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

[00:00:17] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

[00:00:24] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And coming up this week.

[00:00:27] Ruth Fox: Labour's WhatsApp purge. What might it mean for future scandals?

[00:00:31] Mark D'Arcy: The Commons leader unveils her outline plans for more modernisation.

[00:00:36] Ruth Fox: And how far, if at all, should MPs be allowed to have a second job on top of their parliamentary work?

[00:00:48] Mark D'Arcy: So first Ruth, let's talk about the Andrew Gwynne affair. Now if you tilt your head just so in the middle of Parliament Square and listen very hard, you'll just be able to discern this repeated soft popping sound. It took me a while to figure out actually what it was. It's the sound of WhatsApp groups being deleted across Westminster, across parties, amongst ministers, amongst special advisers, amongst parliamentary staffers, who knows, even maybe amongst parliamentary clerks.

[00:01:15] And this is the result of the defenestration of the health minister, Andrew Gwynne. He was part of a, how can I describe it, somewhat louche WhatsApp group, which was called "TriggerMeTimbers", an amusing little pun, in which, amongst other things, they mocked all sorts of people, parliamentary colleagues, Her Majesty the late Queen.

[00:01:36] He talked about hoping a constituent would die soon, certainly wouldn't be able to vote in a forthcoming election, and a variety of other comments that varied from bad taste to outright third form school bully nasty.

[00:01:48] Ruth Fox: This is about 40 odd people involved in this group apparently, and um, so as you say, Andrew Gwynne's lost his job as a minister, he and another MP have been suspended from the parliamentary Labour party pending an inquiry.

[00:02:01] 11 councillors in Tameside Council are out, suspended as well, including Mr Gwynne's wife, and it's all really just a bit unpleasant. And again, why MPs spend so much time on WhatsApp is utterly beyond me.

[00:02:17] Mark D'Arcy: Appen, the younger generation. But there are several things here . WhatsApp has evolved into the indispensable political tool.

[00:02:23] This is now one of the primary ways in which politicians talk to each other, whether they're exchanging gossip or engaging in high level policy debate, or just sharing, as they imagine, amongst friends a few risqué jokes.

[00:02:37] Ruth Fox: People they think are friends.

[00:02:38] Mark D'Arcy: Well, quite, people they think are friends. WhatsApp has become an absolutely indispensable part of political life and everybody's on some WhatsApp group or another.

[00:02:47] And I think that the fact that Keir Starmer has stepped in so rapidly and suspended two Members of Parliament, the others, a newcomer called Oliver Ryan, and these 11 councillors for their conduct on this WhatsApp group has probably set an awful lot of people checking their phones and thinking, "oh, blimey", what did I say in 2019 that's going to get me into trouble now?

[00:03:09] And so, pop, pop, pop, delete, delete, delete. An awful lot, I suspect, of back catalogued comments are being quietly removed from public scrutiny. It may or may not be too late, because as we all know, you can press the delete button, but you can always find stuff. There'll be screenshots out there if some people have been assiduously collecting them.

[00:03:27] Ruth Fox: Yeah, well I think that's the problem, isn't it? With WhatsApp, the encryption and the sort of the ability now to delete messages after 24 hours and think it's gone away, lulls people into a false sense of security. I can understand what Keir Starmer's done and why he's done it. These messages, as you say, they're sort of bullying, toxic, vulgar.

[00:03:45] They involved, you know, criticisms and frankly outright abuse of some Labour colleagues. I mean, everybody from Angela Rayner to Diane Abbott to Marsha de Cordova, colleagues in the parliamentary Labour party. So I can understand why he wants to stamp that out. It got worse. There was, you know, really quite offensive things said about constituents.

[00:04:04] I don't know. One point, wanting to run over. You're happy if the constituent got run over before the next election. I mean, it's not good stuff. So I can understand why he's done it, but it does set now an incredibly high bar because some of the members of the group have been suspended from the party, not just for putting on those messages themselves, but for actually being in the group and apparently not sort of objecting to some of the content.

[00:04:28] Mark D'Arcy: So you don't have to have said bad things yourself, the failure to call them out.

[00:04:33] Ruth Fox: Yep.

[00:04:33] Mark D'Arcy: ...is a sufficient offense now, and, and, you know, with thousands of WhatsApp groups out there, with thousands of members, an awful lot of people, I think, may suddenly be feeling stabs of guilt or stabs of fear about whether their conduct on particular WhatsApp groups is, is going to be held against them in the future.

[00:04:50] And there's this kind of faux macho, tee hee I'm tougher and nastier than the rest kind of quality to a lot of the comments that were made here. It's something where you have a whole load of people egging each other on, I said earlier, sort of third form flavour to it, but it is a bit like a bunch of sniggering, not very mature teenagers all egging each other on to be a bit more outrageous.

[00:05:10] Ruth Fox: I mean, anybody who's worked in an MP's office and has dealt with constituents knows that there will be some constituents, frequent communicators, shall we say? Frequent fliers. Frequent correspondents who can be very, very difficult, can themselves be abusive, relationships can be difficult and in constituency offices up and down the country over the last 30, 40 years, I'm sure that there will have been comments in the, the quiet privacy of the MP's office an off the cuff remark, "I'll be pleased if I never see him or her again".

[00:05:42] Mark D'Arcy: Or worse.

[00:05:43] Ruth Fox: Or worse, but you don't put that down in writing.

[00:05:46] Mark D'Arcy: Basic document security, in my brief flirtation in politics 40, 50 years ago now, one of the first things I was told was there are certain things you don't write down, because they always get out, and that was back in the days when you basically had to put it on paper.

[00:05:59] Ruth Fox: Yeah, that's the difference, isn't it?

[00:06:01] People think because it's digital, and also because you can do it so quickly. Yeah. You know, your mobile phone's always in your hand.

