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Independent Expert Panel

I rise only briefly, as an observer rather than a participant. As I pointed out a minute ago, the Standards Committee has no role in this, though we were consulted about the shape of the final process that should adjudicate the appeal cases in the ICGS scheme and we took an interest in what the character of the panel should be. I am personally very pleased that it reflects the necessary juridical expertise for assessing evidence and balancing the arguments about what rules mean and how this should be properly and independently assessed.

I think it is important for a member of the Standards Committee to convey to the House the disquiet of the Committee that this was taken out of our hands, but also for me to explain why I think that it was right, in the end, to take it out of our hands and why I voted for that. What was evident, not just from the Cox report but from the conversations with many staff in the House service, and conversations amongst MPs, was that the people whose complaints were stifled and ignored for so many years were left with no faith in the ability of MPs to mark their own homework—our ability to adjudicate on ourselves.

I have to tell the House that I find the cases that come before us about the breach of our own code extraordinarily difficult. It is the most testing and miserable task—to find myself having to make decisions about people I know, many of whom I know well and like. Personally, I will be looking at how the panel works, because our system for adjudicating our own code—the House of Commons code of conduct—is rather unsatisfactory, for the reason I have just described, and it may well be that the experience of this far more prestigious, objective and professional panel offers us a better way of adjudicating our own code.

I reiterate that we are conducting our own inquiry into the revision of the code of conduct, which is long overdue and has been interrupted by several general elections in recent years. We are doing a comprehensive trawl of options and considering how our own code intersects with the ICGS, with the ministerial code and with the codes of political parties. Members of Parliament are subject to many codes. The public are very confused, and have either no interest or no confidence in the systems, which overlap and conflict with each other, that we have created for the various roles that people adopt in this Parliament. We have a very big task—to reduce that confusion. There is, indeed, a lot of confusion amongst right hon. and hon. Members who do not understand how these things work.

So there needs to be a much higher level of engagement and understanding and a simplification and clarification, and that is what we are working on now. I hope that we will learn from the work of the panel, and if the panel is a success, we may well learn some very positive lessons.

4.2 pm