Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
SIR PHILIP
MAWER
28 FEBRUARY 2008
Q20 Paul Flynn: I know he did.
Sir Philip Mawer: I do not think
it is particularly important for me to express a view on whether
he should or not. The fact is he did.
Q21 Paul Flynn: But, subsequently,
he was found to have no connection with the incident, if you recall.
Sir Philip Mawer: There is an
important issue which lies behind your question, which I do think
it is important for the Committee to reflect upon, and, indeed,
I think it is one that has concerned you in the past, which is
whether there can be for ministers something of the equivalent
of the yellow card, as opposed to the red card. I think a particular
problem in terms of penalties for ministers for alleged wrongdoing
is that, whenever an allegation is made, the immediate cry from
the press and, inevitably, from their political opponents is that
ministers resign. If your question is implying that it would be
in the real interests of politicians of all parties to find something
short of the red card, short of resignation as a penalty in appropriate
cases, then I support that notion. I think it is a matter which
will have to be addressed as my role unfolds.
Q22 Paul Flynn: The Prime Minister
is likely to be more sensitive than to react with a fire storm
of attacks in the press against a minister than you would be.
What role would you have in that situation, given what we have
seen recently? In the last week or so we have seen attacks on
certain politicians, whether they are based on truth or reason,
or whether they are hysterical. As I say, the Prime Minister is
more likely to act in a political way to ensure---. There was
a rule laid down by Peter Mandelson himself that said, if you
were the subject of the news for more than five days, you would
have to go. That does not seem to be either fair or appropriate.
Sir Philip Mawer: I think, frankly,
both ministers, or politicians, if I may say so, and the press
have some responsibility in this area. The press do not get into
these matters without some cause for doing so. Politicians have
to look at their own behaviour and not give, as it were, a reason
for the press to become interested in the first place. But the
press can, in their treatment of these matters, be disproportionate
and, frankly, dishonest on occasion. If I could take a parliamentary
example: I strongly deprecate the way in which the press will
wrap up all of a Member's expenses, which are paying for staff
and all the rest of it, into a Member's alleged take-home pay.
It is a bit of dishonest journalism, frankly, when that kind of
thing happens. However, that does not avoid the fact that there
are problems in the area of MPs' allowances and they need resolving.
Q23 Paul Flynn: Dishonest journalism—that
is a shocking idea. We will try to digest that. The revolving
doors, which is something ministers and civil servants are very
concerned about. We have many examples of ministers who serve
in a department and then, within months of leaving that department,
we find them working for companies to whom they have awarded large
contracts when they were ministers and receiving very large salaries.
Do you have any responsibility for looking after former ministers
or making judgments on the conduct of former ministers and, if
you do not, should you have it?
Sir Philip Mawer: My understanding
is that my remit will extend to serving ministers. There is the
separate Advisory Board, as you will know—you interviewed
witnesses from it last week—and there is, clearly, a separate
inquiry which you are pursuing in that context. My understanding
is that my remit will relate to serving ministers not former ministers,
that is, in my independent adviser role.
Q24 Paul Flynn: In the last few months
there has been a collapse of confidence in politicians, in the
political system, a more serious one, I think, than possibly many
MPs would like to acknowledge. Do you think the existence of your
post and what you do will do something to restore that trust?
Sir Philip Mawer: I hope so. I
would not be doing it if I thought otherwise. I think, though,
the question of trust in politicians is a deep-seated one. It
has far more aspects than just whether effective regulation is
in place. We touched on a couple earlier. One is the behaviour
of politicians themselves; one is the behaviour of the press in
their treatment of these matters. Another, frankly, is that you
are swimming against centuries, if not millennia, of suspicion
of politicians. I think it was Aesop who said, "We hang the
petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."
This is a recurrent theme and perhaps one that is particularly
strong in a society which is cynical about institutions, from
the monarchy downwards.
Q25 Paul Flynn: You are not at all
cynical after the years in your job?
Sir Philip Mawer: No, my view
is that most people go into politics because they want to make
the world a better place; they do so out of a sense of public
service. Of course, a very few, a very small minority, bend the
rules or attempt to take advantage of them, but, frankly, they
are no different in that from those I have come across in any
other walk of life. And this is what the public needs to recognise
too, because trust at the end of the day is a quality of a two-way
relationship, a relationship between governors and governed, as
it were, between representative governors and governed, and just
as politicians need to demonstrate that they deserve trust, so
the public, at end of the day, have to be willing to give trust;
they have to be willing to grant it and recognise that politicians
deserve to be given some freedom to make decisions and, just occasionally,
indeed, to make mistakes. Even politicians, I would like to suggest,
are not beyond redemption.
Paul Flynn: That is very reassuring.
Thank you very much. I am grateful to you.
Q26 Mr Prentice: You told Paul a
few moments ago that you have been thinking, although it is very
early days now, about penalties, that if there is a ministerial
transgression, the cry goes up for that person to resign, and
you mentioned, I think, perhaps there should be a yellow card.
Do you have any early views on that? What form would the yellow
card take? Would it be a suspension: you cannot attend the Cabinet
for a month, or something? What do you have in mind?
Sir Philip Mawer: Clearly sending
the man off the field or the woman off the field for a short while,
I think, is not an option.
Q27 Mr Prentice: Fining them?
Sir Philip Mawer: It is more difficult
in the case of ministers, clearly, to work out a kind of tariff
of penalties equivalent to the kind of tariff that exists in the
House, but, clearly, one possible approach for very minor breaches
of the code is for the minister concerned to come to the House
and make a personal statement, a personal apology, and be answerable
to the House, not just as in constitutional theory but in practice,
for what they have done in that respect. But, clearly, if an offence
is such as to cast doubt on the credibility of a minister in the
role, then that makes such an approach difficult. I have not got
the answers in this area.
