Good morning, colleagues. Welcome back after the Easter recess. I hope everybody is reasonably refreshed and raring to go for the summer term. As we continue our work with regards to standards, ethics and integrity in public life, we are delighted to be joined this morning by Doug Chalmers, the new chair of the Ethics and Integrity Commission. We are grateful to you for joining us this morning. Maybe we should just start with a bit of a scene-setting question. I think we will all understand—you will understand—the importance of an effective standards system, both in terms of the operation of public life and also how the public perceive the operation of public life. What is your assessment of where the public are on their appreciation of, or belief in, high standards, integrity and ethics.

First, Chair, and to the Committee, if I may say, thank you very much for having me in. I was the Chair of CSPL for about 18 months before I came into the EIC, which I think is an important context as we explore and as we go into it. If I may say, this is our natural resting place; our docking end point into Parliament is this Committee. Also, thank you, Chair, for giving us a bit of breathing room to allow us to settle in and find the initial framing point for the EIC. However, I have an expectation to be in front of you fairly often in the future because our purpose, our linkages and our outcomes often mean we are in partnership in many ways.

Thank you.

In terms of your exam question, I would start off by saying our system of governance in this country relies heavily on consent, for those elected or appointed, for taxation, policing, and everything that goes into that. The importance of standards, and underpinning that by legitimising and retaining the legitimacy of those who are appointed, I think is key. In many ways, the principles of public life, which are agreed both externally as well as by those who are inside public authorities, set that parameter. Many of the artefacts that are in that, I would say, embody the limits of that power that is consented to. That is an important framing for what we are saying. The complexity of our government and the complexity of our standard system, which then maps to that system of government, has evolved over a long period, but most significantly over the last 30 years in comparison to what went before that. The vast majority of those in public life—elected or appointed—operate with good faith and in the public interest and use those artefacts and guidance for their decision making in the same place. However, that is not your exam question. Your exam question is more about what the public perception of this system is. You know, Chair, that, if you look at any of the polling over time, the trust in politicians has never been very high. It has been lower than it is today, but we are talking between 14% and 9%, so not massive. What also worries me as much is trust in our institutions, which is also low at the moment. That is unusual, and historically has not been the norm. I can point to a number of inquiries whose findings identify state failures in a range of areas. I think the combination of those two factors contributes to a public perception that their elected representatives may not be governing wholly in their interests. Therefore, I think there is concern. Parts of it are individual, but a larger part of it is trust in our institutions, which concerns not just me but the Commission as a whole.

Before we roll around in ashes in a hair shirt and see it as a uniquely Westminster or UK problem—this lack of public faith and confidence—are there any international comparisons, which we could or should be looking at, where confidence in the probity of political operations is high and learning from what they do in order to do it, or is this just an international malaise of disaffection and disenchantment?

Although we spend a lot of our time in this space, this is not the only area. We are responsible for public life across its landscape. We have done quite a lot in local government, for example. Most people’s interaction is more to do with planning committees or their councils.

We will come on to local government later, so do not worry about that.

I think it is an important element. We are quite unique, and I get the chance to speak to or ask to speak to EU or other organisations. This is something that we should be relatively proud of. You are quite right about the ashes and hair shirt. We worry about this a lot because I think standards and the rule of law is essential to what we are as a public inside of this country of ours. Other countries don’t even have some of the artefacts and the concerns, and they are not having conversations like this, so in many ways we are—

Is there anywhere that consistently performs better than the UK in this arena, in terms of the levels of public confidence, which we should be looking at and or seeking to emulate, either in terms of the regime that they have to deploy to enforce standards or operational best practice?

There are, but at the macro level none jump out at me. However, if I dive into specific areas—for example, we are doing an inquiry into ombudsman at the moment, which we may come on to later on—there are a number of examples. The Netherlands is one, and New Zealand, which has changed some of its rules, is another. As we look into each area, we can look to see how others have taken on some of these challenges to try to improve performance. As a whole—and I think everyone is in this space—if I was to compare us with, say, parliamentary democracies who are not dissimilar to us, we are all struggling with not dissimilar things, so there is a broader issue. We are all trying to do our part. I don’t think we are too far behind. There are areas where we can look for best practice, but not at the macro level. It comes down more into smaller levels.

A final question from me at this stage. Throughout the work that we have been doing in this area as a Committee—and as a result of general conversations and knowledge—I think I am becoming increasingly concerned that there is still reliance on the robustness of the architecture of the ‘good chap’. That there isn’t enough statutory underpinning of what is done and how it is done, teeth, enforcement, and so on. People write advisory letters and somebody looks in the eye. They take the advice or they don’t, or whatever it may happen to be. That is fine if everybody in the operational field knows the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, and knows that there is broadly a set of rules that everybody plays by. In the case of insurgents and disruptors, it is a badge of honour when that sort of stuff just gets thrown up in the air and discarded. Do you have any thoughts on the long-term robustness of the architecture that we have?

There are a couple of points. One is the architecture. Much of the standards’ architecture has not been around that long. We are talking only 30-odd years. Your ‘good chaps’ theory, there is a problem in that very sentence. It is as much linked to a sense of personal honour and reputation. By the way, I don’t think that has gone. I think for the vast majority of people in public service that still matters a great deal. However, there is that minority that you talked about, so that is a factor. When doing the induction for new MPs, when they first came in, I was highlighting that there are laws and regulations and then there are the principles of life, so your individual judgment, your personal responsibility to operate in public office and make judgments on the public interest rests between the two. You cannot legislate exactly how all of that will be done. It is impossible. The context of each issue that comes forward relies on individual judgment and a personal responsibility to it. I think that what you are saying is: are the teeth enough to nudge and to keep nudging to ensure that that individual responsibility, that personal responsibility of the elected or appointed official to use that office in the public interest is sufficient? That is where we come in. We see it as an organisation that conducts evidence-based inquiries, makes recommendations, adapts where improvements are needed, and addresses gaps as they emerge. I think we are going to talk about a bunch of those later in the conversation.

Good morning. The Government had a very clear commitment to replace the CSPL with the Ethics and Integrity Commission. What is your view on that change? Obviously you have moved over, but was that something you were advocating for or believed had to happen beforehand?

Under my predecessor there was a report on upholding standards, which is a very worthy document. Many of the topics it touched on have been touched on by this Committee in the past. We did have a look at this in that report. There was an idea of a super-regulator—for want of a better word—that could capture every element. We did not think there was really space for a super-regulator. As I mentioned before, much of our standards landscape is still settling. Each of those elements—whether it be to the House of Lords, House of Commons and so on—has a bespoke element that needs to settle down, and to look after that particular constituency, so we did not think that had value. When the Government came in with the manifesto commitment for the EIC, and trying to right-size it so it could add value to the standards landscape rather than disrupt the landscape, that was work that this Government then undertook. What we have ended up with is the remit that you know now. It is quite an expanded remit. For me, I welcome it. Lord Nolan is present in every day of our lives, thanks to the principles, but his full report also contained a number of recommendations that tend to be overlooked over time. He highlighted that the principles alone will not be enough to do it. They set an ambition, but they need some help in order to shape the day-to-day lives of people in public office. He also highlighted the elements of external scrutiny, codes of ethical conduct and education informing. The added remit that we have been given will help us better progress those other elements. We will come on to codes of ethical conduct probably in the term, but I welcome the fact that we are going to be given responsibility to advise on those codes of conduct, and it is an enduring commitment. Our expertise and understanding of what works and how you get a code embedded will increase with time. Where we have ended up—a statutory body that remains advisory rather than a super-regulator—feels right We will explain how our links, as CSPL, with the wider network are now firmer than before, and why that is still of value. Therefore, our primary bit of looking for those gaps and those tweaks across the system which we talked about, while we also become experts in the codes of conduct, I think feels right. We will need to keep that under review as we get a few years under our belt.

