• Ruxandra Serban, (25 June 2026), Are there too many Urgent Questions in the House of Commons? (Hansard Society blog)

• Tim Bale, Eyes and ears, and potentially so much more: the role of parliamentary private secretary to the prime minister—a case study, Parliamentary Affairs, 14 April 2026

• Eve Samson appointed as next Clerk of the House of Commons, press release, 29 June 2026

• Letter from the Lord Speaker to members of the Restoration and Renewal Client Board, 9 June 2026

• UK Parliament, Delivering Restoration and Renewal of the Palace of Westminster: Supplementary Information, 30 June 2026

• Belfast Telegraph podcast, Jeffrey Donaldson: Did MI5 and PSNI know of MP’s inappropriate behaviour?, 1 July 2026

• BBC Northern Ireland, Politician, Predator and Paedophile, 26 June 2026

• Lobbying Transparency (In-house Lobbyists) Bill, Introduced by Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There may consequently be minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above.

Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I’m Ruth Fox.

Mark D’Arcy: And I’m Mark D’Arcy. And coming up in this week’s episode:

Ruth Fox: Andy Burnham prepares for power and Parliament.

Mark D’Arcy: The Commons gets its first ever woman Clerk of the House.

Ruth Fox: And we talk to Labour peer Dianne Hayter about her drive to tighten the rules on lobbying.

Mark D’Arcy: But first Ruth, we are still in the weird kind of shadow zone between the end of the Keir Starmer premiership and the beginning of the Andy Burnham era that is yet to come. It doesn’t look as if anybody else from the Parliamentary Labour Party [00:01:00] is gearing up to seriously challenge the Mayor of Greater Manchester and now MP for Makerfield’s rise to 10 Downing Street. But there are all sorts of things going on that make it very interesting to watch at the moment. Not least that his administration’s beginning to take shape and we’re beginning to get hints of how he proposes to handle the whole task of Government. And perhaps the most critical move and out so far is that his Chief of Staff is going to be James Purnell, the former Culture Secretary during the Gordon Brown years who resigned in an attempt to defenestrate Gordon Brown, gosh now, what, 16, 17 years ago. He’s coming back as Chief of Staff having had all sorts of major jobs outside Parliament, not least in the BBC. And he’s going to be the ringmaster of Andy Burnham’s governing operation. And Chief of Staff is a relatively new thing in the prime ministerial world, I think. But it is something that’s absolutely critical to the way Downing Street has operated, at least since Tony Blair.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Well of course, I [00:02:00] suppose the role started really, didn’t it, in the Blair Government with Jonathan Powell taking the role as Chief of Staff with ability to direct civil servants at that time. It was quite controversial at the time, but he was highly respected for the way he handled that role. And I think he was Chief of Staff throughout the entirety of the Blair years, which, when you think about it, is a quite extraordinary length of time, particularly when you compare it to Keir Starmer’s ability to churn through them. But I think interestingly about James Purnell, speaking to a few people in Westminster this week, it has calmed a few nerves I think, about how the administration at the centre might operate because he’s seen as a serious figure. But the interesting thing about him, of course, is as you say, he’s got experience as an MP, he’s got experience as a minister, and he’s got serious experience outside Westminster. So he comes with that ability to understand the legislative process, understand the policy-making process. He’s a close friend of Andy Burnham’s, [00:03:00] but people say he’s not the type of figure who’s going to be unwilling to speak truth to power. And that ability to say no, perhaps sometimes, or to question, will be vitally important. But also that ability to understand the relationship with his parliamentarians will be....

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. And knowing what parliamentarians go through when there’s a controversy and you are being peppered with emails the whole time and furious calls from constituents and duffed up on social media, whatever it is. He will have had some of those experiences in his time. And you mentioned Jonathan Powell, the Chief of Staff for Tony Blair’s very long term as premier. He’s an example of what happens when things go right in the operation around the Prime Minister, and Keir Starmer’s premiership is an example of what goes wrong when the system around him isn’t working effectively. Because if you think back to the start of the Starmer years, and there’ve only been two of them, there was a long period where infighting inside the court of King Keir between Sue Gray, who was initially his Chief of Staff, and Morgan [00:04:00] McSweeney, who had been his kind of political guru, seemed to paralyse Government for quite a prolonged period. And that was only resolved by Sue Gray being extruded from the system in the end. Andy Burnham can’t afford missteps like that. Time is running out for this Government. We’re halfway through its term now. If he wants to get anything useful done, this system has to work from the get go.

Ruth Fox: Yes. The other figure to think about who I think will have some influence on the tone and the culture of the operation of Burnham’s premiership is Tessa Jowell, the late Tessa Jowell. Don’t underestimate the extent to which both James Purnell and Andy Burnham cut their political teeth with her in her office as advisers when she was Culture Secretary. When she was Culture Secretary, she encouraged them to go into frontline politics and become MPs. A lot of current MPs worked for her. She encouraged their careers, her almost consensual cross-party, optimistic, [00:05:00] empathetic style of politics, I think, they all learnt at her feet and they admire her greatly. Anybody who worked with Tessa Jowell always admired her, and I think that will influence how they pursue politics in a different way. And interestingly, earlier this week when Andy Burnham gave his speech in Manchester, his first sinse it became clear that this leadership bid was now in train following the by-election, he talked about how the Westminster he experienced last week when he first arrived ,and he’s been holding meetings with small groups of MPs, he talked about Westminster having become a fragmented and disjointed place compared to when he was here 10 years ago. I think that’s going to be important and that operation therefore in Downing Street, in the parliamentary management of it, is going to be critical. And they can’t afford to, they haven’t got time, can’t afford to have those divisions at the heart of the Downing Street operation.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, he’s absolutely got to get things right from the start. And a big part of that is making sure that the Parliamentary Labour Party goes [00:06:00] along with whatever it is he’s going to do. We don’t really know what his policy proposals are going to be and how hard edge they are and whether the PLP, the Labour MPs, might find some of them rather difficult to swallow. If he goes into the area of welfare cuts that have certainly be some level of resistance, I would suspect. There’s also the immigration proposals emanating from the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who’s generally expected to keep her job as Home Secretary, and there’s already resistance building up to that. Neil Duncan-Jordan, who turned up on the pod a few months back, is someone who’s already put down a motion criticising some of her proposals on immigration. So there are issues boiling around there, and how that is handled by the Downing Street machine is going to be very, very important. If you think back to the Boris Johnson years, when Dominic Cummings was in charge, his open contempt for most MPs, and indeed most ministers, was such that I think it coloured the way that they attempted to manage Parliament and possibly undermined their attempts at parliamentary management because the contempt was so sweeping and so searing. So [00:07:00] getting that right from the start requires not only an interesting appointment as Chief Whip, I mean who they choose from that is going to be fairly critical, but also the Prime Minister’s direct parliamentary links, his Parliamentary Private Secretaries, who are they going to be? Because those can be very big figures in the Government as well.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Because if you remember a few months back, we did talk about this, didn’t we, in terms of the Starmer operation, that one of the big weaknesses that’s undermined his parliamentary management is the fact that, frankly, with no disrespect to the individuals concerned, the Parliamentary Private Secretaries he’s had have not been highly experienced politicians and parliamentarians. If you compare them to the kinds of PPSs, the Parliamentary Private Secretaries that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had, they were just less experienced, I suspect less able to be the eyes and ears that a more experienced politician would be. And also, if you think about Tony Blair for example, he had, we mentioned this on the podcast when we discussed it last time, he had Bruce Grocott, my old boss as well. Bruce used to be chair of the Hansard [00:08:00] Society. And Bruce was not somebody who shared Tony Blair’s politics on everything. And he was a useful sounding board. But he was also, particularly if you read Alastair Campbell’s diaries, he talks about Bruce being the useful person who would sit in the room and question and say, are you sure about that? Or, this is going to go down like a lead balloon on the PLP, or that ability to understand how these issues are going to be interpreted and land with the parliamentary party. And the party outside as well.

