Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: The role and effectiveness of ACoBA and the Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests, HC 252
Tuesday 11 October 2016
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 11 October 2016.
Members present: Mr Bernard Jenkin (Chair); Ronnie Cowan; Paul Flynn; Mrs Cheryl Gillan; Kelvin Hopkins; Mr Andrew Turner.
Questions 1-106
Witnesses
I: Alexandra Runswick, Director, Unlock Democracy, and Professor David Hine, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford.
II: Ian Hislop, Editor, and Richard Brooks, Journalist, Private Eye.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Alexandra Runswick and Professor David Hine.
Q1 Chair: May I welcome our two witnesses to this session on the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, a follow-up inquiry to our predecessor Committee’s 2012 report on the business appointment rules? Could I ask each of you to identify yourself for the record?
Alexandra Runswick: I am Alexandra Runswick. I am Director of Unlock Democracy.
Professor Hine: I am David Hine. I am Official Student at Christ Church in Politics and Associate Professor of Government, but I retired on 1 October having reached the age of 67 and a half. I wrote the report in those circumstances. I am now apparently retired, but it does not seem to make any difference.
Chair: You are even freer to speak.
Professor Hine: I am even freer to speak.
Q2 Chair: Thank you for joining us, both of you. We have another panel of witnesses after this, and we already have your written evidence. If you wish to refer to what is in your written evidence, short answers are preferable to long ones, and short questions will be our reciprocal offer to you. I might pull you up if things are going on a bit too long. Could I ask each of you to say in turn what ACoBA’s primary function should be?
Professor Hine: My own view is that it probably should not exist any longer. In a way, that is the short answer. It seems to me that some body similar to it should play the roles that have been much discussed in your reports and other reports at various levels. But I think the problem is that the role, as hitherto performed, has not gone deep enough or bitten hard enough. There are levels beyond the level of ensuring the procedural rules are followed where at the moment the Advisory Committee is not able to go, because it does not have the resources, the statutory backing and the legitimacy.
My view, which I expect we will discuss later, is that those are the areas where there needs to be a substantial extension of the role, right to the point at which one asks whether, in the case of a contumacious flouting of the procedural rules, one begins to look at the question of whether an improper gain has been obtained and, if an improper gain has been obtained, whether the criminal law should be invoked as well as the procedural rules that the committee has.
Alexandra Runswick: I would agree very much with what David said. I think there needs to be a body that has responsibility for the functions that ACoBA currently has. It needs to have more powers and to be able to investigate. It needs to have more resources and to be on a statutory footing, but this Committee has set out that case before. I think what is different is that, having gone through all the evidence of the appointments that ACoBA has looked at, you can find examples on LinkedIn where there should be appointments that have gone through ACoBA that have not gone to ACoBA. If you have a body where LinkedIn is a more accurate record of what people are doing now in terms of the revolving door, then I think there is a very strong argument that that body needs to be changed.
Q3 Chair: To be fair, ACoBA does not pretend to be a comprehensive public record of what is going on.
Alexandra Runswick: No, but if it is being avoided to the extent that there is more information on LinkedIn than ACoBA, then I think there is a fundamental problem.
Q4 Chair: The ACoBA website does not list the cases where they have been avoided?
Alexandra Runswick: Yes.
Q5 Chair: That is something we should bear in mind in our recommendations. Personally, I am minded that we should produce a report that reinforces our previous recommendations, informed by the evidence we are taking now. What do you think has changed since the Government rejected our recommendations in 2012? If you remember, they did take a very long time—they did not reject them in 2012; they rejected them in 2014. It took them two years to reject our recommendations. What do you think has changed since then?
Professor Hine: As I said in my evidence, I think procedurally not very much has changed. But I think the credibility of the committee is very weak now as a result of the public attention that it has received over those four years, and as a result of a very long-term change in the relationship between public and private sector careers, both for former permanent civil servants and former politicians—former Ministers. I think that we are now so much more aware of that afterlife of public servants and Ministers that a body as weak and as advisory as the committee has become untenable. I think that realisation—probably not a matter that was spoken of in the pubs and clubs at Sunderland, but at the level of journalists and politicians—of the fact that this exercise is now insufficient, has just come home to us. I think that feeling will go on intensifying if nothing is done about it.
Alexandra Runswick: In addition, one of the things that has changed since 2012 is the volume of interactions between the public and private sector. Calling it a revolving door is almost too gentle a metaphor. It is more of a stampede. We work with a student at Bath University, Josh Leeson, who we cite in our evidence, and he found, looking at all the ACoBA-approved appointments between 2009 and 2015, that 60% of people who went through ACoBA were directly moving into the sector that they regulated or were responsible for at a policy level in public life. I think that level of interaction is significantly different. Also, if you look at the level of appointments that ACoBA looked at, 2012 was a very low figure. That was a dip. I think it is about numbers, and it is about the types of interactions, with the potential for the public to see it as conflict of interest and for the perception of corruption to grow. We have seen this with the public attitude survey, which we may well be discussing later.
Q6 Kelvin Hopkins: You say this has grown. If one makes a comparison with a previous decade, say the 1960s or 1970s, what was the situation like then? It has changed dramatically in that time, I guess.
Alexandra Runswick: I do not have the data for the 1960s, I am afraid. But, as I said, we have had this student look at every single appointment that has gone through ACoBA from 2009 to 2015, and there has been a steady increase. I think there are a number of structural reasons for that. For example, with people coming into politics at an earlier stage in their career, it is much more likely that they want a second career after they have left public life. There is nothing in principle wrong with that, but that does mean that there is a lot more interaction between the public and private sector. Also, the way that the public sector has changed through the introduction of PFI, and through the tender of Government contracts, means that the numbers of interactions are much higher. It is now an expectation that people will go on and have a career in the private sector after their public life, rather than it being an exception to the rule of being a career public servant.
Chair: Professor Hine, on the 1960s and 1970s?
Professor Hine: I do remember them. I think it is clear that pretty much reflects a change in the opportunity structures that we have in our society. For my part, I do not want to say that is in any way undesirable. It is part of public policy that we encourage interchange between public and private. It seems to me that both can benefit from them. It is an enormous calculus to say where the downside outweighs the upside of those changes. One of the striking things is that it is rather hard to find the answers to the question that Mr Hopkins poses. How much has changed? Most of what we see commented on is pretty much casual empiricism, although there seem to be a lot more Ministers going—
Chair: There is far more transparency now than there was in the 1960s.
Professor Hine: That is true as well, but even so it is quite hard to work out how big the flow is today.
Q7 Paul Flynn: I can remember not only the 1960s but the 1940s and the 1950s. Do you think there has been a profound change, in that the top jobs in politics, as a Minister, in the civil service, as a senior civil servant, as a general in the Army, were then the pinnacle of people’s ambitions, and now those top jobs are seen to be a staging post into retirement riches because people are living longer and retiring at 60? Part of the great danger of the change that has taken place is that people might be abusing their positions in those top jobs while they are doing them in order to win for themselves a hacienda in Spain after they step down from the top jobs, and that will corrupt their decisions in office. Isn’t that the great change that has taken place in the last 50 years?
