Good morning colleagues, and good morning to our witness, Jesse Norman, shadow Leader of the House of Commons. Welcome back. I hope that everybody had a recharging and restful summer recess and is ready to hit the grindstone with full impact, if that is possible. Mr Norman, on behalf of the Committee, let me offer our apologies to you. You were due to give us evidence at the last session in July, but the Leader of the House was giving us a full menu, and you were very gracious in allowing us to rearrange. We are grateful and apologise for abortively taking up two hours of your time. You sat in for the vast majority of what Ms Powell had to say to the Committee; what, if any, were your reflections on what she had to say? Was there anything that she said with which you particularly agreed or disagreed?

Thank you Chair, and thank you colleagues for inviting me to this Committee. Having been a member of the Treasury Committee for five years and now the Defence Committee for a couple of years, and having chaired the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, as well as appearing in front of Committees as a Minister, I am extremely respectful of the work that you do and will try to assist the Committee in any way that I can. No apology is required at all; it was a very interesting session last time. I massively believe in accountability and the importance of holding Ministers to account and giving them a proper going-over. I did the same thing when I was in your position, and I think that is quite right. I would welcome you to do that now with me, to the extent that I can help. On the Leader’s testimony, overall I am afraid I thought it was pretty woeful. She said one thing that was correct and a bunch of other stuff that one could agree or disagree with. The thing she said that was correct was that it is not quite right to think of the Leader’s own job as just being the representative of the Commons in the Cabinet. She has a dual-facing role, and that is relatively well understood. I do not think we should underestimate the job that she has of trying to persuade her colleagues and the Prime Minister to play ball on things that are important to her or to the Commons. That is not always straightforward. However, an awful lot of what she said to the Committee was, to put it politely, a bit disingenuous. It was very strongly about defending the Government’s record on all occasions—for reasons one understands, what with the reshuffle and so on—and relatively little more candid exploration of where the system has gone wrong for this Government and previous ones, and how it could be improved.

Are the broad strictures, which effectively triggered the Speaker to write to this Committee to undertake this piece of work, fit for purpose in the multimedia 24-hour news cycle world in which we live?

Broadly, yes. It could be improved. This Committee could make recommendations that would improve it, but with those recommendations, it is a functional and important part of our constitutional machinery. I do not accept the point made by the Leader that, for example, the Government are under any obligation of balance, as she said. The rule is pretty clear: important announcements are made first in the House of Commons. There was an equivocation where she described “first” as being the earliest opportunity. I do not think that is true; it should come first to the House of Commons, and if not via a written or oral statement, it could come via a “Dear Colleague” letter. It could come via other mechanisms that exist in order to put things in front of colleagues. So I do not accept that analysis, and I do not accept that the 24/7 media world exculpates or excuses the Government—no matter what the 10-year-olds in No. 10 may be saying—from the obligation to account to Parliament.

You have just touched on this, but paragraph 9.1 of the ministerial code states: “When Parliament is in session, the most important announcements of government policy should be made in the first instance in Parliament.” What do you think that should mean in practice? Do you think that that statement is clear and understood?

I do not think it is as clear as it could be. Let’s come on to that question first, and then we will pick up on other things. I think it would be helpful for the Committee to enunciate a suggestion for what “most important” might be. If I may, let me make some suggestions for a direction in which that might go. For example, is the issue a manifesto issue? Is it an issue of national security? Does it involve the expenditure of public money and, if so, at a level? Will it affect a large number of people? Those are ways in which you can assess the importance of announcements. You can also assess the importance when there is a breach. Is the breach a repeat one by the same Secretary of State? Is it one that has been briefed out to others in a way that is tacitly contemptuous of Parliament? Those are the kinds of questions I think one could be asking about that, and I think it would be helpful to set out what “most important” might be deemed to mean, and to invite the Government to respond to that and to clarify what it means. I think the phrase “in the first instance” is a little ambiguous, or not ambiguous, it is being treated ambiguously. The Leader of the House made it clear that, in some respects, she was treating it in that way, and I think she equivocated on this. I do not think “in the first instance” means at “the earliest opportunity”; I think it means “first to Parliament”, not to anyone else before it comes to Parliament, and I think that is what the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty has always implied. Therefore, there is a degree of dissembling in suggesting anything different. My own view is that we should get back to that approach. By the way, as I think the Chairman will know, I would have said exactly the same thing when we were in government, because that is how I think the system is supposed to work.

Do you think the ministerial code is the right place for the principle to be laid out, or do you think it should be somewhere else?

I think it is absolutely the right place for it to be laid out. I do not accept the idea—again, this is another equivocation in what the Leader said—that the fact that the ministerial code is “the Prime Minister’s document” means that others cannot comment on it or seek to improve it. Likewise, I do not think it should mean that the Commons cannot reserve its own sanctions for people who are in breach of that code. I do not think it means that the Prime Minister, uniquely, has the right to discipline a Minister who breaches it. I think, for example, it would be helpful if the Committee or others could explore whether errant Ministers could be summoned to the Bar of the Commons, or whether there could be some mechanism whereby the Speaker could demand a written apology for a discourtesy to the House from the Minister. Those kinds of things would be meaningful sanctions. So there is an equivocation, or a fudge or an ambiguity, in that idea of it being the Prime Minister’s document. However, broadly speaking, the fact that we have a ministerial code—that it codifies what was previously a kind of understood mechanism of our constitution—is valuable. Arguably, it would be helpful for it to be more precisely explored as a matter of convention and practice, or in writing—separately, if need be—and potentially to be shared across other instruments that make up our constitutional arrangements. I think there is a question, which the Committee has touched on, as to whether “Erskine May” adequately reflects a contemporary understanding or a full understanding—as you are going to elaborate it, I trust, as a Committee—of what the code is and should amount to.