What were the greatest achievements of the CSPL?

Quite a lot, I would say. We had the 30th anniversary of the principles last year. We took them on a sort of roadshow to schools and universities, just to test them, run them through. I think that is a key gift and one we should not forget. Because the principles are agreed by those in public authorities. They are in most people’s codes to some degree or another. They are agreed by political parties, agreed by our academic institutions, and agreed by our free press. That is a pretty rare common good to be able to do, so that is a big gift. As you know, they were brought in under the cash-for-questions period by John Major—I notice his portrait sits outside this room. There were a series of changes and tweaks. Those recommendations went into it, and led to the creation of the Electoral Commission, the Commissioner for Public Appointments, and the introduction of lay members on standards committees. Of the 29 serious reviews and inquiries that were done over CSPL’s tenure, many of those recommendations have gone on to create or tweak the landscape that we see today. Not all of those recommendations have been adopted or enacted. As Chair of the EIC—having taken forward the body of work and guidance developed by CSPL, including elements that have not been implemented—I will continue to keep them under review. So I think CSPL did a lot to help shape the standards landscape as we see it today.

That was my next question. The inquiry work and other achievements of the CSPL will be carried forward. It is not going to be lost?

Correct. Having been the last chair of CSPL, I am quite familiar with quite a lot of its literature. The basis of CSPL, which is non-statutory and advisory, is the basis of the EIC. The functions of CSPL—which were to advocate and be responsible for the known principles, and do evidence-based inquiries into the landscape for tweaks and gaps, which I have talked about before, and I ran an informal network and some engagement—are all in the remit for the EIC. We are not dropping those. I think they are really important functions that we need to take forward, because it has done a lot of good, as I say, over the last 30 years.

If you fast-forward the clock 10 years, how would you measure the success or failure of the EIC?

CSPL was well regarded, both internally and, as importantly, by external organisations, for providing evidence-based reviews and solid recommendations, which were referred to by many and remain widely cited in the literature today. The EIC—if I roll forward five years—I think will have earned that mantle as being the respected, independent body that ethics and integrity issues come to. In time, that centre of excellence on codes will have built up as well. The credibility for reviewing the standards landscape with the kind of literature that is respected, coupled with our excellence in codes, would be the first thing I think that would be important. Second would be reports and recommendations. We see those recommendations being adopted and enacted. That is important because it confirms our credibility. The last one, which is one of our new remits, is to do more to help on the engagement and the informing of both public authorities and the wider public. I hope that in five years’ time we can look back and see that we have played a part in improving the understanding of the standards landscape within public authorities and started to engage more with public authorities. That is a big issue. We are going to come back to that, I am sure, in the future, and I have to measure my time. In five years I think we will have done well in public authorities, but we still have quite a way to go in the public at large.

Should it also be that standards are higher? All that sounded very procedural to me, but surely the ultimate goal should be ensuring that standards in public life are significantly higher than what they are now, or the perception of that is higher.

Absolutely. I think it was Pat McFadden who said that the public will, at the end of the day, judge politicians in government by how they do their jobs and how they fulfil the principles of public service. I cannot do that. That is for the elected and appointed officials in public life. Our job is to provide the framework to nudge and provide that boundary to it. I hope that everything that we do will encourage those who are in public office to use public office in the public interest. You are quite right about my perspective, but my reason for saying it the way I have described it is that that relies on the individuals—that personal responsibility I have talked about already—to also evolve as we go into the future. We are doing this because we want to help them deliver their public office.

I want to pick up on an answer you gave to Mr Lamont and tie back to my opening question. We take seriously murder, manslaughter, rape, drink driving, the wearing of seat belts—five random things—and we demonstrate to the public that we are serious about them because there is statute law that prescribes them, sets out penalties, and so on. That is a way of saying to the public that we take these things seriously. We do not have non-statutory and advisory bits of paper on those issues for the public to opt into or opt out of. Speaking back to the point that you were making about 9% and 14% public confidence, and this being a global malaise—speaking back to my ‘good chaps and chappesses’ point of how things should run—do you think we miss a trick by not saying to the public we take these issues so seriously that we now make them statutory? That way, if any future Government want to change something, there has to be amendment to statute law, repealing, and amending, not just a, “I am not going to appoint”, “I am not going to ask”, “I am not going to have an interest in these areas and there is nothing anybody can do”. My direct question is: to try to bolster public confidence in this important area of public life, would the putting of your body and others on statutory footings help?

For our committee, it is probably not right for me to talk about ourselves. That will be for others to do.

Of course. That is right. Who else is going to talk about it?

The thing that we have looked at in the past is if a body does casework, individuals, so it is responsible then for taking a code, assessing a breach, and coming to a judgment on that breach. In the past we have recommended that that person should be on a statutory footing, and that is to enable them to operate without fear or favour in order to do their job as an independent body. We are advisory and we don’t make those positions. Dissolving us is a statement in itself, one could argue. For those who do do casework, we have recommended that they are placed on a statutory footing.

Would you like to see the EIC on a statutory footing?

We have to give a few more turns under the handle to see how our wider remit settles in, I think, before we apply that.

Do we have the time for that? Nolan—30 years, as you have mentioned. Public trust is falling like a stone. Do we have time for navel gazing, review and gentle cogitation?

I have lots to do in the EIC, as we know, and this conversation will expand on that. I have to admit, fighting this particular issue is not high on my list to do. I can see some people’s merits for it, but I would not want to expend lots of capital on achieving that, when actually I am not 100% sure it is going to address the exam question that you have asked. Because we do not do casework. We sit above and we provide advice.

Thank you. That leads on to what I was going to ask about. First, why do you think it is more appropriate for the EIC not to do casework? Are you able to expand on that a bit?

What we have—and you know this from the House of Lords, House of Commons, local government, civil servants, I could go on—in public life is quite a range of different constituencies, and the standards regime that has been created over the time we have talked about has been created to look after those constituencies with their various codes. Then their systems and bodies are set up to see if there has been a breach, investigate that breach and then have an appeal system of some form or another. That is quite complicated. That is why, when we looked at if there should be a super-regulator, as described, we could not see how it would add value. It would add more friction than value because each constituency has its own important factors when it comes to our style of governance that should be done. Therefore, we don’t do casework while it is going on. I have a linkage with all the regulators through the network of those that are doing casework, and I can pick up from them whether there are trends or concerns with their ability to do their function. That is where we get the tweaks and the gaps that often lead to inquiries.

That network and those links, are they strong enough to mitigate the risk that, without the direct exposure to the types of issues that are coming up—either regularly or just those that are more topical based on the kind of current political situation or whatever it may be—the EIC could almost have a bit of a specific perspective on some issues that may hinder its ability to make effective recommendations?

No, I don’t think so. The relationship we have with all those regulators is strong. We might come on to talking about the network a bit later on, but the spirit of sharing and talking in there is quite robust in that way. We don’t talk about the intricacies of a case, particularly when it is ongoing, but there are annual reports, the lessons that we learned, things like that that we do discuss. I think the make-up of our commission itself, with independent members and political members, is enough of a challenge forum, I think, to prevent us. If you are inferring we could be captured by one of the regulators in one way or another, I am pretty confident we are able to have enough distance. I think not doing casework helps us maintain that broader strategic overwatch. If we ended up doing casework, we would be naturally driven into the devil of the detail of a particular aspect.

That is a useful perspective. I noticed on the EIC website that the terms of reference that set it up are very short, but also very broad. I suppose that gives you a lot of space. Do you think that gives you the flexibility to examine different issues or does it create a problem in focus?

