Committee on Standards
Oral evidence: House of Commons Standards Landscape, HC 247
Tuesday 23 January 2024
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 23 January 2024.
Members present: Ms Harriet Harman (Chair); Alberto Costa; Allan Dorans; Sir Michael Ellis; Yvonne Fovargue; Sir Francis Habgood; Mehmuda Mian; Dr Rose Marie Parr; Victoria Smith; Dr David Stirling; Carys Williams.
Questions 60 - 96
Witnesses
I: Richard Lloyd OBE, Chair, Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA); John Pullinger CB, Chair, Electoral Commission; and Louise Edwards, Director of Regulation and Digital Transformation, Electoral Commission.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA)
Witnesses: Richard Lloyd OBE, John Pullinger CB and Louise Edwards.
Q60 Chair: Welcome to this afternoon’s evidence session of Parliament’s Committee on Standards, which is looking across the piece at all the organisations involved in ensuring that high public standards are kept by MPs and all those operating on the parliamentary estate.
We are grateful to have, for this afternoon’s evidence session, Richard Lloyd, chair of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority—thank you for joining us. From the Electoral Commission, we have John Pullinger, who is the chair, and Louise Edwards, who is director of regulation and digital transformation.
You have given written evidence to us, for which I am very grateful. One of the things that you do as the Electoral Commission—both you and IPSA—is point to uncertainty and confusion with regards to the various standards bodies that operate within the standards landscape, which you are in. What more do you think could be done to ensure that your distinct roles and remits are explained and promoted? Do you think that should happen?
To shed a little light on this for everybody, could you briefly say what IPSA and the Electoral Commission do, so that we get you in the right place in the landscape? Perhaps we can start with IPSA.
Richard Lloyd: Thank you for having me today. IPSA is responsible for regulating MPs’ pay, pensions and public funding for their offices and staff. It is on financial matters, rather than other conduct issues.
Q61 Chair: You set the pay and the pensions and you give MPs the money for running their offices and travel expenses. Thank you.
John Pullinger: The Electoral Commission oversees the elections and referendums across the United Kingdom and is accountable to the three Parliaments that we have. We also regulate political finance—so looking at where money is coming from and how it is spent during an election campaign.
Q62 Chair: Do you think that more should be done to promote the different roles? Does it matter that people are a bit hazy as to what you do and who has responsibility for what?
Richard Lloyd: It is the right question and I think we could all do more to clarify our roles for the public, for Members and for Members’ staff. We have tried to do that at IPSA by signposting much more clearly on our website what we do, in relation to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, which is where the confusion often arises with members of the public.
John and I talk regularly. It is incumbent on us to explain clearly, publicly, what we do. The confusion that I see most often is probably in the media, where IPSA’s role is misdescribed and that sometimes triggers public questions. To put this in context, the number of public contacts that have come to us in recent months has been on average only around 20 or 30. It is not a huge volume and we should remember that, of which only about a quarter are complaints. At any one time we only have probably 15 to 20 formal complaints being assessed, some of which are not in our remit. We should keep this in proportion and, in particular, communicate much more clearly the outcomes that collectively we achieve—that is, higher standards, and, certainly in our remit, extraordinarily high standards in terms of compliance with our rules.
John Pullinger: Can I invite Louise Edwards to say something? This is a big issue, but Louise is dealing with the consequences of this, how it is managed and leading us through the process. Perhaps Louise could pick up the question.
Louise Edwards: Thanks, John. I am looking at this from two perspectives in my role. One is the user.
Q63 Chair: To start, who is the Electoral Commission and what does it do?
Louise Edwards: Of course. The Electoral Commission, as John has mentioned, oversees well-run elections, but we also have a role, which I am more focused on, about regulating political finance.
You have heard the same words coming out of different people’s mouths, and that says something in itself. Several different bodies regulate political finance in all its different aspects. The elements that we are looking at relate primarily to political parties and to campaigners who try to influence votes at elections on a national or local level, but who do not stand candidates—what we call non-party campaigners, to distinguish them from political parties. And we do have a role with candidates as well, so Members of Parliament who then go for re-election will come under the candidate regime that we have a role in.
The other area we have a role in, which perhaps has less profile, is what is called regulated donees. They are primarily either elected representatives or members of political parties who get given money as donations to carry out their political activities. That political activities area is the one where we have the most direct involvement with elected representatives, but also, crucially, with the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
In terms of our profile, we look at this from two sides. In many ways, Members of Parliament are the users of the system that we are trying to regulate. They need to know, and their office staff need to know, how to properly report money and who to report it to. That is one area of confusion that we are working quite closely to try to resolve.
To give you a quick example of that, I have sat in front of Members of Parliament and told them about these regimes from two different angles. I first did it on behalf of IPSA when I worked for IPSA, and then I came back and did it on behalf of the Electoral Commission. I am very aware that you have, potentially, newly-elected Members who want to get on with running their offices, setting up their constituency work and setting up their parliamentary work, or returning Members of Parliament who want to do the same, and they sit in a room with the RMFI, us and IPSA all saying, “Right, whatever you do with your money, you must account for it to one of us but it is quite complicated because you might have to account for it to two of us, depending on what it is, and we cannot tell you that in advance. We would have to look at the specifics.” And it all gets incredibly complicated.
I am very happy to come on later to the areas where we are trying to work through that, particularly in advance of the next general election, to ensure that it is much easier for people coming into Parliament to understand what they need to do.
The other side of it is public transparency. In that regard, we are all in the business here of publishing financial information to give public transparency, but those overlaps occur again. You might end up with money that is reported to the RMFI but also reported to us, published under two different regimes—
Q64 Chair: The Register of Members’ Financial Interests?