The Leader of the House set out that, while the principle is set out in the ministerial code, she understood it to be an expectation of the House. Do you agree with that? What do you think the significance of that is? I suppose the question I would add on to that is: outside this place, do you think the general public understand what we are actually talking about?

I can imagine no greater topic of debate in the Dog and Duck on a Thursday or Friday evening. No, of course it is not front and centre, but then the mysteries of the constitution of this country have long been celebrated. Indeed, Bagehot gives them a formal dressing in the distinction between the dignified and the efficient parts. There are some aspects of the constitution that are deliberately slightly mysterious and rather add to the majesty of the institution, and I do not actually deplore those—I think those are quite good. What tends to happen in, for example, the Modernisation Committee is that you tug on one part, thinking it is ridiculously out of touch, and it turns out that everything else is connected to it and it was slightly better than you thought it was because the institution’s wisdom was greater than the individual’s. In this case, I would say that we should continue to think in terms not just of improvement or elaboration of what the code means, but of wider promulgation. I think the resting understanding in Britain is that Parliament is sovereign. That is what they have always understood. The fact that we have lost a certain amount of our constitutional tradition in the public understanding of Parliament should not really obliterate that. The reason they are angry with the failures of Government is that they expect parliamentarians, whom they elected, to do their job. When Parliament is not sovereign because Ministers are not accounting to it properly or are deciding to go and brief a whole bunch of other people in the media, or their cronies or mates somewhere else, they regard that with extreme hostility, and rightly so.

You did start to touch on this: do you think it should be the Prime Minister or Parliament that decides whether Ministers are failing to honour their obligations?

I think the Prime Minister properly is under an obligation to account for his or her own Ministers, but I do not think that means that Parliament does not and should not have its own sanctions. Historically, Parliament has always exercised its own sanctions. The fact that we have, in some respects, given in to the Executive over the last 50 or 100 years as an institution is deeply deplorable.

May I touch on that before I bring in Charlotte? You said in answer to the first part of Mr Quigley’s question that you think that the ministerial code is the right place for this principle to be vested. The Speaker’s frustration, on behalf of the House, is that he can shout till he is blue in the face from the Chair, and Ministers can give an apology of varying degrees of sincerity, but he has no power to control or to sanction. We have the ministerial code, authored by No. 10, policed by No. 10 and administered by No. 10—marking one’s own homework. The Executive is accountable to Parliament. It comes peculiarly to this Committee, because it is not an issue of standards. It could not be referred to the Standards Committee, because there is no standards hook upon which the Speaker could have hung the referral. That is why it came to this Committee as a matter of public administration. I share your view of the majesty of the institutions and the invisibility of the sovereignty and so on, but I slightly challenge you on whether it is best to have it solely in the ministerial code, because that is something that the House has no control over in the first instance. The House, as a body, has no instruments to express annoyance or disappointment, or indeed to hold people to account.

That is a very fair challenge, and my view is in no sense one that would not be subject to revision if we had a proper conversation about it, but I do think there is a problem with the way that you have described it. Obviously, if the House felt sufficiently strongly about something, it could instruct the Speaker to impose any sanction that the House, in its wisdom, decided. That is the unique function of an institution, as it were, to which there is no constitutional superior. The House can do that. The House does not do it because we have evolved a system in which the House is dominated by the Executive. We are at the moment—and obviously have been since the last election and the one before—in a situation in which one party has dominant control of the House, and therefore tends to argue its own brief, and that brief tends to be in favour of the Government. Should we dilute that? I think the Committee could properly recommend some measures that the House could adopt, either in its Standing Orders or as an endowed power of the Speaker, under certain circumstances to summon people to the Bar, to demand a written apology, or something like that to strengthen the Speaker’s powers. If you move the accountability away from the Prime Minister, you share the accountability. As soon as shared accountability occurs, you might get even more wriggling. Let me give you a—if I may say so—slightly mad example of where that shared accountability went wrong. What went wrong with the Iraq war was that the Government put the matter to a vote in the House of Commons. A prerogative matter—whether or not to invade—went to a vote. One understands why, but that had the effect that the House of Commons then essentially dipped its hand in the decision on whether or not to go to war. The result of that was that it could not do as Burke always described. He said it is not given to exercise power and control it and hold it to account. Once you have dipped people’s hands in that decision, they cannot get out of it. In the House’s case—I was not in the House at the time, and I was rather against the whole decision, as you may know—the Commons was then unable to wash its hands clean. It took three inquiries to get a degree of clarity as to who was holding whom to account. As soon as you start to vary that question of who is actually responsible, you run the risk of confused strands of accountability.

A very good book about Burke is available in all good bookshops.

I am a broken record on the topic, but if anyone wants to buy it, it is absurdly inexpensive and widely available.

Exactly. I think I have a signed copy at home.

I think the constitutional point is absolutely right: one has to be really careful about tinkering. The problem in this institution is arguably too little accountability. That is what you are seeking. As soon as we vary that, we run the risk of blurring lines of accountability.

Yes. So would you agree that there is merit in, for example, the Standards Committee exploring how it can improve the House’s role with regards to the policing and administering of the ministerial code? At the moment, anybody can fulminate, but there is no hook.

