Independent Complaints and Grievance Policy

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I want to add my voice to the many people who have spoken already and to the many voices who have called me since they met with the Leader of the House and saw the proposals—the voices of the many women and men involved who brought us to this point—in saying what a positive step forwards this is. As someone who has been a naysayer all the way through the process, I thought that it would never be good enough—there would have to be a million tick boxes to satisfy me—but what is outlined in this very detailed and quite long document is to be commended, and I feel confident that people will and should bring cases forward.

It will be a massive pleasure for me to no longer be the referral system for victims of violence in this building. I have been exhausted by the stories that I have heard since the situation started to break in October last year. I think that I am up to around 50 complaints about Members from a variety of people from different political parties and others who work in and around politics. It will be delightful to hand those cases over.

It would be wrong of me to say, as the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) has already outlined, that I do not have concerns about historical cases, not least because most of the cases that caused us to do anything will not necessarily be able to go through this system. I have deep trust in the Leader of the House and in her desire to make this right and to make sure that wherever possible, regardless of when a situation may have happened, there are still ways for this system to look after, care for and respond to victims and to give them independent advice on how to manoeuvre around the system.

It has always been a part of our code of conduct, whether in 1864 or today, that we must not bring this House into disrepute, which is an enormously broad term. I would argue, and I do not think it is up for debate, that sexually harassing our staff brings this House into disrepute. My right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Sir Kevin Barron) rightly said that we should all have great faith in the credentials of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, as well as in her attitude and tone. The way she works with Members of Parliament should fill people with hope for the system, and she has plenty of scope to take complaints from people who may not fall within the 2017 issue raised by this specific report, but there are still things in the code of conduct that have definitely been broken in many of the cases I have heard, so I look forward to the review.

It is brilliant that we have a six-month review, and it is a new way of doing things around here that, after we sign a piece paper on day one, we do not just believe that nothing has to change and that everything will be perfect. This system will absolutely be tested by the first person who goes through it.

[Mrs Miller]

Does the hon. Lady share my concern about how the amendment might incite idle speculation about the identity of victims, which we know could be devastating to those individuals?

--- Later in debate ---

[Jess Phillips]

I thank my friend, the right hon. Lady, for her intervention. I am not convinced by that argument. I worry about the identity of those who come forward being at risk in all such situations, and there are Members who have not behaved well in that regard and who have released things about people to try to shut things down. There are all sorts of reasons why we have to be very careful about how we handle this.

It is right that these cases should be anonymous, although I would never argue for the same in the criminal courts—I do not believe in anonymity for those accused in the criminal courts, which is a battle that many in this House seek to win. We manage in the criminal courts to maintain complete anonymity for victims and complete transparency for the accused. If that can be managed in a very open environment such as the courts, where the public can go in to sit and watch, I have faith that we can manage it here.

I have faith in the commissioner and in the Committee on Standards. However, I worry about how it looks that we are trying to pull back on transparency. To be completely honest, it seems to me like the deal had to be done to get this through. I put aside pretending that I think it is anything else.

The Leader of the House deserves complete and utter credit, because I am certain that she wanted exactly the system that I wanted. She has been vocal all the way through, and she realises how much this affects victims and how much it affects women as they go about their work. I have no doubt that, had it been entirely down to her sitting in a room, I would be having a ticker tape parade. To be honest, requiring anonymity was a deal done by somebody in a Whips Office or somebody on some committee that controls one of our political parties. I have no evidence to suggest that; I am enjoying my parliamentary privilege. Frankly, with the 50 cases I know of, there are a lot of people in this House who should be grateful that I do not enjoy my parliamentary privilege quite as much as I could—I leave it there.

It is important that the system has independent elements, including lay members, one of whom I know and trust incredibly well. She is a brilliant woman from Birmingham, and I feel safe in her hands. People could go through all sorts of different systems before they ever become a Member of Parliament, and one thing that needs to come from this is that the political parties really need to get their act together. The political parties are nowhere near as good as what is being presented to us today. Some parties have walked forward a little, and when I say walked, I mean dragged. I cannot comment on others, but I think that the Conservatives have been working on new systems.

I very much doubt that in any of the cases I have handled—they are numerous—people have been satisfied with the political parties and the processes they have gone through. Every day, I take complaints about the processes that people are put through by the political parties without an element of independence—by an element of independence, I mean the total foundation of independence. Neither the complainant nor the person who is complained against will ever feel protected by those systems, so I call on Government and Opposition Front Benchers to take back to their political parties what they have worked to achieve here in this place today.