Louise Edwards: Yes, sorry. And then from the public’s point of view, they could be looking at the same piece of money under two completely different sets of regimes with two completely different sets of analysis to do. That is tricky. That is an area where again we can work hard to ensure that the media, through media queries, or our website, which is where the money is published, is really clear about what regime you are looking at when you look at that particular bit of cash.
Q65 Dr David Stirling: It is gratifying to hear the relatively small number of complaints that you receive. A common theme from the written evidence we have heard from various bodies, and from the Commissioner in his oral evidence before this Committee, is that a very high percentage of complaints are outwith the remit of the body that is being complained to. What processes do you have in place to redirect any queries or complaints that are not within the remit of your organisations? Do you think they are sufficient?
Richard Lloyd: You are right: we do receive lots of contacts and sometimes complaints within those contacts that are not for us. An example recently was a constituent complaining about the frequency of constituency surgeries in their area. Clearly, that is about how an MP carries out their parliamentary duties and their constituency activity, not a funding query.
What we would do, if there was a complaint that went to an area outside our remit, is redirect people. We have a very clear explanation—in particular, the distinction between IPSA’s role and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards’ role, and how to contact him and his office— on our website. We are, as much as we can now, working closely with all the other players in the landscape to ensure that there are proper data sharing gateways. Sometimes there are legal reasons, freedom of information and data protection reasons why data cannot flow as easily as it might otherwise, but, in particular, as I said at the beginning, it is incumbent on us all to ensure that we collaborate, that we are aware of the themes and the kinds of issues that are coming to us, and, if we see gaps, that we figure out between us how those might be filled.
I have heard suggestions for some form of triage or central point of information. I think if the House had a guide to how to complain, that would help, but to put this in context, for IPSA the numbers are not particularly high. In the other areas that I regulate outside of IPSA, these are an hour’s worth of calls. It is important to keep this in proportion.
John Pullinger: I echo everything that Richard just said. The system does work quite well because we are all geared up to transfer the request to someone else and we all get together fairly regularly and work together, so we know who to go to. That is a help to the complainant, so the risk of any extra structure is that that might add an extra player, rather than streamline it. This particular bit works quite well because we work effectively together. The primary impediment—Louise can explain more if you wish—is where the data is personal data. The gateways are not necessarily as clear as they might be so that we can do that with confidence and respect the rights of the person who is complaining.
Q66 Chair: It is encouraging to hear that you get together and co-ordinate. Who convenes the get-together, how often do you meet and who is in the get-together?
John Pullinger: It is different in terms of who we are getting together with. With IPSA, it tends to be bilaterally. With the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, there is a lot of interplay with Louise’s team, so that is another bilateral but much deeper relationship.
On the broader landscape, a very significant convener—you spoke to him this morning—is the chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. I think he intends to do the same as his predecessor did—to look at those people, particularly in the parliamentary space, who are involved in these kinds of standards questions and ensure that we all know each other and there is a limited level of friction between us. It is an ad hoc thing that the chair of that committee has chosen to do, but certainly from my point of view, it has been very valuable and effective.
Louise Edwards: If I can add to that from a more operational point of view, we have memorandums of understanding in place with most of the regulators that we deal with regularly, including IPSA and the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Most of our overlap comes from the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, because there is a clear divide between political and parliamentary spending. Parliamentary spending is where IPSA comes in.
We also have very regular meetings with them generally—to catch up quarterly to see how the memorandum of understanding is working, and also on case-specific matters. There is an overlap in our regulatory roles between us and the RMFI, so we will sometimes have matters referred to us to consider under our enforcement policy.
Q67 Sir Michael Ellis: On the topic of queries outside remit, there are those outside who feel that there has been empire building. Some Members of Parliament are concerned that there has been a mission creep and that various bodies are taking it upon themselves to advance the regulatory scope of what they do. How do you respond to those charges? I refer to such things as a complaint that someone has not had their email responded to, or perhaps responded to in a timely fashion, as they perceive it, or perhaps even that the response is not something with which they agree. People have been known even to complain about that.
There are constitutional issues here—that Members of Parliament are not employees and they are free to take robust decisions even if people disagree with them. There are such things as how they respond to emails and the like, or whether, to use Mr Lloyd’s example, they have surgeries or how often they have them. These are matters that the individual Member of Parliament will be answerable for at the ballot box, and that is the centuries-old constitutional position.
As this has been talked about, how do you address the suggestions that there is that type of mission creep?
Richard Lloyd: It has been a very live question for IPSA since it was established, and there are still some Members who would say it was a mistake for Parliament to cede sovereignty to a statutory body such as IPSA for decisions that had previously been self-regulated. We are acutely aware of that as a board and as a team at IPSA.
We have the advantage of a very clear statutory remit, and we are very careful about being clear about the boundaries that are set for us. We have quite an extraordinary number of detailed prescriptions about our duties and our powers in the Parliamentary Standards Act and its subsequent amendments. If we wanted to empire-build, the statute would inhibit us.
Equally, I think there is an important and slight distinction, which is how do we use our powers to enable, for example, MPs to be good employers? There are things that we can do, defaults that we can set, and some conditionality that you heard about this morning with our funding that may go to support a better working environment for MPs’ staff. I think that is entirely legitimate and within the boundaries that Parliament set for us.
I sometimes get asked, “Well, why don’t you regulate the fees and allowances for peers?” There is a clear, bright red line around what we are there to do and what we are not, and that helps us to explain our role. It also helps us to assure the public that we are independent on the things within our remit. We must be very careful not to creep into judgments that might be seen as political or subjective. There are always some grey areas—for example, the use of public funds for what is sometimes alleged to be party political activity rather than parliamentary activity, which is a core principle for us—but we are acutely aware of that. We train our staff very carefully on that. We have, at the foundation of our decision making, some very clear statute.