That is very interesting. I can see an argument in both directions on that. The historical problem, as you will know, is that people have tended to worry about standards issues being used to exercise political control over Members of Parliament. That has been a worry for hundreds of years. However, the question of whether a Minister is in some sense being contemptuous of Parliament in the way they respond or fail to respond might conceivably be a standards issue, and therefore properly be investigated by them. I think I can see an argument either way on that.

You mentioned the 10-year-olds in No. 10, and 10-year-olds have inhabited No. 10 almost since Adam was a boy, I suppose.

For 40 years, probably.

We have an independent civil service, which will often define itself as being so apolitical that it does not have to think about the political realm—the daily operation of politics—at all. A lot of advisers of strategy and controllers of the whiteboard, when it comes to the grid and so on, will often see Parliament as a bit of a nuisance, as something that gets in the way of the delivery of Government—pesky MPs asking Ministers difficult questions and holding them to account. Do you have a concern that, across the administrative spectrum, there is not enough deep understanding of and respect for a Minister’s duties to Parliament? Within—I use this word, but not in the way it is usually used—the blob, among those people who advise Ministers and devise strategy, is there a paucity of understanding of parliamentary process and expectation?

I was a Minister for six or seven years and I never really detected that, but then I am fanatical about the proper discharge of a ministerial role and the accountability to Parliament, so I am in a way the wrong person to ask that. I do think that, as an institution, the civil service could have broader shoulders and more of a sense of its own collective worth than it perhaps does. I think it has been somewhat beaten down by repeated attacks on it from all political sides. Let me give you an example. Just before we broke for the summer, there was a clear example in the House of Commons of the Prime Minister misleading the House, intentionally or negligently, at Prime Minister’s questions. He said, in terms, that a decision in relation to the Northern Ireland veterans Bill in a High Court judgment in Ireland had had the effect of striking down the legislation or rendering it “unlawful”. A succession of the greatest judges in this country over the last 25 years, including Lords Bingham, Steyn, Hale, Reed and others, have made it perfectly clear that the status of a law is not affected by a court decision—that you can have an incompatibility and that then gets cured. It is inconceivable that the Prime Minister does not know that, having spent 38 years at the Bar as a barrister, litigating and working on issues of human rights. He has never been held to account for that. I have written, in the parallel case, to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who said the same thing in a debate in Westminster Hall. I have had no response to that question. It absolutely falls to the standards adviser and to the civil service to insist that such things should be corrected in line with the ministerial code. For the Prime Minister himself to do that in Prime Minister’s questions is, I am afraid—I do not use the word inadvisedly—an outrageous contempt of Parliament.

As I think her testimony demonstrated, the principle is not clear, to her at least. I think it is relatively clear, and I have enunciated what I think the primacy of Parliament amounts to in this. It is that announcements should be made here first. There is an ambiguity about the word “announcement”, which we could come to as well. The status of the rule is one that we could discuss further if you wanted to, but I think she ought to be aware that the ambiguities that you have described could be resolved. Indeed, a ministerial statement by the Leader of the House herself as to how those ambiguities would be resolved could be made. She could say, “For the avoidance of doubt, ‘session’ refers to when Parliament is in session rather than is sitting. An announcement can be made by the following four or five different mechanisms. The normal assumption will be that the first mechanism will be an oral statement to the House, before any statement is made anywhere else. The secondary mechanism will be a written statement. It will not be an excuse that there were urgent questions. You cannot wriggle out of making a statement on a topic because an urgent question has been pulled on it, and if an urgent question has been raised on a topic that the Government should, in the normal course of things, have made a statement on, there should be an apology to the House.” These things could be said by her. There is no reason why that cannot be done in the ordinary course of things. From an institutional standpoint, including the civil service, that would be taken on board, and it would then become part of the proper procedure by which Ministers accounted to Parliament.

I think the Committee has a very important role here. If one is thinking of different ways of curing different aspects of the problem, one way could be a Committee investigation and recommendations as to what the status and wording of the rule might be. Another might be a follow-up statement from the Leader enunciating what she, and therefore the Government, will take to be the case for future purposes. Another could be a referral to the Standards Committee. This is not a single, simple issue, and there may be multiple cures. It may be that you want to have a phasing of cures, so that the Committee reaches a conclusion of its own, publishes a report, invites comment from the Government, and then invites the Leader to put some clarifications into the public record at business questions, or otherwise with a statement. You can see how that would work.

No, I am afraid that I really do not. The SDR was a classic example, and the Committee was absolutely right to focus on that. There was no need to bring it on a Monday morning; it could easily have been brought on the Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday of that week—let alone a Monday morning after recess. There was no need to have it handled in that way, where it was briefed out to everyone except the Commons. I am afraid that it was quite misleading for the Leader to say to you that, in some sense, they had obliged Parliament by not publishing it at the end of the statement, because, of course, the publication was extracted from the Secretary of State, in the moment and under duress, because of anger across the Opposition Benches that members of the defence establishment had seen it at 8.30 am and 21 ministerial meetings had been held to brief people. I am afraid there was also an equivocation in what she said about that, because the traditional approach has been that people could read the document under embargo. When Opposition parties turned down a briefing, it was because a briefing is often a way of fudging the obligation to let the document be read in a reading room under embargo. There was no reading room available for the SDR in the House of Commons or anywhere else—I have had that confirmed to me by the Clerks of the Defence Committee—and therefore senior Opposition Members, across any political party, and particularly the Committee, were not able to review it in order to hold Ministers to account. It was a fiasco, and it would be appropriate for that to be called out properly, not swept under the carpet as though everything was fine and the Government was doing its job, because it plainly was not.