Mark D’Arcy: So you need experienced figures who’ve got good antennae who can see when something is going to be trouble, and who have the ability to speak truth to power. They don’t have to be ideological clones of the Prime Minister. In fact, it’s a very bad idea for a Prime Minister to completely surround themselves with people who are their own ideological clones. You don’t want groupthink. You need to realise that you’ve got a very diverse group of opinions in any parliamentary party, of any party. So you’ve got to be able to embrace those, understand them, and see where those people [00:09:00] are going to go.

Ruth Fox: In Margaret Thatcher’s time they say that the Conservative MP Ian Gow, who was her Parliamentary Private Secretary in the early years, they say that the management of her relationship with the parliamentary Conservative Party was never as good once, of course, he had gone.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. He was famously described as being the most important man in the Government.

Ruth Fox: Yes. There’s an excellent piece in our journal, Parliamentary Affairs, by Professor Tim Bale, academic expert on the Conservative Party. And he’s got a piece out, actually at the moment, we’ll put it in the show notes for listeners, about the role of the Parliamentary Private Secretary, its importance, and particularly what you can kind of learn from how Ian Gow managed that. So, really interesting. And of course, Angela Smith, now Leader of the House of Lords for the Labour Party in Cabinet. She was Parliamentary Private Secretary for a number of years for Gordon Brown.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, indeed. These are influential people who can go on to have quite serious ministerial careers of their own, in some cases. Sometimes they just stay at the PPS level, and [00:10:00] that’s where they actually have real power. But that’s one side of the operation there. The other side, of course, is, what happens when the Government reshapes itself under Andy Burnham, because inevitably some people are going to be in, and some people are going to be out. So the act of appointing a whole slew of Burnham allies to the Cabinet is going to mean that there’s a sort of legion of the dispossessed. The Starmer allies, presumably, who no longer have the plum ministerial post they previously enjoyed. And there’s quite a list of people that Andy Burnham is presumably going to have to shoehorn into his Government, mostly at Cabinet level, I would think. Angela Rayner, the second coming of Angela Rayner. Lucy Powell, the former Leader of the House who was extruded from the Government a while ago. Wes Streeting, who resigned. Al Carns, who resigned. John Healey, who resigned. All of those may be invited back into Government. If you look back a little further, and you’ve also got Louise Haigh, who’s been a very close ally of Andy Burnham, heavily involved in the running of the by-election campaign. And I dare [00:11:00] say she’s at least expecting to be brought back, and I think most people around Andy Burnham seem to expect him to bring her back. So quite a lot of personnel change in the Cabinet creating, all right, some close allies around that table, but also creating some fairly well known figures who are suddenly finding themselves back on the backbenchers or reduced to...

Ruth Fox: Demoted to junior ministerial ranks.

Mark D’Arcy: So that’s always a management problem. Because as we know, people bank the favours they’re given as no more than their due, while the people you’ve taken things away from nurture bitter resentment ever after.

Ruth Fox: What do they say? The parliamentary party: a mix of the possessed, the dispossessed, and the never possessed.

Mark D’Arcy: I always wonder what sense of the word possessed is being employed, but never mind.

Ruth Fox: Leave that to listeners’ imagination. One assumes, in a lot of the debate and the media coverage, one assumes that the discussion is really pivotal around who is going to be your Chancellor. And this is where that question of how are they going to deal [00:12:00] with the Defence budget comes in, because you can’t bring in John Healey as Chancellor of the Exchequer if you’re not going to deal with the Defence.

Mark D’Arcy: Bring him back as Defence Secretary or give Al Carns the job, or otherwise bring him into a Government that he’s previously resigned from because it wasn’t doing enough about Defence. Yes. So some of those people come with a health warning attached to them.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So you’ve got to answer those questions before determining who’s going to be your Chancellor. There’s obviously an awful lot of discussion about whether it will be Ed Miliband, whether they’ll bring somebody in, Pat McFadden possibly, somebody. They’re looking at the markets, they’re looking at the Parliamentary Labour Party, they’re looking at the Labour Party in the country. They’re looking at what other sort of challenges have they got in terms of policy. You know, if you bring in Ed Miliband, does that mean that we’re still going hell for leather for Net Zero? How does that affect policy in terms of being more business friendly? So there’s an awful lot of issues, questions that they are going to have to answer fairly quickly because that is going to affect who they [00:13:00] choose.

Mark D’Arcy: And Ed Miliband is a particularly interesting case here, because of course, Ed Miliband’s pedigree is that for a very long time, he was a Special Adviser to Gordon Brown at a time when Gordon Brown was functioning as the virtual co-Prime Minister to Tony Blair. And it was very striking in the Gordon Brown years when he came to do his Budgets, the great Titanic unstoppable announcements that rolled on and on in which he would, for example, say that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education will have more to say about how they’re going to spend this enormous sum of money I’ve just allocated to their department, or my right honourable friend the Health Secretary will explain how these billions are to be used in a statement later on. So he would be setting himself at a level above all the other Cabinet ministers and announcing how they were going to fill in the details later for him. And that was all rather grand. Now, will Ed Miliband want to have that sort of role as a wider driver of domestic policy, because having learned at Gordon Brown’s feet, maybe he wants to apply those lessons in the same way.[00:14:00]

Ruth Fox: The other question of course, is David Miliband. There’s the return, the possible return of David Miliband because can you have a Government in which Ed Miliband is chancellor and David Miliband is Foreign Secretary? I think that slightly challenging.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. The Miliband of Brothers.

Ruth Fox: Yes. But that of course then raises the question again, that we’ve talked about on the podcast in past episodes, of if David Miliband is being brought back, and it’s pure speculation at the moment, but it seems to be quite informed speculation in certain quarters of the media. And I think it’s fair to say that David Miliband would not reject a return to frontline politics in that job.

Mark D’Arcy: He’s not coming back as Minister of State for Paperclips. If you are bringing him back, it’s got to be that sort of area.

Ruth Fox: Yes. If he’s coming back, it’s almost certainly Foreign Secretary. He’s not an MP, so he would have to do it from the Lords. So he’d have to be made a member of the House of Lords. And then you get into that big question of accountability of Lords ministers to the House of Commons. And we’re back into the territory we had in [00:15:00] 2023, 2024, when David Cameron, the former Prime Minister, was appointed as Foreign Secretary in Rishi Sunak’s Government, and was never really held to account by the House of Commons, because it’s nigh on impossible.

Mark D’Arcy: I think I’m right in saying that, although the thought was that one route for accountability would be the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, he never actually appeared before it.

Ruth Fox: No, I don’t think they ever did get him. I think time ran out before the general election, but there had been attempts and I don’t recall him ever appearing before them, but if you remember, Mark, the Procedure Committee, the Speaker was particularly exercised and concerned about this because of course, foreign affairs, the situation in Ukraine, the situation with Russia, the relationship with America, it’s all so important at the moment, international issues, dominating politics.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, there’s a recent analysis on the Hansard Society website by Ruxandra Serban, who we’ve had on this, podcast before, looking at the number of urgent questions asked to different departments, and the Foreign Office tops the league by miles.

