that Members get timely and helpful responses. Having been a Back-Bench MP asking these questions, I know how frustrating it is not to get timely and helpful responses. Clearly, she has raised some serious points about air ambulances and other issues. If it is okay with her, I will take those up with the relevant Departments and see what I can do to raise those points.
I gently point out that the number of parliamentary questions being submitted is at a record high. This summer, roughly three times as many parliamentary questions as usual were submitted, and one Member who I will not name has submitted over 1,000 questions. I am not saying that that is a reason for Ministers not to reply; they are replying. Civil servants and Ministers work hard, but there is a lot to get through, and we are working hard to on that.
Dr Johnson
Take the Department that has received the most questions this parliamentary Session, the Department of Health and Social Care. It has received 15,000 questions since 4 July 2024, which is 29 questions per day. It has five Ministers and a whole army of civil servants to answer those questions.
Chris Ward
That is true; the Department of Health and Social Care is the Department with the largest number of PQs submitted. It is taking action to improve its PQ performance, but it receives a huge number; PQs are at record numbers. I am just saying that there is not wilful avoidance; a lot of this is about the volume, and trying to get through the questions.
I will try to make some progress. The Government are also engaging in the ongoing parliamentary inquiry, requested by Mr Speaker, on ministerial statements and the ministerial code. The Government are determined to ensure that when we have public inquiries, they lead to meaningful change, accountability and justice. For example, we are carefully considering the latest report from the covid-19 inquiry, and will respond fully in due course. To further drive accountability and implementation, the Government have launched a publicly accessible list on gov.uk of all recommendations made by inquiries, and the progress that the Government are making in response.
As I said, the Government do take transparency and accountability extremely seriously. We are, as with so many other things—from the economy to prisons and the immigration system—having to rebuild faith and trust in our politics from the very low base that we inherited. The hon. Lady made some good points about responses to PQs and letters, on which I will follow up, but the Government are making progress and are committed to going further. I welcome the debate, and the opportunity to discuss this tonight.
Question put and agreed to.