Nolan Principles

Chris Vince Excerpts

Thursday 12th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Susan Murray (Mid Dunbartonshire) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Nolan principles.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee and the co-sponsors for bringing this important debate to the House. It is a pleasure to follow the debate on the battle of the Somme led by the hon. Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith). It reminds us of the sacrifices made by so many so that we can enjoy our way of life today, which we cannot take for granted, and which the Nolan principles help us to protect.

Recent polling has shown that just 9% of people trust politicians to put the interests of the nation above the interests of their own party, and recent British Election Study research found that around three quarters of people had low or no trust in MPs. Frankly, I am horrified that people might look at me in that way. For years, I operated in the community as a volunteer and activist, and later as a local councillor, and I was viewed in my community as a trustworthy source of support. Now I am proud to serve that community as the Member of Parliament. I know that most of my colleagues in this place and across public service are in it for the right reasons—to serve their constituents and communities.

More than 30 years ago, Lord Nolan set out seven simple principles that must be followed by people in public life: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. The principles represent not just rules for us to follow, but an agreement and understanding between the public and those they trust to serve, represent and protect them.

We have all read about the headline-grabbing failures—partygate, when the rules our constituents followed were broken in Downing Street, or the questions over Peter Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador in Washington—but sometimes we do not know about the devastating consequences for our constituents when these principles are not followed. We do not always know how the pernicious creep of the ignoring and bending of the rules has reached into public bodies that people deal with every day: councils, the police and our schools.

In my Mid Dunbartonshire constituency and across Scotland, schools operate a software system called SEEMiS. Most hon. Members will not have heard of SEEMiS, but it is the system used by Scottish schools to keep pupil records—the formal records of a child’s education journey. Importantly, the records include notes on bullying incidents. Following a bullying incident in a school, a constituent told me about the difficulties they faced in trying to gain access to the data in their child’s record on SEEMiS. This resulted in a devastating breach of trust. After the incident badly affected the education journey of their child, they asked to access their child’s records. East Dunbartonshire council told them that the incident involving their child that they wished to view had been properly logged at the time, and that records could not be changed afterwards, but that was not the truth. My constituent was forced to go to court to access their child’s records, and only after a court ruling did the council hand them over.

This lack of transparency is deeply worrying, and the willingness of the council to spend taxpayers’ money on a court case, which it lost, shows little objectivity and poor accountability. To add to my constituent’s ordeal, they found not only that the notes were inaccurate, but that they had been altered. They did not find that out because they were told or because it was recorded in the notes; they had to access stored metadata—information that is not readily available and that requires a high level of technical expertise to access. When my constituent complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office, now the Information Commission, they were told that the actions of the school and the council did

“not meet with the obligation to be transparent”.

The ICO told the council that it should change the system so that notes cannot be backdated. The council has said that it has taken action, which I welcome, but the fact is that this happened and has had serious negative consequences for the child involved.

In focusing on the Nolan principles, I have necessarily concentrated on the accountability failures, rather than the full extent of what happened, as well as on how the case was handled by the council and the damage that that handling caused the young person. In another case, a child was the victim of a serious and very distressing incident caused by a fellow pupil. My constituent requested that safeguarding arrangements be put in place to protect their child, only for those arrangements to be removed without either my constituent or their child being consulted or informed. My constituent has spent years trying to establish who made those decisions, what assessments were carried out and what evidence justified them, but to no avail. She has often been told that past unanswered issues cannot be dealt with or has been given no answer at all. The impact on my constituent’s child and family has been enormous. This is not happening in isolation. This local authority, like others, has been subject to multiple findings that have identified failures and recurring concerns.

The Nolan principles speak of accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. That should mean answering reasonable questions honestly, explaining decisions and accepting responsibility when things go wrong. No parent should have to go to court to find out what has been written about their child. More than that, no parent should have to question whether the information they have been given is truthful. Openness, accountability and honesty should not be things that people have to fight for; they should be the foundations of our institutions. They need to be strengthened in our public bodies, and those in leadership roles should understand their responsibility. That is what it means for the Nolan principles to be at the core of public life. In these cases, they were not.

The SEEMiS case is of particular importance. It relates to the Nolan principles at every level. The council is responsible for SEEMiS software and decides how schools use it. The Scottish Government are responsible for the system that Scottish children are educated in, and Westminster is responsible for the data protection laws that govern the records. The Nolan principles can sound abstract, but these cases show why they matter, just as the lives of young people matter. When the principles were not followed, young people were let down and the community’s trust in our institutions was damaged.

Rarely do I speak about trust in politicians without mentioning the failures of the Scottish National party. As we all know, its record is far from clean. In June, the former chief executive of the SNP was jailed for embezzling more than £400,000 from his own party. A party let down on that scale should have welcomed scrutiny and made sure it could never happen again. That would help to rebuild trust and faith in politics. Instead, when MPs proposed that the Scottish Affairs Committee, on which I sit, look at the matter, the SNP’s Westminster leader, the hon. Member for Angus and Perthshire Glens (Dave Doogan), called it

“an unprecedented abuse of the House of Commons Committee system”.