Ruth Fox: Absolutely. So the Speaker then was concerned [00:16:00] about accountability of David Cameron to the Commons. He’s going to be just as concerned now. He requested the Procedure Committee to look at this, and indeed they did. We submitted evidence to it. We basically said, look, if this is going to happen, then why not have the Foreign Secretary from the Lords come in for urgent questions, for ministerial statements, or for relevant debates? They don’t vote in the House of Commons. Of course not. They’re not entitled to do. They don’t stay in for any other non foreign affairs related business. They’re out, he has to leave. But where it is relevant, why not have them come into the House and answer the questions? Because the reality is otherwise the only option available is scrutiny by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Now I think that’s even more difficult today than it was in the last parliament because Labour’s majority means that they’ve got seven of the 11 seats on the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Mark D’Arcy: The other parties don’t get much a look at.

Ruth Fox: So there’s two Lib Dems, there’s two Conservatives. So the minor parties [00:17:00] have got no ability to ask a question of the Foreign Secretary in those circumstances at all, which to my mind just doesn’t seem right. But also you’re talking about scrutiny by 11 MPs. There’s an awful lot of other backbenchers who might have things to say, including other select committee chairs with relevant policy intersection with foreign affairs matters: business and trade, for example, just to give one example, or environmental audit, talking about net zero and international implications, carbon budgets and whatever. So it’s quite limiting. And we just said the easiest way is just to allow the Foreign Secretary in on a limited basis for certain types of business and then they leave.

Mark D’Arcy: The objection to that though is that it makes it far too easy for governments to appoint senior ministers to the House of Lords with a little bit of a chance to question in the Commons, and it’s just too easy then for large chunks of the Cabinet not really to be in the Commons. And that cuts MPs’ influence and you’re getting more towards an American-style separation of powers with an executive distinct from the [00:18:00] legislature. And do we want to go that way? And certainly do we want to go that way without ever really debating it and treating it just as a matter of procedure? When David Cameron was appointed Foreign Secretary, the mechanisms that were put in place to allow him to be scrutinised were a bespoke Lords question time, and giving him a reasonably high powered Commons deputy in the form of Andrew Mitchell as his deputy minister in the Foreign Office, who would take questions. And being a former Cabinet minister himself, a former Development Secretary, he was well versed in a lot of foreign affairs issues. So he was a pretty effective locum for the Foreign Secretary themselves. But it’s not an ideal situation. And if Andy Burnham were to decide to go down this road, I think there would be problems, not least, I don’t think the Labour Party’s all that keen on very grand ministers being in the Lords rather than the Commons, much less so than the Conservatives.

Ruth Fox: Yes. You can see an advantage. The Foreign Secretary in the Lords wouldn’t have constituency responsibilities. And it’s undoubtedly an issue that an MP who becomes Foreign [00:19:00] Secretary who’s got to fly off around the world to all these international meetings and engagements, it’s unavoidable, it is much more challenging if you’ve then got a constituency, and of course if you’ve got a constituency with a very small majority that you need to nurture. So you can see the advantages of it. The Procedure Committee’s approach was to say, we don’t want to encourage any of this. We don’t think this should happen, and we would prefer not to do anything that would set a precedent and encourage future Prime Ministers to make more of these appointments, so we think the Foreign Secretary should answer questions from the bar of the House. Now I described in our evidence to the committee that idea of the Foreign Secretary coming in and standing at the bar of the House, which you never see, I described it I think as ridiculous. And indeed the Procedure Committee went for that option. But the Government rejected that notion out of hand, which I can quite understand.

Mark D’Arcy: I do wonder if there’s some kind of halfway house where maybe the Foreign Secretary might be questionable [00:20:00] in the Grand Committee room or something and any MP could come along and ask him questions there and doubtless it would get televised. But it seems to me it’s that there’s still all these problems there with it. Now, David Cameron went straight into the House of Lords. Might David Miliband try for a parliamentary seat? It’s a pretty dangerous business to get someone to stand down to bring him in. And what happens if there’s a by-election and he loses? Anybody remember Patrick Gordon Walker? Almost nobody is the short answer to that, but he was intended to be Harold Wilson’s Foreign Secretary when Labour came in in 1964, lost his seat to a somewhat disreputable campaign in that general election, was made Foreign Secretary anyway, tried to come back into the Commons via an engineered by-election, lost again and then had to resign.

Ruth Fox: It’s all very messy

Mark D’Arcy: And his career didn’t really recover from that.

Ruth Fox: And we’ve been in the territory for the last couple of years of saying that Labour MPs have not been able to win by-elections. It’s that bad. So Andy Burnham has, by winning the by-election, this is why he is in the position he’s in.

Mark D’Arcy: Broken the spell.

Ruth Fox: And in the [00:21:00] nicest possible way, and I have a great deal of time and respect for David Miliband, in the nicest possible way, I don’t think he’s quite the character of Andy Burnham, man of the people. And he’s been out of the UK for 10 years. Working for the International Rescue Committee in New York?

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, that’s right. So it’s a mega international aid charity and it’s kept him in the foreign affairs world, to be sure. But it’s a very difficult thing to come straight back into full on democratic politics having been out of it for so long. So it would be a risk to put him to a by-election, but then it’s a risk to just teleport him into the Lords and teleport him into the Foreign Office.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So I think two things, Andy, if you’re listening to this podcast or if any of your aides are.

Mark D’Arcy: And indeed David.

Ruth Fox: You’re going to need a strong number two, a big hitter in the Commons if you’re not going to be accountable to the Commons as we would like. But the alternative is, do something radical, do something a bit different, bring the Foreign Secretary into the Commons to answer the questions and then kick him out back to the [00:22:00] Lords when the questions are over.

Mark D’Arcy: Now the other thing that we know about Andy Burnham’s emerging plans for the governance of Britain when he takes office, and I think it’s now when rather than if, to be honest, is that he wants to have a kind of northern node of Downing Street, a Downing Street North based in his home city of Manchester. We are not entirely sure what it will do and how it will do it, but it’s being described as the nerve centre for his decentralised vision of Britain. Do you have a decentralised nerve centre? I’m not totally sure. But anyway, this is described by a lot of people as a devolutionary move. And this is where my inner pedant starts tearing out his hair and saying it’s actually decentralisation, not devolution. Devolution is when powers and ideally money are passed from the centre to regions, cities, whatever. Decentralisation is where you base a set of officials somewhere other than London, SW1, and this is decentralisation. Now, those officials may well acquire useful new perspectives from not [00:23:00] being in the SW1 groupthink and may learn things about it, but there’s also a tidal wave of whataboutery that’s being unleashed by putting this node of Downing Street in Manchester. So Yorkshire, the northeast, the southwest, every other region is going “What about us!” Then there was a headline in the Daily Mail the other day, Burnham Declares War on the South, which I suspect he hasn’t actually done today. You do get a set of problems that come with doing this.

Ruth Fox: Yes. We do. As you say, we don’t really have much sort of flesh on the bones of this other than what he said in his speech earlier this week in Manchester, and he described it as Number 10 North. Which I, don’t know, we should start to call it the Northern Office for Vibes or something like that. He said it would be the nerve centre of a rewired Britain to make power flow into the midlands, the southwest, the east of England and into London. I just note, Andy, you didn’t mention Yorkshire. And it would have three clear tasks, public control of essential utilities, reindustrialisation and regeneration, and would oversee the new council house building programme. [00:24:00] And there are suggestions that his former Chief Exec in the Greater Manchester mayoralty is going to be his Deputy Chief of Staff responsible for this Number 10 North office. Now, how is he going to spend his time? Because that’s the other interesting bit here. How much of his time does he imagine he’s going to spend back in Manchester at this northern office? How is that going to affect, for example, availability Parliament? If it’s basically he’s going to spend his Fridays and his weekends up there, that wouldn’t be that different.