Professor Hine: I do not know how many people regard a very senior post in public life as a stepping stone to something else that is more important. I do not know. For my own part, I think if I became a Permanent Secretary, after that I might like to supplement my pension, but I would not regard it as the major part of my career to go as an adviser to PwC or something like that. I do not think we know the size of those psychological changes, but I do agree with you that when people live longer, when they have more opportunities, when there are more opportunities around the commercial sector, it is going to change perceptions. I absolutely agree with you that in the 1940s and 1950s most politicians—I think there is some data on the difference between the left and the right on this—on the left did not have subsequent careers; many on the right did, but by no means as many as today. I agree with you.
Q8 Chair: How much do you think the differentials on salary that now exist have changed the equation? Until the 1980s private sector salaries were on a par with public sector salaries, and now that has completely altered.
Professor Hine: Absolutely. Material wealth is a status signified now in a way that it was not before, and I think it is very hard for people in public life to live in this extraordinary city alongside people making very large sums of money and not feel that they want part of that action.
Q9 Mr Andrew Turner: How effective do you think ACoBA is in policing the boundary between public and private sector?
Alexandra Runswick: I do not think it is very effective at all. That is not a criticism of the individuals involved in ACoBA, I should say, it is more the resources they are given and the remit they have. We have set out in our evidence that there have been cases where people have gone to them for advice and been told they cannot be given specific advice tailored to the particular role that they might take up, that there are very general rules that they can give out but they cannot advise on the specifics, that it can be quite a slow process.
Their definition of lobbying is very weak. For example, in one case there was somebody who applied to ACoBA and was advised that despite the fact that they had set up the system in the public sector of the grant tendering, them advising on how to get a grant was not lobbying. I would strongly argue that actually that is. I think they have been dealt a very bad set of cards, and they are trying to do the best that they can at the moment. The fact that we have seen more evidence of them objecting when people should have gone to ACoBA and have failed to do so is a very positive sign, but I think there is very little they can do with the position that they have been put in.
Professor Hine: I largely agree with that but, if I might add this, I think that what we are trying to do in the UK is quite hard. A lot of jurisdictions around the world—I mean advanced democracies, which I think are the only places where they really worry about these sorts of things—tend to rely on hard law or have rather different cultures. I think that the problem in the UK is that we believe there should be hard law to prevent hard corruption in the public sense, although there are relatively few cases of that in the UK compared with most advanced democracies, but we also want to go further. We want to get it absolutely right by having this curious advisory role.
The problem is that we are now putting much too much weight on the procedures at the top and the possibility that advice, combined with the basic decency of public office holders, will be enough. “All you need is some procedures”, which by and large I think, at the top level, work well. Of course, your hearings have heard of cases where people have not followed the rules, or the advice has come late, or whatever else. But given the tiny, tiny operation that the Advisory Committee is, I think they do not do badly in formalistically going through the motions of all these things. I think the problem is, what follows up from that? How do you know whether your interpretation of lobbying and of the rules and the advice that you give is going to be followed, and what sort of machinery would you need to ensure that it was followed up? Then, of course, what do you do if you have evidence that it is not being followed?
Maybe we will come on to this later, but I do think there is a bit of a problem about a mechanism—which is there with a wonderful British term “advice and advisory”—also then having to follow up and police something or other. That is often a problem with such organisations. If they are implicated in the advice, to some extent they are already compromised in the investigation into whether the advice has been followed up. It is why I personally—we may want to come to this—would favour some differentiation of function, some investigation process, possibly an investigations officer whose role was somewhat different from that of the chair of the committee and the advisory body in the first place.
Chair: That will come later on.
Q10 Ronnie Cowan: Much of this inquiry is going to focus around this revolving door, the scenario of people moving out of public into private jobs. I think the number I got for former mandarins who have sought clearance from ACoBA since 2010 is 367. The number of times ACoBA has refused them is zero. What is the problem with the revolving door? Is this a toothless organisation?
Professor Hine: I think that is a problem. I absolutely agree with you. I find it implausible that there is a process that is apparently a waving through. Even if it were the case that all those proposals for subsequent employment were completely unrelated to previous employment, there would be an appearance standard problem. People would not believe that that was a completely clean and effective process. I cannot do much but agree with you about it. We can then come on to what we might do about it, but it does not look very good, especially at the level of senior public servants.
Q11 Ronnie Cowan: Presumably these jobs need to be filled, so are we just looking in the wrong place to fill them?
Professor Hine: Out of those 320 there are a whole range of different jobs, of which only some can be regarded as sensitive with regard to previous roles. To be frank, I have no idea how big that need is. Some of those needs are probably letterhead needs; it is very good to put a former Minister on the top of your letterhead. Some of those needs are informational needs, and if you do not get a telephone directory of all the officials dealing with contracting in a particular Ministry out of those people, you may have to go somewhere else. I am sure they are, in your terms, needs that need to be fulfilled; whether we want them to be fulfilled is another matter.
There are all sorts of questions about how appropriate it is for any commercial organisation to have a detailed knowledge of the people working in a Ministry that does a large amount of contracting, but to some extent it is a functional need. Clearly you have to do a lot of talking; the question is how proper that talking is. That is a very complicated thing. I cannot give you an answer to the question of how big is the need and how should it be fulfilled, because I do not know what is proper need and what is improper need.
Q12 Ronnie Cowan: I am wondering how many are just letterhead jobs and it is just a job for the boys—“Here is a position, here is a salary, you do not actually have to do anything for it”—and how many are genuine positions for the experience that people have gained, and the fact that they have been in Government or civil service is a benefit for the employers that they are going to take a salary from.
Professor Hine: I do not think they can all be letterhead jobs, clearly. I do not know whether you are saying letterhead in itself is undesirable.
Q13 Ronnie Cowan: I think anybody working should be justifying their salary. If they are just there to be a name to boost the profile of the company—“It looks good that we have these people on our board”—or even in some sort of advisory capacity, then the employers are cheating their shareholders.
Professor Hine: Yes. I might have to throw that question back at you and say: what would you do about that? I am not sure how you would legislate that.
Q14 Ronnie Cowan: Employ people who are beneficial to the company and pay them a working salary to do it.
Professor Hine: It is probably up to the shareholders to decide whether they are getting value for money from the letterhead name. It might be over-regulating to try to devise a law or rule or procedure against that. It seems to me the real question is whether improper relationships exist and whether the existence of those improper relationships provides all sorts of incentives to people still in public service to behave in ways other than they ought to those in the public interest through the knowledge that you can make those transfers—and that is a very hard one to crack, but it is the one that we ought to be worrying about.
Alexandra Runswick: I would be less worried if I thought they were genuinely just letterhead appointments that were potentially a company wasting their money, because that is certainly not how the public sees it. The perception is that with the revolving door you are at the very least getting that person’s address book, that context, that ability to have informal conversations, and potentially you are getting a lot more than that. Transparency International’s global corruption barometer shows that 59% of respondents think that the UK Government are entirely or to a large extent run by a few big entities acting in their own best interest, and an additional 31% think that is somewhat the case.