Q68 Sir Michael Ellis: Does the Electoral Commission have anything to say about that? As an entity, you have occasionally been accused of empire building, if I am not mistaken. Do you challenge that?
John Pullinger: Our origins are different to IPSA’s and that affects the way we function in this respect. The origins of the Electoral Commission come from electoral oversight, resting with the Government before we existed and Parliament asserting more control over the system, and specifically more independence and cross-party involvement in it. The critical body here is the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission, so, like it, we have a dedicated committee that is entirely devoted to overseeing us and making sure, on a non-partisan basis, that we interpret our legislation correctly and are not overstepping, as you have described. From a parliamentary oversight perspective, that is a very strong mechanism, and that committee is set up to be not under the majority of any individual party, specifically to give that assurance.
In terms of mission creep and our powers, the Committee on Standards in Public Life has undertaken periodic reviews of the Electoral Commission that have looked at the evidence in this respect and made recommendations to reduce our remit, and to increase it. They have recently conducted a review on the transparency of political finance, which has made recommendations. As it happens, they are primarily for giving us extra strength. In terms of your question, that mechanism within the parliamentary structure is a constraint, but also an assurance, that the mission is carefully thought through by Parliament.
Louise Edwards: If I may, though, you point to an important perception issue, which does need to be addressed. One of the things that causes that perception issue is, sometimes, a lack of clarity in the law about the distinction between political activities and what are more for the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which is more about political interests and activities. It is not always very clear which one—or indeed both—is engaged. If there were to be more clarity about exactly what a political activity is and where that falls within the regime, I think that would help us, the RMFI and Members, but also the public, to understand the distinctions.
Q69 Dr Rose Marie Parr: I am a lay member of this Committee. In many ways, you have already touched on the issue I am about to ask you about. As you know, IPSA and the Electoral Commission are both set up by Acts of Parliament. How does that make a difference to your work? Does it bring advantages or disadvantages? Does it bring particular benefits to you? Richard has already outlined some of them, around mission creep.
Richard Lloyd: It gives us that very clear remit and the remit cannot be changed by us unilaterally. Parliament would have to do that. That enables us to be very clear to our people and to MPs and their staff and the public about our role. If we can get that across more clearly, we would like to.
The disadvantages are that we cannot respond as nimbly as we might otherwise like to, for example, to developments and improvements in regulatory practice or employment practice. It does constrain us in terms of thinking about how we deliver against that statutory remit. A good example of that, and I think this is a strength but also an example of where we are constrained, is that the legislation is very clear about our transparency duty, the duty to report MP expenditure. That is also bolstered by a freedom of information case that required us to be in the mode we are currently in, in terms of publishing data, but it is frequently misused and misreported and causes all sorts of other consequences for MPs and their staff.
That is why we are doing much more now to contextualise that data, to explain it, to distinguish between expenses as people in the real world, in normal walks of life, would understand them, and the costs of running a small office and paying for staff. By sticking to that legislation, which we have to, if there are ways in which we can explain what we are doing in a more user-friendly way—in a way that the public can make better sense— of, then we should, but that is clearly the constraint.
John Pullinger: For us, the law is complicated—I would say overcomplicated—and because it is set down in law, it has the problem that Richard Lloyd has just described, which is that you must come back to Parliament to change it. But that problem is overwhelmingly outweighed by the benefit of having a statutory footing.
The first, most straightforward point, is that I think it is for Parliament to debate whether these things should be changed, and they were set up in a particular way for a reason, debated and agreed as such. Matters such as these must be considered openly and seriously by both Houses. That is a straightforward response to your question.
For me, I think the key thing that having a statutory basis gives us is a solidity of the assurance we can give to the public, and clarity about the redress through our accountability to the Speaker’s Committee and the sister committees in Scotland and Wales. A statutory basis for that is a clearer thing to show people and for them to be able to respond to. That is true for all our other stakeholders as well, including political parties here—they have a body and can understand what it is, and it is doing something specific and mandated by Parliament. That makes it easier for Louise’s team, in particular, to get their support and work with them to encourage the best possible vibrant political debate that we can reasonably have.
Q70 Victoria Smith: Good afternoon; I am Victoria Smith, a lay member. My question is to Mr Lloyd. Your written evidence proposes that there may be areas of simplification or consolidation across the standards’ landscape, which could improve the experience of MPs’ staff. Could you expand on that for us?
Richard Lloyd: Thank you for asking the question. It is hugely important to us. We have roughly 3,500 MP staff on our payroll. I think we are all agreed—the Speaker’s Conference recently reported on this—that this is an area where there have been some quite deep-seated problems that need addressing, where standards could be raised, but there is a fragmented landscape to address that set of issues. One of the solutions that was debated by the Speaker’s Conference, but not recommended, was that IPSA should become the employer of MPs’ staff. I think that having put that debate to bed, in setting the starting point that MPs are the employer and that IPSA does not have the power to intrude significantly into that relationship, is an important contextual issue.
Where there is sometimes confusion, and we sometimes have MPs’ staff coming to us and asking about this, is: when things go wrong, to whom do you turn? It is very obvious, clear and straightforward if it is a payroll issue, a redundancy issue, or an entitlement to some sort of financial benefit issue. We are very clear about our statutory remit and role in that regard, but sometimes it is not as simple as that. It may be a grievance issue that is not over the threshold for an ICGS referral. That is where it is incumbent again on IPSA and, in particular, the Members’ Services Team and HR in the House, as well as, if necessary, the ICGS, to work very closely together to ensure that if there is doubt among people who are struggling at work for whatever reason, they know who to turn to, and if someone comes to us, we very simply and straightforwardly pass them to the right person to deal with that problem.
