| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
3 pm
Sir George Young: The shadow of the guillotine is beginning to fall over our debate, so I will not follow up the very interesting speech of the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen), with whom I agree about many parliamentary matters, but focus on issues that directly concern the Committee on Standards and Privileges and enforcement.
I want to pick up the comment of my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood), who said that the aspect of the Bill that we are considering is not the problem. The problem has not been the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards and the Standards and Privileges Committee. We operate downstream, and the problems have been upstream, with processing and making claims. We do not process claims; we process complaints, and I believe that that part of the system has operated well.
The system was set up some 14 or 15 years ago—it is tried and tested and has been improved. The House has been well served by Philip Mawer and now by John Lyon. The Committee on which I serve has tried to operate the rules of the House dispassionately and fairly. In his evidence to the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which is now sitting, Anthony King said that that part of the system works quite well. Clause 8 would dismantle it at breakneck speed and try to replace it. By doing that at speed, one may not get it right.
The Government are trying to fetter the discretion of the Standards and Privileges Committee because they believe that the tariffs that we have operated are not
tough enough. In the speech that the Leader of the House made a few days ago, she referred to the long time that had elapsed since someone was expelled. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) did not make it clear that the Standards and Privileges Committee simply makes recommendations on the tariff to the House. It is open to any Member and to the Government to amend the tariffs recommended by the Standards and Privileges Committee if they think that they are too lenient or too tough.
I believe that we could achieve some of the Government’s objectives, not by dismantling the machinery, but by re-examining the tariff. If there is a general view that we are not being tough enough, we can tackle that without the proposed paraphernalia.
Mr. Walker: When a Member is suspended, even for as little as two weeks, that can effectively end their political career, as happened only recently.
Sir George Young: All we have are our reputations, which can be destroyed by a critical report from my Committee. That has happened many times. The reputational hit is not fully understood outside the House.
Clause 8 tries to make the Standards and Privileges Committee the agent of an outside body. The moment we do that, we run into all sorts of difficulties, which the Clerk of the House identified in his memorandum. One cannot make us the agent of an outside body, as subsection (2) would do, without running into all the constitutional difficulties that we outlined.
Amendment 32, which my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan) tabled, would remove IPSA’s power to recommend to my Committee the application of a particular sanction. For that, it substitutes a power to refer its findings to the Committee. That would broadly replicate the current position, whereby the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards reports his findings to the Standards and Privileges Committee, which then determines the appropriate sanction. I support that amendment because it replicates, as far as possible, the current position. I remind the House that my Committee has said that it would be prepared to have lay members serving on it if that helped solve the problem that the Government identified of our being somehow out of touch with the outside world.
Amendment 12 would remove the provision that allows the new commissioner to conduct an investigation into a case that is simultaneously the subject of criminal proceedings—the hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) made a point about that—while leaving in place the provision that allows him to carry out an investigation into a case that has already been the subject of such proceedings. That is crucial. We cannot have a position whereby a Member is subject to competing jurisdictions for the same offence. He cannot have his collar felt by the Metropolitan police and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards at the same time.
Perhaps I can leave the amendments that the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell) has tabled to him to consider. I have some sympathy with amendment 19, which deletes subsection (6). That would deal with the problem that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield outlined. If subsection (6) is to remain, we must knock out the reference to the Speaker’s
Committee. The Committee on Standards and Privileges should be responsible for drawing up the protocol; it is nothing to do with the Speaker’s Committee, which is solely concerned with appointing and spending plans, not procedure.
I have genuine anxieties about the implications of the Bill. The way through is to follow the path laid out by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield, which avoids some of the complications that he rightly identified.
Mark Durkan: The hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) made some significant points, many of which arise in the context of clause 8. Of course, many go much further, too.
In our debates, we keep coming up against the “there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza” syndrome. We claim that we want to create an independent parliamentary standards authority, yet, at every turn, we assert the sovereignty of Parliament and say that there must be a dual control brake on anything that IPSA or an investigator might do. We need to get real. The public feel little about the sovereignty of Parliament, which we value and discuss here, but are very angry about the avarice of parliamentarians, as they perceive it and as has been represented over past months. People want to know that we will allow any independent standards authority that we create to be independent. Yes, we should ensure that there cannot be excesses and that there are limits. We must also ensure protection for Members’ rights and reputations, individually and collectively. Several sensible amendments have been tabled about that, and some are in the group that we are considering.