There is a capacity thing. I touched on earlier that in CSPL one of the things that we have done very well over the 30 years was those 29 inquiries I talked about. They were evidence-based and led to a series of recommendations, some which were enacted. The committee then chose what it would look at, how it would look at it and how it would take evidence and write. It had the independence to be able to do that. That function has very much continued to today. We take that forward. The one we are doing now is the ombudsman, which you are aware of. In parallel with that, we are going to be doing codes of conduct. We are doing engagement, and then we have the annual letter to the Prime Minister, so we now have concurrency going on. However, they do connect and support each other in a way. My concern, which you might have been touching on, is that, if we had lost that independent inquiry bit, our ability to then range where we felt we should range could have been curtailed, but we have kept that. I think that is a very important thing for us to keep, for the reasons you raise.

On those inquiries, given the status that we have just talked about and the EIC’s positioning, how are you able to make sure that recommendations are implemented? What mechanisms are available to the EIC to follow up, to track progress, and to challenge where the Government are not implementing recommendations? Where are the teeth?

This is what I am very alive to. I took on the role that internal influence matters, because it is the Government of the day that will enact or take on the recommendations that are made. If it is advice, the public authorities will pick up that advice. External credibility with the think tanks and the others in there also matters to us as an independent body to go forward. As I mentioned earlier on, I still believe I am the champion for many of the CSPL recommendations, and I am a nagging conscience, if I may say that. A good example is our local government review, which was done a while ago now, in 2019. It did not get much traction with the previous Government, but we kept on hearing from our local government contacts that there was still work to be done. I wrote to the new Government highlighting this report. They have launched a consultation and, as you know, there are now proposals outside the House. Those are grounded on six of the key CSPL recommendations, but we will see how that one runs. We do not drop those recommendations. As we build up our literature as the EIC, it is about making sure that we are credible externally as well as internally, so that those recommendations—evidence-based and grounded—are as irresistible as we can make them. However, we are advisory. I don’t have any teeth to make anyone do it, which makes sense. I am not elected, so that is for this House, both Houses and government, which is where those recommendations go. As I mentioned earlier on, that is where our linkage with your Committee is a very important one to have.

That leads me on to ask: is there a space, or a requirement almost, then, for Parliament to do more of their inquiry tracking type work, and looking at what you have recommended and what the Government have implemented and trying to dot the i’s and cross the t’s? Yes, that way around. I have your terms of reference here for the public sector ombudsman Review as well, which I was looking at. That looks really malleable. It struck me to an extent that a lot of the issues being discussed are also issues that we look at as a committee, particularly, for example, with the MP filter that the PHSO currently operates under. What do you think the boundary is between where the EIC should look up to and where it is more of a remit for Parliament and particularly PACAC to investigate, or do you think it is fine for there to be a significant overlap?

I think it is fine for there to be significant overlap. There is a strength in overlap because we are an independent body, and you are a parliamentary body. Actually there are many reports. The lobbying report would be one we are almost certainly going to talk about sometime later today as another example. If you go back over the canon of our literature and the canon of your literature, there has been an overlap on a repeated basis. For us, as an independent body making inquiry, if you come up with a similar recommendation and inquiry in your own way, that makes it slightly more irresistible to the Government of the day to enact those recommendations, so I see strength in it rather than not. Also, if we try to divide it we may end up accidentally doing what you were talking about earlier on, which is that our freedom to reign as an independent body would be curtailed. I think we would probably lose. They may create a gap, and I would rather have an overlap than a line because gaps could create.

That is useful. Just one final question then for now. The Government have a broader agenda to try and reduce the number of public bodies and to streamline and have a more efficient and effective system. Of the regulators and standards bodies that we have, the one that always stands out to me quite a bit is the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists, by virtue of it, again, not really having teeth, very much power in that space, nor really much of a requirement to do much system reform or advocating for system reform in that area. They just literally seem to maintain that register. Do we need to do anything about that? Is there space for the responsibilities of that office to go into one of the other regulators or indeed the EIC itself?

That is a very timely and a quite contemporary question to ask. As CSPL and now EIC, we have had a concern over lobbying for quite some time, as have you as a Committee, having seen your recommendations in the past. You will know that the PM has asked us to look into lobbying, business appointment rules and financial disclosure, which we welcome because it gives us a chance to scratch the itch on an area of concern. We had some recommendations on lobbying in the upholding standards report that I mentioned before. This is another example of us keeping a track of recommendations, and we are going to use this vehicle, which the PM has asked us to do, to refresh it, and take fresh evidence into it. As that review goes by, I think it may come to answer some of your questions. For us, in lobbying, there is this balance of government and departmental disclosures. On the other side there is who is registered by ORCL, as you described earlier on. That really matters. By the way, lobbying is good. What we want to do is to ensure that there is no unchecked privileged access into Government decisions, so that there is transparency. Our review is going to kick the tyres of recommendations made before and make sure that the balance between those two elements is right. Once we have completed it, it will lead to recommendations. Exactly what those recommendations are I don’t know yet. However, I would be very surprised if they did not touch on that to some degree or another.

Good morning. I am going to be looking at resources. Starting with what level of staffing and funding do you need in order to carry out the full scope of your remit?

The CSPL was quite small. There was a smaller committee and that was supported by a secretariat of four and a half people. With the concurrency that I have talked about already, that clearly was never going to be sufficient. Last summer, when we were negotiating terms of reference and language, but also the structure for it, we came up with an officials team—I think it is around 18, if memory serves me like—headed up by an SCS at the top end. We have made good progress in terms of getting recruitment from that. We have the SCS, our chief executive in post, which for me is very helpful because it gives the right weight to connect into other Departments, as well as manage concurrency of teams going into it. As of today, I think we are at 16 and we should be at 18 as we head into the summer, so we will have met that staffing requirement. In terms of committee members, you will remember that we are a mixture of independent and political members with a slight majority of independent members. When we looked at our capacity to deal with these issues, I highlighted that we were short of independent members. If we were to put two members on each of the four projects, we would run out of a set of people. It was agreed to expand our independent membership by another two, and the competition for that has been running. I think we are in the last stages, I hope, for the individuals to help us do that. We have almost tripled our officials team, and we have seen a growth in our independent members as well to meet that need. However, we are going to keep it under review. As I said before, we are doing it, but we keep it under review normally because things like this are settling in. We are in start-up mode, working out how we can deliver these remits, and being under review would be normal. The other bit is the codes of ethical conduct. Once we have given our first advice, we will stay on that task, and there is some form of assessment process that will be running. We will almost certainly need more resource for that when that assessment process comes up. I registered that with the Ministers of the Cabinet Office, and they know that we are likely to come back once we have picked up that additional function and are ready to take it on.

Are you confident that you are going to get a positive answer?

On that, yes, I am. If you have read my letters back and forwards—and my conversation with some of the Ministers are very honest about this—I say, “I can do these things resource permitting” or “There is a caveat in there that is about resources because we cannot pick up these tasks without it”. If you think about it, that is not a lot of people to do this broad remit that we have touched on before. Evidence-based inquiries take human capacity to get it right, both in taking the evidence, analysing it and then drafting it.

You said that you are hoping to get the independent commissioners in place soon. Do you have an idea of a rough date for that?

I don’t. You know the public appointments process as well as I do. We went through the process. From my engagement with the Cabinet Office, my understanding is that the Ministers have made some recommendations up to the Prime Minister that now rest there. It should be fairly soon, I would have thought. I was really pleased, by the way in the range of candidates that came forward. As an independent member, I was involved in some of the initial shortlisting and looking at the candidate pool. It was reassuring to me to see the number of candidates and the breadth of experience that the candidates had who wanted to serve, which I think was really good to see.

There is always going to be a balance with any organisation, with having enough people to have them on each of the inquiries, but not having too big a group to actually work together collectively. How have you satisfied yourself that you have that balance right?