It is a consequence simply of the construct of the funding and the arrangements for dealing with grievances, for example. It is also not just about MPs’ staff; it is about parliamentary staff and others, as you heard this morning. This is not something that is solely within IPSA’s gift, but as I keep saying, it is incumbent on us all to work together collaboratively, to recognise the distress that is sometimes there in staff members who come to us with a problem to solve, and that we help as far as we can, hand in glove, in particular, with the Members’ Services Team.
The Speaker's Conference also recommended training. We do fund training, as you know, including, sometimes, for MPs on management training and certainly for office managers. The Speaker’s Conference recommendation on this was that, again, the Members’ Services Team should expand and promote the training that is available to MPs as managers, and I think that is the right route. That said, we are also thinking very hard about what more we can do to support newly elected MPs coming in, bombarded with a huge number of things to get to grips with, who may not have managed a team of people before and how we can support that. I think we can do a lot more, and we will do a lot more, to support people’s entry into Parliament in that way—again, hand in glove with the House HR and Members’ Services Team.
What I have just described to you is not straightforward. It may not always be clear but that is fine. We need to recognise that and help people who are butting up against that complexity and not just say, “It is not for us—off you go.”
Q71 Alberto Costa: Good afternoon; I have a straightforward question for Richard. You mentioned that there is a red line around your remit, your jurisdiction. Your remit does not overlap with that of other bodies that we have been looking at. As your compliance officer’s written evidence argues, the term “standards” in your title means that people can understandably and sometimes incorrectly assume that your organisation plays a role in the regulation of Members’ behaviour. Do you consider that to be an issue? If it is, is it a significant one? Would you advise that perhaps a change of name is required, if this is an issue?
Richard Lloyd: Thanks for the question. I do not think it is a significant enough issue to warrant parliamentary time spent on it. We are clear that we are responsible for parliamentary financial conduct, not other forms of misconduct, but there is a statutory overlap, which is that we have the power to refer misconduct to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. He and I meet regularly; I was with him last week. One of the sanctions that can be taken against a Member who breaches our rules could be an investigation and a sanction ultimately that would reach this Committee via the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, so there is that statutory, formal gateway for working together, particularly where there may be an element of financial misconduct and an element of other, behavioural non-financial misconduct.
As I say, I think it is not a significant enough issue that we should trouble ourselves with primary legislation, which is what it would take. I just take it as incumbent on us to explain our role clearly to the public at every opportunity.
Q72 Dr Rose Marie Parr: My question is to Louise and John. Since 2009, the Electoral Commission and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards have developed ways to try to avoid dual reporting for political donations to MPs. What impact has that had, and can you tell the Committee if there is scope for further consolidation or any other improvements?
Louise Edwards: Dual reporting, as I said, is that the same bit of money can sometimes end up with two different regimes around it—one for the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and one with us. That is just a consequence because political interests and political activities overlap. It is a bit of a Venn diagram situation.
Dual reporting was an administrative arrangement that we put in place to try to minimise the burden on elected representatives—so you report it once to the RMFI and then the RMFI has a gateway to provide the right information to us, and we then publish it. There is some complication there, because it is not always straightforward what needs to be sent to us from the RMFI, and that is where our close links and good discussions with them come in to sort that out. You then end up with the same piece of money published in two different places, and that can lead to confusion.
We must remember that there are two different regimes at play here. Let me give you a brief example that comes up quite a lot: interns in an MP’s office. Imagine that a company wants to pay for an intern to go into an MP’s office and work for them in that office—it could be the parliamentary constituency office, whatever. There is a point there about whether this company is doing that in a way that impacts the Member of Parliament's political interests, so they declare it to the RMFI. But there may also be a situation where that company is effectively making a donation to the Member of Parliament for political activities—a donation in kind of that staff member's time or the intern's time, all depending exactly on what that intern is doing, exactly how they are doing it, exactly what their outcomes are. That is complicated and, indeed, in that scenario, we usually end up with the two regulators and the Member of Parliament in the room trying to work this through at a very granular level. When that information gets published, it is looked at from two different contexts.
For us, you could try to consolidate a little bit more around the way we present our data and the way that the RMFI present its data, and we are both doing some work individually on how we present our data at the moment, but it is difficult to think of a way that you might bring them together because of the context that they are in. Dual reporting, we hope—and we would welcome feedback—has worked to try to minimise the regulatory burden on the regulated donee, the Member of Parliament, but once it has gone into that system, it is quite hard to find a way to bring it together without overlapping the regimes.
Q73 Chair: Do you mean single reporting, rather than dual reporting?
Louise Edwards: We call it dual reporting, but effectively, it is about avoiding dual reporting.
Q74 Chair: So it is single reporting for a dual presentation.
Louise Edwards: Yes.
Q75 Dr Rose Marie Parr: How would you explain that to the public?
Louise Edwards: With difficulty, and with the assistance of my communications team. It is on our website, to try to explain this, and it is also on the Register of Members’ Financial Interests website, to try to explain this.
Q76 Chair: So, basically, it might be relevant to the Electoral Commission’s registration arrangements, or it might be the Register of Members’ Financial Interests arrangements, or both. The point is to not have the MP make a mistake and be in a regulatory breach by reporting it, but reporting it to the wrong one, so, instead, the MP reports it to somebody and you share that information and ensure there is transparency. I think you should change the name to single reporting, rather than dual because that is quite confusing. It is a dual publication of a singular report, but there we are.
Louise Edwards: I will take that back. That is a fair point.
Q77 Chair: It is a good thing that you have done that, because it makes sense. You reach the transparency objective, but without people tripping up by accident. There is a third branch about ministerial interests; do you want to say something about that? How do you come into that?
Louise Edwards: In preparation for this session, I tried to draw all the different overlapping remits and how they impacted on individuals. I did not finish it.