I think the current system with ACoBA is letting people and Government down, because those people who are going through the system as it currently exists, and who are following all the rules, are expecting to be in a position where they can be told that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the job that they are now taking up, there is no potential perception of corruption and there are no conflicts of interest. They have gone through this process and they are not in the position where they are being given that clean bill of health. I think it is bad for the public and the public perception of politics, but it is also bad for the people who are trying to follow the rules, such as they are.
Q15 Ronnie Cowan: How does ACoBA address this, apart from saying no to anybody? They seem to be incapable of saying no to anybody. I gave you the mandarins number; 137 Ministers have applied for a job since 2010, for 394 jobs, and ACoBA’s response to that? They have refused zero. One “no” may be enough to introduce some sort of belief in the system.
Alexandra Runswick: I think in part this is what David was saying earlier about the fact that this is an advisory system. There is still a slight culture that it is a bit of a gentlemen’s club and it is all about the honour code. It is not an independent statutory body. There are not sanctions for if you break the rules. I think ACoBA is in a very difficult position. To be honest, it could say no and it does not have the resources to stop anybody doing it. It also, as we have mentioned before, cannot investigate. It could, for example, set requirements that you are not allowed to lobby in a certain way within that role, but it has no way of knowing whether or not you are doing that. There are huge problems with the way that ministerial meetings data is published, and that is also very difficult to find out from other sources. I think in its current state there is not very much ACoBA can do there. That is why, as the Committee recommended previously, there has to be a statutory body, and it has to have the power to investigate.
Professor Hine: We are looking at an extreme interpretation of the numbers here. We are not taking into account the conditions that are imposed on jobs that are deemed suitable. One can smile and be a little bit sceptical of that, but nevertheless the process of toughening up the conditions of jobs that ultimately, as you say, are approved, is very clear from the work of the committee over quite a long period of time. I do not believe it is anything like enough, but it is not quite the same as saying, “Yes, go ahead and do what you want.” We had better be accurate in what we are talking about here. I think we also have evidence from the hearings that you have held, and from the reports of the Advisory Committee itself, that sometimes jobs are deemed unsuitable—and it is rare that there are such cases—and the application is withdrawn. So we have to be a little bit more careful about what we are talking about than just saying everything goes through on a blanket basis. It does not.
Alexandra Runswick: Although part of the problem is that because we are not told what does not go through, we have no way of understanding that as a process.
Q16 Chair: To be fair, also, potential applicants to ACoBA read the rules and then decide not to approach ACoBA because they know that they will be falling far off the guidance. It is hardly a comprehensive filtration mechanism. It relies on self-selection to begin with, we would accept that. But I think that, from the public’s point of view, a regulatory body that never seems to regulate does not give much confidence.
Professor Hine: It looks like we are all agreed on that.
Q17 Chair: Anything else? When do you think it is okay for someone to move from the public sector to the private sector? Can you give an example of what is all right, or are we just against people moving from the public sector to the private sector?
Professor Hine: I am not at all. No, I think it is highly desirable that there is interaction. It is a fact of life. It would be enormously complicated and expensive—
Q18 Chair: When is it okay? Give an example of a case that has been approved that you think was absolutely fine.
Professor Hine: It seems to me that any public servant who has been involved in a range of contracting tendering processes and has, therefore, developed skills in the operation of the public sector can be perfectly appropriately employed in the private sector, as long as it is not in the area for which that public servant had any type of regulatory responsibility. It does seem to me that it would be completely inappropriate to say that at a certain point in one’s career, having developed a range of skills, one could not use them in any circumstances.
Alexandra Runswick: I would broadly agree with that. I do not have an in-principle problem with people moving either from the public sector to the private sector, or the reverse of that relationship. One thing we do have to think about with the increasing number of interactions between the public and private sector is whether there comes a point where you start to lose the benefit of it. I am not suggesting that we are there yet, necessarily, but I think when it becomes an established career path and there is an extreme level of interaction between the two, you are in danger of starting to get groupthink. Rather than the different sectors challenging each other and bringing out the best in each other, they can start to think and behave in very similar ways. You could start to lose some of the benefits of the revolving door at that point.
Q19 Chair: How much do you think it is okay that we have a former Energy Secretary now working for EDF? I am sure he has not broken any guidelines or rules, but what does that say about the system, in your opinion?
Alexandra Runswick: I think that is the kind of appointment that raises a large number of concerns, because it is somebody who is moving from one specific Department policy area that they were responsible for regulating in Government into the private sector. That raises a large number of questions from an anti-corruption point of view. I am not suggesting that they are corrupt or that there are corrupt practices going on, but when you are looking at the measures you analyse around corruption, at the potential conflict of interest and at the possible use and potential for pressuring contacts from your previous career, those kinds of appointments, where people move straight from a policy area in Government to that policy area in the private sector, raise a number of concerns for me.
Professor Hine: I guess you have two dimensions to this. One is: are there reputational safeguards you can impose? I agree with the implication of your question; it does not look good to see a former Energy Secretary taking consultancy positions with companies that have been under his regulation. I would hope that we would develop a culture in public life where that sort of thing was so damaging to the public perceptions of that individual and to the companies involved that it would not be acceptable. Sometimes this does work in exactly that way, but it takes enormous pressure by campaigning journalists and by Committees like yours to bring it to public attention, and sustaining that over a long period of time is very hard. I do believe that cultural values have to be an important part of the process of policing public life. So I think the reputational damage is important, but there will be some who are insensitive to that. You then have to ask the question: how are you going to get at whether or not an improper gain has been made by commercial organisations or the individual, probably both? Clearly at the moment we do not have that in place at all. We might have to go on to what we do about it.
Chair: In the interest of balance, I should say that a former Minister of
State in that department is also working in the energy sector.
Q20 Paul Flynn: One of the great question marks, the great puzzles of Parliament over the last six years, to me, is how we could have been so idiotic as to strike a deal with EDF that guaranteed them a price that was three times the going rate for electricity and guaranteed and index-linked that price for 35 years, when we do not know what the price of energy is going to be in 35 weeks. It did seem extraordinary that this absolutely certain financial disaster of Hinkley Point was agreed by a certain Ed Davey.
I had many clashes with him in the House in the past years, when he was here, to try to find some explanation of how we could have struck a deal that was so damaging and bound to be damaging and hugely expensive to electricity payers for the next 50 years. There was never any answer to that puzzle, and I put a great deal of energy into finding out why Ed Davey struck that deal, which seemed palpably insane. We now see that Ed Davey has taken a knighthood and is working for EDF. He is not only working for EDF but he is presented on television and is the independent voice for EDF, for electricity policy, and so on. Can’t we possibly float the idea that there might have been some anticipation by Ed Davey of the future job when he struck this terrible financial deal?
Chair: Anything to add to that?
Professor Hine: No. Mr Flynn has the advantage over me.
Chair: He usually has the last word.