[00:06:06] Mark D'Arcy: The gap between thought and action is too small for comfort, I think, and for safety. And the other thing to remember, of course, is not only do these things not disappear, but if they're publicly available, there may be people taking screenshots of them for later use.

[00:06:19] You may think the people in your WhatsApp group are your friends or are bound by some common bond of confidentiality. But, as happened here, clearly someone leaked the contents of this WhatsApp group. Indeed, there were people who were apparently complaining about it for some time before it actually became public.

[00:06:35] It's not like people didn't know that there was something afoot on this WhatsApp group.

[00:06:39] Ruth Fox: Yeah, so apparently the Labour Party headquarters sent a team in last October to the area. To, as it was described in the press as, "oversee a culture change due to what is called unacceptable working practices". It smacks of almost dynastic politics, you know, same families involved in the local political community.

[00:07:00] The areas where it's kind of almost run like a political fiefdom. It's quite small and insidery. And that's where you see, we see it across the country with all political parties, local constituencies, where you've got relatively small memberships. And it sort of feeds this kind of toxic, toxic factionalism.

[00:07:17] Mark D'Arcy: And now it's had real world political effects, in that a minister has lost his job and been replaced by another minister, and a number of other people have had their political careers pretty seriously blighted because of their participation in this group. But Keir Starmer set a very high bar here. And what if another different, unrelated WhatsApp group comes to light in next Sunday's newspapers?

[00:07:42] And he has to do the same over again, possibly, with someone rather more senior than Andrew Gwynne, who's a mid level minister at best.

[00:07:48] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, if you you end up with a cabinet minister who's been in one of these groups and these things get out. He's going to have to explain why, if he's not going to sack the cabinet minister, why he's not going to do it.

[00:08:01] He'll then be accused of a lack of consistency. So as you say, it's a really high bar. Um, and difficult to maintain. I mean, it's interesting, they've readmitted to the whip some of those MPs that were suspended after the King's Speech vote last summer. That group of, I think it was half a dozen MPs.

[00:08:18] Yeah. Not all of them, but some of them have been readmitted to the whip. So there's there the sort of dangle of you can come back after a bit of bad behavior. Soviet

[00:08:26] Mark D'Arcy: style rehabilitation.

[00:08:27] Ruth Fox: Yeah, so the discipline is managed in that way. But it does set a very high bar.

[00:08:32] Mark D'Arcy: In the meantime, of course, for every set of losers, there's a set of winners.

[00:08:36] And, uh, the departure of Andrew Gwynne has occasioned a, not even a mini reshuffle, a kind of micro reshuffle, really, in which a few ministerial posts were created. Ashley Dalton, a relatively new MP, has stepped into Andrew Gwynne's shoes. She was elected in a by election in, I think, West Lancashire, Rosie Cooper's old seat, when Rosie Cooper stepped down to run an NHS trust.

[00:09:00] Ashley Dalton was elected in the ensuing by election. Well, you say

[00:09:03] Ruth Fox: she's relatively new, but I mean, she's been an MP for about three years, which by today's standards is an old hand.

[00:09:09] Mark D'Arcy: Today's standards is approaching veteran status, I suppose. But there are, however, I think plenty of longer serving MPs who might be beginning to realise that for them the prospects of ministerial office are becoming increasingly distant now.

[00:09:25] So people who did the hard yards in the long years of opposition they've had since 2015 and who maybe have had front bench office in the Labour Party before and are now sitting on the back benches, watching relative newcomers being teleported straight into pretty desirable jobs through the pearly gates into ministerial office.

[00:09:45] And they will be thinking rather sourly, well, what about me then?

[00:09:49] Ruth Fox: Yeah.

[00:09:49] Mark D'Arcy: What value was my service in all those difficult and unrewarding years? They've already seen a huge tranche of completely newly elected members directly given ministerial office without the formality of going through a backbench initiation, learning the ropes on the back benches.

[00:10:03] And now they, they're seeing again, a relative newcomer in three years. She's, she's not a complete newcomer, but all the same. I just think that's again an example of Keir Starmer's preference for new talent over long experience.

[00:10:18] Ruth Fox: Well the interesting thing about Ashley Dalton becoming a health minister is that I think she has recently announced that she has recovered from a bout of cancer.

[00:10:26] So it'd be interesting from quite up close and personal experience of the NHS what she she makes of that in terms of her roles and responsibilities. Somebody else who has got not a new job but an addition to his job is Douglas Alexander who was already a minister at the Department of Business and Trade and has now got responsibilities at the Cabinet Office as a result of this merry go round.

[00:10:46] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, this has got the Kremlinologists wondering quite what's going on here. Douglas Alexander was actually, I think, a Cabinet Minister in the very last years of Gordon Brown. Was then Shadow Foreign Secretary in opposition under Ed Miliband, lost his seat in Scotland in the SNP landslide in 2015, then spent a very long time out of Parliament.

[00:11:07] When Labour were looking well placed to become government, he was again made a candidate. in Scotland and was straight in as a minister when he returned. Fair enough. I mean, he had ministerial experience. So Labour quite naturally, I think, brought him straight into government. And now he's got this double role in the cabinet office, the engine room of government.

[00:11:25] I'm not really quite sure what it's about, why he's suddenly there. Another experienced set of eyes, perhaps, on things going on at the very centre of government, because he will know his way around.

[00:11:36] Ruth Fox: He's known as a bit of a political fixer.

[00:11:38] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

[00:11:38] Ruth Fox: And, uh, I suspect some of the, kind of, the business and trade areas of responsibilities, they've got some cut across with the Cabinet Office, not least in relation to the EU.

[00:11:47] So we'll have to see, but if, uh, we talked about, mentioned dynastic politics earlier, Douglas's sister is now a member of Parliament but in the House of Lords. So Wendy Alexander, former leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, joined the House of Lords this week.