Urgent questions were a recommendation by Lord Lisvane when he was Clerk of the House, as part of a series of changes that were suggested by the Clerks, and Speaker Bercow picked that up. I think it has been an immense improvement to the way in which the Commons has functioned. I would not regret it for one moment. But the idea that we are going to play truth or dare on urgent questions with the Speaker, which essentially is what it is now coming down to, is unfortunate. To some extent, it has lifted the obligation on Government to think hard about whether an announcement should come in front of the House, and to take Parliament seriously, as the first place an announcement should be made. To have announcements made contemporaneously with being in Parliament but elsewhere, as I think happened in the case of the fiscal rules, is an offence, in my view, to Parliament and a contempt of Parliament of a small kind—and it should be treated as such. It also demeans the Office of Speaker if he has to be continuously putting in place urgent questions in order to achieve what he takes to be a reasonable level of parliamentary accountability. That is why I think the sanctions ought to be slightly stronger. The House should properly vote a slightly stronger—temporary, if need be—power to the Speaker, for the next two or three years or until the end of the Parliament, to hold Ministers who are not taking this seriously to account. When you have a Government—as with this one; as with the previous one—with a very large majority, it is always apt to get too big for its boots. It is very important, under those circumstances in particular, for Parliament to try to exercise that further degree of accountability.

Before we leave UQs, is there any merit in removing the Government’s discretion, or any Government’s discretion, when the Speaker has granted an urgent question, to convert it into a statement?

I have not thought about that question. It is very interesting, and it is definitely worth consideration by the Committee, and consultation with the Clerks perhaps, but I have not thought it through. It would, to some extent, increase the sanction implied by having an urgent question, and it would reduce the Government’s ability to control the agenda. Of course, they only convert it because they think it will be an easier ride for the Minister than a UQ. So I would potentially be quite sympathetic to that approach, as I think it through.

With Speakers and successive Ministers over both Governments in the 10 years that I have been here, when a Minister has said, “I am delighted to be making this statement,” the Speaker has intervened and said, “You are only making this statement because I granted an urgent question, and you are now trying to make a virtue out of something that you were effectively hoping would be ignored.” To remove the right of changing it from a UQ to a statement would stop the Government turning an error into a virtue, and therefore might make a new sanctions regime more toothy.

Yes, that is absolutely right. On 2 June we had a UQ on Government announcements outside the House. The Leader said, “I am satisfied that the Government are coming to the House regularly to keep Parliament informed,” and the Speaker said, “I am not satisfied, and I think that is the key.” And of course he is absolutely right about that. You can always tell a fudge—there are many ways you can tell a fudge in Government—when people talk about being “clear”: “I have always been clear that this is the case.” What that means is, “We’re fudging it.” Clear is often what they are not being; they are saying it to try to disguise the fact that they are not being clear.

The obfuscation is clear for all to see.

That is a very good question. Yes, it is a permissive or so-called directive “should”, rather than a mandating “must”. I have always regarded that as being a polite compulsion, but if Ministers do not regard it as a polite compulsion, there is definitely a case for strengthening that language. Part of the problem when you have an evolving Parliament, or public, is that it lacks the constitutional understanding that its predecessors might have had. That is inevitable when you have 330 new MPs, although in many ways there are advantages to having that turnover, as well as disadvantages. But when you have that reduction in constitutional understanding, you will get a lot of Ministers who say, “Well, it only says that I ‘should’ do. That doesn’t mean I have to, so I’m bunking off on that.” That, of course, does create scope for disagreement. I do think that the civil service must be stronger with Ministers, as with this clear-cut case of the Prime Minister misleading the House, and there are other cases where I think the civil service should be better—for example, in improving the quality of response to written parliamentary questions, which is lamentable at the moment. That could be improved by civil servants saying, “We’re not going to accept the SPAD’s rewrite, where they just put a line through everything and say that the Minister did nothing wrong and has done nothing.” This is a case where removing any possibility for ambiguity would be helpful. Of course, that could be done in other ways. One could write the word “must” instead of “should”, or say that the convention will be enunciated through the Committee and the Leader in a statement. That would have an effect. People in the civil service and among the Clerks take seriously what is said in the House of Commons. It is not absolutely clear that MPs or Ministers take it as seriously as they should, but the officials do. 

I want to look at this from the ministerial code perspective. I appreciate that you suggested that there might be sanctions options that could fall outside of the ministerial code. What do you believe could potentially be sanction options from the ministerial code that the Prime Minister could consider?

As I said, I think it is a mistake to equate sanctions and the Prime Minister. I think there can be parliamentary sanctions, and we have talked about those. The Committee could very properly—

Do you not believe that there any options that the Prime Minister could have?

Let me come to that in a second. On the parliamentary side, the Committee could profitably consult with the Clerks as to methods by which this could be handled on the parliamentary side. On the ministerial side, it is hard to know. In our system, a Prime Minister with a large majority has an almost unfettered capacity for action. I suppose there is one way one could do it. Of course, our parliamentary system, for reasons I touched on in conversation with the Chair earlier, focuses the accountability on the Prime Minister because he is the Executive component of the King in Parliament, which is our supreme sovereign authority. That is a reason we do not set up other bodies that might be superior to the Prime Minister in other ways. But that does not mean that the Prime Minister could not be held to account. Let me give an example. If you had a situation like the one I described on 16 July at PMQs, it ought to be possible for a Back Bencher, a shadow Minister or anyone else to write to the Standards Commissioner, Laurie Magnus, to say, “The Prime Minister said x. We know from the law that y, not x, is the case. This is a clear case in my view—certainly not prima facie, just a knock-down obvious case—of misleading Parliament. I invite you to present that to the Prime Minister and ask him to explain why he has not corrected the record in Parliament.” I think he could do that. I do not think it would be an infringement on the authority we give the Prime Minister, if individuals could write to the Standards Commissioner—no, sorry, to Laurie Magnus as commissioner on the code—to say, “This looks like it may be a breach of the code. Could you explain why you have not treated it as such?”