Mark D’Arcy: That’s what most prime ministers end up doing. Tony Blair would be up in Durham back in the day, quite often, if not every weekend.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And this of course goes to how much time he thinks he’s going to spend on domestic policy versus international policy, which informs what he may want in a Foreign Secretary. But all Prime Ministers say they’re going to spend less time on foreign affairs, and very few of them find that they actually can. So how much time he’ll end up spending there is open to question and therefore, what’s going to be the [00:25:00] driving purpose of this? How’s it going to work? We will have to see. It’s interesting, it demonstrably positions him as doing something different.

Mark D’Arcy: Which may be the point, frankly. Although you do wonder if PACAC, the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, might take a very strong interest in quite how much all this will be costing.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Quite. But in terms of timescales, just to give listeners, particularly our international listeners, a sense of the timings ahead, we now know that there will be on 13th July the hustings for the Labour Parliamentary Party, even if he is the only candidate. And it’s looking like he is, there’s only Al Carns, the former Defence Minister, still delicately testing....

Mark D’Arcy: Just above the parapet, occasionally, but probably not staying there for all that long. Incidentally, these hustings will be a very interesting event. I don’t suppose they’re going to be televised or anything like that. So what you will get is a load of journalists sitting outside doing their damnedest to eavesdrop outside the Grand Committee room or wherever [00:26:00] it’s held.

Ruth Fox: I don’t even know where they’re going to be held. I think that’s been confirmed because there’s no committee room big enough in the House to hold the entire Parliamentary Labour Party.

Mark D’Arcy: 400 people. Yes. So there is an issue there, but secondly what you will get is all sorts of different accounts of what he said to whom that could be quite important as well. So a whole load of hares will be set running by this event, I’m sure with different interpretations of what Andy meant when he said to such and such.

Ruth Fox: And nominations formally close on the 16th. So we will know definitively whether or not there’s going to be a contest. I think the assumption of everybody is there won’t be. There will then be a special conference on the 17th, Labour Party special conference to make the announcement of the new Labour Party Leader. We assume Andy Burnham. Again, we don’t know where that will be or any timings yet. I had assumed that that being the case, he’d probably take office that Friday afternoon. But in fact it looks like the plan is that he will take office the following Monday. The intention is that Keir Starmer would go to the Palace on Monday the [00:27:00] 20th.

Mark D’Arcy: Shortly thereafter Andy Burnham drives in to kiss hands. And that’ll all be doubtless lovingly photographed from above by drones as the limousines move in and out and capture all the choreography of power transfer.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And I’ll get really annoyed at all the TV companies paying for the helicopters to follow this. Then the afternoon of the 20th, presumably there’ll be a lot of announcements of the new ministerial team. I’d be very surprised if these take a long, long time because they’ve obviously had several weeks to think about this and make the decisions. So one assumes that they will happen, they will start to emerge fairly quickly. But the House of Commons will have risen, so it rises on this Thursday the 16th, so he won’t face Parliament. The House of Lords is still sitting that week, week commencing the 20th. So there’ll be Lords activities but no Commons. So he won’t face Parliament until after the summer recess.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, indeed. It looks as if his first PMQs under those circumstances will be Wednesday 2nd September. So he’ll have a long time to read himself in. I imagine he’s envisaging a nice [00:28:00] serene passage of power in which all his members of the Cabinet and so forth can absorb the key decisions they’ll need to take in their new briefs and so forth. And you can only hope that “events, dear boy, events” don’t mean that they’re all dealing with some massive crisis without Parliament being there.

Ruth Fox: Yes. If that happens, Parliament presumably will be recalled, but it does mean that unusually ministers are going to get a period of time, A, for a bit of a break, which will help them, but B, to read into their briefs as you say, and to prepare and to build those relationships with the departmental civil servants, which ministers don’t usually get. This is like a transition period.

Mark D’Arcy: You often get these awful situations where five hours after basically taking over as the minister for whatever it is, you suddenly have to go to the Despatch Box and make an emergency statement. Can be absolutely nightmarish. Or even if it’s just your ordinary question times tomorrow, minister, and you’ve got to learn up on these following 23 subjects that are being asked about.

Ruth Fox: Yes. I think Mark, we should stop there [00:29:00] in a minute, but, just before we do, you were talking about devolution, this Manchester being decentralisation, not devolution, but there is a devolution issue of real importance that is to my mind not getting anywhere near enough traction here at Westminster or enough coverage in the media here in mainland Britain, but the events in Northern Ireland and what’s happening in Belfast, following the announcement last week of the conviction of Jeffrey Donaldson, the former head of the DUP, the Democratic Unionist Party, for 18 charges of child rape, indecent assault, and indecency towards a child, frankly absolute depravity in terms of what appears to have been going on for over 20 years. We don’t want to talk about that side of the case, it’s horrific. He is now in Maghaberry Prison, ironically in his former constituency of Lagan Valley. He’s facing a very long custodial sentence, but there are some political fallout questions that I think ought to be on the [00:30:00] radar because I think there could be fallout at Westminster. The first one is the implications of this for the Democratic Unionist Party. Their leader Gavin Robinson is instituting a review about who knew what and when. I think it’s widely accepted that nobody at the upper echelons of the DUP knew anything about this in terms of the paedophilia charges. But what’s also come out through the court case about essentially Jeffrey Donaldson leading a double life and frankly being a two-faced hypocrite, pontificating about abstinence, pontificating against gay marriage, and yet apparently having being seen widely quite often at Westminster as being drunk, womanising, also allegations that have come out in the BBC documentary this week, which seemed to have been widely accepted in Belfast, of allegations that he was seen going into a gay sauna, and he may have been leading a double life in that respect. All pretty horrendous, but implications for the DUP, its brand, the sense of hypocrisy, very damaging.

Mark D’Arcy: But [00:31:00] also in this, there are some serious questions about what did anybody else know about this? And in particular, what did the Security Services know? I would’ve thought that someone of Jeffrey Donaldson’s stature in Northern Ireland politics would’ve attracted the attention of the Security Services. Did they know anything about it? And there are allegations flying around in Northern Ireland all over the place that the Security Services used this as leverage to get him to acquiesce, for example, to restarting the Northern Ireland Executive at a time when it had been suspended over various political disputes in the past. Was that true or not? I certainly don’t know, but it’s being said in Northern Ireland now. And I think there will be enormous pressure for this matter to be investigated. And it may be that the Northern Ireland Select Committee gets dragged into it. It may be that the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee is asked to take a look at these questions. But it’s very murky stuff and it is incredibly high powered and potentially very dangerous in the context of Northern Ireland politics.

Ruth Fox: Absolutely. As you say, there’s an awful lot of allegations flying around, [00:32:00] so there’s implications of what might happen here at Westminster, but there’s also implications for the Northern Ireland Assembly because at the moment the politics there is very difficult. There’s suggestions that, for example, the Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly, Edwin Poots, who had himself become Leader of the DUP and was dethroned by Jeffrey Donaldson, so there’s an awful lot of internecine personal politics there, that he may have known certain things, not about the paedophilia, but about the behaviour of Jeffrey Donaldson in respect of living this double life and in essence being open to blackmail. And that’s essentially the allegation that he was open to blackmail and that it may have been that the Security Services were indeed blackmailing him to get him to change his position on, for example, during the Brexit process, the existence of the sea border between Northern Ireland and mainland UK. And you think about the sort of broader situation in Northern Ireland, you’ve had a period of race riots in Belfast just a few weeks ago that seemed now, the [00:33:00] Police Service of Northern Ireland seem to be acknowledging, were orchestrated by Loyalist paramilitaries. There’s a Budget crisis in Northern Ireland where they’ve not been able to settle on the Budget. There’s a lot of dispute within the Northern Ireland Government and then disputes with London about the Budget. The future of the Speaker, the Northern Ireland Assembly has gone into summer recess this week, but Matthew O’Toole, Member of the Assembly for the Social Democratic and Labour Party, the SDLP, who basically stood up and asked a question to the Speaker, how do we bring about a recall of this Assembly if we want to bring forward basically a motion of no confidence in you if things are revealed. So a really difficult political situation in Belfast. I don’t think it’s getting as much attention here in mainland UK as it should, both for the merits of what’s happening in Belfast and whether or not Stormont will continue. If the DUP is in serious difficulties, how that’s going to affect the operation of the Government and the Assembly. But also implications, as you say, for [00:34:00] Westminster.