[00:12:01] Mark D'Arcy: Yes, her brief rather unhappy tenure as Labour's leader in its most faction ridden period in opposition in Scotland to the SNP didn't end all that well for her but now she's donned the ermine, she'll be in the House of Lords and maybe she too might be given a job quite soon as a fairly experienced hand and someone who you can imagine any number of roles might seem quite suitable.

[00:12:22] Yeah,

[00:12:22] Ruth Fox: I mean since she left politics she's had a lot of experience in the university sector and working in higher education internationally. So I think, um, certainly for the education department, she'd be seen as an asset. And, uh, somebody else to just mention on the dynastic front, Sue Gray joined the House of Lords.

[00:12:39] And her son is a Member of Parliament as well, Liam Conlon, so it goes on and on.

[00:12:44] Mark D'Arcy: It does indeed. I'll just flag up one other name who I think may be being promoted to a sort of immediate rising star position, and that's a guy called Josh McAllister, who's a former teacher, I think he was President of Edinburgh University Students Union not impossibly long ago frankly, and he's now been teleported into a position as the Parliamentary Private Secretary, the political bag carrier, so to speak, for someone who people tend to regard as the effective, real deputy prime minister.

[00:13:15] And that's Pat McFadden, the cabinet minister who sits in the Cabinet Office doing all sorts of mysterious internal engineering room tasks in the centre of government. And that really is an apprenticeship in, in hardcore power brokering. Pat McFadden's been around forever. He was a speechwriter to John Smith.

[00:13:31] He was the political secretary to Tony Blair. He became a minister in, uh, Tony Blair's second term, uh, third term, I think, in fact, in 2005. So he's, uh, one of the real long serving people there. And standing at his elbow suggests that, um, this is someone who's been earmarked if not for greatness, then certainly for higher things in due course.

[00:13:50] So a bit of Kremlinology there just to start things off.

[00:13:53] Ruth Fox: One to keep an eye on. Well, Mark, shall we take a break there? Before we go, just my usual message to listeners. If you're enjoying the podcast, whether you're out on your allotment, delivering your party political leaflets, uh, in your constituency, whether you're out shopping and listening to the podcast, please just take a moment to rate us on Apple or Spotify.

[00:14:12] It really helps other listeners find us. Thanks. See you in a minute.

[00:14:16] Mark D'Arcy: See you soon.

[00:14:19] And we're back, and Ruth, an interesting development for those watching to see how Parliament wants to upgrade its procedures, upgrade its building, work better, is that the Modernisation Committee that was set up by the Labour government as soon as it took office, chaired by the Leader of the House, Lucy Powell, has now announced a few headings that it's going to be looking at.

[00:14:40] It's going to be looking at the physical accessibility of the parliamentary buildings. Famously, Parliament is not a great place to get around if you're a wheelchair user. It's going to be looking at upgrading parliamentary procedure. It's going to be looking at how to more effectively utilise parliamentary sitting hours and possibly reorganise the way parliamentary time is used.

[00:14:59] A number of things to say about this. First of all, on the accessibility side, it's certainly the case that this is the easiest one in principle to talk about. Everybody's in favor of having better access in this day and age for wheelchair users and people with disabilities in principle. That's straightforward.

[00:15:16] In practice, the cost and the practicalities of finding ways to improve this sprawling Victorian building that's at the heart of our democracy may be much more difficult and, tellingly, much more expensive.

[00:15:28] Ruth Fox: Well, of course, that was one of the things that they hoped to achieve through the Restoration and Renewal Programme which hasn't stalled, it's still underway, there's a lot of work going on, but the prospect of when that, the major work on the refurbishment of the building is going to start just seems to get further and further into the distance. But the idea of, you know, rethinking the parliamentary estate and looking at how you can build in more accessible, more inclusive structures into the building, not least, as you say, lifts for wheelchair access, was something that was going to be explored.

[00:15:58] Mark D'Arcy: What this does suggest is perhaps they're taking a slightly more piecemeal view. Once upon a time there was an idea of a big bang, all singing, all dancing, move everybody out for a decade and completely redo the building kind of effort. Now this sounds like maybe they can find ways to, as it were, tack on accessibility to the existing structure without that total revamp.

[00:16:19] But yeah, the nightmare scenario here is that they spend a fortune putting in lifts and accessibility improvements. And then the place burns down because they haven't fully revamped it. And the creaking electrical system finally gives up the ghost and sets fire or whatever.

[00:16:33] Ruth Fox: Looking on the bright side there, Mark.

[00:16:35] Mark D'Arcy: As ever very cheerful.

[00:16:36] Ruth Fox: The alternative view is that the Modernisation Committee presses ahead and they come up with proposals in the short term to make changes to the structural estate. And in the end, eventually you do get to R& R and some of that's got to be ripped out and there are cost implications.

[00:16:50] So the critical question I think that we're going to have to explore as we learn more about what Modernisation Committee's views are on this, and what the specifics are that they're going to explore, is how this idea of improving physical access is going to integrate with what's happening with the Restoration and Renewal programme.

[00:17:06] Now the programme has got to bring proposals back to the House of Commons to consider whether they're going to do a full decant into another building to enable all the refurbishment work to take place all at once, or whether they're going to do a partial decant, or whether they're not going to do the decant at all, and they are going to effectively turn Parliament into a building site while the work goes on around them.

[00:17:26] A decision on that was supposed to happen early part of this year. Now, best we can understand at the moment is that's been pushed into later in the year. Oh, shocking. As ever, it gets further and further away. And of course, the price tag for Restoration and Renewal is huge. And the government, given its financial situation, just doesn't want to confront it.

