Independent Complaints and Grievance Policy

Kevin Barron Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), who chairs the Women and Equalities Committee, and I look forward to the publication of her report next week. I think that it will make a useful contribution to the general debate that we are having about these issues in the House.

Let me start by thanking the Leader of the House for her opening contribution, and congratulating her on the leadership that she offered throughout the deliberations of the steering group. It seems a long time since the group was formed after all the party leaders had met. This has been quite a journey, as I think all of us who have been involved will agree. Certainly, during my 17 years in the House, I have not been involved in a piece of work that has been so detailed, so considered and so comprehensively reviewed, and rewritten on several occasions.

That says a great deal about the diligence of all the members of the group, many of whom are in the Chamber today, and the amount of work and effort that we have all been prepared to put in—particularly in trying to get down to London from Scotland on Monday afternoons in time for the meetings with staff. I think that that effort should be recognised. I also thank all the members of the secretariat who are sitting in their Boxes this afternoon for their hard work, and the commitment and the sheer effort that have gone into the delivery of this very good report.

The report is a joint piece of work which has involved Members of this House and the House of Lords, but, most important, it has involved members of staff and trade union representatives, as has already been recognised today. That is a novel and innovative way of working, and I cannot commend it enough: I think it is great. I think the involvement and buy-in of members of staff and their union representatives will give the report more credibility in the House, and that people will be reassured that it was designed not by Members of Parliament but—as the report says—by the parliamentary community. It was designed by the parliamentary community, for the parliamentary community. I hope that that will be recognised, and that the report will be accepted on that basis.

The report is a significant and ambitious piece of work, which I hope will help to redefine the culture in our Westminster workplace. Some appalling incidents and issues arose towards the end of last year, and we recognised then that something awful was happening in our workplace that had to be tackled. The efforts made by all parties in the House to do that properly should be commended. I think that the most important part of the report is the first sentence of the first paragraph, which states:

“It is vital that all those who engage with Parliament, whether working or visiting, are treated with dignity and respect”.

That is an obvious statement, but it cannot be repeated enough. It underpins every other part of the report, and every part of the work that we have undertaken.

In the last few months, we have tried to make sense of the motion that was passed in February, when the House agreed unanimously to proceed. The way in which the workstreams have been designed during those months has been very helpful and useful, enabling us to identify particular issues that needed to be addressed and ensure that there was a practical way forward. Hopefully, we now have a robust and effective regime that everyone in Parliament will be able to endorse and support.

That regime offers a strong foundation to promote better behaviour and improve the culture of Parliament. It delivers the commitments set out in the motion that was passed by the House in February, and, specifically, it helps to deliver a new behaviour code that recognises the need for Parliament to meet the highest ethical standards of integrity, courtesy and mutual respect. That has underpinned the work of the group over the past few months.

There will be an independent complaints and grievance scheme to underpin the code. There will be procedures to deal with reports of sexual harassment, which will include the provision of a specialist independent sexual violence advocate service and an independent specialist investigator. There will be a system of training to support the code, and work will be done to effect cultural change in order to support its principles. The Leader of the House is right: no other legislature in the world has attempted to do such ambitious work in this regard. Hopefully, it will set a standard for other legislatures not just throughout the United Kingdom but throughout the world, by showing what can be done when everyone gets together and tries to make progress.

There is always more to be done. As the report says, reviews will be held six and 18 months after implementation to ensure that we have made the necessary progress and can address the many issues that will doubtless arise. I am pretty certain that we have not managed to cover everything. I know that there have been many conversations and debates about other matters that could have been included in the report. I think that the reviews will be a useful starting point which will help us to establish whether anything needs to be covered further, and will, I hope, define and determine future work and inform the policies of the future.

Several issues consumed the group. For instance, we spent a great deal of time dealing with the issue of historic cases. I think there was general disappointment that the new scheme could not cover such cases, and we tried at least to do something to ensure that they could be taken up. Legal advice has, of course, been swirling around, and I invite Members to read, in the appendices of the report, about the advice that the group secured, so that they can reach their own conclusions.

I hope that what the Leader of the House has said about enabling people to come forward with historic cases will satisfy the House. It is disappointing that that could not be included in the scheme, but there is a route for such cases to be addressed, and I hope that Members will find that sufficient. We are well aware of the Dame Laura Cox review, and hope that it will inform some of the views that we will be able to take in six months’ time, when we presume that Dame Laura will be able to report to Parliament.