I agree with the right hon. Member for Basingstoke that, perhaps at the six-month review, we need to consider a whistleblowing or bystander element, because we all see all sorts of things going on in here. We need to be confident, our staff need to be confident, the Doorkeepers need to be confident and the people in the Lobby need to be confident in knowing whether or not they should be reporting such things. I seek to have that in future.

Once again, I commend the Leader of the House, the working group and the brilliant people who advised them, some of whom I deeply trust. Finally, a massive thank you to the victims who stepped forward, because none of us would be standing here without their bravery. They are considerably braver than we are.

Proxy Voting

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Wednesday 18th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

The hon. Lady says that she is an employment lawyer, in which case she will know very well that Members of Parliament are not employees but office holders. It would be a very fundamental review that would say that MPs should become employees. The hon. Lady would have to consider by whom they would be employed, and the subsequent taking on of modern employment regulations. She has not been clear about what she is after, but I am absolutely clear about the fact that we will be debating this issue. We want to provide proper baby leave for new parents, but the hon. Lady cannot possibly suggest that we should become employees in order to do so.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I have a quick question for the Leader of the House. I wonder how many times Members, mainly on her own side, raised with her, prior to the proposal for baby leave, the need for a new system for sick Members of Parliament. It seems to me that they have all become incredibly committed to such a system, in what I would call “whataboutery”, since the suggestion about parental leave. Did anyone ever raise the issue with her before?

[Andrea Leadsom]

Yes, a good number of people. For example, my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood), the Parliamentary Private Secretary, was absent for a considerable length of time with a very serious life-threatening illness. For as long as this Parliament has sat, there has been the need to provide pairing for people who are extremely ill suddenly, and the issue of how best to manage those processes has always been raised. The suggestion that baby leave is a unique problem for the House is simply not true: there are clearly other issues that Members want to raise in the debate.

Independent Complaints and Grievance Policy

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Wednesday 28th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I, like everybody else, want to commend the work that was done by the Leader of the House, the shadow Leader of the House and everybody else on the working group. One hundred hours—I would definitely have lost the will to live halfway through the negotiations. Everybody worked really, really hard.

The report has been done relatively quickly for this place; it is the quickest thing I have known go through since I have been here. There are just a few slight concerns I want to raise about how we might take this forward, but, by and large, the work that has been done is brilliant, particularly when there are often not easy answers to the anonymity and privacy issues. This is not easy; people outside this building can say these things are easy, but when you are actually here, it is quite different.

We talk about the events of last November and those being the reason we are all here. I want to say thank you to Ava Etemadzadeh, Jane Merrick, Bex Bailey and Kate Maltby, who all had the guts to come forward and say that people who were powerful had not always behaved the best with them. They deserve huge praise and merit.

I have concerns about the issue of representation during any process on sexual harassment. The Leader of the House said both parties would be entitled to representation, which is absolutely as it should be—and fair—in every system in the land, whether that is trade union representation or legal representation. However, I have a concern about how we will make sure in this place that there is equality of arms in that representation. If a caseworker is working in one of our offices, and a very wealthy peer, for example, sexually harasses them, I worry that one of those people has very good representation and can frighten people with legal letters—I have received some myself in these past few months. It worries me greatly that there will be an unfair imbalance. If the Weinstein issue teaches us anything, it is that rich men know how to use the law to get away with murder. We need to make sure that we address that all the way through this process

I also have one slight issue about the independence of MPs as decision makers. That is not in regard to them marking their own homework—I did not even know anything about the lay members until today, and I am satisfied with the explanations I have heard. However, in the report, one of the decision-making lines is that if a member of our staff perpetrates sexual harassment, bullying or harassment, we are one of the decision makers. I, as the employer, would the decision-maker. That seems completely acceptable—that is what it would be like in the outside world. As the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) put it, that is the same standard as that used for other employers. In this place, however, we are in close quarters with our employees. I employ only one person here and she is very, very close to me. I feel incredible loyalty to her. When I walk around this building, I see Members’ partners and children working here. I am not entirely sure that a Member of Parliament could be completely and utterly without bias in a case against a member of their staff, and that definitely needs to be looked into.

[Andrea Leadsom]

I hope to be able to reassure the hon. Lady, because we did come up against this issue. As she rightly says, there are some unusually close relationships in this place. Clearly, however, where there is a finding against somebody who is employed by a Member of Parliament, and the finding goes to that Member of Parliament and they fail to take action, the complainant will be able to take that Member of Parliament to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards for failing to fulfil their role as an employer. I hope that reassures the hon. Lady.