That is a very accurate question because I have always been a believer that there is something about human ergonomics to get to the size of creative dialogue. If you get too big you end up managing and you do not have the creative dialogue. We are about the right size. I would not want to get much larger because we are going to have, as I say, these projects that are run, but the Commission is still a collective and it will need to opine and challenge on how that project work is done because the recommendations, reports or advice that we provide is Commission advice. It is not that of a project. I think we are about the right size. I feel that the extra two members will enable us to still run that in-person challenge forum that we have at the moment. When I come back in the future, you can ask me if that has worked or not, and if I found it a struggle. But I am confident that it is about the right size at the moment.

The political commissioners, how are you getting on with those?

They are invaluable. As you know, we have Ian Blackford from the SNP, because the basic rule of principle was the top three parties in the House, and obviously there was a change the last time, but Ian was allowed to carry on to see the conclusion. We have Ian Blackford, Michael Tomlinson from the Conservative Party, and Ruth Dombey from the Lib Dems. We had Margaret Beckett for a long time as the Labour member, who was invaluable in terms of her insight and experience. She has stepped down and we are now waiting for Labour to nominate her replacement.

What about the process for appointing the vacancy—it is the parties who do it?

My understanding, when I inquired about this, is that the Prime Minister writes to said party and then the party puts forward a nomination and then the nomination joins us. That is the journey that we had with Michael Tomlinson, for example. In this case, that process might be shorter.

Effectively, you take what you are given.

For political elements, yes, as we do for the independent members. We don’t appoint the independent members. They go through the public appointments process and come to us as normal with everyone else. We have a part to play in the process, but we are not the decider or chooser of who becomes part of the committee. I think that is healthy, actually. It keeps us a diverse and challenging group.

However, as you say, you have a part in the process, even though not the ultimate decision. Whereas with the political one, you have no part at all. Then a more personal question. You are Master of Emmanuel College, a full-time job. Are you really confident that you have the time to devote to the EIC to make sure that you are developing a new organisation and making it run well?

That is a very good question. I raised this when the expanded remit of the EIC was being discussed, whether they wanted a full-time chair now or they wanted to keep to a part-time chair. They were very clear that they wanted to keep to a part-time chair, which is when I highlighted that we would need more independent members because the CSPL way of working is it was the chair and a member who did the inquiries. I cannot do four collective inquiries concurrently. That would be impossible. Hence we got the more independent members in. As a Master of a Cambridge college, if you want to do an additional role, you have to take it through our governing body, which I did. They are very supportive of this role, and they have been very supportive to this date. I will be honest, though, the last couple of months have been very busy because we are in the start-up element to get everything running, and it is one to keep asking me as we go into it. Once we get the systems up and running, I think it will be manageable, but right now I am doing long days and time at the weekend to make sure that the right things are done, and I am supported both by my college in that endeavour and a very patient, long-suffering spouse. Something you guys know a lot about, I would suggest.

Who will be delighted that she gets the last mention. Luke Taylor.

Thank you very much. A bit of a looser question to start with. Is the independence important and how is that delivered?

I think it is critical. I will come back to why it is critical in a moment, but in terms of how it is delivered, the make-up of the committee—with independent members and political members from those parties—I think creates a discussion group that treasures its independence, and it really does treasure its independence. We retain absolute full control over the work we undertake, and this goes back to that individual inquiry bit: we do not want to be told what to do. We range and we choose what to do to go into it. We also understand that we need to maintain that internal influence and external credibility. We can be asked to look at something, and that is the Prime Minister’s prerogative. That is written into the essence of our footing as CSPL and now as EIC. The manner in which we would interpret and answer that question still remains for us to do as an independent body. The recent exam question to us about lobbying, business appointment rules and financial disclosure is a good example of that. When that question came in, we had an extraordinary meeting of the Commission to discuss the request. The first question is: should we take that request or not? Take it: how should we then look at it? As I have already mentioned, business appointment rules and lobbying have been concerns of ours for quite some time, so this seemed like a really good opportunity for us. But the manner in which we do it and the timeline to which we do it, we retain independence of that. It goes slightly back to the conversation we had about what you do and what we do as an independent body and our ability to range across public life. Being independent, I think, is very important for the external as well as for the internal influence element. Our recommendations by an evidence base will hopefully make it stronger in going forward. I don’t think we are the only ones to believe that. The Prime Minister and this Government, by asking us to write to him on an annual basis on the health of the landscape as an independent body, I think shows that other people recognise that having someone that is independent rather than a government directable entity has real strength and value to it. Independence really matters to us. I think it matters to enable us to have the recommendations that endure beyond a particular period of time and our candidature can grow. It definitely helps us talk to different entities as we go around to it. I think that independence is recognised as being valuable for those who are in government as well.

With that answer in mind, your terms of reference are set by the Prime Minister. Your budget is set by the Cabinet Office. You report to the PM annually, as you have said, the appointment of yourself and the other commissioners is done by the Cabinet Office and approved by the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister has been setting the inquiries that you carry out. Does that conflict with some of the need for independence, some of the perceptions of independence, and how are you reassuring people that that independence does remain?

How we operate as a group, which treasures our independence, I think is valuable. It is really important. It is hard for me to explain to you. Unless we have this conversation with the group, they will not be told what to do. We talk about it as a collective to come to that decision. As chair, it is my privilege to help that conversation, but it is not a directive one. It is not like my old life in the military where you got an order, you translated that into policy. That is not how this works. If I may just check on one thing, for example, the ombudsman one was self-determined by us. We chose to do that, and we chose to do it based on our last report, which was into recognising and responding to early warning signs. Out of that report, we gained that there was something more that the ombudsman might be able to play along that journey of where things have started to go wrong. We determined that report, just as we determined the one to look at recognising and responding, so we have complete sovereignty and control over that. As I mentioned before, the Prime Minister can request us to look at something, but he cannot direct us to do it and the manner in which to do it. The most recent example is the one on the lobbying business appointment rules that I talked about. We are interpreting that in our own way. You have seen my response to his letter, and you have seen our terms of reference since. They reflected concerns that we had, but we chose the manner to do that. You are quite right and, therefore, managing that balances thing comes down to very small sub-details of it. We have moved our new EIC website to a slightly different platform. We have tried to make it not look as publicly branded. We have gone for our own branding to come on to it because that independence matters to us. I have to balance this internal influence—within public authorities as well as the Government of the day—as well as the external think-tanks and others that are watching this daily.

The role of the Prime Minister is obviously important here. How many times have you met with the Prime Minister to discuss the work that you are doing? What has your impression been of his appetite to embed the standards within the Government?

My impression of what he is trying to do is based on what he said when he came into office about government service, what he wrote in the front of the Ministerial Code, which I think stands very strong, and in his response to the correspondence that we have had in letter form going backwards and forwards. In terms of personally meeting, we have had one or two events organised that have been cancelled and I have not yet had a chance to speak to him in person.

That is a helpful clarification. Moving on slightly now, the Prime Minister has asked you to carry—

Just before you do, do you have a date rescheduled with the Prime Minister?

Not yet. The team are working on finding us a date.

When was the last cancellation?

A couple of weeks ago. I think we can all remember what was going on a couple of weeks ago, so I have to admit that at the time I completely understood why I was no longer the priority on that particular day.

I have a slightly different question now. We have mentioned the review of lobbying, disclosure and access to government already. There are areas where the CSPL, PACAC and many others have made clear and complementary recommendations. How are you conducting the review and what evidence beyond that gathered by existing reviews do you think is needed?

If you remember, there were three questions—lobbying, business appointment rules and disclosure—which they had asked us to do. As we have talked about already, many of the recommendations on lobbying are complementary to each other. That is our start point. Our report that we put in before the summer recess will major and feature very heavily on recommendations on lobbying. Many of those will be the ones we have seen before, but iterated, kicked, because context has shifted and changed and we just need to make change. In the conversation we had earlier on about the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists, I said that balance between Government Department disclosure, advice, who registers on to that, as we go through, by going around the entities that are responsible for this, seeing and speaking to them—in fact, Chair, I think I am having a conversation with you at some point on this as well.