[00:17:44] So it's going to be quite interesting. How does this fit with the R&R programme. But they're not just talking about, um, physical access, they're also talking about understanding of parliamentary procedure, understanding of parliamentary language, looking at the practices, which is something that was actually in our submission from the Society.

[00:18:03] Mark D'Arcy: Because, of course, the language with which Parliament describes its activities and internal processes is, how can I put it gently?

[00:18:10] Ruth Fox: Not as clear as it could be.

[00:18:13] Mark D'Arcy: Sometimes a little archaic. Why, for example, is a select committee select? In what sense is it select, for example? All sorts of oddnesses and archaisms built into the normal language of Parliament that perhaps the time has come to remove.

[00:18:27] Ruth Fox: Yeah, well even something as basic as a bill for a piece of legislation. I've sat through focus groups for the Society in the past where we've talked about the legislative process with members of the public and people in the focus group have said "Why are MPs allowed to amend their bill? I'm not allowed to amend my 'leccie bill".

[00:18:43] And you sort of think, yeah, okay. It's worth saying the Modernisation Committee has had hundreds of submissions. 400 written submissions. They've had lots of internal meetings. with political parties, with parliamentary staff, with the parliamentary trade unions. Interestingly, they are not going to publish all the written evidence they've received.

[00:19:04] They're only going to publish it from organisations, not from individuals. Not quite sure why. I do wonder if it's a volume question. There's so much of it, and the resource implications of putting all that on the parliamentary website are significant. We're already seeing similar things on the assisted dying bill, where they're struggling to publish the evidence perhaps as quickly as it comes in.

[00:19:22] So there may be something there, but we'll look into that.

[00:19:24] Mark D'Arcy: But the Hansard Society submission will of course be published, has of course been published. It

[00:19:28] Ruth Fox: has been published, but you know, I do think, okay, that's fine for us. It's fine for, I know, um, organiaations like My Society, the Fawcett Society, the Constitution Unit have all had evidence published.

[00:19:40] But if you're an individual researcher or even a member of the public and you've spent time putting your evidence submission together and it doesn't get published on the official website, I'd feel a little bit disgruntled. But that's one strand of what they're going to work on. Improving access. The other was this other strand of future work, "effective use of the Commons".

[00:20:00] So as you say, how to make better use of time within the existing sitting hours to improve scrutiny of legislation, how to give backbenchers and smaller parties what's described as "a fair opportunity to raise issues and causes".

[00:20:14] Mark D'Arcy: Well I don't think anybody can make the claim at the moment that the time of the House of Commons is effectively managed.

[00:20:20] I mean, only this week, Peers were voting past midnight on detailed changes to legislation, while the Commons had already shut up shop by tea time. Now, a home in time for Hollyoaks policy is ridiculous enough.

[00:20:30] Ruth Fox: Do they still have Hollyoaks?

[00:20:32] Mark D'Arcy: I believe it's still there. I've actually now stopped watching.

[00:20:35] I've kicked my Hollyoaks habit. But all the same, the slightly ridiculous side of the House of Commons complaining about long sitting hours, when quite honestly, sometimes the business is petering out ridiculously early. I think on this occasion there were a couple of Statutory Instruments that nobody particularly wanted to debate at length, so time was provided and then wasn't taken up.

[00:20:55] But should there then be some kind of mechanism for saying, okay, the business has stopped early, is there some other debate we can wheel out? Should there be some kind of substitutes bench on which a group of MPs who want to talk about something can sit waiting for that business to run out so they can get up and have their debate so that the Commons isn't packing up early?

[00:21:12] Ruth Fox: That's one option. I think this Debate will also reopen the question about whether there should be a Business Committee for the House so that the agenda is, there's more input from the House generally that they've got control of it rather than it just being in the hands of the government. Ministers will of course not want that.

[00:21:27] There's debates to be had about the timing of opposition days, about whether Private Members' Bills should be on Fridays, and we've talked on the podcast about a number of these issues. Should we just sort of abandon sitting Fridays and incorporate Private Members Bills into the week? Free up Members of Parliament to spend, know that they can dedicate Friday, Saturday, Sunday to their constituencies and back on

[00:21:47] Monday.

[00:21:48] There'll be questions about the balance for backbenchers. Is the time being used by the Backbench Business Committee for backbench debates being used as effectively as it could?

[00:21:57] Mark D'Arcy: Yes, the Backbench Business Committee was at one point supposed to have its debates in real prime time and now they're pretty much routinely consigned to a Thursday afternoon when political attention, press attention is moving away from the House of Commons.

[00:22:10] Arguably people have been complaining for some time now that effectively the Commons works a two day week. That all the real business is concentrated into Tuesday and Wednesday and MPs are drifting off by the end of Wednesday, let alone Thursday.

[00:22:23] Ruth Fox: Yeah, Lucy Powell, when she appeared before the Procedure Committee, I think just before Christmas, said that they'd not been putting legislation on Mondays because so much of the time can get eaten into by ministerial statements and urgent questions and therefore that reduced the amount of time that could be spent on legislation.

[00:22:40] Interestingly they didn't do that this week, they put the Borders Bill on the Monday. quite why they put it on a Monday rather than Tuesday, I'm not sure why, perhaps somebody can get in touch and explain it to me, but that's been the sort of pattern. And then Tuesdays and Wednesdays have been when they've been dealing with legislation.

[00:22:55] As you say, Thursdays are given over to backbench business.

[00:22:58] Mark D'Arcy: Yes, indeed. The difficulty that I have is the routine way in which any request for extra time to be spent on anything is dismissed. There's not enough parliamentary time for this. You can't, on the one hand, have a House of Commons that's finishing its business at 4:30 on a Tuesday, and on the other hand, say, oh, there isn't the time to have a debate, there isn't a time to have a decent sized Report Stage for a very important piece of legislation, it's all got to be tanked through with minimal attention to detail.