Q78 Chair: If we can have a copy, it will get published in our report.
Louise Edwards: It became so confusing. For individual regulated donees—so individual Members of Parliament or elected representatives—there are a few different plots on the graph. There are political interests, Register of Members’ Financial Interests, there are ministerial interests, which overlap with that, and then there are political activities. As I mentioned, political activities are not well defined in law and the money that is donated for that purpose then falls within our regime—although we only have part of that regime, because we are about permissibility and whether it has come from an acceptable place. All that fits into a very complicated Venn diagram, and then, thankfully, with some clear water, you do have IPSA on the parliamentary side, off to one side of that.
When you start to get into groups of Members of Parliament—this is the point where I stopped drawing because I could not make it work. After all, you then have members of a political party who come together and form a group—that is a members’ association. They have a separate regime, which we regulate. They may also be an unincorporated association—they have a separate regime, which we also regulate. It becomes incredibly complicated to work out based on individual pieces of activity and individual setups where the individuals and the groups end up sitting within it.
I understand why Parliament has laid it out this way—it is to maximise transparency and ensure that no matter what format the funding takes or what format the group takes, there is some kind of regime around it. But there is a huge amount of overlap between them and it leads to a lot of different registers of finances being out there on the web for people to look at. From our point of view—just going a little bit ahead of this year and a potential general election—one of the things that we want to do is try to put the data out there in a way that is much easier to manipulate, search, analyse and so forth.
The one thing that we do not touch on there, which does not overlap in our way, is—as you mentioned—Ministers’ interests. It is possible for a Minister to get a donation that is also a political activity and therefore must come to us, but they have a very separate reporting regime. The reporting regime does not overlap in that sense, other than if it goes to the RMFI. I realise I am talking in circles, but that might indicate how complicated it is.
Q79 Chair: There is a bit of an overlap, isn’t there? There was a recent case of a Minister who went to a premiere of a film and did not have to declare it because it was a ministerial activity, whereas the shadow Minister who went to that same film—because they were not in public office; they were an MP—did have to report it.
Louise Edwards: Yes—as a member of a political party and an elected representative. If you tried to work out a flow diagram, I am not sure how many loops you would have in it. The key thing for us is to ensure, at least in so far as we are regulating and making transparent parts of this regime, that we do that in as simple and as effective a way as possible. That is why we make sure we are available and accessible to Members of Parliament and to their staff, who might be the ones trying to unpick all of this, to give them help, support and advice.
Chair: We have had quite a lot of discussion about landing pages or hubs for complainants. It sounds as if you are saying that we need a bit of a hub/landing page for people declaring. Anyway, we can explore that a bit further. I was talking about the “Wonka” premiere, if anybody is intrigued.
Q80 Dr Rose Marie Parr: It has been helpful that you have outlined some of that complexity. For me, it is not just about complexity; it is all about understandability and if you can help Members, Ministers and their staff work through this, how do we then help the public understand that? In essence, transparency is there for the public and accountability, so there is something for me about our needing to be able to explain better.
Louise Edwards: I think you are entirely right. Being able to explain it better for me first comes back to a regime that makes sense and is easy to explain, and it comes back to supporting people to then comply with that regime. That is key for us because transparency depends on people knowing where to report their money. If you get that bit right—I am happy, if you would like me to, to go into the work that we are doing to try to get that bit right for us—then it flows through into transparency. I do think there is a need—we recognise this—to try to improve and modernise the way that all this data is published so that it is easy to extract, manipulate and understand it, and ultimately report on it, if you are a member of the public who wants to hold an elected representative accountable.
John Pullinger: Chair, if I may, before we go on to the next question, you raised the point about making a single landing page. When we were rehearsing for this and thinking what would be the single most useful thing that might come out of this, it was that. So look at it from the perspective of the Member of Parliament and just have something that explains to them what they need to do, because then they are much more likely to get it right. The complexity will take us a while to deal with and there will inevitably be some, as we have all said, but it is about something that is designed to help them navigate the system so that they can be confident in who they are declaring things to.
Q81 Chair: There is an argument that instead of MPs spending their time learning to navigate the system, they just do declarations and you work out where in the system you put it so that we can get on with our job, having been fully transparent, rather than becoming experts on several different regulatory regimes. I do not want to become an expert on these regulatory regimes, because I have full confidence in you. But I would rather declare it and ask somebody out there to work out whether it is political, parliamentary, an interest or an action, and whether it is ministerial or a group, or whatever, and register it somewhere, so that I can get on with my job without concealing.
John Pullinger: I think I expressed myself poorly. The objective will be to do just that, so that there is a page that the MP comes into that says, “I am doing this”, and all they need to do is say they are doing this. At the moment, they have to go to all of us. We are quite efficient, as we have said, in making it a clearing house, but it gives the MP confidence that if they can describe what they are doing in this one place, someone will deal with that effectively.
Chair: That is helpful and thank you for working out in advance what you can suggest to us, which would be helpful. I appreciate that.
Q82 Allan Dorans: Louise mentioned that there is some dual reporting analysis of certain financial information. In your written evidence, you stated that although the Electoral Commission’s political finance data duplicates some of the House of Commons register, it is necessary for transparency so that the information is searchable and accessible. Would it be advantageous to make improvements to the searchability of the Commons register to eliminate this duplication?
Louise Edwards: The challenge is that it needs to be searchable within the right regime, and if you start to combine the data, you end up with significant duplication. With that intern example I used earlier, that intern may well be a legitimate political interest and may well also be a donation, because they are doing political activities in the MP’s office. There are simply two regimes around that, trying to serve two different purposes. If you tried to combine them into one publication, you would end up with a duplication that would be very difficult to analyse. There does need to be some way of unpicking which regime they are within, but that is the end product in terms of transparency. If we get a way of getting the information in, in the right way, that end product of pulling it apart and putting it in the right place can be something that happens behind the scenes and then gets published.