Yes.

We will be checking those recommendations and augmenting, editing or adjusting them as we see fit before we make the recommendations. In the piece of work that we are going to do, lobbying will be the area that it is going to be strongest on, and for good reason. Many of us have had concerns for quite some time on this, but we do need to go around again to check that they are fit for today’s context and, indeed, tomorrow’s context.

I think that highlights some of the challenges from the public, and you mentioned think-tanks more often than you mentioned the public. I think the public is our audience here about trust and faith in politics. What reassurances or commitments have you had from the Prime Minister that recommendations that have been made repeatedly—and now you will be putting in time, resource and effort from experts who have huge amounts of time and responsibility committed elsewhere—will actually be implemented? Because the recurrent theme is that recommendations are made but they are not actually implemented, and we repeat this merry-go-round of having problems and scandals and then we look at the recommendations that were there that were not implemented last time. How do we stop that carousel of repeating mistakes?

I touched on that a little bit earlier. In terms of the assurance that our recommendations are adopted, there cannot be. That is like a blank cheque thing. It is a very difficult thing to do. However, they know what we said last time, and if you read my response you would have seen that I put a short sentence in there that many of these recommendations already exist. So they know roughly the shape of what we are going to pass. They would not have asked us the question if there wasn’t an appetite for it. Therefore, I think the environment is ripe and I think the Government have asked us because they do want to do something on this. That is my understanding at the moment.

Do you see it as your role to make the case for those recommendations?

Absolutely, yes. It goes back a little bit to what we talked about before. That is why the evidence-based nature is relevant. To make our recommendations as irresistible as possible really matters here.

The only thing I would push back on is the importance of the public in these considerations. We have a crisis of confidence in politics, and, while I do completely acknowledge the importance of think-tanks and the organisations that are more closely attached to the political bubble, we do need to see it in the context of the wider public, who see the revolving door from government into business from lobbying and the real lack of confidence that we are necessarily acting in their best interests. That has to be the primary prism through which this is viewed.

A very good check, if I may say, by you on my words. Think-tanks are but one thing. In most of our reviews we lay out some form of public consultation at some stage or another, which interested parties then come into. I know that you had Daniel Greenberg in front of you not that long ago. I think he coins a phrase about disengagement and that worry, and we worry about that. One of the remits that is given to us as the EIC is to engage and inform the wider public. That is a big function. I mentioned before that it is a very difficult function. We have developed an engagement strategy about how we will try to do that. Of course, there are many aspects to the public, but there is a lot of misunderstanding, and we need to start working our way to try to improve that. Of all the tasks we have, that is probably the hardest one, also because we know that we cannot do it alone. We are going to be doing it in partnership with many others as we go forward. You are quite right to check me on that. I did not mean just think-tanks. I am aware of the broader piece, yes.

Just before we leave think-tanks and in relation to lobbying, if it is not on your radar and we place it on it, which is that very often organisations, businesses and so on, will use think-tanks as a way of lobbying for policy change as if the work was self-authored by the think-tank, as though some light bulb idea had come to some bright, fresh-faced graduates without realising that a large sponsorship cheque was provided by an organisation to facilitate the discussion. Ditto “friends of” organisations, which badge themselves as friends of whatever. They often fall between the cracks of the paving stones, but they are also lobbying without necessarily being registered lobbyists. Is that an issue on your radar when thinking about lobbying? If it is, great; if it is not, can you—

Well, there are two parts, I think. There is the broader element, and I think that you are both quite right to check me about think-tanks and the broader bit. There are a number of organisations out there—some of which I would describe as think-tanks, some of which are more pressure groups—that have particular causes that they wish to raise. They represent elements of the public that have concerns. We do listen to them. We connect with them. I think that it is our right to do so. Whether they are being bought and paid for and their precedence I think is something for us to compare and bear in mind that we need to worry about, and that is just for our routine business. As we do this inquiry at the moment that has popped up every now and again.

Good. Okay.

Because we are looking at unchecked privileged access. That for me is the exam question. This has come up in one or two of the conversations so far. What we do with that, whether that is going to be part of the thing we do by summer recess or whether it is something we look at in the longer term, I don’t yet know the answer to that.

I think it is just that lobbying has expanded sometimes to try to circumvent the guidelines that are there with the registrar.

Good morning. I have some questions on the annual review for the Prime Minister. You have mentioned that one of your new responsibilities is to provide this annual review of the constitutional landscape in a letter to the Prime Minister. Is there anything else you would like to add on how you are intending to use that letter?

I think that some of your previous witnesses have said something not dissimilar about it. It is a powerful tool for us, so much so that, when it was first born as an idea, I did check with the Ministers that they knew and understood what this would mean. Why I say it is powerful is, first, it provides a letter form. It is not that it is going to talk to and signpost evidence-based inquiries but it itself is not going to be an evidence-based inquiry. It is going to be a horizon scan over it, and it will talk about what is going well. It will talk about areas where commitments are made but we have not seen much progress. It will talk about areas where we see gaps or tweaks where we are doing work, and we will either signpost to other people’s work or recommendations that we will endorse or not to go through. So it will do it in that way across the piece. There has to be the good as much as the not moving fast enough as much as the more to be done to it. It is annual, and it is the annual thing that I think is important because that will keep this conversation live on a cycle. That is new. We have not had that before. Some of the CSPL reports took over two years to get a response to. This annual cycle, I think, will change the dynamic. The Government have made a commitment to respond in a timely manner to all our reports, which is to address the problem of the long delays in the past. For an annual report, that time obviously has to be within that, otherwise the first paragraph of my next year’s letter is self-writing itself. I think it is a real commitment by the Prime Minister, actually, to have this conversation in a public way on an annual cycle, so I welcome it. Obviously, we are thinking about what will be in the first one at the moment and we would be hoping to publish that sometime in the late autumn, roughly on the annual cycle that has come into it. Picking the right time is something that we are going through at the moment.

Thank you. Have you had any assurances from the Prime Minister as to what timely means? One would hope that it would not take almost a year for him to respond. Has he given you an indication of when he may respond?

I have not written the first one yet, and when we write the first one, then obviously on its tone and tenor I would hope—using many of the habits and precedents that exist inside of this House with Select Committees and so on—to get a response in a reasonably timely manner so that we can then interpret it in order that it can then inform the next annual cycle.

Would you expect a matter of months?

It is difficult for me to judge that. I would love an answer at the six-month point. By the six-month point would be nice.

Have you had any assurances about how it is going to be received and acted upon?

I think that until we have drafted the first one it is hard for me to say exactly how that will be done. I will give you an example of that. When we were drafting up what we were going to put in there, lobbying was going to be one of the things that was going to be in the letter. We are now doing a sprint bit of work on that before, so how that then feeds into the letter and the timeliness of what we put in and so on, until we publish this letter it is going to stay slightly changing. That is why getting it right for me is going to be quite key. I welcome it. Like I say, it keeps that annual cycle, which we have not had before. It also does strengthen our independence, back to your point before, because it is us as an independent body writing a public letter to the Prime Minister and it is the Prime Minister writing back to us in a public forum as well, which I think is good.

When you do the first letter in late autumn, what will the process be? Will it be you sending it to the Prime Minister and then making it publicly available?

Like we do with all our other letters and reports and correspondence, we send them and shortly after that it is posted on our website.

You have a responsibility to advise public authorities on the development and oversight of clear codes of ethical conduct. Given the wide range of public authorities, how do you intend to discharge this responsibility?