[Jess Phillips]

That does reassure me to some degree. My concern is that the complainant, as is always the case in such instances, has to do an awful lot of work. We need to make sure that they are supported all the way through the process. There is also the issue of equality of arms. As Members, we are much more powerful than most people and we are much more frightening than most people. [Interruption.] I am, that’s right! I would like to think that I can recognise that and employ it appropriately, but I still worry that there will be a power imbalance. The working group has done everything it possibly could do on a matter that is very difficult, and I imagine there were lots of voices on both sides. I will finish by just saying that I totally commend the report—

[Mr Jenkin]

rose—

[Jess Phillips]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, who is loquacious today.

[Mr Jenkin]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady, because I think she rightly points to the necessity that, as employers, MPs, because we are public figures, must be held to a much higher standard than we would expect of an ordinary small businessman and employer outside. That is because we are accountable, we are expected to be accountable and we are expected to be leaders and example-setters. I think, however, that the report addresses that and her concerns, because there will be HR support from outside the Members’ office for the staff of Members of Parliament, so they get the support and counselling they need to take a complaint against their employer in a way that has not existed before. I think it is a very important reform.

[Jess Phillips]

I totally recognise that and I am very happy with the progress that has been made. I personally felt listened to throughout the process, and I thank the Leader of the House and the shadow Leader for that. The system will need to be tested as we go through it. Lots of people have talked about review. It will be strength-tested by those who go through it. We have to ensure that, when the first case comes and things have not been as they should have been, we do not close ranks with each other. I will always commit to being the person who closes ranks with the people on the outside. I commend the report.

Baby Leave for Members of Parliament

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

It is a massive honour to follow all those who have spoken so far, and I feel that we are hon. Friends across the House today. I suppose that I should register not an interest, but a total disinterest in ever having another child, so this measure would not benefit me in the slightest. I could not be more disinterested.

I found the testimony of my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) incredibly moving. It put me right back at that moment when I was 22 and a new mum, and I was terrified that I was going to break that little thing. I will not put you through it, Mr Deputy Speaker, but some of the things that happen to a woman’s body immediately after she has had a baby are terrifying, and you do not expect them. I thought my internal organs were falling out. [Interruption.] The thought that I would have had to get up and go to a meeting—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

May I just say that it is not me that is worried, but I am very worried about the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith)?

[Jess Phillips]

Forewarned is forearmed is what I think in these situations: “You’re not dying,” is what I would say to my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith), but we all thought that we were.

The idea that I would have had to get up at that moment, terrified, suffering real fear for the first time, and go to a constituency party members’ meeting is absolutely horrifying. The thought of my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East doing that is absolutely terrifying to me—so massive, massive credit to all the women who have had babies while they were MPs.

Because I quite like a row, I want to head off at the pass some of the things I have heard in this place about why what is proposed in the motion cannot happen. I think we are pretty much all here to support it today, but I have heard quite a lot of mutterings—and they are mutterings, because they sound like this: “Mutter, mutter, mutter, amazing idea, mutter”—and I want to address them. Some of them have been from women in this House; I have heard squeamishness about asking for a right, because we as MPs are criticised for talking about ourselves and accused of being insular. We all know about the fake news on the internet when sites show a busy Chamber when we are supposedly talking about our salary and an empty Chamber when we are talking about something else—which are, I say just for the public outside, all a total lie. The idea that we should be asking for a right for ourselves is totally and utterly acceptable.

I am chair of the women’s parliamentary Labour party and I have had to talk to women and say that I will not feel afraid about asking for rights for the people in this building. When I worked at Women’s Aid, I fought for the rights of the women at Women’s Aid to better parental leave. No matter where I worked, I would be fighting for the women there to have better rights, and we should not be embarrassed about fighting for them here, either. So I want to put to bed the idea that this is somehow selfish. It is not; it is a right that we should be entitled to.

The other chuntering I have heard is about the proposals being the thin end of the wedge: “Where will this lead?” It will lead to being exactly like every other employer in the country. As the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) said, the big end of the wedge is that we are kind and nice employers; the big end of the wedge is decency and humanity. I am all right with the proposals being the thin end of the wedge, but the reality in this situation is that we are asking for something for a very specific reason.