Q83 Dr Francis Habgood: I am one of the lay members. I will move on to something different—but this is probably still for John and Louise—which is a question about the Recall of MPs Act. Your submission proposes that the Government should reduce the length of the signing period for recall petitions and consider introducing an equivalent signing sheet for those who oppose the petition. Do you want to expand on the general points around the Recall of MPs Act, or on the specific recommendations you make? I am also interested to hear if you have had any feedback from administrators, MPs or the public on your proposals.
Louise Edwards: Let me very briefly outline our responsibilities in terms of a recall petition. We have a responsibility to deliver the guidance on how to run a recall petition, and we also report on how well run a recall petition was and make recommendations such as you have referenced for how the regime can be improved. We do not run them. They are run by the petition officer, who could be the local returning officer, for example. It is important to mention the guidance point, because this gives the petition officer responsibilities that they would not normally have in the case of a local election, a by-election or a parliamentary election. We are there to give them that support to try to make it run effectively.
There is an inherent issue around voter secrecy and transparency with petitions, because as things are currently set up, if you go into the place where the petition is to be signed, more likely than not you are signing the petition, so there is not a huge amount of secrecy going on there. The recommendations—
Q84 Chair: Could I just cut in at that point? Whose responsibility is that? Mostly when you go into an election or you go into a referendum it is “yes” or “no” or it is different names—therefore, it is not perceptible, when you go into the polling station, what side you are voting on. With a petition, because it is only one thing, which is signing “yes” for a recall, it is evident if you go in that that is what you are doing and therefore you do not have privacy for what your vote is. Who decides on what is on that voting form? Is it your decision to just have “yes for recall”? Could you change that with some guidance to have “yes/no” or is that our responsibility? Is it in statute or secondary legislation?
Louise Edwards: I am afraid to say it is your responsibility.
Q85 Chair: Right, okay.
Louise Edwards: This is why we recommend that there are other ways you could do it. You could adopt that approach of yes or no, for example—
Q86 Chair: We would have to do that in statute.
Louise Edwards: It would have to be done in statute. We think that it is important that these ideas are explored for a number of reasons. Voter secrecy is one of them, but there are also some of the recommendations we have made around the duration of the petition. They are designed to support the local authority and the local petition officer to make sure that they can run a petition fairly, securely and safely, with the minimum of administrative burden placed on them, given that they are stretched when it comes to electoral services across the UK. These are ways which could potentially improve voters’ confidence in the process and the way they feel about going in, when, as you say, it is pretty obvious by going in which way they will vote. Also, they help electoral administrators to administer an effective petition that gives everybody, including the person affected, the outcome as quickly as possible. We have put those recommendations out there several times in our reporting after recall petitions. They are with the Government. We understand the Government are considering them, but we have not yet had a response from them.
Q87 Yvonne Fovargue: Richard, can I return to some of the issues you spoke about earlier about MPs being staff employers? You say that they have to have a contract for their staff and other duties to get IPSA funding. If they had to undertake continuous management training as a condition of receiving the IPSA funding, would that be a good idea, in your view?
Richard Lloyd: This was recommended, as you will remember, a few years back in the White report. We have thought about this carefully and discussed it with the House HR team and Members’ Services because we do not want to impose conditionality that might have the unintended consequence, say, of cutting off funding for staff. There could be a bad consequence for the staff who need to be the beneficiaries of the training. As you heard this morning, it is important that one-off pieces of training are not seen as the answer here. In particular, as we have seen with the Valuing Everyone training, there has been a high uptake, but there are some MPs who have not. It is a small minority. That is supposed to be mandatory.
What other levers are there? In our view, the Speaker’s Conference was clear about this. Expanding and being much more proactive in offering ongoing training to Members and office managers who need it is the right thing to do. I think that our role is to support that. We already fund some Members to have management training when they ask for it—we are happy to do that—and some office managers’ training too. But if we were to move into that form of conditionality on top of requiring our model contracts, job descriptions and pay bands, and the softer nudges we do with annual cost of living increases for staff, I think that would be a good example of mission creep for us. I think that would probably be over the line for us.
I am anxious, in particular with the forthcoming election, that we make sure that we have, with the House, all the kinds of training and support that new MPs might need—recognising how much MPs have to deal with in the early days of becoming a parliamentarian, and ensuring that we have ongoing interaction on payroll and related issues in particular. If we identify a need for training across groups of MPs, there is the possibility that we would fund that, procure that, and offer that, if the House HR or Members’ Services teams, for some reason, were not able to do it.
In other words, I think that we already do quite a lot. I think there is more that could be done, and we are keen to support the Members’ Services team in providing that to make sure that newly elected MPs, in particular, are not just left to get on with working out how to manage a small team. The Speaker’s Conference was clear that a mandate from an IPSA point of view was not the solution.
John Pullinger: Might I add something, Chair? There is a similar experience for us. The group we have not mentioned at all yet today, which is increasingly significant in our world, is the political parties themselves. My observation is that the leadership within the political parties recognise this need for training, particularly in the mechanics of these difficult elements, whether it be staff training or financial reporting. I think that there is definitely scope for supporting political parties to uphold standards within the communities that are effectively their brand, their images, as their elected representatives. I think that there is an opportunity within this discussion to engage the political parties actively because they are often geared up to give training. Their members are much more likely to want to go to them in a safe spot to receive it. Certainly, my experience with the larger parties particularly—all of them—is that they are very keen to do this.