Yes, it is a big role. I touched on earlier that one of Lord Nolan’s recommendations was that the principles are fine, but they need some codification in order to help people navigate them day-to-day. Codes of conduct are a good vehicle to help them do that. We have been interested in codes of ethical conduct since the very early days of CSPL and we have made some recommendations to them over times past. We welcome the task that has been given to us. As you know, our work is going to be linked to the public accountability Bill that is going through at the moment, which makes these codes mandatory. It is quite prescriptive about what should be in some of these codes. I roughly put this into four blocks of work, if I could describe it as that. The first block of work is for us to come up with, I would say, some drafting guidance, because once the public accountability Bill becomes an Act and then it becomes enacted, all public authorities will be required to have a code of conduct with the following criteria put into it. Anyone’s code of conduct now is going to have to be reviewed or updated in some form or another to reflect that Bill and the enactment of it. The first bit of advice we are going to do is to drafters about how to go through that journey in order to provide them some advice to do that. The second part, which is the more important part for us, is how does that code of conduct—and I should say, sorry, on the drafting bit, it is not just the code, because codes of conduct on their own as an isolated document I do not believe are sufficient. It is how they link into your HR documents, your discipline documents and all the other elements that need to be done. I think sometimes in the past there has been a code, it has been put behind glass at the end of the corridor, and it has not necessarily shaped behaviour. That is one of the reasons that the public accountability Bill is being crafted the way it is, to make it more structured to be able to shape behaviour. If I can describe it in that way, the second block on which we are taking some insight from behavioural scientists—and we will do quite a lot of case study work on—is what best practice is for ensuring the code of conduct shapes the decision making and the culture inside your organisation. That is hard work, actually. That block of advice is going to be helpful to someone coming into it. We could all sit here and say the answer is the leadership and training, isn’t it? That is not good enough for us to help a public authority make sure that code of ethical conduct shapes the decision making and the culture within an organisation. That is the second block, which we have started doing some work on. We have launched some research, but that I think is going to take more time. That bit of advice is going to be key. We have then published the advice, but that is not where our journey ends. We keep our responsibility under our terms of reference on codes of ethical conduct. The way the Government are looking to do it is that they are going to have an oversight board to see how the public accountability Bill is being adopted and taken forward. That is the Government’s responsibility. We have been invited to attend as an independent observer, and we have been asked to run some form of external assessment process, which we will determine exactly how we will do. In my mind’s eye—particularly having seen not dissimilar things in my service career in the past—is where you check in with the board, see what goes on at the board and see how that is lived as the delivery person at the bottom end of it, to check whether it has changed the culture, and then also learn by practice. Over time, those assessments are going to provide us a deeper understanding of it in order to better inform our advice. I have not yet fully answered your question because the landscape of public authorities is very diverse. The first two blocks I have talked about will be reasonably generic and best practice, but there will be some parts that we need to cut out. If you are in the police, if you are in the NHS, you have some ethical responsibilities that rest on you that are not covered by the public accountability Bill but are not being removed by it either, so you will need to factor in some of those other elements. There will be some safeguarding in education. There will be other factors that need to be considered, but we will not provide as much technical advice on that. As we then get into our assessments, we will choose—going back to our independence element—where we want to go and have a look to go into it. We will not be able to cover everything. We looked originally at whether we can just go around everyone. It takes too long. We are going to have to choose where to go, where there are concerns, where there is a reason or where there is a request, and we have yet to determine the mechanisms for that. That is going to help us get there, but the joy for me is this is not a “we have done a report, sent it, end of journey”. Many of us here in public life know that codes of conduct have been around for a while. Have they always changed the culture of an organisation? No. Us building and owning this over time will hopefully sharpen and improve our advice as we go forward.

That is quite refreshing to hear, as somebody who has been heavily involved in maternity inquiries where all those trusts have a code of conduct but, when you link it into HR, that is not always what has taken place. So I do welcome that and I will watch that work with interest. The Public Office (Accountability) Bill defines ethical conduct following the Nolan principles. Are these principles enough?

I think Lord Nolan, when he wrote it himself—and I keep coming back to that, but the more I have read of his work, I have to admit, the more I found it to be sound and strong, and it actually has survived. The seven principles—and we have tested these with schools and other groups, like I said, last year—still embody what people believe those in public office should do, but they are aspirational. For those of you, if you remember, when I was explaining in that very short induction period as new MPs, these are the aspirations and regulations for here. Most people’s lives and individual judgments live between the two. He said back then that they need to be supported by codes of conduct and education in order to do that. What we are going to do with our expanded remit is hopefully improve our ability to help that journey and those connections together. Alone they are not enough. They need the supporting architecture to help shape it—and this goes back to a point we have had before—but not to the point that this becomes a binary choice. The individual responsibility remains paramount at the end of this. This is how our political system and choice works. There has to be the freedom for individuals to judge. What we are trying to do is provide nudges and barriers and controls on the outside for it.

Thank you. You are tasked with developing these codes, but what role do you think the EIC should have in monitoring the effectiveness of codes and how could this be best achieved, given the huge job getting there in the first place?

I will come back on a couple of issues. First, we are not going to write a code. We are going to provide drafting advice on a code, because all the experience and the insight we have seen and talked about before is the institution, through consultation with its own body, needs to derive its own code. We will provide, “You need to consider this, you need to consider that, and you need to do this and that” into it. What we are not going to do is provide a template that they just change the header and footer on and that becomes their code. That would not help the big prize, which is the changing of the culture of that organisation. They have to go through a journey to derive their own code. On the second part of your question, because we are not a regulator it is not upon us to meet the intent of your question. That I believe is for the Government oversight body that they are putting together. What we will be asked to do is to provide independent assessments about how the codes have been done, whether they are changing the culture and what might be learnt for future iterations on it. We will do that, but like I say, within our capacity. I may need some more resource even to do that. Even with that, we are not going to be able to cover every public authority every year over that time. We are going to remain at a higher level. Although we are doing quite a lot of deep dives, we are not doing deep dives on everyone every year. We are providing advice and assistance rather than tracking and enforcing. I think the Government oversight body will have some of those functions.

May I ask one more question?

Of course you can.

Thank you. It is just to get some clarity because I know I am going to walk out of here and I am going to get some questions with regard to this. You did mention the NHS. When you are talking about advising a code of conduct, will that be on individual authorities within an authority or is that overarching? For example, if you are advising on a code of conduct for NHS trusts, will that be via the NHS or is that an individual aspect for each trust to take on their own code of conduct?

It is going to be the latter, because there is too much for us. By the time you break it down into trusts, you could do the same with police forces, and I could keep on going around that. It is going to be overarching. By us using the mandatory nature and the quite prescriptive nature that is in the public accountability Bill, our advice is there to help these public authorities to refresh what they have and interpret what the Bill does to make sure that they have a code of conduct that changes the culture. We don’t have the capacity to dive down to that bespoke level.

There is some monitoring that is required with regards to how, for example, the NHS brings that down to their individual choice and how the police—

It is, yes. I believe that is part of the oversight that the Government oversight board will do, and how it does that through the Departments, which would be the natural gearing for it, I have not yet seen how that has been defined.

It is a very important part of it, isn’t it?

I think it is. Our part of it is to provide that advice to the drafters and the best practice on how to make sure it is actually lived.

To make those cogs go round is that other entity that is—

Yes. I am glad you asked the question, actually, because our role is independent and advisory, to help. The law, the Act, and oversight of its delivery does not sit with us. That sits with Government.

Good morning, Doug. The EIC now has a responsibility to engage and inform the wider public on the values, rules and oversight mechanisms that govern standards in public life. How do you intend to carry this work out?

We have touched on this quite a lot as we have gone around. As I mentioned in one of my earlier responses, I think this is one of the more challenging areas that we have. It is challenging I think on two parts. First, the backdrop of individual trust, trust in individuals in public office as well as public institutions is low, as we have already talked about. Therefore, that disengagement that Daniel talked about is a challenge for us to do. The other part is the complexity of a governance system makes some of it quite impenetrable to get through. So, how are we going to do it? As I have mentioned, we have created an engagement strategy. Chair, I am more than happy to share a copy of that with you.