Q21 Ronnie Cowan: I will see your Ed Davey and raise you a Lord John Hutton, who was Health Minister and then Defence Secretary, and has now gone on to work for a private company, Hinchingbrooke Hospital, and is also adviser to Bechtel and Lockheed Martin. These people went in front of a committee who said, “Yes, okay. On you go.”
Alexandra Runswick: I think one of the things we also have to bear in mind is that The Times has already raised the issue of Brexit being a lobbyist’s bonanza. We are already seeing a very large number of lobbying firms setting up their Brexit units, many of which have extensive networks within Government, within special advisers currently serving in Government, but also with former Government Ministers moving in to work on their Brexit units. I am very aware of the issues that you raise. As I have said to this and other Committees before, one of the things that we need is a comprehensive lobbying register that helps to show both that the lobbying on those policy issues is taking place and also where people who have held roles in public life are doing that lobbying. But you are right that at the moment all we have is the perception that there could be a problem and no actual information.
Q22 Kelvin Hopkins: We have a right to be angry. I just feel anger when I hear all these stories and we are talking very softly about this is not working very well or whatever. The reality is that it is corruption on a mass scale that is going on, and people rightly feel angry about it. I certainly do, anyway.
Alexandra Runswick: I am more worried that they do not feel angry enough. I am more concerned that we have had such a string, particularly post the coalition Government, of former Cabinet Ministers taking jobs in the industries that they regulated that it gets a newspaper headline, and everybody says it is a bad thing but nothing happens. I just feel that all it does is add to the general perception of corruption in our politics, that things are broken, that things are wrong, but nothing is ever done about it. I would feel more confident in our political system if people were angrier.
Q23 Paul Flynn: Do you think we should be angry at the prospect of the degradation in the public’s mind of the political system, which then produces obscenities like Donald Trump, because if people become so disillusioned about the political system they will turn to extremes? Is that not the grave danger of the failures of ACoBA?
Alexandra Runswick: Yes, absolutely.
Q24 Chair: I asked if you could give an example of somebody who has obeyed the rules and it is okay and you would accept it. For example, the former Lord Chancellor Michael Gove has gone back to writing at The Times. He had to go through the ACoBA system. Is that an acceptable example of someone moving from ministerial office back into the private sector?
Professor Hine: I think it probably is.
Alexandra Runswick: Yes.
Professor Hine: Yes. We see quite a lot of people in the university system. There are conflicts of interest in the university system, but I do not believe public servants who come and join us pose that big a problem. We have a lot of heads of houses in Oxford who are diplomats and that sort of thing; I do not think that is a problem. Not always better than others, but—
Q25 Chair: Would someone from the Ministry of Defence moving into a military charity be a problem? Sometimes when people take charitable positions they forget to go through ACoBA.
Kelvin Hopkins: There is a distinction where public money and contracts are involved. If you go and write for a newspaper, it is not public money. I am not saying it is a good idea, but nevertheless, there is a difference between somebody being involved in a gigantic contract that is going to cost the public many billions over decades and somebody writing a column for The Times. They are quite different situations.
Alexandra Runswick: The issue for me is the secrecy. If somebody is writing a column in The Times or wherever, however influential it is or however important it is, it is public. Everybody can see that that is an influence that they are having. The danger with people moving into the private sector and doing lobbying for the private sector is that we do not know what they are doing. There is a perception that it could potentially be a problem, but what we have at the moment is a regulatory system that sets conditions that it cannot monitor, but generally says the appointments are fine. We just do not know enough to say that they are fine or to be able to regulate if they are not. Yes, they can go on to lecture on a particular subject, or go on and do something in a completely different industry—I am not saying that people cannot have second careers. But I do think there are real problems, both with conflicts of interest and with potentially pressuring colleagues from your previous career, if you move straight into the sector that you were regulating in Government.
Q26 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: As a former Cabinet Minister I had to apply to ACoBA to do a small advisory committee job, and I hope it did pass the smell test, as it did. I would just like to declare my entry in the Register of Members’ Interests before I start my questioning.
Is it not true that it is not just about the politicians, and it is not just about where the system is now, but there are too many loopholes in the whole system? Our next panel is going to involve evidence from members of Private Eye. I was reading Private Eye, and I see that Simon Virley, who was the Director General for DECC for many years, has escaped official scrutiny of this revolving door by terming his departure from the civil service as a five-year career break, which means that he has been able to stay on the Government books, allegedly, and be a partner in an accountancy firm at the same time.
Something that appears, if it is absolutely true, to be so blatant surely should be caught by the rules somewhere. There must be a better way of doing this. It is not just the high-profile politicians; it is people who are moving seamlessly between these areas of private and public. I would like you to lay out for me what you think are the conflicts arising from this revolving door.
Professor Hine: I think there is a bit of a risk that we sit here agreeing with ourselves. I absolutely agree with you on that main observation.
Can I say something about an area that I think is less visible, where I think we do need to do something, and pretty quickly? In fact we did at one stage do something about it. It was not in the public eye, and now it is out, and that is all those public appointments that are approved inside Departments. Some time ago, I think a couple of years ago, I gave evidence to the Committee on Standards in Public Life, and in that I looked at the difference in the approvals and the conditions that were laid down for senior appointments and appointments that were approved within Departments. At the time two things struck me.
One is that in 2009-10 the evidence just stopped. There is no longer an evidence trail in the Advisory Committee reports. The second was that between 2001 and 2009 one saw very little toughening up of the conditions that the Advisory Committee was imposing on senior appointments and Ministers. One saw very little toughening up at the level of the Department. From time to time the Advisory Committee refers to this issue in its annual report, and what it says is, “The rules and the procedures changed, so we have not got the data since 2010, but we are trying to do something about making sure that all Departments impose the same conditions”. But that is the only thing we have in the public domain. All we have is the word of the chair—I do not doubt her word at all—that the committee is concerned about this. But once upon a time we did know exactly what conditions the Departments were imposing, and it stopped; it absolutely stopped. The Committee on Standards in Public Life was very struck by this. If it helps your Committee, I am very happy to send you the report that I wrote about it.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Yes, please.
Professor Hine: I am very struck by that.
Returning to what my colleague says about a culture among employees at a particular level, I am very struck by the thought that, if there is now not just traffic but a veritable flood of movements from particular Departments of Government, nothing is being done to monitor the consistency with which Permanent Secretaries are imposing conditions on their former employees. That could change the culture in a seriously deleterious way, and possibly is, but we know nothing about it. It really does need investigation. It will be incredibly hard to do anything about it, because I suspect that if you are leading a major Department of State it is jolly hard to say to the people that you are struggling to get to come and work in the public sector for much lower salaries than those in the private sector, “Do come and work for us and, by the way, if you feel like a career change at 40, life is going to get a lot tougher for you”. Those are real problems involving hundreds, if not thousands, of public servants.
Q27 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Before I ask Alexandra Runswick to respond to my question, would you also say that it is more important, particularly at this time when the Government are making a huge drive for major infrastructure projects that are not in the millions but in the billions, and when, even to work in Government, they are offering absolutely astronomical six-figure salaries—for example, to Simon Kirby, who was at HS2 Limited, one of my particular pet subjects, as the Committee appreciates—to pass the smell test, we must be able to see the web that evolves with these major infrastructure projects? There may be a benefit of this exchange between the public and private sector, but the public would want to be able to see that, and it should be fully transparent.
