Independent Complaints and Grievance Policy — House of Commons, 2018-02-28
Topic: Mixed Topics
Bernard Christison Jenkin (Conservative, Centre-right): It is just a few months since Parliament faced a wave of allegations of bullying and sexual harassment, in an atmosphere in which it was at times hard to distinguish real and serious cases from the proliferation of accusations and rumours. It exposed the lack of a credible, transparent and robust system for addressing legitimate complaints and grievances about bullying and sexual harassment. It led to the establishment of the working group and its report, which I fully support. The report is carefully drafted and reflects a great deal of thought and discussion The working group has proposed first, the adoption of a new shared behaviour code for all who work in Parliament and its Members; and secondly, the introduction of a new independent complaints and grievance policy to underpin the behaviour code. This, not surprisingly, concentrates on creating new rules and new procedures for investigating incidents and complaints, not least to try to address the present hotch-potch of arrangements for different categories of people and the glaring gaps in the system, such as the oversight of how we MPs employ and care for our staff The working group has rightly spent a lot of its time discussing and defining what constitutes the bad behaviour that must be called out. But there is also a need to address how Parliament arrived at this situation—how a culture of tolerance towards bullying and sexual harassment has become embedded and was left substantially unchallenged until now. Very few people who come into political life and to work in Parliament—at whatever level and whatever capacity in this building—are bad people, and most are appalled by the culture that has been exposed So how have we let this happen? After all, MPs are already subject to the House of Commons code of conduct. As employers, we are already covered by employment law, and there is the Respect policy to protect staff of the House. It is clear, however, that there needs to be a wider and continuing discussion about the positive attitudes and kinds of behaviour that we want to promote in Parliament and in public life, and what the values and principles are upon which those positive attitudes and behaviours should be based The remit of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which I chair, includes oversight of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the ministerial code, the civil service code and the special advisers’ code. More broadly, much of PACAC’s work is concerned with leadership and governance in the civil service and public bodies, so we have done a lot of work on this area In December, PACAC submitted evidence to the working group, drawing on the work that PACAC has carried out in other areas. This was in the form of a letter to the Leader of the House, which she kindly acknowledged, although it was not included among the record of written submissions received by the group. I know that it was substantially discussed, and I am grateful to the hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz), the spokesman for the Opposition, for drawing attention to it, too Some of the reasons for our failures are practical and procedural, and the working group has made great strides to address these. However, it is also clear that there is confusion among MPs and others about what behaviour should be subject to public scrutiny and what should be regarded as entirely private. As we argued in our submission to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards’ review of the House of Commons code of conduct last year, this confusion is not resolved by our current Commons code—far from it. PACAC set out the fundamental ambiguity about whether our Commons code of conduct was intended to function as a set of principles governing the whole of Members’ behaviour, which would naturally extend, to a degree, into the private sphere of MPs’ conduct, or simply as a set of regulations, mostly about financial disclosures, relating only to an MP’s public role. The 2015 code states that it does not seek to regulate what Members do in their private and personal lives, yet it is clear from the recent controversies that it is not always possible to keep the two as separate as many of us would like The risk now is that the new behaviour code will again be mainly concerned with rules and regulations and new enforcement procedures, but if that is just patched on to the present system, which has manifestly failed on at least one of its main objectives—to promote public confidence in the standards we observe in Parliament—we should not be surprised if problems continue to arise. The working group is right to promote a system of training to support the new code—there might be problems with persuading some colleagues that they should be subject to the training, as I will come to; it is easy to put such a thing in a document, but there might be practicalities when it comes to persuading colleagues to participate—but what about extending that to training about what the seven principles of public life actually mean in the lives of all public figures in this place?