Richard Lloyd: I think that is an important point. In the last several elections, IPSA has provided a “What can you expect if you get elected?” pack to the political parties to give to their candidates. I would not describe the response to that as particularly enthusiastic or proactive, but I think that if people are being prepared to come into this place, it is probably never too soon to start thinking about the practicalities of running a small office, dealing with constituency issues, and working out how Parliament works. Once the election has happened, as you all know, for some people, it is a shock and for some people, it is not top of the list to work out how to be a good employer.
Sir Michael Ellis: It is difficult to tell sometimes who is going to win and who is not going to win, so it would be a bit presumptuous for the parties to make that assumption. Perhaps they would fear that if that became public knowledge, they would be being complacent about their electorate, which would be very damaging politically.
Q88 Chair: On the issue of making things mandatory, if I remember rightly, for quite a long time, the unions were urging that those who work for MPs should be entitled to a contract of employment, because a contract for employment is a legal obligation on an employer. An awful lot of MPs were not giving their staff a contract of employment, but public money was financing that employment. Years—probably decades—went on while MPs were urged to give their staff contracts of employment and good practice was held out, and still many did not. Is it not the case that it became conditional on getting your staff paid? The argument was made at that time, “Do not punish the staff if the MP does not give them a contract of employment. Do not withhold the pay from the staff, because that would punish the staff.” But actually, it went to conditionality—the staff cannot get paid without a contract of employment—and blow me down, MPs all gave their staff contracts of employment. That is how it evolved, in terms of, at least, getting the standards up—to MPs complying with the law on their employment responsibilities, to give contracts of employment.
Richard Lloyd: You are right, Harriet. I am not saying it is impossible. I am just saying that as a solution to deal with the worst behaviour in managing teams of staff, that might not be the best answer. Certainly, that was the conclusion the Speaker’s Conference arrived at. You are right. With the conditions that we apply to receive funding for staff, it is three—contracts, job descriptions and pay bands.
Q89 Chair: Yes, but not uptake of training, following on from Yvonne’s point.
Richard Lloyd: But not requirements on the MP as the employer to do certain things, other than the narrow contractual ones. We have been hotly debating this internally and watching very closely what the Valuing Everyone training has brought about. I think that if we were to go down that route—what we heard from the Speaker’s Committee was not that, but if we heard from this Committee that that was something we should look at again, we would be all ears.
Q90 Chair: Would that have to be in statute, or could you just effect it as a condition?
Richard Lloyd: I would need to take that away. It could be challenged in terms of requiring an office holder and employer to do certain things themselves—
Q91 Chair: To get the money.
Richard Lloyd: Rather than towards their employees—but let me take that away and we will have a look at it again. I also take the point about political parties not wanting to look presumptuous by training people to be parliamentarians when that might not happen.
Q92 Mehmuda Mian: Good afternoon. I am Mehmuda Mian, a lay member. In your evidence, you spoke about hosting the first conference for international parliamentary regulators. Were there any specific key lessons that IPSA learnt from hosting that? Could anything be usefully applied across the House of Commons standards landscape?
Richard Lloyd: First of all, I want to reassure you that we are not flying around the world visiting other Parliaments, but the equivalents of IPSA are starting to spring up, modelled on IPSA. We were the first of our kind. It is more that our equivalents want to come and learn from us about how we do this and our evolving thinking about how to regulate within our particular remit.
I think that the interesting inputs for us have been how, in some jurisdictions, there are approaches that are much more principles-based. I know you discussed that this morning, where there is more of an onus placed on the Member of Parliament, whatever they might be, to comply or explain that they are spending public money in line with some principles, rather than the detailed rules—that is the approach we have taken. We have looked at how effective that has been, and what risks or opportunities there might be with that approach. We are starting to work that into our way of working as well.
The other thing I should say is that we talk regularly to the Welsh Senedd, the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Scottish Parliament equivalents of ourselves. Again, there are some learnings within the UK context and some slight differences in approach. In short, it is still work in progress. This is all very new in every jurisdiction with which we have had a discussion. I think, rightly or wrongly you might say, IPSA is seen as a world-first, and others are keen to learn from us what we have learned over the last dozen years or so.
Q93 Mehmuda Mian: There was not anything coming from those discussions with other Assemblies that made you think that because they are coming to it new, they may have some ideas that perhaps IPSA might not have considered—because IPSA has been involved for a while and they are new—and you thought, “Actually, we could use some of that”. Are you doing the teaching, and they are learning?
Richard Lloyd: I have not seen anything that I thought, “I wish IPSA had been set up in that way”. Quite often, talking about the landscape in some Parliaments, there is quite a narrow remit—expenses in Australia, for example. Again, rightly or wrongly, IPSA was given a broader remit than some of our other equivalent bodies, certainly with pay and pensions. We are watching keenly to see if anyone else is coming up with a better plan. With the approach being less about box-ticking and detailed rules, and more principles and risk-based in this area, we are keen to move towards that and to learn from other jurisdictions that have started in that space.
Q94 Mehmuda Mian: Do you think that the principles-based approach should be expanded across the standards landscape more than it is at the moment? Do you think we are too devoted to the specific rules as opposed to the broader principles?
Richard Lloyd: I discuss that in particular with the Parliamentary Commissioner and I think that there is an appetite for that. Obviously, in response to particular problems or crises, there has been the instinct to move to more detailed rule making. In line with the Nolan principles and the aim that people in public life embody those and that is the culture within which we operate, if we get into detailed rule making, there is a risk that people say, “Well, you didn’t tell me I couldn’t”. I think that there is general agreement and emerging consensus that a principles-based approach is better.
The question is: what do you need to do? What do you need to put in place? It may be harder at times to enforce those. I think that if we can sensibly remove the burden of overly prescriptive, detailed rules to give MPs more time to do their day job, for example, it is the right thing to do, provided we still have those checks and balances and the ability to audit the use of public money.
Chair: Thank you—Michael?