Professor Hine: I absolutely agree with you. For major infrastructure projects—building an aircraft carrier takes 15 or 20 years—it is very difficult to get out of the contractual relationships you have as the conditions, the specifications, change. It seems to me highly likely that close relationships will build between contractors and public servants. The larger those contracts are and the more you have to employ people on a temporary basis from the outside, the more you are going to create a web of interests, as you say, across the two sectors, which is potentially very damaging.
I think we all agree on all of these problems. The question is how on earth we build a framework that is capable of covering those sorts of questions; how we monitor it; how we ensure that you can bring the culture of a Department into line with higher expectations and higher standards while you are also asking it to deliver over short timescales in a way that gives the public value for money. Reconciling all those things looks to me to be something that requires a very strong report from this Committee, and then a lot of work on the part of the Cabinet Office, because in getting the details of these things right, the devil is clearly in the detail. With the best will in the world, I do not think your Committee can write a report that gets on top of those things, but it can make a strong plea that this is a very vulnerable area of ethics in public life.
Alexandra Runswick: If I can just briefly add to what you are saying, as part of the project we were doing on looking at the revolving door, we not only looked at the ACoBA appointments, but we attempted to look at the appointments at a more junior level that do not have to go to ACoBA. We did a number of freedom of information requests around not even something as specific as the conditions but just the numbers of people who had left and had been given approval to takes jobs in the private sector, and their destinations. We found it impossible to even get that information from all Government Departments. We also tried to do FOI requests to get more detail of the ministerial meetings data.
One of the problems in terms of the revolving door is that you can’t see if people who have had lobbying restrictions placed on them because of their previous work in the public sector are actually abiding by that. For example, Campaign Against Arms Trade found that there were a number of meetings that they were able to obtain through FOI that had not been published through the publication of ministerial meetings. We have tried a number of ways to get some of that information, but we have not been able to do it. I think it is important that somebody is able to look at that data, and if we are having an ethics body that it is able to have that data.
On your original question, which I think was about the risks of the revolving door, there are two that I have already mentioned, which are basically the abuse of office and influencing former colleagues. The other two that I would particularly highlight are the use of privilege and information. If you have helped set up a system while in public life you then, in a role in the private sector, may switch sides and argue the other case but use the privileged information you have from your previous role to enable you to do that. The other potential risk is around regulatory capture and the kind of too-close culture. Individuals who go on to regulate their former sector may be unduly sympathetic and not have enough independence to be able to be effective as regulators.
Q28 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: That brings me nicely on to the business appointment rules. ACoBA stated in their annual report, which I am sure you are very familiar with, that they would supplement the current wording of the lobbying ban to make explicit that an individual should not make use directly or indirectly of his or her Whitehall contacts to influence or secure business for any organisations to which he or she moved. How effective do you think these business appointment rules are as far as the clarity around lobbying is concerned? How effective do you think that proposal is on strengthening the definition of lobbying?
Professor Hine: I think human nature varies hugely. I suspect it does work for some people and I suspect it does not work for others. Probably it is the latter group that we have to try to legislate for, so it does matter that it is not effective, if it is not effective. I think we would agree that we can’t know for sure whether it is effective, but we have to legislate to try to deal with the risk.
That takes us into the question of what we might do about it if we had reason to believe that a contact book was being abused, or if people were making improper introductions at the golf club, or if people were lobbying on behalf of somebody else but were being given all the information by a person who was not supposed to provide that information. That is a very tough one. My own view is that you have to have machinery capable of investigating particular cases, and you have to have uncertainty on the part of both the commercial organisation and the individual who has moved into that area about whether they themselves might be subject to significant investigation. I would be in favour of random checks but, of course, it does require quite a lot of investigation. Maybe not as random as they said in the report; maybe they should be risk-based. You should identify who you think should be investigated and then have them before you.
Then the question is what sort of penalty you impose and what is the standard of evidence, the evidential basis you are going to require, before you say, “You have failed to follow the advice or the requirements laid down, you have lobbied”. Whether or not the lobbying was effective, you might want to say, “You should face a penalty for that”. The evidential base, the size of the penalty and who the penalty is imposed on are all details that one has to work through, and it would be quite tough for your Committee to produce a report that actually sets these things out about what you want to see. All you can do is say that this requires significant investigation. Unfortunately, I have to say I do not think there are many parallels around the world for that sort of detailed investigative activity on a large scale.
Q29 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Is there anything around? Is there any system around the world that you think we should look at and take lessons from?
Professor Hine: You have already looked at one that is quite close to our system. It is a Westminster model, the Canadian model, and it has a statutory basis, which is the first step but not the only step. You concluded in 2012 it was quite a good system. I do not know whether you have read the subsequent review of the Canadian Ethics Act in 2014. That document is well worth reading, because it shows that it is not all wonderful in Canada either, and in fact they have many of the same problems that the Advisory Committee has, even though they put it in a statutory wrapper. I do not think Canada provides the obvious model.
Quite a lot of advanced democracies have traditionally based it on the hard law of corruption. I guess one reason why we have not used the hard law of corruption—and we might say there is not much corruption—is that the hard law of corruption is incredibly hard to mobilise. The evidential standard is so high and the costs to the public purse of bringing cases are fearsome, so it would be dangerous.
Q30 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Is there any other jurisdiction that is developing this area other than Canada? Clearly Canada was a good example but is not making progress. Is there anybody else who is making progress?
Professor Hine: The United States is not just one political system, it is 51 political systems. At state level there are all sorts of experiments with all sorts of combinations of rules and procedures and hard law. It might well be worth going to—I don’t know—the Congress or state legislatures and looking to see what, across 51 states, might provide a model. Historically, the United States has relied much more than we have on hard law, and they got into ethics regulation much earlier than we did. In some areas of conflict of interest regulation—it is normally a civil penalty rather than a criminal penalty—they have criminalised failure to resolve a conflict of interest even if there is not an improper gain obtained.
All those are complex legal issues, and it is not at all clear that you can fit the model that you derive from one jurisdiction into the practices, the expectations and the procedures of another. I don’t think the Canadian model is a bad place to start. It is the best place for you to start, but all I want to say is, my goodness me, they are not very happy with it. There are a lot of minority reports to the essentially majority-dominated review in 2014, some of which started with the sentence, “This whole review is a farce, this does not work”. You need to look very carefully at what has happened in Canada and get Mary Dawson to give you some more advice. I think she gave you advice in 2012.
Alexandra Runswick: The fundamental problem that you have highlighted is that we just don’t know. It may be that everybody is abiding by the rules impeccably and it is all fine. Certainly that is not the public’s perception, but there are problems with assessing public perception too. From an Unlock Democracy point of view, we came at these issues because we got involved in campaigning for lobbying transparency, so the obvious answer for me to give you is that a big part of the problem is that we do not have a comprehensive lobbying register that shows us those interactions. As you have already heard, there is not a neat, simple solution that we can take off the shelf and say, “This is going to miraculously restore trust in politics and reduce all perceptions of corruption.” We are going to have to evolve a system that we believe works for the UK.