That is a specific case where you are laying a charge at the Prime Minister and his own actions about what is misleading. Paragraph 9.2 of the ministerial code suggests that the Prime Minister will be consulted on paragraph 9.1. Do you believe the capacity is there for the Prime Minister to be in a position to judge whether 9.1 has been met? You have some experience in Government, as I can see from your CV. Do you think it is realistic that the Prime Minister has the scope to rule on whether his Ministers are meeting their responsibilities under 9.1?

Ultimately, the Prime Minister has to be responsible for the behaviour, the conduct and the adherence to norms, standards, conventions and rules of the House. I do not think any derogation from that is possible; that is how our system works. If the Prime Minister wishes to vary his or her judgment on the practice, our system allows him or her to do that. That can mean—and has meant in the past—that Prime Ministers have been willing to put up with some pretty unsavoury characters around the Cabinet table for other political reasons. It is not clear that, even if we might personally deplore it or think it bad for Government or politics, that we should prevent the Prime Minister from exercising that discretion. On this issue, there are proper ways in which you can interrogate the Prime Minister, within the civil service and among officials, as to why decisions have been made as they have. Let me give you another example, if I may, where there was no attempt to answer four or five written questions from the shadow Secretary of State in relation to Home Office questions. There was one question which I raised in the House about a Minister whose response to the question, “How many private schools has the Secretary of State for Education visited in her first year in office?” was, “The Prime Minister visited a number of schools.” No attempt was made to answer the question. There ought to be some mechanism by which, as a matter of parliamentary accountability within the code, someone should be able to respond to that.

I am sorry; how Government deals with parliamentary questions falls within the purview of the Procedure Committee rather than this Committee. It is an interesting point, and it is one that all Back Benchers complain about irrespective of whom they are asking questions, but we are looking specifically at policy statements to Parliament. I do not want to be diluted into parliamentary questions.

I completely understand. I was interpreting it in the context—

Back on to the ministerial code, you mentioned the role of officials. The current independent adviser has told us that he does not see it as his role to advise on breaches of the ministerial code, such as breaches of 9.1. Do you think that the independent adviser should have a different view on that?

Just to respond, if I may, to the Chair’s point, my apologies; I was reading this in the context of the ministerial code, and that obviously does have a lot of material about accurate and truthful information to Parliament and the courtesy of engaging with questions rather than ducking them. On the question that Markus has raised, I think it is hard, within our constitution, for the Prime Minister’s semi-independent official, in the form of Laurie Magnus, to be able to investigate those breaches. In practice, they will be inundated with requests for investigation, and then you have essentially set up a separate para-governmental entity. I am not at all sure that our constitution really allows, or should allow, for that; again, it rather dilutes the principle of accountability. But I absolutely do think that the independent adviser on ministerial standards could be asked whether he or she could put to the Prime Minister that something has been a breach. I think it would have to be an egregious breach; I do not think that, for example, a response to a parliamentary question would do that. It would have to be the standards I mentioned earlier: very high level, about something that a senior figure—a Minister—repeated in front of the House; those kinds of things. I think you could properly do that. Then the Prime Minister would just have to account for why he had done it. It would not be public, and it would not be something that would ever be put in an official document, but the Prime Minister would know that he would be asked a question—officials would be present—as to why he or she had not done a particular thing or had not accounted in a particular way.

So you do not foresee a role for the independent adviser where they advise or adjudicate on breaches; rather, they would just be a conduit to put the suggestion, “Was this a breach, Mr Prime Minister?”

I think, in cases of the most egregious breaches, asking the Prime Minister to explain his decision does not fall against the tradition of the Prime Minister having unfettered—or more or less unfettered—discretion, but it does force him to be accountable even within the civil service and to his own adviser.

Would you foresee some kind of formal response to that request?

I think he would need to make a response. I am just giving you an off-the-cuff view, but I had not considered this being a request and an answer which would be published. It could be that. I slightly disagree with that. I think that a lot of our constitution works best when it is uncodified, but the potential for publication is a further sanction that could be applied. Some mechanism that requires the Prime Minister as owner of the code to explain how he has discharged the code, not just in some aggregate and cover-all way but specifically, is important and is something the Committee could properly look at.

When we were discussing the independent adviser before, you used the word “inundated”, I think—correct me if I am wrong. If we are putting those challenges to the Prime Minister, I am trying to work out how that would not equally end up with them being inundated. Am I missing some practical application in what you are describing?

As I say, I am just developing this line of thought in response to the questions you have put; it is not something I have thought through, and if necessary, I could write to the Committee separately with a suggestion in detail. The way I would contemplate it working is that the standards adviser would just have to work out, on the basis of representation, whether this met the test of being an egregious potential breach. If it was an egregious potential breach, he could then privately ask the Prime Minister to explain what his thinking had been. That leaves everything as it is. That does not breach any norm. The parallel case is the one I mentioned earlier. The genius of the idea of a declaration of incompatibility in the law is that it does not change the law. The law is what it is. It just says, “Would the Government like to cure the incompatibility?” All this would do is say, “There is a potential incompatibility here. Would you, Prime Minister, like to cure the potential incompatibility by correcting the record for PMQs on 16 July?” or whatever the case might be. It might relate to the Prime Minister in the case I mentioned, or to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in the Westminster Hall debate I mentioned, or to the Leader of the House or other Ministers. That is the essence of the approach I am touching on.

