Cox Report: Implementation — House of Commons, 2019-06-18
Topic: Government Operations
Andrea Jacqueline Leadsom (Conservative, Centre-right): The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I had the great pleasure of going, with my hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford), to one of the first prototypes of the Valuing Everyone training. I join him in thoroughly recommending that all colleagues undertake that training. It is quite insightful and extremely helpful Let me move on to address further points made in Alison Stanley’s report that should inform the roll-out of the responses to the Cox inquiry. Alison Stanley talks about independence. Quite often, people who want to come forward with a complaint will be concerned that they do not want it to be discussed with somebody whom they may then come across, whether in a corridor, a Select Committee or, indeed, the Terrace café. They do not want to feel that they are going to bump into the person, so the scheme’s true independence is vital, and Alison Stanley makes strong recommendations in that regard on which we should focus I wish to focus my remarks on the final point, which is about the ownership of the scheme. This goes right to the heart of what my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke and the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley said: who owns this scheme? We want to see things happen—we all say that it is not happening fast enough and ask why. The reality is that the recommendations in the Stanley report set out the problem rather than the solution. Using her best efforts, she has in effect sought to use current parliamentary processes to try to find a little scrap of accountability somewhere. I am afraid we are going to have to change that, so I shall focus on some specific recommendations First, the House of Commons Commission has struggled to tackle issues—not only this one, but others—at pace. The Commission should meet every week, not every month, and should have a much shorter, more focused agenda. The Clerk of the Commons and the director general should be voting members, not people who just sit there giving comments and are then overruled. They are clearly the two humans who are accountable for many issues, including the roll-out of this scheme and of changes to the culture, so it is right that they have a say on the House of Commons Commission The Commission’s meeting times should be fixed, and if the chair is unable to attend, as is often the case, an alternative—I suggest it should be one of the external commissioners—should step in and chair the meeting instead, rather than it being cancelled or delayed, as happens now and is often a problem for the other attendees. The minutes of House of Commons Commission meetings should be circulated promptly within a couple of days, in line with best practice in the business world, not with the agenda for the next meeting, as so often happens now On the point of the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley, MPs should be elected onto the House of Commons Commission. Colleagues are saying, "I don’t know how the House of Commons Commission works. What does it do?" The reality is that if Members were to get elected onto it, they would find out. In the House of Commons, we should be electing the members not only of the Commission, but of the Standards Committee. It should not be the case that somebody who might be dangerously independent is muzzled.