Sir Michael Ellis: Thank you—in fact, I don’t know whether Carys was going to speak, because I don’t want to come in on this particular answer.
Chair: Yes. We have dealt with the issue about rules-based versus principles-based, so we are moving into yours.
Sir Michael Ellis: I was going to ask about a completely different topic.
Chair: Go ahead.
Q95 Sir Michael Ellis: Thank you. This just struck me while the evidence session has been in progress, and this point is particularly for the Electoral Commission. Part of your function is about transparency, of course—well, a large part of it is that—and the avoidance of any form of deception. What do you say about those examples of entities outside of the political parties who have used advertising techniques to pretend they are a political party, even to the extent of using logos, fonts and colour schemes to do so, and put billboards up and things of that sort? Is that an area on which you think the Electoral Commission has authority or should have authority?
I do not know whether you know what I mean. I think that Louise is indicating she knows what I mean, and probably you do as well, John. Do you think that is an area that you already have authority on? If it is not, should you have authority on that? If it were a commercial entity, such as Apple computers or Coca-Cola, or somebody like that, there would be action taken if they purported to use their logos or tried to deceive people in that way. I wonder if you have a view on that.
Chair: Do you mean one political party pretending to be another political party in order to say something bad about it?
Sir Michael Ellis: No, a campaign group pretending to be a political party.
Chair: But it could be another political party, putting out stuff that looks like the other side in order to say something dreadful.
Sir Michael Ellis: It could be. I don’t know of that example. For example, using the Labour rose or the Conservative tree—
Chair: Saying, “We are going to put up your taxes”.
Sir Michael Ellis: That sort of thing. Is it a sort of deception, isn’t it? Especially if they use the colour schemes, fonts and all the rest of it.
Louise Edwards: The common phrase at the moment is misinformation or disinformation, which is essentially what you are talking about—misrepresenting to the voter.
Q96 Sir Michael Ellis: It is becoming more common.
Louise Edwards: It is something that is increasing over the last—how long have I worked at the Electoral Commission? Eight or nine years. If you followed the trend of complaints that we have about it, it would be pretty exponential.
On a high level, we exist to give the public confidence in the democratic process, whether it is about the administration of elections or the campaigning process. That is why we maintain a register of political parties with full transparency. It is why we publish all the financial information. It is about trying to give the public confidence that the democratic process, particularly when it comes to elections, is fair and there is integrity to it. The sorts of instances you are talking about impact on that public confidence.
We have done the research and it is published on our website; we can send you links. It is quite clear that public confidence falls if they see examples of misinformation or disinformation out there. We, as the Commission, have a role in making very clear to the people who might put these things out that there is a consequent impact on public interest.
Chair, you mentioned legitimate or registered political parties doing this about other political parties. You would hope that having it pointed out that this undermines public confidence in democracy is a factor they would take into account. I think that many established political parties do. That is important to them, not just for their own electoral prospects, but because public confidence in democracy is part of the reason that we are all sitting around this table. In the heat of the campaign, there are choices to be made. It is something that we can and do comment on at the public confidence level.
There are two other things I would say. First, when it comes to the specifics of how information is presented, what colour choices people make and so forth, the law is very clear that there is not much of a framework around that. You have to put what is called imprint—a little piece of text that says, “This was published on behalf of this person or party, paid for by—” and so on. Whether it is in print or online, you have to have that imprint in there. Beyond that, go for it.
The bit where there is a lot of regulation—I was thinking about this in the context of the principles-based versus rules-based—is around the money that is spent on it and the transparency of that money. When it comes to non-party campaigners, the sorts of people you are referring to, transparency is very closely tied to elections. As of next week, 30 January, we will definitely be in a regulated campaign period for a UK general election. We might be already, because it is applied retrospectively, but by next week we absolutely will be, so there will be financial recording. People will have to be clear about what they are spending so that we can then publish it. That is part of the picture. It is important to have that in place, but it does not go to the heart of misinformation and disinformation.
My passing comment on that would be that the people who are responsible for putting the material out there in a way that is not clear and simple for voters to understand have chosen to do that. I think that it is important that those who are campaigning in the scheduled elections this year—the general election when it happens, elections at any point—need to be clear about the choices they are making and the impact that can have.
John Pullinger: Another thing we are doing on this is recognising that it is not necessarily an Electoral Commission issue. We have been convening other regulators who have a responsibility in this space. That includes the Advertising Standards Authority. It includes Ofcom because a lot of this is on social media. It includes the UK Statistics Authority because often it is about misrepresentation of fact. It also includes the Charity Commission, because they are also concerned about the reputation of charities if they are getting a bit overexcited about how to make their case within an election period.
I convene my counterparts and Louise’s team convene at working level. As we get closer to the election, we will be standing that group up very frequently so we spot how fast it is moving. With artificial intelligence changing as rapidly as it is, there will be different forms of misrepresentation popping up during the course of this year that we collectively need to be ready to tackle.
Chair: Thank you for your written evidence and for your oral evidence today. I cannot guarantee we will not come back to you with a request for more information as we head towards our next stage, which will be to draw up a report and agree it in order to present it to Parliament. In the meantime, thank you for the work that you do.
As far as we MPs are concerned, we set the statutes, the statutory instruments and the oversight that create you and under whose terms you run. We create the oversight organisations as well, the jauntily named SCIPSA—the Speaker’s Committee on IPSA—and the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission. You are doing the work within the framework that we have set, but we are interested to know how it all interacts with each other and whether it is working as best it can to enable us to get on with our job as MPs and to ensure the public can have confidence in the highest possible standards. I appreciate that in the run-up to an election, there is rightly even more focus on this.
I am very grateful to you for your work, for your co-ordination with each other and your helpful co-operation with us. Thank you very much.