Should there be a beefed-up role for the Cabinet Secretary in all of this?

The point I made earlier about the civil service having broader shoulders does specifically bear on the status of the Cabinet Secretary. The Cabinet Secretary, historically, was a very weighty figure who might privately have had precisely this kind of role. Burke Trend, Robin Butler, Robert Armstrong—these were, in many ways, great figures; they are great figures, in Robin’s case. It is hard to imagine a Prime Minister ignoring what they say. We have had quite a lot of turnover recently of Cabinet Secretaries, which has not helped the currency, but that would be another way of doing it. I, in fact, wrote to the Cabinet Secretary, along with the shadow Secretary of State for Defence, on some aspects of the SDR announcement, and I got a pretty weak response, candidly, but there is no reason why the Cabinet Secretary should not be able to do this. If the Cabinet Secretary felt that they were in that job for a period of time that was likely to outlast the Prime Minister, they might have slightly stronger, broader shoulders.

They certainly seem less muscular than they used to be.

Some of that comes down to the individuals concerned.

Maybe it is like policemen getting younger; I don’t know.

Well, that is true. Also, let’s not forget that when you have a Prime Minister who has himself sat around the table of the permanent secretaries, which this one has, they have seen how a lot of this mystery actually works, and that, to some extent, takes away the authority of the Cabinet Secretary. You really want a bit more distance between the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary than we have had in recent years.

There does seem to be—and this is relevant whoever is in government—a very ad hoc approach to how members of a shadow Cabinet are communicated with by their Secretary of State opposite number. Do you think that there is merit in setting that out in greater detail to enable more forensic and meaningful parliamentary scrutiny?

I think that is a very interesting idea. Our constitution gives a special privilege to the official Opposition. At moments such as now, where you have a third party that is not a million miles away from having as many seats, it can feel like a relic of a two-party system that is somehow out of date. But it has a constitutional function. I think there is a case for looking at whether there are formal procedures that ought to be undertaken. The Secretary of State for Defence has gone some way, to his credit, after the fiasco of the SDR to put that in place in relation to the Defence Committee. Such a thing could be done in relation to Committees as a whole and in relation to the Opposition. I think that is a reasonable idea. Also, it would be helpful to consider, to come back to the question raised by Charlotte, the ambiguity around what an announcement is: the idea that somehow, we are going to brief all our friends and media people, but we will save the announcement for the House of Commons, and there is no difficulty with that because it is all under embargo. Whether that meets the standard of a declaration in the House is a further question, which I think the Committee could opine on in its report. There is certainly an open question whether that counts. I do think that we should get away from the idea that, for example, a briefing is the same thing as being allowed to read the actual document. I also think, for what it is worth, that Governments create the environment for their own standards. When the last Prime Minister but three—or whatever it was—decided not to appoint a new ethics adviser, that spoke volumes. This Prime Minister has taken a different approach. His manifesto says that Labour will ensure that Ministers are “held to the highest standards”. It is reasonable to say, “Is this consonant with being held to the highest standards?” Even if you think that Ministers should be held to high standards, is it the highest standards? I think that is a question that could be properly explored.

On that comparison, who defines highest is a question. If we are brutally honest here, there is an element of Opposition shadow Leaders, as Ms Powell was before she became Leader and Lord President, taking the sort of St Augustine approach, is there not? Oppositions want Government to be whiter than white and purer than pure. Then, when they get into government, the cold face of reality hits them, and the practicalities of the delivery of government come as a bit of shock. Is there any merit in trying to find cross-party consensus, through detailed working between the relevant spokespeople and Front Benches, to try to find a way that meets the expectations of the House of Commons and our constituents, that meets the complex demands of delivering governance in this country, and that ticks as many boxes as possible? Then, to take your Iraq war analogy, everybody has their fingers dipped into the blood. It is then a document agreed between the parties on the approach of Government and the expectations of the House, and that could sit with all the sanctity of one of the gospels for many years to come.

I actually did not use the word “blood”—advisedly, because I think that is quite an emotive word—but the idea that there is valuable work to be done in building cross-party consensus on these issues is immensely valuable and immensely important. The way to do it, I would suggest, is to do it now, and for all the parties to agree that it will be adopted as of the next election. When people do not know what the election result will be, they are therefore then pre-committing themselves behind a veil of ignorance, you might say, to the outcome. The recurrent tendency is, as you said, for Oppositions to say all kinds of wonderfully reassuring things, and then they get into Government and they say, “Well, of course no one could have anticipated the dreadful context we are in now. Everything’s going bust. What do we do? We have no choice”, and it all gets swept away. Governments have done that since time immemorial. We cannot expect them to be any purer, but we can try to put the tramrails in place that might make it harder for them. Parliament did that very effectively with the Wright Committee. Before the 2010 election, it put in place a series of changes. When Parliament reconvened, this was a matter of the formal procedures. This is why we have elected Chairs of Select Committees and elected members of Select Committees. I do not think anyone would say that that has not been a significant improvement. Many people who would have been denied any kind of ministerial career have made their lives through the independence of mind required to be on a Committee and chair it. I thoroughly support that. Getting those tramrails in place and not asking people to decide them now for themselves is, I think, quite a valuable approach. That would be the way I would suggest moving forward.