Some people say to me, “You can’t have other people voting for you!” as if we have the divine right of kings when we come into this place and our vote is handed to us by God and is so special that nobody else could say how we might feel about, say, fisheries industries. That is, frankly, ridiculous. The idea that people feel they are so special that nobody could ever cast their vote for them, because they have never followed the Whip and are always deciding exactly what they will vote for all by their little selves, I find highly unlikely. The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) might be the only person who could say that.

[Seema Malhotra]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does she agree that the thin end of the wedge is not a thin end of erosion of our democracy, but a thin end of how we balance work and family life when circumstances might be unpredictable? Two months ago my mother had a stroke. While she is a lot better now, I was in a position of having to put in place, with my sisters and brother, 24-hour care for someone we were used to having caring for us. While I know and understand the issues there will be with parents, for those in that position to have to struggle for the flexibility to manage that alongside being a Member of Parliament is something I would want to see us change, and have the courage to change.

[Jess Phillips]

I could not agree more. As someone who cared for my own mother when she was dying, I know how much pressure gets put on, and it is largely the women in society who are in the middle, and are caring for children and for dying or very sick relatives. As a nation, we have got to get better at dealing with that. Why not start here?

I went for lunch with a gentleman yesterday—my husband is listening; it was not him. That gentleman told me that he had intended to take the shared parental leave that other colleagues have spoken about. He said, “As soon as I had said, ‘Okay, I am going to take three months off,’ it started to creep in: what if my clients get given to somebody else, and what if people judge me for leaving?” I thought, “Oh, really! My heart bleeds for you, here’s my tiny violin, because that is what we have all had to put up with forever.” I do feel total sympathy with what he was saying, because I have lived that life.

The truth of the matter is that we have got to make sure that when we make these changes, it is not only the women in this building who take this leave, and that the men in this building take it, too. Frankly, given some of the backtalk I have heard when I have talked about this, I think some of the men in this building should be ashamed of bragging about being here at the moment when their babies were born, and of standing up and saying in Committees, “Point of order: my wife just had a baby.” I say in response, “Point of order: I would divorce you if you were my husband.” There is one place a man should be when their baby is born, and that is by the side of their partner.

This is not about the women in this place getting something better; it is about the parents getting something better. We have got to lead by example. I know, not just from my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East but from the opposite side of the Chamber, that there are husbands in this building who are starting to take that leave, and we have got to stand as an example of that. So, basically, I say to the men in this House, “When this comes in, I am coming for you, to make sure that you take it.”

Independent Complaints and Grievance Policy

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Thursday 21st December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

My hon. Friend raises a really important point about language, and I encourage her to send in her own written submission to the working group.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I want to say thank you to the Leader of the House for having a very open process, which I have personally felt that I could take part in throughout. Good progress has been made, but what worries me about what has been said today is that there seems to be quite a lot of potential for kicking the can down the road, and that we are not going to hear what is going to happen. I fear that politics is still stopping some of these decisions, and I want assurances that, whatever sanctions regimes and independent regimes the working group has worked towards, they will come to fruition as swiftly as possible.

[Andrea Leadsom]

The hon. Lady has been very helpful and open with her views on this matter, and I absolutely assure her that I am working to get this sorted as soon as possible.

Business of the House

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

My hon. Friend speaks for many people across the UK. We are a nation of animal lovers, and the Government are absolutely committed to the highest standards of animal welfare. We propose to increase sentencing for animal cruelty and introduce CCTV in all slaughterhouses. He is right that the current EU instrument, article 13 of the Lisbon treaty, has not delivered the progress that we want to see. It does not have direct effect in law, its effect in practice is unclear, and it has failed to prevent practices across the EU that are cruel and painful to animals. The Government are committed to the highest standards of animal welfare and will take all steps necessary to ensure that they are in law.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

When do the Government plan to restart the debates on what was the Prisons and Courts Bill, which fell because of the general election? I have been told that there is not parliamentary time to restart a Bill that had cross-party support and would have ended the unnecessary deaths of children in the family courts system.

[Andrea Leadsom]

The hon. Lady raises an incredibly important point. The passage of the previous Bill was not completed by the end of the last Parliament. Different but similar measures are being brought forward in this Parliament and will be debated as soon as the parliamentary timetable allows.

Independent Complaints and Grievance Policy

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

My right hon. Friend raises an important point about the need to ensure that everybody who works here understands the rules and code of conduct expected of them. There are many different places in which to find codes of conduct; indeed, the respect policy itself is very clear on the type of mutual respect required in this place, and online training is also available for those who want to understand more about the legal definitions of harassment and bullying, and I encourage those with a particular interest in pursuing that to look at it.