I think that the new direction offered to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards is equally important. We concluded that the PCS remained the only viable authority for the assessment and handling of sanctions. Being asked to consider issues relating to behaviour and bullying will present new and significant challenges. However, the commissioner is entirely independent, and it is almost impossible to ensure that the independence currently enjoyed by the PCS can be replicated elsewhere. Obviously, the report contains new guidance on the operation of the PCS.

The chairman of the Committee on Standards, the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Sir Kevin Barron), has tabled an amendment to the motion, and several concerns have been raised about transparency. That is just one of the tensions that emerged throughout our deliberations. I think that every member of the steering group was profoundly disappointed by the prospect of the loss of a degree of transparency to address the issue of confidentiality for those who might be minded to come forward. I will listen carefully to what is said by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) before I finally decide on my position, but I am veering towards what was said by the Leader of the House, and I hope to be able to accept her views on confidentiality. That has to be at the centre; everything has to start from that.

[Sir Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab)]

Would the hon. Gentleman be happy as a Member of this House if somebody went to the local press and said that he had been accused of breaching the code of conduct—not the new code of conduct, but the current one—and there was nobody to deny that an investigation was taking place, so he just had to accept the accusation?

[Pete Wishart]

In all honesty and candour, I would not be happy with that, but we are trying to secure that the starting point is confidentiality for the people who come forward. There are compromises and things that are uncomfortable and unsatisfactory, and perhaps in the six-month review—this is a request to the Leader of the House—we can start to look at this again. I understand totally both sides of this: I hate the idea that we are losing transparency on issues to do with the normal work of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and we must try to address this further.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab)]

I beg to move amendment (a), in paragraph (4), leave out from “Report;” to the end.

I wish to begin by paying tribute to the work of the Leader of the House and her colleagues on the steering group. The Select Committee on Standards has worked very closely with the steering group on the various work-streams over the past few months. There is one issue over which we disagree, and I have tabled an amendment to deal with it, which I will come to shortly. Because I and some of my Committee colleagues have tabled that amendment, under the rules of procedure we are not able to put our names to the main motion; otherwise, I personally would certainly have done so.

I want to emphasise that, this one area apart, the Standards Committee is completely in accord with the steering group and its delivery report. We strongly support the work that has been done to bring Parliament into the modern age in terms of personal conduct. This is not about complicated rules or codes or Standing Orders; it is about ordinary human decency.

People should not bully or harass other people. They should not sexually harass them or abuse their power. That is obvious, and yet not everyone in this institution has behaved in a morally decent way. Parliament should be giving a lead on this, but we have been lagging behind. The Standards Committee made a big effort some years ago to expand the code of conduct to include some aspects of personal behaviour, but this was undermined when it came to be decided in the House by what I may call today “the forces of reaction”. Now we have another chance, and we must take it.

The Committee set out its views in a report published last week. This focuses on matters which are the direct responsibility of the Committee—in particular, complaints against Members and the role of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. We have worked with the steering group to develop proposals to ensure that Members are properly held to account while maintaining an independent, fair, trusted and effective process.

We support the new parliamentary behaviour code. We propose that it should be incorporated in the Members’ code of conduct, alongside an additional rule stating that:

“A Member shall treat his or her staff, and all those working for or with Parliament with dignity, courtesy and respect.”

This will ensure that Members can be held fully to account for any instances of bullying, harassment or sexual harassment. The motion before the House today will achieve that.

We have given a great deal of thought to how the complaints process will work under the new system. Clearly it has to be sensitive, and supportive of the people who wish to bring forward complaints, but at the same time it must follow the principles of natural justice and be fair to the people who are complained about. We believe that the new system should build on the strengths of the existing system, in particular the role of the independent parliamentary commissioner, while tackling some of its weaknesses. We and the steering group propose that investigations relating to complaints against Members should be overseen by the independent commissioner.

In our report, we set out the background of the current commissioner, Kathryn Stone, who was recruited on merit through open and fair competition. She has a background in child protection and social care, and she has shown independent-mindedness in previous posts, including the particularly sensitive posts of commissioner of victims and survivors in Northern Ireland, commissioner of the Independent Police Complaints Commission and chief legal ombudsman for England and Wales. She also ran a charity for victims of crime, including sexual offences, for 11 years. I have had the privilege of seeing Kathryn in operation, and I have no doubt at all that she is a tough-minded person who will be fiercely independent in carrying out her new responsibilities.