Mark D’Arcy: Indeed. And we had a little foretaste of this with the Peter Murrell scandal and Nicola Sturgeon’s husband recently going to prison for an embezzlement. There was talk then of the Scottish Select Committee taking a look at that whole scandal and investigating. And again, this is Westminster being dragged into the internal politics, the very sensitive internal politics, of a devolved area. And it is to say the least, a touchy role for Westminster to take that you can quite easily imagine them getting dragged into this. It won’t be easy and the intervention may not be welcomed. To put it gently.

Ruth Fox: To put it gently, yes. So we’ll see how things unfold and keep an eye on it because, as I say, I don’t think quite a lot of the media and other political commentators here are covering it in the way that perhaps they ought to be. But I think we should take a break there, Mark, and come back and talk about the appointment of the first ever woman Clerk of the House of Commons.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. Eve Samson will take office, I think, in October.

Ruth Fox: She will.

Mark D’Arcy: As the first woman Clerk, sitting just [00:35:00] below Mr Speaker. And how will that unfold and what will she do and what does the job entail?

Ruth Fox: We’ll come back in a minute and talk about that.

Mark D’Arcy: See you.

We are back. And Ruth, there’s been a lot of eyebrows raised in the Palace of Westminster about the appointment of Eve Samson, a long serving senior Clerk in the House of Commons to the top job, the main Clerk, the Clerk of the House of Commons, technically I think the Under Clerk of the Parliaments, is one of the titles attached to it. Basically it’s the biggest official job in the official hierarchy of Parliament. An incredibly senior post managing a vast budget and being the key constitutional adviser to the House. So I suppose the first question is, who is Eve Samson?

Ruth Fox: Yes. Eve will be the first female Clerk of the House of Commons, 53rd Clerk in the historical line, going back centuries

Mark D’Arcy: A long apostolic succession of Clerks stretching right back to the mediaeval era.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So you and I, so we should probably, for transparency [00:36:00] for listeners, you and I both know Eve, because we are all members of the Study of Parliament Group, the parliamentary nerds gathering at Oxford every year. We’re often together with Eve at that event.

Mark D’Arcy: The invitations always say “anoraks will be worn”.

Ruth Fox: So Eve is, I mean she’s been in the House I think since the mid 1980s. I think what’s interesting about her appointment is she’s a bit older than recent Clerks. She is in her sort of, she must be mid sixties, I think.

Mark D’Arcy: Mid sixties. Yes, I think so. She’s older than her predecessor.

Ruth Fox: Quite a bit older, more than a decade older. So that I thought was interesting. In terms of the line of succession, historically, the Clerk Assistant, the number two job, has been, if you like, the apprenticeship to be Clerk of the House. And again, what’s interesting about this is she has not been Clerk Assistant, so she’s currently the Clerk of the Journals. She advises the House on procedure, she advises the Clerk and committees and so on, on [00:37:00] procedure and privilege.

Mark D’Arcy: It’s one of the senior Clerk posts, but it’s not the senior management, most senior below the Clerk themselves.

Ruth Fox: No, it is a senior management job, but as you say, not the most senior. In the last Parliament she, as Clerk of the Journals, advised the Privileges Committee when it was doing its inquiry into whether or not Boris Johnson had committed a contempt of the House. So she was heavily involved in that process. I would say her career has probably been one where she’s more focussed as a Clerk on what I’d describe as the sort of technical and documentary scrutiny committees. So quite legalistic committees. And she’s got a legal background, so she’s been Clerk of things like Standards and Privileges, European Scrutiny, the Joint Committee on Human Rights. She actually, I think, came to a senior management role quite late. She only got a senior management role about six, seven years ago, which is probably longer than the usual career path of senior clerks. And one of her responsibilities now actually as Clerk of the [00:38:00] Journals, is she’s in charge of the update to Erskine May. So what I would like to know, Eve, is are you going to get it done before you become Clerk of the House? Because we’re all waiting for it, and it seems to have been taking quite a long time to emerge. What I found interesting though, Mark, was what the press release that was issued by the House of Commons did not say. Because it focussed very much on the role being procedural, which fits with her career. She’s been very much on the procedural sides, and traditionally Clerks of the House have been. But, as you say, and you alluded to earlier, the job is much bigger than that.

Mark D’Arcy: You are managing an absolutely vast budget. You’re talking about things like the catering for thousands of parliamentary staff. You’re talking about the increasingly fraught area of HR and complaints against Members that once upon a time were very rare indeed, but are now extremely common because things have moved on culturally, and people are now much more prepared to [00:39:00] complain if they’re being bullied or harassed than they were in the past. And above all, you’ve got the issue of security of the House. There have been terrorist attacks on Parliament in fairly recent and very painful memory. And so the security of the building is an extremely important issue as well. And Eve as the top official is the one who is overall responsible for that. And you do wonder, that in the John Bercow era, they created a new post called Director General.

Ruth Fox: They did.

Mark D’Arcy: Which was the kind of head of the administrative side of things. The status in relation to the Clerk was a bit unclear at first, but is now clearly a supporting up post to the Chief Clerk. So I think that maybe she may find herself leaning on that administrative post the DG much more than perhaps some other Clerks have.

Ruth Fox: Yes. If you remember Mark, I don’t know, I mean you presumably must have reported about this at the time, back in 2014 when Sir Robert Rogers announced he was leaving as Clerk of the House rather earlier than expected, and of course, it subsequently came out that [00:40:00] this was all related to John Bercow and the bullying of staff in the House.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes. They had a famously fraught relationship.

Ruth Fox: Yes. So Robert went, and John Bercow was very keen on bringing in an outsider, somebody with fresh thinking. And he alighted, following a recruitment exercise, on a Clerk, I think she was called Carol Mills from the Australian Parliament. Now it transpired there was some controversy around her position in the Australian Parliament anyway. Her background again was not procedural, it was more public engagement, which fitted with John Bercow’s interests, in terms of what he wanted to do with the job of speakership. But it proved to be incredibly controversial. And the role of Clerk of the House has to be approved by the King. So the Government has to convey the proposed appointment to the King, and the King has to essentially sign it off. I mean from the King’s perspective, it’s a formality. But it turned out in 2014 it wasn’t a formality for the Government because David Cameron refused to pass on the recommendation [00:41:00] to the King. So an appointment couldn’t be made. And we had an Acting Clerk, Sir David Natzler, for quite a while before eventually they finally settled on him and gave him the job. But it was hugely controversial, and as a result of that, the future role of the Clerk and the governance and whether or not there should be a Chief Operating Officer, which they eventually called Director General, was the subject of an inquiry that was chaired by Jack Straw on the governance of the House back in 2014. So they created this post. And there was always this tension about can you really have, on the one hand, the Clerk of the House dealing with the constitutional side of things and the chief operational role, a DG? Who’s in charge, who ultimately is the master? And it was always a real tension. They appointed a guy called Ian Ailles as the first Director General, and I think he came from the travel company Thomas Cook. I think it’s fair to say that experiment did not work well. It just didn’t work. [00:42:00] And it may have been....