Mr. Gerald Howarth: We all understand the public anger, but we cannot simply have a knee-jerk reaction—I see the Justice Secretary frowning, unusually. If we understand the significance of parliamentary sovereignty and the public do not, and we knowingly impair it, we will damage hugely the interests of our constituents and our ability to serve them. It is nothing to do with protecting us, but with safeguarding the fundamental rights of the British people and our powers in this place to represent them. We must not allow the Bill to impair that fundamental principle. If we do so, we do grave damage to our constituents.
Mark Durkan:
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point. None of us wants to do damage to the sovereignty of Parliament. However, we will not help the reputation of Parliament if we respond to every measure to try to restore credibility and public confidence by simply boasting about the sovereignty of Parliament. I have heard more from some hon. Members about the sovereignty of Parliament and about standing up to the Executive and not being cowed in relation to this Bill than I heard in relation to measures such as the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, when Parliament really should have asserted itself and when a lot of people should, in good conscience, have known that something was wrong. The same goes for identity cards. I have heard people today celebrating what has happened, yet they were willing to be whipped into voting for them and all the rest of it, so let us be a bit more real about some of these issues. It seems that some people are a bit more assiduous in protecting the
sovereignty of Parliament in relation to parliamentary standards and the privileges and rights of Members than they have been in relation to the wider interests of their constituents and the citizens of the United Kingdom. So let us get real all round. It is not just the Executive who have questions to answer; all of us have questions that we should perhaps ask of ourselves and that we should answer.
Amendment 32 is sensible. The idea of the authority making recommendations and just giving them to the Standards and Privileges Committee on a hand-me-down basis seems crude and excessive. Amendment 32 would deal with that, thereby obviating the need for amendments 17 and 65, which would seem to be sensible. Some of the other amendments, however, I am not so sure about. Amendment 34 would mean leaving out clause 8(4), which would in turn mean leaving out subsection (5). I do not know that it would be right to leave those two subsections out. There would then be a hole in the procedures and a hole in the Bill, although some fine-tuning may still be needed.
Mr. Grieve: It is very simple: if the hon. Gentleman reads the report of the Select Committee on Justice, he will see that everything after clause 8(4) does nothing to add to the regulatory powers of IPSA, but everything to undermine the independence of this House. By taking out one, the rest fall down like a domino, and that is why it should go.
Mark Durkan: That is also why, if people think that we have to be cautious, because the legislation has been brought forward in haste, I would be cautious about demolishing parts of it in haste. We need to consider whether we are getting the tuning of the Bill exactly right.
Sir Robert Smith (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (LD): I can understand the hon. Gentleman’s caution. In particular, he was right to remind the House of the importance of the independent handling of expenses, salaries and finances. However, if we are cautious about what we allow to go through in the Bill, so that it focuses on that core function, but then decide after more consideration that there are other functions or ways in which we want to go further, that is surely safer than allowing things to creep through in the Bill that are dangerous or have risks attached, and then repenting at leisure as we try to sort them all out.
Mark Durkan: I fully agree. Indeed, I have supported a number of amendments and, even in this bunch, there are a number that I would support and some that, if adopted, would make the need for others disappear. However, I worry that some of the amendments would go so far as to leave a significant hole in the Bill. That might provide a site for which planning permission could be given to do more things in relation to other issues. However, I would prefer to hear from the Justice Secretary or the Deputy Leader of the House before drawing those full conclusions.
On clause 8(6), we definitely need some provisions in respect of a protocol, but I believe that subsection (6) is wrong as drafted. I do not go as far as the hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve), in saying that it is a recipe for disaster or that the sky will fall, in the way that he colourfully suggested it would. However, perhaps we have all missed something. Perhaps we
should have amended subsection (6), so that it said that IPSA and the Speaker’s Committee or the Standards and Privileges Committee would seek to agree protocols with “the following”. Instead, subsection (6) says that IPSA will prepare a statement or a protocol on how “the following” will work together. That means not just how “the following” will work with IPSA and somebody else, but how “the following” will work together. It therefore seems that something needs to be done about subsection (6).
Mr. Jenkin: I will endeavour to be as brief as possible, Mrs. Heal. I beg to move amendments 65, 66, 64—
The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Sylvia Heal): Order. Perhaps I should remind the hon. Gentleman that we are actually discussing amendment 32. He can speak to those amendments, but they do not need to be moved at this point.
Mr. Jenkin: I am out of practice again, Mrs. Heal. I wish to speak to amendments 65, 66, 64 and 67, which relate to privilege and should be read in conjunction with amendment 94, which will be debated under clause 10, should we get that far.