One of the big problems we are still struggling with is that transparency is as much about culture change as it is about legislation. Despite the fact that we have had transparency measures legally in place for some years now, culturally Westminster and Whitehall are still, in my view, struggling to get to grips with those and to adapt culturally.
Q31 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Would you prefer to have a system of sanctions for breach?
Alexandra Runswick: Yes
Q32 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: How would you construct that?
Alexandra Runswick: Coming at this from a basis in lobbying regulation, I would say that you need sanctions that involve reputational damage both for the individual and for the company that is employing them. Unfortunately I don’t have a neat solution that I can give you of exactly how that would work, but that is looking at it from how lobbying is best regulated around the world. That is the most effective tool we have had to date.
Q33 Chair: This is a supplementary on that. How do you address the culture change that is required, given that regulation can’t do that?
Alexandra Runswick: A lot of it is about training. There has been work done, for example, suggesting that MPs should all have individual training in ethics, but there was some resistance to that because the concern was if you have ethics training the suggestion is that you didn’t have ethics beforehand, and it gets caught up politically. A lot of it is about the values of the organisation, understanding that transparency is not a threat.
You only have to look at datasets like ministerial meetings data. They are absolutely published, and they are even being published in a more timely way, and there are improvements being made, but you still have positions such as how the chart for Energy and Climate Change used to list all meetings as being about energy and climate change. I have no doubt that that is true, but that doesn’t actually tell anybody anything. Equally, you have meetings being described as “introduction” or “catch-up” or “general discussion”. Technically transparency is being complied with but still, if you are coming at it from a public perception, you are not actually being told anything.
Other than saying “lots of training”, I do not really know what to suggest about that culture change, but I think that is the knot we have to unravel.
Q34 Chair: The rules seem to me deficient in one glaring respect, in that there is, in some Departments, an implied pipeline of Ministers and officials moving into certain industries. There does not need to be any contractual interchange between them, it just changes the perception of that Department about that company—“If we are horrid to that company, they might not offer me a job”. How do the rules address that? Supposing a senior military person is dealing with Capita, and is hoping to perhaps have a job with Capita at a later stage, he does not need to do anything overtly corrupt to have his judgment altered while he is still holding public office. To what extent do the rules address that problem?
Professor Hine: I do not think the rules do address that problem, you are quite right. One solution is to have some kind of absolute ban. I think the wording of that ban would be tough, but that is the only belt and braces solution to the problem you have outlined.
It is not entirely true that you can get away with very soft treatment of your commercial interlocutor as a Minister or a public servant. There are all sorts of rules on public contracting that have to be followed. There is the Public Accounts Committee, there is parliamentary investigation, and so on. The problem is that it seems to me that while Parliament and its Committees have done a reasonably good job in investigating this over recent years, compared with the situation 20 or 30 years ago, in a sense it is being swamped by the growth of the opportunities that are there. If your Committee concludes from that that the time has come to put in some really tight rules about what you can and can’t do—to make it clear to people, while in public office, that there is not a benefit that is going to come from, as you put it, being soft or being friendly—then maybe that is the answer. But, again, you are going to have to specify in considerable detail what is acceptable transfer and what is not acceptable transfer. But I would be most sympathetic myself to trying to do it.
Alexandra Runswick: I agree.
Q35 Paul Flynn: Can we point out what an auspicious day this is for you to give your information? This is the day on which Mr Hopkins and myself have been promoted by our leader to the Back Benches in order to liberate us and to speak the whole truth on these matters. We went to Canada—we were the only members of the Committee then who are still here on the Committee now, and who wrote the report in 2012. That report was distinguished in that the only recommendation that was accepted by Government at the time was a recommendation that members of ACoBA should be paid, which was not the most serious or profound of our recommendations. We are very grateful for your reports and your work on this. Ms Runswick, I see you say that currently, ACoBA’s response to retrospective applications is to send them a letter stating its displeasure.
Alexandra Runswick: Yes.
Paul Flynn: That must be a dreadfully distressing experience for someone who is only consoled by £100,000 in their bank account for taking the job. But you are suggesting that you use something even stronger, even crueller than such a letter would be. What would that be?
Alexandra Runswick: Partly, I feel the need to say that I am pleased that ACoBA is starting to express its displeasure. That is a positive step. It is nowhere near far enough, but I do welcome the fact that they are now expressing displeasure.
I do not think that ACoBA should be an advisory committee. I think you should actually be required to abide by it. I think that calling it an advisory committee misleads people as to the seriousness of the job that it does and the importance of the function that it is trying to fulfil. We have had far too many people, as you say, who have simply decided not to ask ACoBA, or to wait two years and then say, “Well, I am doing this anyway, because ACoBA now can’t say anything about it”.
To get back to your question, I do believe that there need to be strict sanctions for when people don’t abide by the rules. As I have said, I think the most effective way that we have seen so far of doing that is where there is reputational damage and potentially a fine for both the individual concerned and the company that is employing them.
Q36 Paul Flynn: But does it not prove the utter futility of ACoBA, which has been described as not a watchdog but a pussycat without teeth or claws, that the only sanction they apply is the pussycat does not purr when people break the rules and put two fingers up to ACoBA? Doesn’t it prove the utter uselessness of this body?
Alexandra Runswick: Absolutely. As I said previously, when we studied the appointments for 2009 to 2015 for ACoBA, we were able to identify, by going on LinkedIn, that there were people who should have applied to ACoBA but had not. Fundamentally, when you have more information on LinkedIn than ACoBA, you know that that system is not working.
Q37 Paul Flynn: So what do we do about it? For the information that we have about what is going on—you suggest it came from LinkedIn—we have to rely on the press, the investigating journalists, Private Eye, “Dispatches”, The Sunday Times, otherwise we would be completely ignorant of this corrupt system. Hasn’t Government—and it is not just this Government, but past Governments—utterly failed, probably in their own interests, because so many people at all levels, politicians, civil servants, generals, have an interest in these retirement jobs and do not want the wholly permissive system to change? Isn’t that the truth?
Alexandra Runswick: That is certainly the public perception of it, absolutely. As I quoted before, people see that the Government has, in effect, been taken over by corporate interests, and that people see that their career is going to be in the private sector and that they have a cosy relationship with those organisations, with a view to what their future career might look like. That may not be what actually happens in practice, but that is certainly the public perception when you have the revolving door working in that way.
Professor Hine: I don’t entirely agree with you. I think that is not the only reason why we have not made much progress. There are the problems of building machinery—certainly in 2012, remember, the view of the Treasury about any increasing regulation or expenditure in 2012 was that the system you are proposing might have been horrendously expensive. It would certainly have involved the Cabinet Office in an enormous amount of work. I think that is also a reason, and it is very important for that reason that you are very detailed. For example, if you want to add some teeth and some claws, the $500 fine that the Canadian ethics officer is able to impose for failing to observe the procedures and ask permission to hold a particular appointment is not much and is easily paid by a commercial organisation. For a very thick-skinned public servant, it is water off a duck’s back, to continue the analogy.