Good morning, Mr Norman. I would like to ask you about the balance between time in the Chamber for statements and other business of Parliament. When the Leader of the House came to Committee, one of the defences made by the Government regarding this issue is that there have been so many ministerial statements in the Session. I think at that point there had been 153 oral statements and 673 written statements. How do you think statements should be balanced against the other business of the House? For example, on Monday we had a number of statements as the House returned, but we lost two general debates on what many Members would regard as important issues. Do you think it is a strong defence by the Leader of the House that there have been so many statements? Are we getting the balance right in terms of the business of Parliament, statements and the House’s other business?

Thank you very much indeed, Mr Baker—Richard. I said at the beginning of my evidence that I thought the Leader’s response to the Committee had been pretty woeful and there had been quite a lot of equivocations. One of them was the suggestion that somehow the failure to do what the Committee was suggesting now was offset by doing a lot of other stuff, which I regard as irrelevant to the question being asked. I am respectful of the Government’s willingness to make statements—I think that is valuable—and simultaneously I wish it did not try to use that as an excuse for not answering the questions that you have been putting about actual ministerial accountability and compliance with the code. As to whether ministerial statements are crowding out other business, I think it is an open question. There is a moral hazard involved. It might not be unhelpful for the Government to get a lot of miles in, if you like, by putting ministerial statements in in order to be able to bulk up the numbers that the Leader has given, and some of those statements may or may not be valuable. We have all seen statements with a very small number of people in the House and we have seen general debates that have been heavily attended, where people have thought, “Hold on a second. This has been squeezed by decision.” I think that is a reasonable question when it comes to balance. It is not really a matter of accountability, particularly; it is more a matter of how the Government, who have dominant control over the business, manage that business. It is proper to ask whether they are not, as it were, drowning the House in statements rather than actually providing specific accountability that is responsive to parliamentarians’ needs, rather than to what you might call the “Government push” desire.

The Government recently protected Opposition time by providing a business of the House motion to allow for statements. Would you like to see more of that?

I think that is perfectly appropriate in the case of Opposition time, because otherwise it feels like you are oppressing Opposition parties, whoever those Opposition parties may be. If the Government worried that they were getting a bit too big for their boots with statements, they could provide scope to protect general debate time. I am not sure that that has been done particularly in the past, but the Committee could certainly explore that. One of the problems is that a lot of parliamentarians are not aware of the informal channels: 30 Members of Parliament texting the Leader of the House to say, “Hold on a second! I've just looked at the Order Paper—what’s going on here?” is a pretty effective mechanism. A Member of the House who does not have the Speaker’s mobile number is probably not doing their job. It ought to be possible to register a concern informally. Even if the Leader does not schedule the time at that moment, she or he could do that the next time the issue comes around. There is scope for evolution here, I think.

Finally from me, on written statements, I think you responded substantively to this point in your answers to Charlotte Cane. But can you see no situation where it would be satisfactory for a major policy to be announced via a written statement? I was in Holyrood for 12 years. Quite often, SNP Ministers would issue a written statement or answer an inspired question, making a very significant policy announcement, and then brief the media—there would be a media launch. Immediately after that, they would come to the Chamber and answer Members’ questions. Would that sort of scenario still not live up to what you think would be respecting the position of the House on these matters?

I am a Conservative; I would never say never about anything. There may be contexts in which that would be appropriate. Of course, there can be statements that do not have a lot of public profile but are nevertheless immensely important. You could imagine that there. The key thing is whether the Minister is obviously deferring and showing the courtesies appropriate for accounting to Parliament. If Parliament gets a sense that that is what is happening, my experience is that colleagues will be extremely generous in not minding about things, if you see what I mean.

It is always a clear-cut call, then, when analysing and assessing what level of importance a policy announcement has—whether it would be a satisfactory process to announce it to the House or not.

I am a bit leery about automated or semi-automatic processes, but I am very sympathetic to a general expectation. Actually, I think the ministerial code provides that general expectation; it could be potentially elaborated through this Committee and through a statement by the Leader of the House. Measures could be taken to give it more teeth and enforcement, whether through powers allocated to the Speaker by the House or a power given to the independent adviser. All those things that would improve accountability without disturbing our current constitutional arrangements could be put in place. I think it would be improved if we did that, but I would be a bit worried about a purely automated process—you will inevitably get the case where the Minister has decided that something with an enormous local importance, for example, can be put into some subordinate form of declaration. That will always be controversial. It is probably of the essence of Parliament that it will be controversial, if you see what I mean, because that is part of the process of holding the Minister to account.

That is very helpful. Thank you very much.

I have a couple of questions. I do not really expect you to answer the first one in this session, because it is probably a broader point. I have been listening to what you have said; is the real question that the theatre of the Chamber is no longer sufficient to provide adequate scrutiny for Parliament?

