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Mr. Levitt: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Davey: No. I have given way an awful lot, so I intend to continue.
Other serious questions have been raised in the debate. The Select Committee report asks the Prime Minister to amend the ministerial code. When the Leader of the House intervened on the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young), she said that the ministerial code was being reviewed, but that does not mean that it will be changed. It does not mean that the Government have accepted the proposal in the Select Committee report. The Leader of the House did not give us a timetable for the review, or any idea of when the House would have its conclusions. I hope that the status of that review will be clarified.
The report raises wider issues about the way that the Government govern and the way that Ministers and the press operation treat Parliament. Through that, it impinges on how the House protects the Select Committee system. It is a key part of our democracy to ensure that that Select Committee system is independent and has full integrity, so that we can hold the Government of the day to account.
Leaks, such as that which happened from the Foreign Affairs Committee, can damage the Committee system. They damage the Committee in the public's eyes, thereby detracting from the report's authority. They can damage the trust between Committee members and the efficiency of a Committee's workings, and thereby damage Parliament's ability to hold the Executive to account.
Therefore, I submit that the Government should be looking at not just these Committee recommendations, but the need to review and strengthen the Select Committee
system--and how we might make members of Select Committees more independent of their party. Select Committee members should be responsible to the House irrespective of party labels. Perhaps we should consider developing career paths within the Committees of the House, so that people can see their way to developing their political careers, not just within their party, but within Parliament.
We should consider making positions on Select Committees more prestigious. The prestige of those senior positions should equal that of a junior Minister, so that people who hold them take the independence of the work that they do very seriously indeed.
The report is about upholding the integrity of the Select Committee system. A stiff penalty has been served on the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross), and I believe that all hon. Members will accept his full apology. However, to ensure that the integrity of the Committee system is maintained in future, more than the ministerial code needs to be changed. We need a clearer definition of the responsibilities of civil servants to Select Committees.
I do not know whether there is a code governing the relationships between civil servants and Select Committee members, but some of our exchanges today have shown that there is an urgent need for such a code, to ensure that the civil--
Mr. Levitt:
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way at last. Obviously, we need not bother with the Standards and Privileges Committee in future--it will be enough to have the hon. Gentleman investigating. He seems to have a gut instinct for determining what is right without bothering with the evidence. On this occasion, if he looks at the minutes of evidence, he will see the Civil Service and the Foreign Office responding in exactly the way that he asks. That is one of the benefits of the report--a report which, I believe, does correctly attribute blame. I speak as one who spent many hours serving on that Committee, investigating the matter in great detail.
Mr. Davey:
The hon. Gentleman's comments are rather rash. I began my speech by paying tribute to the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne and his colleagues--including the hon. Gentleman--for the quality of the report. However, I must say that, after what we have heard today, obviously that appendix is not exactly complete and we need more information to ensure that the valuable work that the Committee did is fully finished.
Mr. David Wilshire (Spelthorne):
As the Member who first raised the question of a possible leak of this Foreign Affairs Select Committee document, I am grateful to you,
The report from the Standards and Privileges Committee raises two vital matters. These are the conduct expected of us as Members and the conduct expected of Her Majesty's Government. Like others, I want to say little about the first matter, which is the conduct expected of us all. The report makes it crystal clear that what happened was wrong and worthy of punishment. I fail to see how any of us could disagree with that conclusion. However, there is a redeeming feature in this aspect of this sorry affair. The hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross) swiftly admitted his actions. He did not hesitate to agree that they were wrong, he promptly offered the Committee a fulsome apology and he immediately resigned. Once the report that we are debating is behind us, I believe that we should draw a line in the sand regarding the hon. Gentleman's conduct.
However, I do not consider that the report closes the issue of the Government's conduct. In my opinion, and as we have heard the argument developed this afternoon, the report requires us to pursue matters more vigorously. The contrast between the response of the hon. Member for Dundee, West and that of the Foreign Secretary could not be more stark. Nowhere do I see any apology from the Foreign Secretary or from his permanent secretary for keeping, circulating and using a leaked document.
Instead of an apology, the Foreign Secretary contents himself with offering us weasel words in an attempt to justify his behaviour. He claims that the lack of clarity in existing rules entitled him to ignore the words "Confidential--For Committee Use Only", which appear in large letters at the top of each page of the leaked document. That is a pathetic attempt to wriggle out of his proper responsibilities.
The right hon. Gentleman suggests also that a Foreign Secretary can sneak into the private meetings of Select Committees and listen to confidential discussions. That is the most stupid defence of wrong-doing that I have ever heard. If there was no sense of wrong-doing in the Foreign Secretary or the Foreign Office, why did officials react with alarm and concern when they saw the leaked document? Why were documents destroyed rather than returned? I mention return because the report says that documents should be returned. As late as lunchtime today, not one page of one copy of the leaked document has ever been returned to the Clerk of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
In his evidence the Foreign Secretary claimed that no use was made of the leaked document. However, I raised my original point of order because someone was patently using information that could have come only from a leak,
in an attempt to rubbish our Committee and our conclusions before a single official copy had been handed to anyone.
The evidence given to the Select Committee on Standards and Privileges by the Permanent Secretary is not much better. It amazes me that diplomats who provide what the Permanent Secretary described to the Foreign Affairs Committee as a Rolls-Royce service require a memo to be circulated before they realise that receiving leaked documents, circulating them, using them, keeping them and failing to return them is plain wrong. I cannot comprehend why they need a memo to tell them that.
There is one thing about the evidence from the officials that does not surprise me. It does not surprise me to read in the report that they cannot remember when the leaked document arrived, they do not know how many copies were made, and they are not sure why they took weeks to tell the Foreign Secretary. Such a shambles led to the Sierra Leone report itself. The shambles revealed this afternoon led the Chairman of the Committee, my hon. Friend--if I may call him that--the Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson), to issue a stout and utterly convincing defence of himself against more shambles from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Mr. David Heath:
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. Before he leaves the subject of the evidence from the permanent secretary, has he read the evidence on page 17 of the report in answer to the questions from the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams)? There the permanent secretary seems to be advancing the proposition that Select Committees should not concern themselves with the way in which a Department has handled affairs of state, only with what it might do in the future. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that is an extraordinary position for a permanent secretary to adopt?
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