Mark D’Arcy: The borderland between the two of them was pretty ill-defined and debatable, shall we say. And there is a bit of a resentment amongst the clerks. I remember one senior Clerk once remarking to me, just because you wear a wig, it doesn’t mean that you can’t manage things. And I think they rather resented the implication that they were ethereal creatures concerned only with the nuances of parliamentary procedure and couldn’t read a spreadsheet.

Ruth Fox: But equally there was tension the other side where, if you were not part of the priestly cult of clerks, this relatively small number of officials, that you could never be Clerk of the House. So if you’d come up through the project management side, or if you’d come up through being an adviser, a special adviser, or you’d come up through the Library or something, that you were never going to have the opportunity to become Clerk of the House.

Mark D’Arcy: But that’s because the Clerk’s central job is as the chief procedural and constitutional adviser, both to the Speaker and to the whole House. And it’s the Clerk you can sometimes hear their voice whispering, giving [00:43:00] advice to the Speaker when the Speaker’s on their feet giving some ruling or other, the Clerk is often supplying the exact wording to them and telling them how they should handle something. That is not a job that you can do having come down a different road to that seat. Really, you really do have to have experience on how the House operates and what the deep procedural issues that they might be confronting actually are. You can’t just walk into that from somewhere else entirely with no experience on it.

Ruth Fox: Yes. Although I had dinner once with, last time the Clerk’s appointment was being considered, with Hannah White, my friend and colleague and Director of the Institute for Government, and Meg Russell, of course who was on the podcast a few weeks ago when she was Director of the Constitution Unit. And the three of us would periodically meet up and we had dinner and I did suggest at the dinner that we perhaps should do a job share application to be Clerk of the House and just see what happened for a laugh. But we didn’t do it, but perhaps we should have done, that would’ve put the cat amongst the pigeons. How do you deal with that? Anyway, there is a Director [00:44:00] General post at the moment. It isn’t, I think, quite the post that they envisaged back in 2014, but there is a Director General (Operations), Marianne Cwynarski. Apologies, Marianne, if I’ve not got the pronunciation of your surname correct. Marianne’s been in the House for a very long time. She manages the operational teams. The Clerk of the House always relies very heavily on that post, on that role, and Eve will have to do the same. But there’s some huge questions coming up. You’ve talked about things like security, environmental issues. We talked a few weeks ago on the podcast about the budget and savings position. You’ve got to make 10% savings across the board.

Mark D’Arcy: And that’s a huge issue of itself. And there are others coming down the track. Maybe Eve Simson’s procedural expertise was particularly valued because of the thought that maybe after the next election you could have a very complex, messy hung parliament, which might require some considerable changes to the way the Commons operates. And maybe she’d have to deal with that. So there are issues [00:45:00] procedurally that the Clerk will need to grapple with. But there is also a huge issue overhanging the whole of Parliament, which is the state of the buildings and whether, for example, bits might start falling off and injuring people. And it’s worth noting that were that to happen, which heaven of course forbid, but were it to happen, the Clerk as the chief operating officer is personally responsible along with the Clerk of the House of Lords, the Clerk of the Parliaments. They’re personally responsible in that event, which brings us neatly to the subject of the restoration and renewal of the Victorian Palace of Westminster. Because that question is still hanging over the whole shebang really.

Ruth Fox: Yes. As you say, if you and I were to walk through one of the courtyards of the Palace of Westminster this afternoon and a gargoyle were to fall off and hit you on the head, Mark, heaven forfend. But if it caused damage...

Mark D’Arcy: I’m sure it would bounce off.

Ruth Fox: If it caused damage, they are legally responsible. And this is what annoys me about the whole Restoration and Renewal debate, because the [00:46:00] politicians are ultimately making the decisions, but it’s the clerks that are accountable. And I have to say, I admire them greatly for being willing to take on the kinds of risks that exist here because they are significant. But they would be the ones hauled up in court and held accountable.

Mark D’Arcy: It’s responsibility without power.

Ruth Fox: It is. As you say, Restoration and Renewal. There has been a development though, in the last week.

Mark D’Arcy: A couple of developments, indeed. A couple of weeks ago now, the National Audit Office, the Government’s sort of financial watchdog, issued a report saying, I bowdlerise completely, get on with it, take a decision, it is incredibly expensive not to take a decision, you have the information necessary to decide what to do about the state of the buildings and what sort of programme should be launched to renovate them and whether or not MPs and peers should move out for a while to let the builders get in and fix the place. So there are a whole series of decisions around that waiting to be taken. And essentially for, I don’t know, the best part of a decade now, Parliament’s been twiddling its thumbs refusing [00:47:00] to finally take a decision, which they know will generate a storm of furious headlines about billions being spent on their comfort, as the tabloids would doubtless describe it.

Ruth Fox: It made a decision, didn’t it? It passed an Act of Parliament. It set up new governance arrangements. It made the decision and then it changed its mind. And the next parliament decided, no, we’re not doing that. We’re going to tear that up. We do know actually exactly what the cost of delay now is. And there’s a letter from the Lord Speaker, the new Lord Speaker, Lord Forsyth, dated 9th June, but actually only published this week. He’s written to the Restoration and Renewal Client Board and copied it to Sir Lindsay Hoyle, his opposite number in the Commons as Speaker, about the cost of delay on the decision being made about the next steps. So essentially, when are the Commons and the Lords going to get to debate and vote on whether or not the proposals that were outlined a few months ago, the revised proposals, whether they’re going to be acceptable, and whether the House is voting to accept the first stage [00:48:00] of the options proposals to get the work going.

Mark D’Arcy: And what’s interesting about this is just quite how eye watering, and that’s the phrase he uses in the letter, the costs of doing nothing and just having make do and mend as we go along really are.

Ruth Fox: Yes. He says, we are told that if the debates are held in July, which essentially means in the next couple of weeks....

Mark D’Arcy: Before Andy Burnham takes office, by the way.

Ruth Fox: And we’ve seen the Business Statement for the next couple of weeks, and it’s not mentioned. So one assumes, at least in the Commons, that it’s not going to be taking place before summer recess. He says they had assumed an Easter date, and that was my understanding, that this was going to be taking place in March, that the debate and the votes, it somehow got delayed. But compared to Easter, a delay into July is between a £100-£135million costs extra. If the debates are not held by December, you’re talking about an extra cost of between £223-£288million. If the debates are not held until middle of next year, [00:49:00] which goodness me, that’s a very long time to hang on, you’re talking about an extra £479million, and as he described it, this is intolerable, it is crucial that the Government brings forward the debates at the earliest possible opportunity to enable members of both Houses to come to a decision and reduce the cost of their taxpayer.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, and the issue here, I suppose on the timing now, is that we’re in the middle of a change of Government as we’ve been discussing for most of this programme. And I suspect that Keir Starmer is quite happy to leave this particular hot potato in the lap of his successor. So it’ll be Andy Burnham coming in in mid-July, then deciding what to do about this. And I suspect it may not even be over the summer because on the hierarchy of things he has to make decisions about, this is probably quite a long way down the list.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And if you’re in the position as they are where they’re struggling to meet the requirements for the Defence budget, scrambling around to find an extra £10billion here and there, how on earth are you going to commit to Restoration and Renewal of the [00:50:00] Houses of Parliament?

Mark D’Arcy: Umpteen billions to re-gild the roof of Central Lobby or whatever.