You need much tougher sanctions, and for that, the evidential base is going to have to be higher; the potential costs in terms of miscarriage of justice are going to be very high; the possible amount of gardening leave you are going to have to offer is going to be very high. We have been through all this with Baroness Browning in her hearing in April. But they are real problems, and you have to work through them, and I think that those are also reasons why nothing has happened.
Q38 Paul Flynn: The commissioner in Canada was very clear to us that it was far from a perfect system. There is room for improvement there, but it is certainly far better than what we have here. I think we all recognise that the danger is when civil servants, admirals, politicians, Ministers, go into areas where they previously had control and influence, and it might have influenced their decisions at the time. Would you think it would be possible to have a rule where they could not go into those areas where they previously worked? There would be nothing to stop them going off into other areas, but we know that The Sunday Times had a figure of 3,500 people who had worked in the Ministry of Defence over a period of 15 years who were working for defence contractors—3,500 of them. They were not working in other areas, because of their skills. They are there because of their contacts and the influence they would have about the recent decisions. We know that from experience of it. Do you think that would be a reasonable rule, to keep them from going into those areas?
Professor Hine: The first question was whether it was possible, and then you changed it to whether it was reasonable. I am sure it is possible. Whether it is likely, given the complexities that we have talked about, and whether it is reasonable, I do not know, because we would have to work through what the deleterious consequences were. I am sure there are some, in terms of the incentives to go into public life, the incentives to public service and the benefits of interaction between private and public sector. All that has to be worked through.
Q39 Paul Flynn: We have looked at the membership of ACoBA, and virtually every member of ACoBA has a second job outside. They are mostly retired politicians. In fact, when “Dispatches” did an investigation into them, they did not report on the programme because it was so full of outrageous things that politicians were saying and shaming themselves. But after they did the investigation, the chair of ACoBA sent his CV in to this bogus company that was set up as part of a sting. Do you think it is worrying that most members of ACoBA have a vested interest and think it is normal for people to have retirement jobs paying £80,000 to £100,000?
Professor Hine: I am sure the CV episode was extraordinarily unhelpful to ACoBA’s credibility. Those episodes in the past, and the people who were on ACoBA before the Public Appointments Commissioner procedure was used, are one reason why I think it has probably had its time. Even if it is only a cosmetic change, it seems to me vital that a fresh start is made, and I absolutely agree with you. Whether we would agree on who the appropriate people were to sit on the committee, I am not sure.
Q40 Kelvin Hopkins: Professor Hine said that a number of jurisdictions around the world in advanced democracies have hard law in these matters. I must say, I am absolutely convinced that we need hard law. Are we pussyfooting around the subject, and isn’t it the case that the culture change you talk about will only happen when hard law drives it? Historically, with children going up chimneys and down the mines, it was law that changed the culture. In drinking and driving, it was changes in law that made the difference in culture.
Professor Hine: You may be right. I think it is incredibly hard to apply hard law to lobbying. Is lobbying something that you want to criminalise? I say to you, as a public servant, “I’ve got a very good company, and our product really works and it is exactly what you want”. You are the public servant, you have to decide, there are lots of things going on in your mind. Is my lobbying, when I have been told I probably should not lobby for a couple of years, something we can criminalise? I am not sure.
Q41 Chair: We are being pressed for time, I am afraid. This is a very helpful session and I am grateful to you. You have already commented substantially on our 2012 report. Generally, how good or bad was that report? What should we learn from the reaction to that report? Just briefly.
Alexandra Runswick: I think it was a very good report. It demonstrates is how hard it is to make changes in these kinds of areas, because there is not the political will to do it. You put together a very good report; there was a lot of research and a lot of evidence in it. But as you have already pointed out, the Government did not even reply to it for, was it two years?
Q42 Chair: But in terms of our recommendations, how practical were they?
Alexandra Runswick: A number of them were incredibly practical, for example putting ACoBA on a statutory footing. I think these are all things that can be done; there just needs to be the will to do them.
Q43 Chair: Professor Hine, don’t pull your punches. Tell us what was wrong with it.
Professor Hine: I was not so impressed with it. I thought you spread your fire too widely in adding in the Prime Minister’s Adviser on Ministers’ Interests and getting rid of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. I think that was a distraction from the core issue.
Secondly, I think your report needed to say much more about the sorts of penalties that could be imposed by a body with teeth. I think that is where the consultation, very widely, needs to be done to try to figure it out. But I do see a problem. The Government have no interest in doing this; elites, in Mr Flynn’s word, have no interest in doing this. So I think it is going to be very hard to get the momentum going. This is something where Parliament itself is going to have to be very proactive and you are going to have to draft some law.
Q44 Chair: We are moving on to the Prime Minister’s Adviser on Ministers’ Interests, and Mr Flynn wants to ask some questions about that, but do tell us if that is an additional distraction we can do without while we are grappling with the main issue.
Professor Hine: The history of the development of ethics advisers since the Committee on Standards in Public Life was set up 20 years ago suggests that if you give an organisation a number of different remits, then with any discrediting of that organisation in one area, or any controversy that makes politicians like yourselves attack it, as you do periodically—and I am not saying rightly or wrongly—you are going to discredit it in the other areas. I think you are going to raise questions about where resources should be devoted and what the principal function of the organisation is.
It does seem to me that an ethics commissioner to police something as important as the subject that we have talked about this morning merits its own office and its own organisation. You excluded MPs, and I am inclined to agree with you. I think if you tried to put the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards into this as well, you would have a hopelessly unmanageable thing, but there is something essentially political about the Prime Minister’s Adviser on Ministers’ Interests as well. I personally think you should keep them out and focus on an ethics commissioner.
I am fully behind you in trying to make it statutory, but I would go further. I would say, as Mr Hopkins says, that we have to investigate how we can mobilise the law. It is not so much that the law doesn’t exist; there is lots of statute and common law on corruption. The problem is, no one knows really how to mobilise it effectively and efficiently in the service of the objectives that you have. I think that is such a huge task in itself that I would keep the ministerial adviser and Parliament right out of it.
Q45 Paul Flynn: The role was created in the previous Parliament as an essential reform, and it was used by the previous Prime Minister to report to his Ministers. The system is that only the Prime Minister can refer anyone to this Pooh-Bah figure, as he has become now; he is someone without a job.
If we give one example—there are many of these—Liam Fox was sacked for his conduct when he was Secretary of State for Defence. He was never investigated and he gained absolution by resignation. The then adviser, Sir Philip Mawer, resigned and he told our Committee that he thought he should have investigated the conduct of Liam Fox. A new appointment was made of someone who had spent years saying, “Yes, sir, no sir, three bags full, sir” to politicians. We have had these last five years in which I think he has investigated one case, and that was a baroness who had already pleaded guilty to a menial decision that did not really matter, but every other case of ministerial misconduct has failed to be reported to the adviser by the Prime Minister.