Q28 Mr Prentice: But you are working
on it?
Sir Philip Mawer: It is not for
me, it is for the Prime Minister to work out what the tariff should
be, but I do think that it is in everybody's interests to try
to work out something falling short of the red card on every occasion:
because the trouble with that is that it simply feeds the public
view that all these people are guilty and need to be turfed out
at the earliest opportunity.
Q29 Mr Prentice: I think an apology
to the House of Commons would keep them all on their toes, would
it not?
Sir Philip Mawer: I am always
in favour of not just observing the constitution in theory but
in practice.
Q30 Julie Morgan: To go back to you
in this role, you talked earlier, saying you were attracted by
ethical values. Is it your ethical values that attracted you to
the job?
Sir Philip Mawer: I have a background,
as you may know, in public service and also in the service of
the church, and those two strands in my life—serving politicians,
ministers, of both main parties, governments of both main parties,
and an interest in ethical issues—came together in my last
role, and I see them as informing the role as I go forward, the
new role. I see, looking back, a thread of continuity. I hope
I am not mistaken in that.
Q31 Julie Morgan: In answer to Paul's
question, you said that the Prime Minister approached you to do
this job.
Sir Philip Mawer: Yes.
Q32 Julie Morgan: What is your personal
relationship with the Prime Minister?
Sir Philip Mawer: I knew Gordon
Brown when I was a student at Edinburgh University because we
overlapped there as students. He was editor of the Student Newspaper
when I was Senior President of the Student Representative Council.
As editor, I think he saw his job as being to make my life as
President as difficult as possible. That was certainly how I viewed
it—nothing new there in the relationship between journalists
and politicians—and so we knew each other but we were not
friends, it will follow from that.
Q33 Mr Prentice: Are you friends
now?
Sir Philip Mawer: I would not
describe us as friends. Since university days I have met him only
a couple of times in the street; so acquaintances, yes, with a
past shared history, but social friends, no.
Q34 Julie Morgan: Do you feel sufficiently
independent from him to operate?
Sir Philip Mawer: Absolutely.
I would not have taken the job on if I had had any reservation
about that at all.
Q35 Julie Morgan: Do you do any other
job?
Sir Philip Mawer: I am a non-executive
director of a small insurance company, which I have rejoined following
my departure from the House. It is called the Ecclesiastical Insurance
Group, and it principally insures churches, schools, and the like,
and it does not have independent shareholders; it is owned by
a trust.
Q36 Julie Morgan: Did you consider
continuing with your previous job with this new job at all?
Sir Philip Mawer: That was not
for me to decide. I think there is an issue for the House and,
indeed, for the Government as to whether the same person could
be both Parliamentary Commissioner and Independent Adviser to
the Prime Minister. It would certainly require two reporting lines
and I am not sure whether the House authorities, for example,
would regard it as proper for someone who was essentially an officer
of the House, as the Parliamentary Commissioner, also to be an
appointee of the Prime Minister in a different capacity. I do
not know what their view on that would be, but it is a question
which someone would have to address if they thought they were
going to bring these two roles together. I do hope, as I said,
that the one I did here will inform the one I am now doing. I
think in the initial stages, and I regard it as the initial stages,
not just in terms of my own tenure but that of Sir John Bourn
too—we are still getting our way into forming and shaping
this role—it is rather important that one can focus on it
pretty fully. Indeed, one of my aims is to try to get systems
and processes in place which will allow it then to become an accepted
part of our overall regulatory framework and enable it to continue,
not necessarily with the same person in place but to continue
as a piece of machinery into the future, whatever the political
colour of the particular government.
Q37 Julie Morgan: How many staff
have you got or will you have?
Sir Philip Mawer: I do not have
a dedicated staff of my own. I am working with the Propriety and
Ethics Team in the Cabinet Office, and that makes sense, because
they are the people who are in daily touch with permanent secretaries
about these issues, and so I am being supported and serviced from
there. In its advice capacity, it is not a full-time job, not
by any means. Of course, if and when inquiries are called for,
I expect the time demand to increase very significantly indeed,
and one thing I am trying to do in my personal life is to keep
enough capacity to cope with that if and when it happens. As far
as staffing an inquiry is concerned, I will look to be supported
by staff from the Cabinet Office, bringing in such other expertise
from within or outside government as is necessary.
Q38 Julie Morgan: So the staff in
the Cabinet Office do not work for you; they have got other jobs
and come to you at specific times?
Sir Philip Mawer: They come to
me with problems; they come to me with issues. For example, since
my arrival in the job I have gone through all the returns from
ministers of their personal interests. As you know, ministers
are required to make returns which are more wide-ranging than
those which are made by Members of Parliament, because they carry
executive as well as parliamentary responsibilities, and so I
have been through all those, looked at them alongside the particular
responsibilities of each minister, raised questions where I thought
that they needed raising in terms of clarifying facts, raised
questions where I thought there was the potential for a problem
or possible conflict and transmitted that. That advice has been
sent back by the Propriety and Ethics Team to the permanent secretary
of the department concerned. So, one of my tasks, as I see it,
is both to challenge and support. It is to challenge, in the sense
of probing and asking sensible questions as the reasonable outsider,
if you like, about these issues; it is also to support the civil
servants in the dialogue that they have with ministers about these
issues. It may be on occasion—it has not happened yet—it
will be necessary for me to go and see a minister and talk to
them and talk them through an issue. It is that kind of walking
alongside role, as I see it, but not walking in the pocket of,
walking as a critical friend, if you like, that is the advice
function; and in the investigative function, of course, one is
an investigator. One has to be clear about the distinction between
the two roles.
Q39 Julie Morgan: Are you a civil
servant?
Sir Philip Mawer: I was many years
ago.
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