Committee on Standards (Reports)

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Kevin Barron) and his fellow members of the Standards Committee, including the lay members, on the two reports the House is considering today. I thank them for those reports, which each represent an important step forward and provide welcome clarity on the standards system and the guide to the rules.

I concur with the Leader of the House that it is important to agree the changes in advance of the new Parliament, in which the new Members will need clarity. We are all content that we have just managed to get in under the wire in doing so. The situation is complex: we have many structures of rules that Members are expected to follow, and they have become more complex and divergent over time. It was therefore important for my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley to be able to look at how to simplify some of the structures. We have the Electoral Commission and the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, both of which are independent, but there are also—quite rightly—the rules of the House of Commons, which the Standards Committee has looked at.

The first motion is on the report from the lay members of the Standards Committee. It suggests some sensible changes to improve public trust in the standards system. As I said in my evidence to the Committee’s inquiry, we need a system that is predictable, simple and transparent. It is helpful if the system is intelligible to members of the public as well as to colleagues, many of whom will have seen the rules change multiple times over their years in the House. In my experience, Members tend to remember the rules as they were when they first came into the House and do not always manage to follow the myriad changes that occur as their time in the House lengthens. Many people have been caught out inadvertently by the evolution of the rules, which they have not noticed, because Members tend to respond to the rules that were in place when they first came into this place.

In my evidence, I said that we needed to remove the Government’s majority on the Standards Committee. I note that that is not proposed in the motion, but I hope that we can return to it. It is vital not only that the Committee act fairly—that goes without saying—but that it be seen to act fairly. We must avoid any perception among the public or others that Government Whips can affect the outcome of an inquiry.

I welcome the Committee’s proposal to increase the number of lay members so that there is an equal number of MPs and lay members on the Committee. I also welcome the decision to make it clear in future reports whether the lay members agree with the Members of Parliament who serve on the Committee. The use of lay members on House Committees is a relatively new innovation. In my experience of serving on Committees that include lay members—I have not served on the Standards Committee, but I have served on the Speaker’s Committee for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority—the innovation has worked well to date and has helped the House immeasurably.

The changes in the motion will ensure that our standards system is in line with the regulatory systems of many other professional bodies, while respecting the House’s unique position. We welcome the Committee’s recognition that,

“The electorate have the right to choose their representative”

and that

“any standards system must not constrain that right”

in a democracy. That is an important part of the summary of the report. As the Leader of the House pointed out, we now have recall, which might also impact on this area in some circumstances.

The report makes the welcome suggestion of a clear description of the role of an MP in increasing public understanding of the work we do. The Committee even made an heroic attempt to describe the role on page 24 of the report. It is an interesting attempt, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley and his Committee were extremely brave to set it out. We will see what kind of dialogue ensues in subsequent Parliaments as a result of their writing down that description.

Turning to the second motion, on the code of conduct and the guide to the rules, the new guide recommends simplifying the process of registering interests, tightening the rules around lobbying, and clarifying the relationship between the code, the guide and resolutions of the House. All of those recommendations have to be welcome. As the Committee’s report notes, the guide to the rules was first published in 1996. Over time, as I hinted earlier, it has seen many piecemeal additions and revisions—or evolution, if you like, Mr Deputy Speaker.

The new guide is intended not only to be a comprehensive revision of the rules, which is certainly long overdue, but to ensure that we meet our obligations as a member of the group of states against corruption, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley said. As the Committee notes, if we do not agree to the new guide, Members who are elected in May will be bound by rules that are “not always clear”, that are “out of date” and that do

“not respond to the recommendations of a Treaty organisation of which the United Kingdom is a member.”

It is clearly welcome that we are able to have this debate today. I hope we will pass the motions on the Order Paper to bring ourselves into line with the international treaties we have signed.

The first thing these changes will do is to reform how Members’ interests are registered. The proposed guide harmonises the rules on registration and reduces the number of registration categories, with just one, rather than the current three, for outside employment. The report also recommends a lower threshold for the registration of interests. Those are welcome and sensible simplifications. Labour Members want to go much further and have a system in which registering a paid directorship or consultancy is no longer possible, in which second jobs are far more regulated than is currently the case.

The report also suggests changes to the rules on lobbying—an area that clearly needs change following the scandals of this Parliament. The proposed changes to the guide go some way towards tightening the rules, but the system of regulation the Government have put in place is fundamentally inadequate. Despite the Prime Minister promising before the last election that he would shine the “light of transparency” on lobbying, the register the Government are set to introduce would cover just 1% of ministerial meetings organised by lobbyists, and would not have caught any of the lobbying scandals that have hit this Government. The lobbying Act prevents charities and civil society from campaigning—rules that are already having a chilling effect on debate in the run-up to the general election.

If Labour wins the election we will introduce tough new limits on lobbying and an effective register of all professional lobbyists, backed up by a code of conduct and enforced with sanctions. We will also review whether lobbyists should be allowed to provide the secretariats for all-party parliamentary groups, and continue to support the ban on parliamentary passes for any APPG staff.

The report also recommends updating the basis of the rules. As the former Clerk of the House, Lord Lisvane, made clear in his evidence to the Committee,

“there is a certain amount of doubt about what actually constitutes the ‘rules’ of the House”.

As well as the code and the guide, a number of other resolutions of the House also provide guidance on MPs’ conduct. As the report says,

“defining the rules of the House through a series of Resolutions of varying antiquity, which need to be regularly amended, is unsatisfactory”.

We therefore welcome today’s motion, which clarifies that all previous resolutions on Members’ conduct should be read in a way that is compatible with the guide and the code. We also welcome the sensible proposal to revert to the 2009 wording on Members’ private lives, which I hope will assuage concerns across the House that were raised when this matter was last debated in 2012.

I welcome both reports as a positive step in the right direction, while believing that we can, and should, go further. On second jobs, proper regulation of lobbyists, and the Government’s majority on the Standards Committee, I look forward to a Labour Government working across the House for further reform in just a few weeks’ time.