The role of the Committee on Standards under the new system will be to carry out any appeal function that might be required. The ultimate decision on sanctions in serious cases will be taken by the House itself on the basis of a report on the case from the Committee, with the complainant anonymised and the report subjected to any redactions that the Committee considers necessary to protect the complainant. I know that some people are sceptical about involving the Committee because they think it will be a case of MPs marking their own homework. I have heard that view quite a few times in the media. I understand that point of view, but it does not reflect the reality of how the Committee operates. In particular, it does not take account of the crucial role of our independent lay members. There are now equal numbers of lay members and MPs on the Committee.

The lay members’ role is not widely understood. Our report gives more detail on this, and I urge Members to read it. In particular, they might like to look at the CVs of the lay members, which are set out in the appendix. They are members of the public, chosen on merit through open and fair competition, from diverse backgrounds and with a wide spread of experience and skills. None of them has been an MP, and nor are they in any way part of what people would call the parliamentary establishment. In general, the lay members work closely and harmoniously with the elected Members.

The Committee—like other Select Committees, and arguably more than most—proceeds by consensus. I have chaired other Select Committees in this House that have not had the type of consensus that the Committee on Standards works to. However, the lay members do not have voting rights—which we are aware of now—partly because of a concern that to confer such rights on them might open the work of the Committee to challenge in the courts. This concern is based on the ground that it is not a properly constituted Select Committee entitled to the protection of article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1689. Notwithstanding this, any lay member has the power to append an opinion to a report of the Committee. That power has never been exercised, but it has been seen as an essential safeguard for the lay members’ independence. Any one of them could at any time express an opinion on any of our reports dealing with Members’ conduct, but they have never done so because of the consensual way in which we operate and because of the fairness with which we adjudicate against Members of the House.

Indeed, there have been only two occasions on which formal votes have been held since lay members first joined the Standards Committee. The most recent was in May this year. That led us to review our procedures, because there was clearly a flaw in the arrangements. Lay members can append an opinion to a Committee report but they do not have such a right if the Committee divides on a motion not relating to a report. As a general rule, this does not matter because most Committee decisions relate to reports. Reports are how we announce our decisions on individual cases. However, at the meeting in May, two votes took place on motions relating to the commissioner’s right to start an investigation. This drew attention to the fact that lay members had, in those unusual circumstances, no way of putting their views on record.

We have therefore introduced a new system of what we call indicative votes. This means that before the Committee has a formal vote involving only MPs, it should have a non-binding vote involving the whole Committee. We give more detail about this in our report. The motion before the House today will make this binding on the Committee, as we requested. In fact, the motion goes further than we requested, because it requires indicative votes to take place before all Divisions, including those on reports. We discussed this in the Committee last Tuesday and we are entirely happy with that. I should repeat that the vast majority of Committee decisions are taken by consensus. The point of the new procedure is to make it even less likely that things will be pushed to a formal vote. I certainly hope that that will be the case.

I should also mention that it would be wrong to think of the Committee as consisting of two opposing blocs: lay members and MPs. Except in relation to formal voting, both types of members are treated in exactly the same way and we work as a unified team. We are aware that indicative votes are an interim measure. Along with a majority of my colleagues on the Committee, I would like to see full voting rights given to lay members. We have called on the Government to bring forward primary legislation to guarantee that free speech in the Committee is protected by parliamentary privilege, as set down in the Bill of Rights 1689, in order to allow the extension of full voting rights to lay members. I hope that the Government will respond positively to this request.

Finally, I come to the one point of disagreement between the Committee and the steering group. This relates to the proposal in the motion to change the existing system under which the commissioner publishes details of ongoing investigations on her website. We entirely accept and support an extension of confidentiality in relation to complaints under the new system, particularly in relation to sexual harassment. There is a real need to ensure that victims of sexual harassment are given the confidence to use the new system, and confidentiality will play an important part in achieving that. We set out in detail in our report how this will operate, and we are in agreement with the steering group on that.

The difficulty for us arises from the proposal to extend confidentiality to complaints under the existing code that relate not to bullying and harassment but to financial misconduct or the abuse of House facilities. At the moment, the commissioner announces the names of Members when she launches an investigation, along with a brief statement as to the nature of the alleged offence. We can see from the commissioner’s annual report that the vast majority of complaints that go to her never get anywhere near to an investigation. They normally involved wild allegations that are made without substance or evidence, and they effectively go nowhere. Of those that are investigated, very few come to the Committee for adjudication. The commissioner rectifies people’s misapplication of the rules on issues such as the misuse of parliamentary envelopes, for example, so we do not see that this is a major issue for the House.