[00:23:27] Ruth Fox: Yeah, well this I think is, again, where there's an interesting intersection between this agenda and the future of the legislative process and whether there should be changes to that.

[00:23:36] Now, the Committee memorandum that's been published in the last 24 hours about their future work programme says that they're going to take, quote, "a deeper dive into effective legislative scrutiny" in a future work stream. So that's sort of kicked off into the next strand of work in the future. Now, I have some sympathy for that.

[00:23:53] Obviously I'm disappointed because I'd like them to get to grips with delegated legislation. I don't think there is a more important thing for them to, to deal with. But on the other hand, I do understand that when you've got so many new MPs, and they're so inexperienced in the legislative process that they need some time to work out how it works and what the problems are and experience it for themselves before there's any prospect of them signing up to reform.

[00:24:18] You can't expect them to say, "Oh yeah, let's reform delegated legislation process, let's abolish delegated legislation committees" when most of them have never sat on one. So I'm sympathetic to that. There's a timing issue. The important thing is that this isn't used as an excuse to kick it into the long grass.

[00:24:33] But I do think in relation to things like Private Members Bills and, as you say, you know, reform of the legislative process, more time at Report, for example, how do you do that does fit with this consideration of the parliamentary timetable.

[00:24:44] Mark D'Arcy: I don't think anybody really imagines that any government is going to want to reconstitute the long standing idea of a House Business Committee in which backbench members can stay steady on a minute, we need another day for report stage on this very important piece of legislation, or steady on a minute, there just isn't enough time for something else.

[00:25:03] That dates back to the Tony Wright report on the workings of the Commons that was published before the 2010 election, and it was the bit of it that always seemed most likely to get dropped because it was a serious erosion of the government's control of the Commons agenda and no government wants to lose that control because it's such a vital tool of power.

[00:25:22] So that's not going to happen, but is there some chance of a little bit of leverage somewhere?

[00:25:27] Ruth Fox: I'm dubious that it would happen. I mean, I think there are advantages to it if they could persuade Ministers along that route, but I'm dubious that they will. But I think when we're considering time, I hope they just don't look at the parliamentary week sort of day by day.

[00:25:40] I'd like them to look at, if you like, the parliamentary calendar. We've talked on the podcast before, particularly when we've had the sort of the King's Speech. Do we have to do things this way all the time? Because we've always done it this way.

[00:25:51] Mark D'Arcy: Does there have to be sessions?

[00:25:52] Ruth Fox: Yeah, does there have to be sessions? Why do we have them? What is the purpose of them? They solve some problems, they create a deadline when legislation has to be done by, but that creates its own problems. Are there different, more creative ways we could do it in the future? Other parliaments manage it. So let's look at each hour of use of time in the day. Look at the allocation of business each day. Look at the parliamentary week. Look at the parliamentary month. Look at the parliamentary session. look at the Parliament itself over a four to five year period and think about what kind of parliamentary business will be best done when and also where. I mean, you know, Westminster Hall is increasingly used and there have been some very, very well attended Westminster Hall debates in recent weeks, particularly around petitions and some backbench.

[00:26:37] Mark D'Arcy: Westminster Hall is actually arguably now too small. The physical chamber that's used is arguably too small to accommodate all the MPs who may want to get in on some of these debates. Petitions Committee debates are now very important. They're something that the public takes a look at. So there's a lot more interest in them than there used to be.

[00:26:54] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I did wonder whether some of those debates would have been better in the chamber. Yeah. But also thinking about the balance between the House being a chamber based or a committee based institution again, something we've sort of talked about previously.

[00:27:06] Mark D'Arcy: I increasingly think that committee work is becoming more and more important now, and not just the select committees, important in themselves, but also public bill committees, the scrutiny of legislation. And maybe the House should perhaps have fewer chamber days and some days that are dedicated just to having committees. Maybe the September sitting in the House of Commons could be mostly devoted.

[00:27:30] to committee work rather than having the chamber in use. And if, you know, something happened and there needed to be a ministerial statement, hey the chamber's right there, you can go into it.

[00:27:38] Ruth Fox: Yeah, well I've advocated for looking at whether there's a case for sort of committee sitting weeks. Again, other parliaments do it, there are pros and cons, but it's worth exploring.

[00:27:46] Mark D'Arcy: And the other one that could be looked at is the Private Members Bill process. I mean, we've been talking in our separate series of mini pods about the Assisted Dying Bill, about the limitations of the way Private Members Bills work these days. And we've been wondering between ourselves and discussing a lot, whether the system needs a revamp so that it's not just a random kind of raffle in which an MP wins the right to bring in a bill of their choice.

[00:28:14] Ruth Fox: Parliamentary bingo.

[00:28:16] Mark D'Arcy: Maybe, maybe there's a way in which you could have the House, across all MPs, voting on a choice of bills that might be brought in. Maybe there's some kind of more rational process. that couldn't just be co-opted by the government as a backdoor route to get legislation in that they hadn't managed to get into the King's speech.

[00:28:34] Ruth Fox: Just to explain to listeners, when we're talking about Private Members Bills, we're talking about a ballot that takes place at the beginning of every session, where the Deputy Speaker pulls out the name of 20 MPs.

[00:28:44] Mark D'Arcy: Literally in bingo calling style.

[00:28:46] Ruth Fox: Yeah, there's a fishbowl with numbers. It's a bit like the FA Cup draw, if you're a football fan.

[00:28:52] For parliamentarians, it's like winning Willy Wonka's golden ticket, for those of you who are Roald Dahl readers. But you don't have to say as an MP what your legislative proposal is going to be. So you get pulled out of the ballot, your place on the list of 20 will determine when you get to introduce your Private Member's Bill and get it debated.