What does that tell the people of Scotland about the openness, honesty and leadership of those who govern them?

I have three asks of the Government. First, every public body that holds records on people should be expected to keep a full and transparent trail of what is recorded and what was changed in those records, and when. There must be meaningful accountability when they fail to do so. Secondly, political parties should be held to the standard we expect of public bodies. Peter Murrell took more than £400,000 from his own party over 12 years, using his position to get around the party’s checks. If that can happen, the checks on how parties handle their money are not strong enough. Will the Government give the Electoral Commission stronger powers and, more importantly, the ability to issue higher fines to ensure that when questions arise, parties investigate themselves properly?

Finally, the standards system here at Westminster should set an example for every other institution to follow. The Government have strengthened the powers of the independent adviser, which is a good first step, but I would like to see the role put on a statutory basis with the power to open investigations, decide whether the ministerial code has been broken and publish what it finds. If we want to restore faith not just in politics, but in wider public life, the public need to be able to see that public bodies, MPs and political parties are held to account when they break the public’s trust.

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Susan Murray]

I have just finished my speech, actually.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Sam Rushworth (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

It is poignant that this debate follows a debate on the battle of the Somme. I was reflecting yesterday on remembrance and thinking about the sacrifice of my grandfather in the second world war and our great-grandfathers in the first world war, and I reflected on what they might think about politics today. I think they may be quite disappointed in the democracy that we have built, particularly in the coarsening of public discourse, the amount of times that people engage with others as their enemies, rather than their opponents, and some of the falling standards in public life.

[Chris Vince]

I was going to make this point to the hon. Member for Mid Dunbartonshire (Susan Murray), but she had finished her speech. My hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Dr Rushworth) talks about the behaviour of Members of Parliament, which is really important. I visit schools quite regularly in my constituency and talk about the debates that we have in this place, and it is really important that when the debates end, we treat each other with respect and courtesy; I think the majority of Members do that in this place. Does he agree that it is disappointing when some Members of this House do not treat other Members with the same respect?

[Dr Rushworth]

I agree 100%.

There is a responsibility on all of us, frankly, to do better. Why? The point has already been made very well, but there is a decline in trust in politicians. I naively thought when I was elected to this place that if I just told the truth all the time, worked incredibly hard and acted with integrity, it would shine through, but it does not. I have many constituents who do not trust me and think that I am a liar, not because of anything tangible that I have done, but because they think the whole political class is not to be trusted and that the moment somebody becomes a politician, they fall into that class. That is why it is so important that we do more to uphold and strengthen standards in public life.

It is important that we address a couple of areas in particular. One is around stronger safeguards that give our constituents confidence that when we choose to put ourselves forward and become elected to this place, we genuinely have their interests at heart and are not using this place to enrich ourselves. For example, we have to get rid of second jobs. I am not talking about medics maintaining their medical licences; I am talking about people earning vast sums of money while not representing their constituents in this place. I have found that this job is equivalent to two full-time jobs. It is impossible to be a proper Member of Parliament and to do our job properly while constantly being away earning huge sums of money elsewhere. It simply cannot be done, and we need to legislate strongly against that. We also need to do more to enable our constituents to see the difference. Maybe there needs to be greater transparency. I have often wondered if we should clock in and out of the Chamber and report how many surgeries we all hold, and so on, so that people can make fair comparisons and understand who is doing the work and who is not doing the work.

Another point we need to address is our debating. Maybe we need to review “Erskine May” and what constitutes parliamentary language. I have been really disappointed at times since I was elected by the things that are deemed acceptable. For example, I thought it was disgusting when the Leader of the Opposition described Members on the Government Benches as “paedo defenders”, and we all know that we got abuse because of that. The things said in this Chamber get repeated to us by our constituents. Members on the Government Benches who are themselves survivors of child sexual abuse had that label attached to them, and it was deeply distressing to them. Frankly, the Leader of the Opposition should have done better, but that was not called out by Mr Speaker because it is apparently deemed to be parliamentary language. We need to address that.

We also need to look beyond this place. There are examples—one has been given already—of where the public simply do not have the transparency that they would expect at lower levels of government and in public bodies. I was very disappointed to see that the leadership of Durham county council changed the rules on hearing standards complaints, so that a very small committee, on which Reform always has a majority, hears an increasing number of serious complaints. Some former Reform councillors who resigned and sit as independents have described the leadership as shambolic.

The Nolan principles predominantly deal with integrity, but do we need to consider principles that address the challenges of 2026? Is it acceptable for people in public life to express racist opinions under the guise of free speech? Before Reform took control of Durham county council, I supplied it and the media with a full dossier of disgusting Facebook posts from accounts that claimed to be their candidates’ accounts and who the administrators of those accounts were. One of those people went on to become a Reform councillor, which was entirely unacceptable.

Finally—as I raised with the Leader of the House today—as we look increasingly to devolve power, there needs to be stronger accountability for regional mayors and local government, right down to parish council level. There need to be legal safeguards in place to provide protection. At the moment, town and parish councillors do not have to declare interests and are not subject to the same scrutiny as us, yet planning decisions are often made by them. I think we can do better on this issue in a number of areas.