The rules were agreed by the House some years ago in the wake of the expenses scandal, and were seen then as an important way of demonstrating transparency and openness. I was on the Standards Committee from 2005 to 2010, and I was a winger during the expenses scandal. I can tell the House that there was a real need for openness at that time, and a real need to let the people of this country know that we were being transparent and open in our dealings on their behalf. We believe that transparency and openness should continue to apply. There is no doubt that if the House votes for the Leader of the House’s motion today without amendment, many people outside will criticise us for rolling back the openness that was agreed back in 2010 following the expenses scandal.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

My question is simple. Under the plans proposed by the Leader of the House, is there any chance at all that an MP who is under investigation for sexual misconduct would be named?

[Sir Kevin Barron]

No, there is not, and I will go on to that. What the amendment does to paragraph 4 comes after the issue to which the hon. Lady just alluded. We are not going to stop anything. As I have said, confidentiality is crucial to the policy’s success.

[Rachael Maskell]

The reality is that this is about amendment of the Standing Orders, which govern the procedures of the House, so while I accept that the motion is not necessarily in the right place, without the amendment it could lead to the identity of a reporter being exposed.

[Sir Kevin Barron]

I will say—this is an aside—that I have been in this House for 35 years, and I have seen many allegations made against Members of Parliament for all sorts of reasons. Quite a lot of them come from the press, the television or stings in the media, and the idea that we have anything to shy away from in these decisions is not true. We agree that sexual harassment and bullying cases require confidentiality to ensure that people will come forward and speak out so that action can be taken. The Committee carefully considered the Leader of the House’s arguments for making the changes, and we understand why she has put them forward. However, we do not think that they outweigh the reputational damage that may arise if we go ahead with this proposal as drafted. It will be presented as MPs trying to cover up their misdoings.

The proposal is also good news for anyone who wants to smear an MP. They can simply tell the media that the Member has broken a rule and is under investigation, and, since the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards will effectively be gagged, she will not be able to confirm or deny it. The rumour will continue and no one will have the authority to put the record straight. Members ought to remember that that could happen. On most occasions, that is how things work for the Committee on Standards as it operates under the current code of conduct.

The proposal goes beyond the independent complaints and grievance policy and is not essential to it. We do not believe that the publication of whether a Member is under investigation will cause irreparable damage to that Member’s reputation. I could cite the example of the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Mr Hunt), who was recently under investigation by the commissioner following a complaint. It was in the national press and on national television, but it does not seem to have done his career any harm whatsoever because he was appointed Foreign Secretary last week.

The Committee was unanimous on the issue. All the lay members have written a joint letter to me, which has just been posted on our website, and I will read out the key paragraphs:

“Through our involvement in the work of the Committee we recognise the unusual, and sometimes precarious, nature of the role of MPs, the media interest they deal with on a daily basis and therefore, the importance MPs rightly place on their reputation. We also recognise the importance of the reputation of the House and the impact the actions and behaviours of MPs can have on how this is viewed.

Our experience to date suggests that publication of an announcement that an investigation is taking place does not cause significant damage to an MP’s reputation and, on a number of occasions, the matter is already in the public domain through the media. Therefore, in our view, the announcement can provide assurance that concerns are being handled independently and in a fair and impartial manner.

Our view is that the current practice followed by the Parliamentary Commissioner on Standards, and explicitly agreed by the House in 2010, creates the right balance between the individual reputation of MPs and the collective reputation of the House. Any proposals to limit this approach would be a detrimental step in continuing to build the credibility of the reputation of the House.”

I think those views make the case for the amendment very well.

The reason why the Committee on Standards has lay members is probably because, back in 1999, I was appointed as a lay member of the General Medical Council. Three Members of Parliament were appointed to it at that time, and I dealt with fitness-to-practice cases where doctors were in front of us, for example, and I thought that I played a constructive role. The first time that I said that the Committee on Standards ought to have lay members I remember a few sets of eyes widening, but the way that the lay members have operated for years now has been to the credit of this House. It certainly gives us a lot more credibility than if MPs were marking their own homework. When this motion is put to a vote, I hope that Members will recognise that lay members are helping us to change the culture in Parliament, just as the report does, which I do not take anything away from.

Obviously, the Committee on Standards will accept the decision of the House on this matter, and my colleagues on the Committee and I look forward to giving every assistance we can to the new complaints system as it is implemented. I repeat my congratulations to the steering group on its marvellous work. The acceptance of the report today marks significant progress towards building further public confidence in the standards expected of all Members of the House and shows our determination to uphold the rules if they are not met.