[00:29:09] Mark D'Arcy: And then you decide what you're going to do.

[00:29:10] Ruth Fox: And then you decide afterwards. Now, you know, shock horror, 15 years ago, I wrote a paper about reform of Private Members Bills, because these problems have been ongoing for many, many years, and Private Members Bills are an area of the legislative process that's been unreformed for decades.

[00:29:25] I gave evidence to the Procedure Committee some years ago about this, and I suggested that perhaps a better approach would, rather than having a ballot that decides access to legislative time on the floor of the Chamber it would be better for MPs to have to come up with their proposals first, decide what it is they want to legislate on, and then put those proposals to a committee, whether that's the Backbench Business Committee, or the Liaison Committee, or a specially comprised committee solely for the purpose of looking at these ideas and then..

[00:29:55] Mark D'Arcy: So you're an MP who wants a bill to promote the dying art of leg spin bowling and you get the support of a number of MPs and they say yeah that should be number three in this year's roster of Private Members Bill so you get the third Friday opening slot to promote leg spin bowling and away you go.

[00:30:11] Ruth Fox: Or, even more radical than that, you don't have 20 and say that there are going to be 20. You say all the MPs can put their submissions in and there will be three, four, five, six, whatever it may be. And you, you don't necessarily have dedicated time on Fridays. Maybe it's done through the parliamentary calendar.

[00:30:28] Let the other MPs then decide what they're most interested in. And that's where you would get, for example, the proposals for assisted dying coming through, you know, that could have been put forward and resource it better. Whatever process you put in place is not going to be as greatly effective as it could be if you don't resource it as well as government bills.

[00:30:47] Mark D'Arcy: Especially if you're trying to do bigger things than a lot of Private Members Bills currently attempt. Private Members Bills have had their ambitions trimmed back fairly radically in recent years and they tend to be about quite small techie changes to the law. If you're trying to do something as big as Kim Leadbeater's assisted dying bill, if you were trying to ban hunting, if you were trying to legalise or ban ban something else that had really wide legal ramifications, then you would need perhaps more advice than is available to a single MP, perhaps with the help of a friendly pressure group or two.

[00:31:22] Ruth Fox: And the government would possibly resist this because of course they have these handout bills, so government bills that they haven't got time for in the legislative programme, they hand over to MPs to put through under their own auspices. Well, you could find another route. for that. Again, it goes back to the use of parliamentary time.

[00:31:37] Why can't the government put through a bill, if it's a small technical bill, why doesn't it go through in a day, or in over a couple of days, you know, filling these gaps in the parliamentary timetable. It's about thinking through the sort of the sausage machine and the planning of legislation throughout the parliamentary session each year. Well it'll be interesting to see with this group of new MPs because when I gave evidence to the Procedure Committee seven, eight years ago on this, my suggestion that MPs should actually have to think about what their legislative proposal was before they went into the ballot was greeted by two MPs, I won't name them, you can find out on the parliamentary website, one was a Conservative, senior Conservative, one was a then senior Labour MP, she's no longer in the House. And my suggestion, radical as it was, was greeted with the words, "she's stupid". So that's also a lesson to new MPs. Those of us who are giving evidence can hear what you say, even if you say it under your breath, because the microphones are on.

[00:32:37] And there then ensued a bit of a bit of an argument among some of the members about, no, she's not stupid, she just doesn't agree with you. But that idea that MPs should have to think about what their proposal was before they submitted it, rather than discover whether they are high up the ballot and had got a chance and then decide what they wanted to do was greeted as somehow heretical, heretical, and that I just didn't understand the workload and pressures that MPs were under.

[00:33:01] Mark D'Arcy: The other thing that they were talking about in terms of organising the parliamentary timetable was just trying to have more advanced warning of what's coming up. And a welcome development in recent years, has been a tendency, not always observed, but a tendency for Leaders of the House to try and set the business out for two weeks, hence, you know, the first week, this is exactly what we're going to be debating, the week after that, here's the draft business which may be subject to change.

[00:33:25] And of course, there is always the point that parliamentary business can be disrupted by events, dear boy, events, especially in the era of Donald Trump, when you wake up in the morning and the President of the United States has done some other new and exotic and wacky thing that a minister has to get up and make a two hour statement about thus disrupting the parliamentary timetable.

[00:33:43] So there is always the need for a bit of flexibility, but you can set out in advance a certain level of parliamentary business. And it ought to be possible perhaps to do a bit more, to say that we know when we want the Report Stage of such and such a bill to be.

[00:33:57] Yeah. With the understanding it could change.

[00:33:59] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, I think in fairness to Lucy Powell, she has endeavoured to do that, to give MPs a couple of weeks notice, uh, as much as possible, um, which wasn't true in, in recent parliaments all the time. So I think she has made efforts in that direction. The Committee, it should be said, has also got work underway liaising with other committees in the House where there's crossover of interest.

[00:34:19] So, the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme, for example, is looking at some reforms already. The Procedure Committee has got some inquiries underway. Largely, I think, at the request of the Modernisation Committee on proxy voting, electronic voting, call lists and written questions. So, some really techy stuff.

[00:34:36] But again, electronic voting goes to the whole debate about the use of time. One of the clear frustrations that so many new MPs have is how much time they spend walking into the division lobbies, using their pass to vote, going back into the chamber, having to sit around waiting for the result to be announced.

[00:34:52] And if you have multiple divisions in a row, roughly each one takes 15 to 20 minutes. That's suddenly an awful lot of time used in what feels to many of them not the most effective way. So that's underway. And another inquiry is the Standards Committee, which is looking at outside interests and employment.

[00:35:08] So it might be worth talking a little bit more about that after the break.

[00:35:12] Mark D'Arcy: Let's talk about it then.