Ruth Fox: I think they should. I think that they ought to be able to find a way to do this. And it’s the failure of Parliament to put this right, failure of successive Government to deal with this problem that leads us to where we are. And they can’t do nothing. Some of the repair work is going to have to be done, but I think we’ve got to be politically realistic. And this is the essence of Lord Forsyth’s letter. He’s basically urging everybody to be politically realistic. He says, I do not believe there is sufficient political consensus on the long-term vision of the Palace to be sustainable. There must be a focus on driving down costs, the duration of any decant, in order to increase the likelihood of cross-party and cross-House support. We already know that the Conservative Jesse Norman has already expressed considerable reservations and opposition to the proposals for the next stage of R&R. So they’re not onboard. And he talks about needing to reduce, limit or change the scope of what it is that is proposed to be delivered and says [00:51:00] basically there needs to be a fallback position. And there does, because I just cannot see however much I wish that they’d deploy some vision and some ambitious thinking about this and the opportunity as well as the costs, the reality is politically we’re not there and we haven’t been there for the last 10 years. We’re not going to get there in the next six months to 12 months. So they’re going to have to have a fallback position if the proposals are not accepted. And he says, I think interestingly in his letter, that the assumption seems to be the Houses will agree the recommendations of the report. And he basically says, I’m not really sure about that at all.

Mark D’Arcy: What if they don’t? And one of the things that increasingly strikes me about this is that if you go round the Palace of Westminster as built in the Victorian era, you see this fantastic, ambitious building. And certainly its gestation was not a simple matter. There were lots of rows over cost and design all the way through its construction. But if you go around there, the sheer ambition of building a structure like that as the Imperial [00:52:00] Parliament of the British Empire was there. If you wander down Whitehall and look at the buildings that the Treasury and the Foreign Office are in, they’re fantastically ambitious, confident buildings. And this country isn’t like that any more. We don’t build ambitious, confident structures any more. And when we try, it’s usually a disaster. I’d dare dare mention HS2.

Ruth Fox: The alternative is Crossrail, which has been a roaring success.

Mark D’Arcy: There is indeed that, maybe I shouldn’t get over pessimistic. But you do feel that the scale of ambition that we once had just isn’t there any more. And it’s very disappointing. And earlier generations wouldn’t have hesitated to get a few things done. And here we are footling around about it. Now there are real issues about the money. I absolutely agree with you about the politics of trying to spend billions on this when we can’t fund our defence properly. And there are clearly all sorts of problems around it, but earlier generations I think would’ve found a way to get something useful done and we are just paralysed.

Ruth Fox: Yes. If they’re not going to agree to funding [00:53:00] the full package of proposals, then they need a plan and a schedule of works that enable the real and serious problems with things like the sewage, the heating system, they need those basics to be sorted out and I don’t see how they’re going to be resolved without a very big bill.

Mark D’Arcy: And as a flock of pigs fly majestically past the Hansard Society building, I think that’s probably a good moment to take a break. And when we come back, we’re going to be talking to the Labour peer Baroness Dianne Hayter about her bill to tighten up the rules on Government lobbying.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

And we’re back, and discussion around private members’ bills this session has been dominated by one question, Mark. Will the second attempt to pass the assisted dying bill succeed? But that’s far from the only interesting private member’s bill making its way through Parliament. And over the coming weeks we will, I hope, be looking at some of the others from major campaigning measures to bills designed to close some legislative loopholes. But one [00:54:00] that’s particularly caught our attention is Labour peer Dianne Hayter’s bill to tighten the rules on lobbying. It has its second reading this week, so Mark and I went to Parliament to talk to her about it.

Mark D’Arcy: Dianne Hayter, Baroness Hayter, welcome to the pod, first of all. Now, you have a private member’s bill that’s designed to plug a sort of loophole in the way lobbyists are registered. What’s the gap in the law that you are trying to sort out? What’s the existing law and what’s the gap in it?

Baroness Hayter: It’s more than a loophole. It’s a great big hole. When the Coalition Government in 2014 made a register of lobbyists, it’s actually only a register of consultant lobbyists. So if you’ve got a lobbying firm called, for example, Hayter, Hayter and Hayter, and they helped see a minister, then they have to register and report. But if you are a great big company, a defence company, a drinks company, a developer, and you use your own people to meet a minister.

Mark D’Arcy: So this is like an [00:55:00] in-house public affairs manager?

Baroness Hayter: Exactly. Or an in-house chief executive or a chair of a company who’s the one likely to meet a minister. That can all be done without any registration, without any reporting. We estimate that means that the existing register misses 95% of the lobbying that goes in. Because all the serious stuff basically is done by companies, not by consultant lobbyists.

Mark D’Arcy: So the existing system then is just focussed on big name public affairs, public lobbying firms that companies will, as you say, use as consultants. And that doesn’t capture most lobbying, most actual people from companies going to see ministers to get something changed in the law or changed in Government policy.

Baroness Hayter: That’s exactly right. Some of these lobbying firms are quite small and they help perhaps small businesses or small organisations who can’t afford their own in-house people. But the vast majority of lobbying, the vast [00:56:00] majority of meetings either with ministers or permanent secretaries, take place by in-house people. And that’s what my bill will cover. It will mean anyone who goes to see a minister or a Permanent Secretary to try and change a law or influence bills going through Parliament would have to register and report.

Ruth Fox: And you say register and report. Register with who and report to who.

Baroness Hayter: There is an existing register of lobbyists, but it is only a register of consultant lobbyists. So this would extend the remit of that existing registrar so that it was required that anyone who was lobbying would have to go on to that register. And then it would be up to that registrar to decide what should be reported, and how often. Should it be just that a meeting took place? Should it say what it discussed? Should it name the people going? That will be up for the register to define what goes into the report.

Mark D’Arcy: Would this also cover, for example, trade associations? You know the, National Association of Grommet Manufacturers goes to see the minister for [00:57:00] grommets. Would that already be covered or would your bill bring it in?

Baroness Hayter: It’s not covered at the moment and that’s the most interesting thing. And so the trade associations that of course do a lot of this, you could think of the Scotch Whisky Association or the ABI, the Association of British Insurers, or Make UK, really important that the Government hears from them. It’s important that you know I am not against lobbying. I’ve been a lobbyist for too long myself. I think it’s right that Government hears from people affected by what the Government does and they’re often here through trade associations or indeed charities. Both now would have to register if their own staff, their own people, meet a Permanent Secretary or a minister.

Ruth Fox: And does it go beyond ministers and perm secs? So take the example of the Hansard Society. Obviously occasionally I have reason to meet a minister or the Leader of the House of Commons or something. Would it cover that? Is it lower, more junior members of Whitehall, of the civil service? If you are, for [00:58:00] example, I don’t know, lobbying to get a change on a statutory instrument, for example, to get back to my favourite subject. It always comes back, as you know, to delegated legislation.

Baroness Hayter: I have to tell you something. There aren’t many people in life for whom a statutory instrument is their favourite subject. It would cover anyone who is trying to influence a Government decision. So not if you’re having a general meeting with a group of ministers and it’s just a general chitchat, but if you are trying to influence, either wanting them to do a piece of legislation or not do a piece of legislation or any bit of their policy, then yes, even the Hansard Society, if you are lobbying to get some change, then you would have to register and report.

Mark D’Arcy: Do they cover the increasingly influential and important figures in the back rooms of Government? The special advisers?

Baroness Hayter: The bill certainly should, and the existing Act does have provision for special advisers to be covered and to have therefore any approach to them having to be registered and reported. [00:59:00] Unfortunately, the Government has never triggered that bit of the bill, of the Act as it is now, although I have been asking for that regularly. Of course, special advisers are really important and any approach to them about trying to change policy or legislation should similarly involve registration and reporting.

Ruth Fox: And when you say the provision in the Act has not been triggered, you mean that there have not been the commencement regulations necessary to bring it into effect? So it is the law of the land, but it’s not actually practically being applied. And actually, Mark, this is one of the things we’ve talked about in the podcast before, that quite often laws are being passed, Parliament’s spending a lot of time scrutinising bills, bringing them into law, and then the Government sits and doesn’t actually apply them.