My right hon. Friend raises the important point that, once we have established our proper independent grievance and complaints procedure, we will also want to look at how we can roll it out, so that nobody can be in any doubt about the sort of behaviour that is expected of them.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I welcome the Leader of the House’s statement, although I notice from having quickly read through it, as well as having listened to it, that it does not use the term “sexual harassment” once. I therefore support what the shadow Leader of the House said in encouraging the Leader of the House to ensure that there is a specialist sexual violence service that gives advice to the working group and is in place for people in this place afterwards. I urge that mediation in cases of sexual harassment is never appropriate.

Employees have been put into this process in the round, but what if a person who used to work here wants to make a complaint against a Member of Parliament? What if an activist in a political party wants to make a complaint here through Parliament? What if a journalist who is not a passholder wanted to make a complaint? All the complaints we have seen so far speak to what I am asking here; where would they go in this new system?

Sexual Harassment in Parliament

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Monday 30th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

Cross-party agreement and working closely with your office, Mr Speaker, are vital. Of course, the House officials themselves have some expertise in this area, but all ideas will be welcomed—bearing in mind, as a number of Members have said, that this is a very unusual workplace.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I welcome what has been said here today, and I look forward to working with you, Mr Speaker, on the reference group on this issue. As I rushed in here for this statement, I overheard two male colleagues walking through the halls wittering about a witch hunt that was going on in Parliament. We in this building must think of this not as a party political thing, but as something that absolutely has to happen. We should not just cheer when one of our opponents is the person getting attacked; we should cheer when everybody is bang to rights.

Will the Leader of the House touch on what she believes should happen to perpetrators of this crime—she did not mention this when she outlined what she and the Government felt needed to be done? Good referral lines and support for victims are obviously things that I support, but the fact of the matter is that nothing hurts a victim more than watching a perpetrator getting away with it.

[Andrea Leadsom]

The hon. Lady is exactly right, and I certainly welcome her desire for a non-partisan approach to the resolution of this matter. It affects all parts of the House, and we need to work together on it. What happens to the perpetrators is, of course, a matter for the House to debate, but it will include the following: where staff are the perpetrators, the normal contractual potential for losing their job, and where the perpetrator is an MP, the possible withdrawal of the Whip or the sacking of a Minister and so on. All those well-known things that can happen from time to time must and will be in scope.

Business of the House

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Thursday 26th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I welcome the comments of the Leader of the House on the difference between this Government’s and the last Labour Government’s commitment to women. Would she like a comparative debate? If not, could we have a debate on the rape clause? Could we have a debate on the rise in maternity discrimination due to court charges for women? Could we have a debate on the one in four women who cannot get refuge any more? Could we have a debate on the number of split payments in universal credit? Could we have a debate on the gender pay gap, which is not closing? Could we have a debate on the women under 25 who are not entitled to the minimum wage? I could go on and on. I would like some debates.

[Andrea Leadsom]

The hon. Lady raises a smörgåsbord of issues. As a strong supporter of women, I heartily agree that we need to raise issues that affect women. We also need to raise issues that affect the entire population. The Government are determined to improve the lives of all people in this country. We have done a huge amount specifically focused on women, including having had two female Prime Ministers. We have improved the number of women on boards and in public life. We also have improved the employment rate for women, women’s wages and childcare support for families where both parents work. It is vital that we continue to do so; on that we can heartily agree.

Business of the House

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Tuesday 18th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lidington]

Ahead of tomorrow’s debate it is somewhat premature to speculate on what the broadcasters will decide to propose with regard to the allocation of time for general election coverage, but I will take the hon. Gentleman’s comments as a representation.

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I was not going to speak, but like everybody else sat in this Chamber it may well be the last time I get the chance. [Interruption.] If hon. Members will let me finish. I came here to speak honestly and plainly, and to speak like the people outside this building. What I cannot understand from what the Leader of the House has said today is how any of this makes things clearer, or makes us feel more stable, more secure. All I ask is: how does this look to people outside? As somebody who came from outside, it looks to me like political opportunism.

[Mr Lidington]

I think and I hope that people outside this building will look at what the Prime Minister said on the steps of No. 10 this morning and believe that she is seeking an electoral mandate for herself as leader of a Government who will then be in a position to carry through the extremely challenging and ambitious European negotiations over the next two years. She would then implement the new partnership we are seeking with the EU 27, with confidence deriving from the fact that—I hope—the Government enjoy a secure, enduring parliamentary majority for those measures for an entire five-year term.