[00:35:15] And we're back. And Ruth, this is an issue that's been hanging over Parliament for well, forever, really. Should MPs have second jobs beyond their employment as a legislator? Should MPs have family businesses, practice as lawyers, practice as doctors, run their farms, whatever it is?

[00:35:35] Or should they be required not to have any outside employment? And what effect would it have if that requirement was put in place?

[00:35:43] Ruth Fox: Yes, so this is It's something that the Standards Committee has announced an inquiry on, and it's something that the Modernisation Committee that we were talking about just before the break is also driving forward.

[00:35:53] So the Labour manifesto, if you remember, for the election last summer said that the Modernisation Committee that they then planned to set up would look at, restrictions that need to be put in place to prevent MPs from taking up roles that stop them serving their constituents and the country. The question is, what constitutes that? What roles stop you serving your constituents and the country? How do you define it?

[00:36:18] Mark D'Arcy: I imagine that time comes into this. I mean, are they going to draw a line in the sand if you're spending more than x hours a week on your outside interests? You shouldn't be. And I do wonder if there is a clear target. in this, in the shape of Nigel Farage and his Reform Party colleagues all seem to have shows on GB News. And whether maybe the agenda behind this is to stop Members of Parliament presenting shows on the media rather than being in their constituencies or wherever.

[00:36:49] Ruth Fox: Well funny you should say that because back, I think it was last November, Lucy Powell, well she appeared before the Procedure Committee and then she gave, I think uh, there was an exchange of correspondence with the Chair of the Standards Committee, Alberto Costa.

[00:37:01] She said that "there was a consensus among members of the Modernisation Committee that the House should implement a qualified prohibition on outside interest in employment". In one of the memorandums to the Modernisation Committee, she said that they should consider "whether paid engagements such as media appearances, journalism and speeches have any public benefit".

[00:37:22] Now, if you are thinking about the kind of GB News, Lee Anderson, Nigel Farage scenario where they're earning big money, more money than they earn as an MP for presenting programmes each week, that would go to the heart of it, there's a clear target there, but it goes more broadly.

[00:37:38] Mark D'Arcy: Oh yes, well, for example, I mean, Geoffrey Cox, the, you know, the former Attorney General, very, very eminent barrister, does lots of very, very high powered and indeed very, very highly paid legal work, and takes quite a lot of time out from Parliament to do it.

[00:37:52] Now, you may be in favour of that, you may be against it, but the one thing I can tell you is that his constituents know it, because it's an established fact and it's been out there for a very long time, and they keep re electing him.

[00:38:03] Ruth Fox: Yeah, that is the counter argument, isn't it? Ultimately, if the constituents know and the constituents are content, does it really matter?

[00:38:09] And this, I think, is what the committee's going to have to try and get to grips with. What do they mean by stopping you serving your constituents and the country? And also a question about, did you get the role and the job and the money as a consequence of your position as a parliamentarian, or is it a consequence of your previous non political experience.

[00:38:29] So in Geoffrey Cox's case, he's a barrister. He was earning an awful lot at the bar before. He's got a contract to work x number of hours for this firm each month. But you can't say he's got the job because he's a parliamentarian. He's got it because he's a very, very qualified, highly regarded barrister.

[00:38:46] Similarly, Nigel Farage, he didn't get the slot on GB News because he's an MP. He had it way before then.

[00:38:52] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, I mean, and I do think that the, the Nigel Farage stroke Lee Anderson issue is one of the big draws for this. And you can argue that GB News has rather too many people from Reform UK and the rightward fringes of the Conservative Party acting as its presenters.

[00:39:10] That's not an issue for Parliament, that's an issue for Ofcom. If you think that, that's who should be dealing with it. If you start drawing up specialist rules for the House of Commons to stop people you don't like doing things you don't like or that irritate you, then you're on a considerable slippery slope.

[00:39:27] Ruth Fox: And we should say that this, I think, would capture not just Nigel Farage and GB News, but scenarios where, for example, prior to becoming Foreign Secretary, David Lammy was presenting a weekend programme on LBC radio, and other MPs have done it, you know, guest slots and so on. I've always found it odd that that's permitted.

[00:39:46] But then there's a wider agenda about journalism. If you're paid for journalism, for writing articles, should that be the case?

[00:39:52] Mark D'Arcy: Well, the great Tam Dalyell used to write a regular column in New Scientist, for example, and no one batted an eyelid at that.

[00:39:59] Ruth Fox: But should you be paid for it? Is that not part of your parliamentary responsibilities if you take a broad view of it?

[00:40:06] Would he have had that column if he hadn't been Tam Dalyell MP? If he'd just been Tam Dalyell, you know, scientist in wherever his constituency was.

[00:40:15] Mark D'Arcy: It's an interesting question, but then I mean there's a long, long tradition of Members of Parliament writing books. I mean, Chris Bryant cranked out a giant multi volume biography, as he described it, of Parliament while a sitting MP.

[00:40:27] Ruth Fox: And more recently a book on parliamentary standards based on, you know, what he'd learned as Chair of the Standards Committee. But again, would they have sold as well as they did had he not been Chris Bryant MP, because he wrote books before, biographies, wrote a biography of Glenda Jackson, as I recall. I rather doubt they sold as well as his books probably do now.

[00:40:47] Mark D'Arcy: That's the difficult question. What are you going to stop? Yeah. Where do you draw the line? What is permissible? And drawing these lines is quite a difficult thing. I mean, some MPs are such workaholics that they can do their full job as a constituency MP, they can do their full job as a legislator, and still find time to crank out 20,000 word books on any subject you like.

[00:41:06] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, some of them will say, well, doing the research and the writing at the weekends is my form of relaxation. It's actually what I enjoy doing as a, you know, my, my sort of non parliamentary work. And who's to say that's wrong and to stop it? Do you say that certain types of books are permitted but not other books?