3.15 pm
The importance of privilege was underlined by the learned Clerk in the evidence that he gave yesterday. It is well to remind ourselves of the purpose of privilege. He said:
“If there was not that freedom”
“Parliament could not...function effectively.”
“I think the traditional view in this country, the United States and a lot of other countries, is that if speech is not free in the House of Commons, it is not free anywhere...we are not unique by any means. All systems have immunities and they are recognised.”
Most importantly of all, he made it clear that
“if you start to make exceptions to parliamentary privilege for one reason or another, under one Act or another, eventually you will undermine the whole principle.”
“The earlier decisions to do this are now being adduced in support of the current proposals,”
to which the learned Clerk answered yes. That is why we should tackle the question of privilege in these debates.
Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con): Is not the short point that the only thing that stands between the people and arbitrary government is this Chamber? If we undermine the position of this House in that relationship, we open up the possibility of dictatorship, arbitrary government and misconduct in government. If we lose sight of that, we might as well give up.
Mr. Jenkin: I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. and learned Friend. I would submit that, not by virtue of the erosion of our sovereignty but by virtue of the imposition of whipping—the whipping on this Bill on the Government Benches is an example of that—the House of Commons is not losing its sovereignty, but simply giving away our influence. We should use this opportunity to wrest it back.
I support the principle of independent regulation. Indeed, I do not think that anyone speaking in this debate has suggested that we should take the principle
of independent regulation out of the Bill. The scheme that I propose with the amendments standing in my name would mean that the process of independent regulation would become privileged itself. We should put an envelope of privilege round the entirety of the Bill’s operation, with the exception of the criminal offences, which is another matter that I shall not try to address. However, the principle is that privilege should envelope the entire Bill.
Therefore, my amendment 65 proposes a new subsection (2A) of clause 8, which reads:
“Any recommendation under subsection (2)”—
I am led to understand that that would also mean any direction under subsection (1)—
“shall be deemed to be proceedings in Parliament as expressed in the Bill of Rights 1689 notwithstanding any other provisions of this Act.”
That would have the effect of making the activities under clause 8 privileged—that is, beyond question by the courts, so that they could take in evidence what Members of Parliament had said in this place, because their proceedings would be privileged. There would then be no question of any of our proceedings leaking into the jurisdiction of the courts outside Parliament. I have also proposed a similar amendment to clause 7, for debate on Report, which would mean that all investigations would be regarded as proceedings in Parliament.
My amendment 64 would remove clause 8(8). I have read subsection (8) many times, but I simply do not quite understand what it means. It seems to me to have been drafted highly ambiguously—although that probably means that parliamentary counsel are much cleverer people than I. However, even the explanatory notes say that subsection (8)
“preserves the right of the House of Commons to exercise any disciplinary powers which it may have.”
I do not know why we need to legislate in the Bill to allow a sovereign House of Commons to continue to exercise its own disciplinary powers. Why is that in the Bill?
The explanatory notes continue:
“It is not to be limited to acting only following an investigation by the Commissioner or a recommendation from the IPSA.”
If we believe that we are sovereign, how could any implication in the Bill limit what the House of Commons does? The very fact that the Government have sought to put this provision into the Bill at all underlines the weakness of their case that so much of this is justiciable: they are putting provisions in legislation to try to prevent the actions of the House from becoming justiciable and limited.
Mr. Straw: I am listening to the hon. Gentleman with some care, but if I may say so, I think he is making a bit of meal of subsection (8), which is there for clarification. That is its purpose, although I would be happy to give it further consideration, if necessary.
Mr. Garnier: I thought we were on clause 8.
Mr. Straw: I thought we were on clause 8 as well.
Mr. Jenkin: I will move on as swiftly as I can.
My amendment 67 addresses the question of what should take precedence. Even if there is, as I propose, an envelope of privilege around the entire activities of IPSA and the commissioner, there would still need to be
some means of deferring to criminal proceedings if they were in progress. It is in any case something that we do automatically on an administrative basis within the House. The amendment proposes:
“Where any criminal investigation or proceedings are concerned with the same or related matters which are the subject of an investigation by the Commissioner or of a recommendation by IPSA, the criminal investigation or proceedings shall take precedence”,
“subject to the agreement of the House of Commons Committee on Standards and Privileges”,
which should surely be the final arbiter of such a case.
Finally, I shall briefly refer to amendment 94, which I appreciate is in a different group. It would amend clause 10, and it states:
| Next Section | Index | Home Page |