That is such a good question—thank you for asking it. I wish the Modernisation Committee would take up that question, because there is something very odd about talking about modernisation and not considering the core functions—which the Committee is not really doing at the moment—of holding Ministers to account, passing legislation and acting as a forum for representation. That is what Parliament is about; that is what we have to be doing. If you were going to do that—I do not know if this will fall within the Committee’s purview; it might not because of the way in which these responsibilities are allocated—you would be doing things like saying, “Well, there should be no repetition of points made in debates.” So if you want to hear a debate, it is a progressive elaboration of a line of thought and a collective embodiment of wisdom, and that debate then stands, in some sense, as an intellectual achievement of its own. You might say that, for example, after the first six months in Parliament, Members are encouraged not to read parliamentary questions or use anything other than notes for speeches. Churchill used notes; everyone uses notes—that is perfectly acceptable. Reading speeches is a bit of a discourtesy, because it suggests that you had already made up your mind before you came into the Chamber, and that you had not been listening to the previous comments that were made. There are ways of restoring the House of Commons to something like its strength as a deliberative assembly, and I worry that some of the decisions that are being potentially contemplated in and around this House will take away from that core deliberative, digestive function, and the core functions of accountability that you are quite properly concerned with in this inquiry. I think it is very important to go back to first principles and ask, “Is Parliament doing what people expect it to do?” People are not stupid; they know that PMQs is a mad circus. But when they tune in normally, they expect to see debates in which people are not just recording 30-second clips for their constituents, but are trying to be part of a deliberative assembly of the nation, as Burke would put it. I think that is quite valuable—in fact, I think it is essential.

One last question from me. At the beginning of the session, you listed a slew of changes to the current principle. Is there a reason—this is not aimed politically at your Government—that those changes were not implemented under a previous Government?

Oh, I think they absolutely should have been done. I do not think this issue was given anything like enough care, and I do not think Parliament in general was given enough attention. Let me give you an example: it was open to Governments after 2015, up until 2024, to pass sensible reforms to the House of Lords. They failed to do that, the result of which is that there is going to be quite a swingeing change to the House of Lords. That will remove a lot of experience. Of course, one can have different views on the political merits of the change but, as a change to our constitutional arrangement, it is a much more drastic and arguably less effective change than a more gradual process of reform would have undertaken. I think the general problem is that Governments of all stamps have tended to be relatively ignorant and contemptuous of the constitution and the instruments of Parliament. That is a terrible shame.

May I close this session by asking—I will guess that the answer is yes—whether there is a role here for the Speaker’s Office? It is not in the interest of Whips from any party when inducting new Members to say, “Here is a whole list of the powers that the House of Commons has to better hold the Executive to account.” You and I, Mr Norman, will remember when, as a result of having no practical majority in Parliament, the House was able to take control of the Order Paper with Boles, Letwin Cooper and so on. There was a spark of recognition that the House actually had more power than it had hitherto realised. Power needs to be exercised judiciously, as we know, but do you share my worry that, as parliamentarians, we are not au fait with precisely how much influence we have over these sorts of matters and that we are too slavish to the party Whip or the party affiliation, instead of realising that we also have a fleeting or temporary guardianship of the operation of our constitution, both written and unwritten, and we do not take that quite seriously enough?

I hate giving answers that are in any sense predictable so, although I am going to say yes, I am going to elaborate a little bit on this. In 2015, I approached the Clerks and asked if it might be of interest for them to supply someone who had a lot of experience in the Chamber, because I thought it would be helpful to incoming Conservative MPs to run a couple of sessions on the different mechanisms you can use to exercise political influence in the House of Commons, such as amending legislation, PQs, urgent questions—seven or eight different levers you can pull. That was because—and I am sure this is true of every MP here—when I first arrived at the House of Commons, there was very little effective education about what those levers were, and I felt that you needed a combination of the Clerks’ experience and a Back-Bench parliamentarian. At that point, I had run the rebellion on the House of Lords, and I had disagreed with the Government on Syria and a whole series of things, so I knew how to do that. It was enormously influential and valuable for my colleagues, and they provided an excellent Clerk, who did a bang-up job in helping me to do that. I would like to think that those MPs were then much more able to be effective, because otherwise, the feeling is, “I’ve got into a car, and I don’t know if it’s a Morris Minor or a Lamborghini because I can only drive it at 5 mph. It’s not helping me.” There is one other thing to say. I think that the authority of the Speaker’s Office needs to be given greater respect, and that includes by the Government. You will recall the very lamentable episode, documented in the Maguire-Pogrund book, of the Government essentially saying to the Speaker, “We’ll never re-elect you if you don’t do what we say on the Gaza vote”, and the Speaker then choosing the wrong amendment and getting everyone off the hook. That was a complete violation of parliamentary procedure and practice and an exercise of naked political muscle by the Government, of a kind that is deeply deplorable and very far from the highest standards of parliamentary behaviour. We ought to find some mechanism for calling that out, being clear about what has happened and not forgetting about it, so that the Speaker’s Office retains its ability to pursue and support accountability of Ministers on behalf of Members. If the Speaker can be intimidated, that obviously is a disaster for Parliament and the House of Commons as a whole.

Shadow Leader, thank you for taking our questions. If we have provoked further thought that requires what I always refer to as the Columbo moment—

One final thing!

One final thing: the gun was in your hand, the victim was at your feet, and you’re saying you were at the café. That was a terrible Peter Falk impression; forgive me. I am now showing my age even more. If there is any issue that you want to elaborate upon or further thoughts you have about the practicalities of delivering change, we would be very pleased to receive them in writing.

Perhaps I could say one thing. You will not understand how grateful I am to this Committee for holding this inquiry and for asking me to talk about this, because these are issues that never get debated and discussed in any structured or systematic way. It is very hard to exercise a decent understanding of the practical accountability of Ministers if you do not have a coherent discussion like this. We never get it at the Dispatch Box, and it is great that the Committee can offer it. If, having reflected on this, it would be helpful for me to set out some of these ideas in writing, I would be very happy to do that. I am quite reluctant to, as it were, ram things down the Committee’s throat if it does not want it.

All submissions gratefully received.

I will look at the transcript and see if it makes any sense, and perhaps I will come back to you.

I am sure it does. Thank you everyone.