[00:41:22] Do you say certain types of articles but not other articles?

[00:41:24] Mark D'Arcy: You're only allowed to write slushy romance novels.

[00:41:27] Ruth Fox: Are you going to say that only those, whether it's barristers or whether it's accountants or doctors, if you're in a regulated profession where you need to do a certain amount of work for that to maintain your your license and to to keep up with training, you're going to be permitted to do it but people who are working in professions that are not regulated in that way, academics, historians, for example, you can't continue your work.

[00:41:52] Mark D'Arcy: Imagine the scenario, you are an up and coming solicitor who slightly surprisingly wins a marginal seat in a very tight contest by 15 votes. You want to maintain your professional qualifications, you want to keep up to date with the law, because you must be conscious at the back of your mind that you could lose that seat at the next election.

[00:42:09] Being an MP is not a secure job. The electoral geography of this country has changed to the extent where even people who thought they were sitting on huge great majorities may find themselves out at the next election. And, uh, they may find that they're unemployable because they haven't managed to keep up their qualifications.

[00:42:23] That's also true, of course, with doctors, for example, that you have to continue practising to a certain degree. And some of them do. There was a great furore a while ago when, um, who was it? Philip Lee, former Conservative MP, was practising on a Monday. As an A& E doctor, I think, and, um, some people felt that this was inappropriate, but on the other hand, he was able to bring reports of what was going on in the NHS from the battlefront, if you like, straight into the Chamber of the House of Commons.

[00:42:49] Ruth Fox: And that's the other argument, isn't it? That actually you want MPs who've got experience of, you know, different professional backgrounds, who've got real time experience of what's happening on the ground, whether it's in business or in the military or in the NHS, and bring that expertise into Parliament in a way that that um, certainly used to happen sort of 40, 50 years ago.

[00:43:07] Mark D'Arcy: The military is quite an important point here, because there are a number of MPs who are reserve officers. Mm hmm.

[00:43:12] Uh, Penny Mordaunt particularly, I seem to recall, doing a very funny speech about what she had learned. Let's not go there. Well, indeed, let's not rehearse that particular story. Slightly rude.

[00:43:21] But, but that again requires a time commitment. Yep. And so you need that. And if the argument is that Westminster is a hermetically sealed bubble entirely absorbed by its own parochial concerns and completely unconnected with the outside world. Then taking away one of the direct connections between Members of Parliament and the outside world strikes me as the wrong move.

[00:43:40] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and this has been the argument over the last sort of 20 years as successive committees, particularly the Committee on Standards in Public Life, has tried to grapple with this. You know, they've, the committee has sort of argued, well, you know, MPs should be able to undertake paid employment, provided it's within reasonable limits.

[00:43:56] But then how do you decide and determine what reasonable limits is? And what might be reasonable to me might not be reasonable to you and to my constituents and so on.

[00:44:03] Mark D'Arcy: I still think that the ultimate safeguard on this is if the voters in that particular Member of Parliament's constituency feel that they're not doing enough, feel that they're absent, feel that they're basically taking the mickey, then that's the best safeguard against MPs abusing their position.

[00:44:21] And of course MPs can go too far, do too much, start neglecting their duties. But having that regulated from within Westminster by what would necessarily be some kind of political committee strikes me as very dangerous, because it could get weaponised in all sorts of ways and used against political enemies very, very easily.

[00:44:40] I think this is one you ought to leave in the laps of the voters.

[00:44:43] Ruth Fox: Yeah, well the situation at the moment is that the Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, has apparently provided the Modernisation Committee and the Standards Committee with a memorandum about what the principles might look like in terms of limiting second jobs.

[00:44:58] What kind of principles should underpin exceptions for second jobs, paid employment. Principles based rather than rules based. The MPs should be expected not to accept offers of paid outside interests that might detract or appear to detract from their ability to pay full attention to their parliamentary responsibilities.

[00:45:19] MPs should, uh, be expected not to accept offers of paid outside interests that might create, or appear to create, actual or potential conflicts of interest. And MPs should be not to accept offers of paid outside interests that are made, or that a reasonable observer might think are being made primarily because of their membership of the House.

[00:45:40] So it would kind of lie with the members to think about those principles and whether or not a reasonable person would interpret them in a different way to themselves.

[00:45:49] Mark D'Arcy: With the Standards Committee as the backstop there if a case is brought before them. And of course it should be said in all this that Parliament has already acted to ban paid advocacy, someone being paid as the representative of a specific interest group, that's right out now, it may still go on on the quiet, but it's a, it's a hanging offence, essentially, for a Member of Parliament to be engaged in paid advocacy these days, they'd be out.

[00:46:12] Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, with that, Mark, um, it'll be interesting to see what the, uh, the Modernisation Committee and the Standards Committee make of this inquiry.

[00:46:19] We'll keep an eye on it and, uh, report back occasionally when we, we glean anything new. But with that, shall we, uh, leave it there for this week?

[00:46:26] Mark D'Arcy: Yes, indeed. It's good to be back, incidentally. I was very amused to be described as indisposed in last week's podcast and made me sound like Lady Bracknell, but, uh, my stomach and other bits of me are now much recovered and so I'm very glad to be back in the pod.

[00:46:38] Ruth Fox: Good to have you back.

[00:46:39] Mark D'Arcy: Parliament's not sitting next week, so we'll be putting out a special edition. We've got an interview with Greg Power, a former special adviser to former Leader of the House Robin Cook, amongst others, who's got a very interesting book on how reform of parliaments works.

[00:46:55] Ruth Fox: Inside the Political Mind.

[00:46:56] Look out for it in your podcast feed. See you soon.

[00:46:59] See you soon.

[00:47:02] Speaker: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk or find us on social media at Hansard Society.