Mark D’Arcy: So doesn’t pull the trigger.

Ruth Fox: No. Doesn’t pull the trigger. And it’s something that we need a lot more clarity about. Because I think if we knew the numbers and we knew the volume of it, I think there’d be, frankly, a scandal of itself.

Baroness Hayter: There are an enormous number and as you’ve you just said, the bullet is there. It is [01:00:00] just the trigger that needs pulling. It would be done quite easily. Again, if the Government wants to do something serious, I’d be surprised if they didn’t include SpAds. And so it should, because I think it’s very important that the public know who has the ear of Government. And this is about saying, and most countries do it by the way, if you are able to get in there and have your point of view known, which is right, then the public should know that you’ve been in there.

Mark D’Arcy: Why wasn’t this done in the first place? I can remember back in the Coalition years, David Cameron remarking that he thought the next big ethics scandal in British politics was going to be around lobbying. So why did they then have a bill that only covered 5% of lobbying activity? Was the argument that perhaps it was too much of a burden to get every company to register every contact with officialdom?

Baroness Hayter: It’s interesting because I did an amendment, because I was dealing with the bill at the time, and the stuff that’s now in my private member’s bill was basically an amendment that I did to the bill at the time. The argument was [01:01:00] that, which I don’t accept, that if a company went to see a minister, it would appear in the minister’s diary and you’d be able to see it that way. Whereas if a consultant lobbyist went to see a minister, you wouldn’t know on whose behalf they met. Now, in fact, of course, very rarely does a lobbying company themselves go, they usually have somebody from the company. So actually it was a slightly false distinction. But the important thing is it’s very hard from the minister’s diary to see who’s being lobbied. Firstly, they’re very out of date, they’re about three months late. Secondly, they very often say general update or general discussion, and they don’t say what the issue was. Let’s go back to a brewing company. They could go and see a minister saying, look, we’d really like to extend our brewery. We need planning permission for this. But they need to do that. You could go as a brewery and say, we want you to change the tax on alcohol. You could [01:02:00] go saying, look, we want this trade deal to be different because that would help our export of our beer. It wouldn’t say in the minister’s diary what it is. And yet it seems to me really important that you know what that exchange is all about.

Ruth Fox: How will it relate to lobbying not of ministers, but of politicians? So one of the things is, you mentioned you have an amendment and one of the features of my time at the Hansard Society has been that the lobbying of peers has increased massively as campaigners and businesses and so on have recognised that actually you can sometimes get changes through the upper house in a way that you perhaps can’t get them in the lower house because of the Government whipping. So if a brewing company comes to lobby you for an amendment to the Beer Bill, would they be registering that or would the expectation be that’s registered, or simply ministers and civil servants?

Baroness Hayter: It’s ministers and civil servants. Because that’s what the existing Act is. So it is just to change the existing Act. But it’s very interesting you raised that. I had an amendment [01:03:00] this week about Hong Kong in the state security bill, I forgot the name of the bill, because people from Hong Kong, particularly Jimmy Lai and the people around him, raised that. So a lot of that goes on and I’m very happy to be able to raise that. But of course I’m not a decision-maker. And so this will only alter the existing law, which is about the decision-makers in Government.

Mark D’Arcy: Now what you are proposing is a private member’s bill in the House of Lords and without wishing be too nasty about it, that’s a pretty low form of legislative life in the sense that House of Lords private members’ bills have a brief, glorious existence on the floor of the House of Lords and then nothing happens. You can get through third reading with a big majority in the House of Lords and the bill just disappears with a plop into the House of Commons, never to be seen again. So why actually do this? Are you essentially angling for a minister to say “Yes, jolly good idea, we’ll put it in the forthcoming Transparency And All Good Things Bill”?

Baroness Hayter: I was originally hoping that they would say, look, this is good, it’s a relatively small change because it is only about [01:04:00] existing law, about ministers and permanent secretaries, and that they would see its way through, which occasionally a Government will do. However, something much bigger is happening. Because the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, asked the Ethics and Integrity Commission to look at lobbying, they have been looking at both sides. Not just my side, if you like, which is looking at what lobbyists do, but they’re looking at from the point of view of ministers and how they report, and the Ethics and Integrity Committee will produce its report on 9th July. My guess is that the Government will then want to act on that. They’re very sympathetic to my bill, and I think mine will be a bit of a warmup, but I would be very happy if they go one further and do their own bill. But I hope that my bill will help make it clear that this is urgent. This is not something to be kicked into the long grass. We’ve had too many of these. It’s interesting that David Cameron, as Prime Minister, thought the next big scandal would [01:05:00] be lobbying, but it turned out, of course, that it was he, because he was lobbying on behalf of Greensill, but because he was part of the in-house team, he didn’t have to register. So he didn’t break the law. But he was lobbying and in a sense, my bill would absolutely cover and catch what he did because he would then have to register and report. I’m not against lobbying at all, but it clearly has to be transparent and not take place below the radar.

Ruth Fox: You have the support of the sector bodies. So the, Chartered Institute of Public Relations and the Public Relations and Communications Association, which is interesting that they are actually advocating for more registration. How are you finding getting much cross-party support in the House? Because your second reading is this week. So are you expecting to attract support from the other benches?

Baroness Hayter: Absolutely. I’ve got people from the Conservatives, from the Liberal Democrats. And I think from the Cross Benches. My judgement is [01:06:00] nobody will dare argue against this bill. Nobody could argue against transparency of lobbying. What I think, if anyone is opposed, they will say, oh, it’s very difficult, how do you define when a meeting took place? Is a three minute meeting counting? And they will try and undermine it, if you like, by saying it’s difficult to define, but I don’t think anybody will stand up and say we’re against this. But yes, I’ve had a lot of support from across the House and a lot of interest. The second reading is on a Friday, and I’m afraid not all that many of my colleagues will be there. But we’ve got, I think, 15 or 16 people speaking, which for a Friday in the summer is quite good numbers.

Mark D’Arcy: And of course, by established House of Lords tradition, they don’t normally throw private members bills out at the second reading in any event. So I’m sure you’ll get through that one.

Baroness Hayter: I will indeed get through. I predict it’ll go through and it will be committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Mark D’Arcy: Dianne Hayter, thanks very much for joining us. We’ll wait with bated breath to see what happens next.

Ruth Fox: Thanks Dianne.

Baroness Hayter: And thank you.

Ruth Fox: Well, Mark, I think that’s all we’ve [01:07:00] got time for this week, but before we go, I’ve got a quick housekeeping note about private members’ bills in the Lords. Last week, if you remember, we were talking about the bills that had been presented and I said I thought the Nature’s Rights Bill from Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle, that’s the Green Party peer Natalie Bennett, I thought it had already been presented in the Commons in the last session. Natalie’s been in touch and she’s a listener to the podcast. And while she was kind enough to say she loves Parliament Matters, she pointed out that I got that one wrong. So the Nature’s Rights Bill hasn’t previously been presented in the Commons. She also said she’d love to come on the podcast to talk about it. Mark, that’s one to add to our burgeoning list of potential guests. And Natalie, thanks for getting in touch and for listening, and for your kind words about Parliament Matters. And of course I’m very happy to correct the record. And that really is it for this week. So if, like Natalie, you’re enjoying the podcast, please do take a moment to rate us on your [01:08:00] podcast app. It does help more people discover Parliament Matters by nudging us up those mysterious podcast audience algorithms. So thanks for listening, and Mark and I will see you next week.

Mark D’Arcy: See you then. Bye-bye.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm, or find us on social media @HansardSociety.