That would be helpful, yes. Thank you.

It is going to take us, we think, about three years or so to get up to speed on it, to roll out a number of the initiatives we want to try to do. You will hear of and see more of the EIC than before when we run things like standards weeks or other initiatives that we will endeavour to bring out. We recognised right at the beginning that, given the complexity of explaining our governance system and the complexity of engaging people to explain our standards system against the backdrop we have, this is not an insignificant task to take forward. We are going to work in partnership with many others. For example, we have talked about the regulators and how we enable them and that network that we have. We have had a good discussion about this and how, if they are announcing something or explaining something, we will work more in a loose framework of knowing who is saying what at what time. We have all acted very independently in the past, which sometimes means that it can be confusing when there are lots of voices at the same time. We have yet to work out that mechanism, but we look to do a bit more of that. The representation Bill that is coming through at the moment, as you know, has quite a large chunk of the education aspect in it, particularly with the dropping of the voting age. We see that as an opportunity, and we have been engaging with the Electoral Commission, with which we have quite a strong relationship anyway. That is another example where we would probably work with it to start into that area, as well as running our own events. It is quite a complicated network, and it is not like people are waiting to hear from us. They may not even be ready to hear what we have to say, let alone appreciate it. It is quite difficult, which is why I mentioned earlier on—and your challenge to me was quite right—it is first about building up over the next three years, because we know that there is a lack of total understanding within public authorities of the standards landscape. That is an audience that we need to inform first, and then we are going to be working to expand those rings as we go further out. We have done some audience analysis and some bits that you will see in the engagement strategy we have. We have an idea. We have a plan. We are now going to start, and it is going to take us about three years to test that plan and then iterate it and evolve it going forward. I do not underestimate the challenge.

Thank you. It is great that you will be able to share with us that engagement strategy. Can I ask how you will measure the impact and success of that engagement? The Committee on Standards in Public Life published a report on public perceptions of standards in public life in the UK as it monitored this area between 2004 to 2014. Do you intend to restart that research or create a new survey? How will you gauge the impact of your education work?

With everything we have going at the moment, which is a pretty busy role as you have seen already, I was very aware of that polling when I came into CSPL, which was stopped, the funding for which was pulled. It is not at the top of the list of things to go back to. At the moment we have many polls to lean on, the Ipsos Veracity poll, many of which you will have read as well, which we will look to. We will look at those, we will track those, and they give you a macro view of public perception. Whether we need to add to the number of polls that are going on I do not yet know on that side of it. What we will do links back to when you asked me earlier on what I thought success was going to be like in five years. Is the EIC referred to? We could check on clicks of our document. We can click on engagements that we have had. We can click on feedback from the events we run. All those matter to us. They will give us a feel for whether what we are doing in the engagement strategy is getting—what is the phrase?—cut-through in order to get into it. So, we will do that. We are also working with our other partners to see where that can evolve and iterate to go forward on it. I am going slightly more procedural, which was your challenge to me earlier, about what it is that we are doing and how we keep checking that what we are doing is making a change. We have clearly got to keep an eye on the poll at the other end, but that will lag. I do not expect huge change in the Ipsos Veracity thing going forward. It is going to take us several years, I think, to get this up before we see any change over that, and that is being optimistic if I am being truthful.

You mentioned some of the existing research and polls that are out there. The British Social Attitudes Survey indicates that trust in government has fallen to its lowest point since the survey began. You have raised issues around what impact your work can have, what the cut-through might be, and how long it might take. Do you think that it will show ultimately that there is a connection between standards and trust in politics?

I do not want to over-quote Pat McFadden, but I think his statement was right, actually. It is how those who are in public office behave that is what will change the dial and what shapes the dial here. We have a part to play in that. It is about shaping the individual judgment that those in public office make and then for the regulators that sit within the standards landscape, if breaches have occurred, the remedies that will be followed on thereafter. Sorry, I have lost the trail of the last bit.

Do you think there is ultimately, though, a connection between standards in politics and our system to ensure that standards are robust and the trust of the public in politicians?

Yes, I do believe they are. We touched in the beginning on why standards are important. Particularly in the way our nation operates, that trust in individuals to operate on their public interest is quite palpable. It comes to that rule of law. If you ask many people on the street—and we did a little bit of this when we have taken evidence in the past—whether they wake up thinking about standards issues, no, they don’t wake up thinking about standards issues. They wake up thinking about the public services that they have been told they will get and whether they get them or not. If they do not get them, they then start trying to think about where they might go. If you see what I mean, you follow down that line, then standards come in if they believe that one of the reasons they are not getting what they are being told they will get is because those who are in public office are not making decisions necessarily in their interests. I think that is probably a better answer to your question, which I am sorry—

That is a very helpful answer. Thank you very much indeed. It leads me neatly on to my next question. The British Social Attitudes Survey also indicates that the public thinks politicians are putting party before the nation, so they are not seeing improvements in public services in their perception because we are not putting that responsibility first. Would you say that the EIC might look at the role of the political parties themselves in maintaining high ethical standards?

Okay, now I understand. I think party processes are absolutely part of the standards landscape. They are critical because of the nature of much of what we talk about. However, they are a part that is more opaque. We do not understand them. Each party has its own processes to run through. That said, we have looked at aspects of this in the past. The most recent one was the intimidation report that we did. That was a real effort by CSPL—as was then—to develop a draft joint code of conduct. We got close but one party did not agree to it in the final yards. It is an area that we understand is inside of the standards landscape. It is a really important area. We could talk about disclosure, due diligence, selection, training, all those elements, to help people navigate what being in public office is like. I would welcome the ability to provide some help there and it is something that we use our political members for regularly about how we might be able to do that. It is very difficult. It is not something we have not looked at in the past, but our ability to get in there to properly provide some assistance and support—understandably, because the parties have sovereignty over their own processes and elements and they are not part of the formal structural landscape.

You said there was not an ability to create consensus between all the parties on taking that work forward. What was a particular barrier that existed?

One of the parties could not sign up to it.

What was the reason for that, can I ask? No? Okay. It is interesting to know that the prospect of that was there, but one party was not able to sign up to it.

It is back now, as you know. You know better than I that the intimidation aspect is not a factor that has diminished. I know that the Speaker is doing a lot of work on it at the moment.

It might be worth revisiting that issue as a Committee at some point, Chair, given that it is pretty fraught at the moment.

Which party and why?

I do not know the why.

Which party?

The Conservative Party.

We will undertake to find out; how very intriguing. Thank you.

We shall remain intrigued until your investigation is concluded, Chair.

Exactly, yes.

My final question is on the Cabinet Manual. It was published with the purpose of making our political system more transparent and more accountable, but it has never been updated since it was developed first by Gordon Brown’s Government and then published by the coalition, which is now over a decade ago. Do you think it is still important? If so, will you be considering including a reference to it in your first letter to the Prime Minister?

I might take a step back from the Cabinet Manual. We have made recommendations on the Ministerial Code for quite some time. We recommended that some of the procedural elements should be taken out of the code and run as a separate element. In some of the procedural elements of the Cabinet Manual there is clearly an overlap between the two. The most recent Ministerial Code has gone quite a long way towards that, but there is still quite a lot of procedural governance stuff within it. I noted that the new Cabinet Secretary has made one of her objectives this very issue. I cannot remember exactly the words, but it is to make sure that the Cabinet Manual and systems for sharing information are fit for the modern age. I welcome that objective that she has set, and I look forward to seeing how that work progresses going into the future.

Do you think it would be something that you might consider mentioning in your first letter to the Prime Minister, given other areas of your work?

I think I have to give the Cabinet Secretary some space to refine that a bit more. The reason I connected that with the Ministerial Code is there was procedural stuff in the Ministerial Code and there is procedural stuff in the manual; which one is updated, which one is driving process? That is why we made the recommendation on the Ministerial Code that we did.

We shall be seeing the Cabinet Secretary in pretty good order, soonish, so we will ask her, too.

To return to some of the topics we discussed earlier around the other bodies that the EIC interacts with, I just have a few more questions around the network and the way that that is working. First of all, the network of ethics bodies has been formalised now with the formation of the EIC from the CSPL. What change would you say that that has had on ways of working? Has anything been lost or are there any particular benefits to it?

You made a good point at the beginning. We speak to many people. We keep a lot of relationships going. My predecessors had established an informal network of regulators in central Government and Parliament, but by their invitation and their agreement to join us. That became a very good group to connect and share much of the conversation that we had earlier on. When we were changing from that informal set-up into the formal requirement, we did not want to lose that vibrancy of dialogue and honesty of conversation that we were having by over bureaucratising it or turning it into too much of a process. I spoke to the individuals who are on the network, and then we spoke as a collective. We are more public about it. We publish minutes out of those meetings. What we are now doing is we are following up on issues. If they were raised before, we might then bring them back to have more of a discussion group on a particular topic. I was quite sensitive of losing what we had, which was a very vibrant, challenging group that we were able to share with. I did not want to lose that, and I don’t think we have yet. We have one coming up later this week, actually. Therefore, I want to treasure that to go further forward. What has changed, which was your exam question, is that it is now a publicly known entity, the minutes from which are published.

That is really helpful. Do you think there is scope for a wider range of bodies to be included in that network or is it about where it needs to be?

It goes a bit back to the wise question, if I may say, that you raised earlier on. If it became too big, we would not have the same level of dialogue. I am slightly letting the new structures settle and come in. We do talk quite regularly about who we might bring into it, but I am not rushing to change it until it has settled in a little bit more to go forward. It does come back to we speak to a lot of people, and we keep those connections going. One of the areas that I need to ponder on a little bit more is whether we should make those more regular rather than episodic. Sometimes we go and talk to people when we have an issue to talk about, which is fine for us, but if they want to talk to us, we have not necessarily put a diary exchange into that, and that is something we will keep in mind as we go into the future.

That is useful. How do you approach considering wider issues where they are primarily within a particular body’s remit? As an example, there is a lot of concern sometimes around the appointment process to the House of Lords and whether that is working, whether there are enough independent Members coming through the HOLAC process. Of course, that is primarily HOLAC’s responsibility, but if it was something that EIC wanted to look into, would you feel able to do so? How would you then? It is an example, I am sure.

It is a difficult example because it sits within, obviously, the House of Lords and House of Lords reform is a wider topic than that for the EIC to tackle. If I step away from that example, if I may, and look at others, our ombudsman one is not a bad example. We have a feel for it. There is PHSO, which I know you know well. There is housing and the LGSCO, which also matter in this environment. We speak to them; we take evidence from them. We then speak to others who are connected in different elements to it, in order to gain a—holistic is probably an overused word, but a broader view. If we only speak to one entity, by nature we are not necessarily picking up a broader understanding of what the impact of that entity is. We are taking that entity’s ideas, and that is not good enough for us. We need to check whether those ideas are tested. Can we test them, challenge them, and take opinions from others that are connected to it? As you have seen, defining the terms of reference and defining who we take evidence from, it is actually quite a lot of work to get that right.

Can I just talk finally about local government? You mentioned local government earlier in the session. Where do you see your work being as far as local government? I will just clarify that when we are defining local government, we are talking about unitary district, borough, county, but we are also including town and parish.

We have touched on this a couple of times before. I would say most of the public’s primary connection into governance is going to be through local government, as you have described it, in that network or layering as you described there. We have done work on this in the past. The report that we published I think in 2019 on local government made quite a few recommendations that went forward. As I mentioned earlier on, that was one of the ones that I felt ownership for when I took on the chair, that we had not had the resonance to that work or the recommendations made to what we would like. That was not just our opinion. We heard that when we took evidence on recognising and responding, for example, from local government organisations at the time, LGA being one of them but Solace and others you have had a chance to connect with and you will know well, because I know the background of many of you and you know this area far deeper than us. We did write to this Government about it. That was raised, and then we played our part in the consultation, both joining their circles and then we ran our own workshops in order for us to submit our written consultation, which took the recommendations that we had made in 2019 and in a number of areas sharpened them up. For example, the mandatory code we have already spoken about. We also felt that standard bodies should be in place. We offered some thoughts on appeal processes. Then there is the monitoring officer/independent person aspect, which we made some opinions on. We wait to see how the Government proposals now inside the House progress forward. I think local government is an area that matters a lot to our public, and it matters a lot to us. The sweet spot lies in front of us, standards body England model versus nothing. What is the thing in the middle? Our view is there needs to be something in the middle. How do you get the sanctions element to give the system teeth for the very small minority—and you touched on it yourself, Chair, earlier on—that might use that office to disagree with the system as part of a platform? How do you manage that? That is the challenge ahead and it is one of the reasons we kept a high look on those recommendations. We welcome what the Government are doing, and we are now looking to see how that proposal moves through, but it will not be the last time we look at it.

Would the EIC consider setting up a separate network for all those bodies representing all the layers of local government to convene to share their concerns and their ideas?

Chair, I think that is a very wise idea. It is something I answered in your question. We have these connections with people earlier on and we do not necessarily connect with them as much as we could do. I think it would be fair to say local government is probably top of that list. I think bringing them into that would probably not be right, but if I looked at who we had around the table when we were doing some of our workshops, we have those connections. There is almost a ready network there. I will take your idea back to the commission and look at it, but I think having a regular connection with them would be good for both sides.

Can I impress upon you not to forget the National Association of Local Councils, the national association of town and parish councils, because very often most of us as elected Members with town and parish councils will find problems within their operation and there is no route to try to solve them apart from good will. Very often, of course, when we are alerted to it, the good will has slightly evaporated, if it existed at all. Thank you. Finally, with regards to the devolved institutions, your terms of reference specifically preclude you from looking at issues relating to the devolved Administrations. However, a citizen is a citizen is a citizen. They have high expectations of standards and probity. How do you see the EIC interacting with the devolveds?

Around the time that polling was taken off us—that general review of CSPL was at the same time—is when that constraint was placed on us. The constraint is that we could not independently self-designate to go into a devolved to look at an issue. It did not stop us talking to them and it did not stop us learning from them. Both our chief executive and I play our part in making bridges open to them. Since they have been devolved, they have taken some directions of travel on some of the common issues and in many ways are doing it because of local reasons. It is good for us to stay up to date with them. Particularly having a chief executive, that is helpful now to keep us connected to the layers that are going in that area. We have Ian Blackford with us at the moment. It has been quite a useful challenge function to constantly remind us to think about how the devolveds have actioned it. We cannot launch an inquiry into devolveds without their permission, but that does not stop us talking to them and seeing how they are tackling some of the common issues.

Thank you. I see no other hands. This has been a good session. We wish you well. Failure is not an option, not least because—as I think we are all realistic enough to understand—we are all trying to play our part and we see your body as having a key role in this, trying to stem the negative flow of public confidence and seek to identify ways of trying to highlight best practice in order to rebuild it. It is not an easy task, but if a DSO cannot do it, then who can?

Chair, thank you for giving the EIC a bit of time to settle before today’s session.

Yes, that was important.

You are our natural docking point, so this hopefully will become a regular fixture for the EIC connecting into your Committee. As you know already, much of your work overlaps with our work, which I genuinely think is a positive, so I look forward to working with you more in the future.

Thank you. We look forward to doing that as well.