The question is: do we get rid of the post, or are we going to have reform, or shall we have some sanction on ministerial conduct and misconduct? This man has suddenly reappeared, reincarnated as a Brexiteer, for god’s sake.
Alexandra Runswick: I think you do need to have an investigative function. You are absolutely right that calling somebody an independent adviser when the post is in the gift of the Prime Minister, it is a closed recruitment process and they can only investigate at the behest of the Prime Minister, is possibly a misnomer. But I think it is important that there is a role that can investigate. I think whether it is maintained in that particular office or moved elsewhere is open for debate. It certainly does not work when you can only investigate when the Prime Minister asks you to.
Paul Flynn: The difficulty of this is that I had a case which I reported—
Chair: Can we have Professor Hine’s response to your first question?
Paul Flynn: Yes, of course.
Professor Hine: I could agree with you; there are lots of cases that you have alluded to that are undesirable. I could say, nevertheless, the presence of the prime ministerial adviser may be an incentive to lots of other misconduct that has not happened because of the adviser’s presence. My main point is that whatever we might or might not agree on in terms of toughening up that role, I personally believe it is best to keep it separate.
Q46 Paul Flynn: Could we say what the seriousness of this is? There are no sanctions on the conduct of Ministers. I will give you one less serious example, a case that I reported to the Prime Minister and asked him to investigate and pass on to the adviser. It involved a Minister having a lunch in the Savoy with a group of people who had an interest in his Department and were seeking favours from his Department. He did not declare that interest, and he should have done. His explanation was that day he was digesting his food with his private stomach and not his ministerial stomach. He was there as a private person, not as a Minister. That explanation was accepted by the Prime Minister and no investigation took place.
So we have no sanctions whatsoever on the conduct of Ministers. We have gone backwards on the lobbying rules, and we have a more permissive Parliament that is rightly being mocked and discredited outside. The likely possibility is that all of politics becomes a situation where we are not just at rock bottom with our reputation, we are subterranean. It is getting worse, unless we strengthen the role of the adviser and we look at our other systems as well to make sure that we are not as permissive as we have become. There is a question in there somewhere.
Professor Hine: Even if our reputation is at rock bottom, not many other parliamentary systems do have such a role. They manage to get by and keep their reputation higher than ours without one.
Q47 Paul Flynn: What do we do? How do we find out what Liam Fox did? It was something so serious that he was sacked, but nobody knows what he did. He is now back reincarnated without a crease in his knickers, and he is there as the new Brexiteer to do enormous damage, possibly, to the country. As we head down what the Chancellor said were bumps in the road, there will probably be a sinkhole in the road into which the politicians will fall.
Chair: Was there a question in there? I do not think there was.
Paul Flynn: There is.
Professor Hine: I think he resigned because he was a distraction, and I am glad that being a distraction is a reason for resigning.
Q48 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I think Alexandra Runswick mentioned that there needs to be political will behind wanting to do something. Maybe our timing is good on this Committee, because the leadership and the political will may be there this time to do something, so this is a very timely inquiry for us.
I wanted to clarify, if we got rid of the Prime Minister’s independent adviser, as you seem to be—
Professor Hine: No.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: You would like to maintain that?
Professor Hine: I might agree with Mr Flynn that the powers should be toughened, and that the Prime Minister’s adviser should come under the jurisdiction of Parliament, as PASC at one stage asked. I think there was a question of whether he or she could be made an Officer of Parliament. I would happily look at all those sort of changes. I just think you would get into trouble; it is such a politically sensitive post. I think it will be a muddle if it is put in an organisation that begins to have a quasi-political function.
Q49 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: How would you measure success in monitoring the conduct of this office holder?
Professor Hine: Thus far, do you mean, or going forward?
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: No, in the future.
Professor Hine: The obvious answer would be that Mr Flynn would not be upset by so many cases of apparent misconduct.
Chair: That is a tall order.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: He is upset about everything, usually, so I do not think we could do that.
Professor Hine: If there are no controversial cases. I fear there will continue to be controversial cases, just as with Parliament you can have grounded complaints and you can have vexatious complaints against Ministers. I think it is good that Ministers have some protections against vexatious complaints and ill founded accusations, but I am inclined to agree that ultimately the decision about whether a Minister has to go, and whether we find out about something or other, is likely to depend, first, on the Prime Minister deeming it politically expedient and, secondly, on how much investigative journalism can get to the bottom of what that person has done. I am not sure that you will change that situation very much.
Alexandra Runswick: One of the big problems that we have already discussed is the sense of independence—how will that investigative function be able to independently investigate whether or not wrongdoing has happened? One of the big challenges that we have is at the moment, if you look at the Committee on Standards in Public Life data, is that the public is not confident that public authorities are committed to upholding standards in public life; 61% were not confident that the authorities will generally uncover wrongdoing by people in public office. Where you have systems that are only allowed to look at it when the Prime Minister tells them to, that just reinforces that perception.
It is important that we have investigations, and that if there is wrongdoing people are seen to be sanctioned for it, but we can only do that when there is a genuine sense of independence, because otherwise it is not going to change anybody’s perception.
Q50 Ronnie Cowan: Have we covered this question, Chair? It is about the ethics commissioner.
Chair: You have the last set of questions, but if you want to ask that question instead, fine.
Ronnie Cowan: I am concerned with the conflict of interest in the ethics commissioner and who would appoint this commissioner. We have a history in this Committee of rubber-stamping people for those jobs, and it is just another strand in “jobs for the boys”. How do we satisfactorily appoint the right person in that position whose job it is to control ACoBA?
Professor Hine: I would refer you to the Commissioner on Public Appointments, an excellent man. I think he would be very good at making those decisions, but I agree with you it is tough. There are judges—
Q51 Ronnie Cowan: Was he himself not rubber-stamped by this Committee? We had only one candidate for the job.
Chair: That is a question about the pre-appointment system, Professor Hine.
Professor Hine: I am not against pre-appointment hearings, and pre-appointment hearings with more teeth than you appear to have, but that is probably a wider argument, is it?
Q52 Ronnie Cowan: The pre-appointments gives us one candidate for the job, so we appoint that person. I am wondering if that person is then in a position to control who is going to be the ethics commissioner. Surely it is just another strand of the same thing. We are not really getting to the heart of the matter if it is still jobs for the boys appointing jobs for the boys.
Professor Hine: In a way you have been saying that about the Advisory Committee for a long time, which is why a statutory committee would presumably identify procedures and much greater public scrutiny of who that individual was—not only your Committee, but a wider press interest in the appointment.
Ultimately you have to choose somebody—you can’t get round that problem—and you have to choose them for a particular period of time, which I think has to be three or five years. You have to have confidence, if you are going to have one individual who is going to head an office doing a very big job, that they are capable of doing that job. Your judgment about whether they are competent to do it will be an important part of public perceptions. I am not sure whether you should sit around and choose between five people here on a table.
Chair: I am not sure either.
Q53 Andrew Turner: This is not a question. The trouble is that the “remains” are used to doing this all the time, and people who voted to leave did so because they were not the sort of people who do these things.
Professor Hine: I refer you to the British election survey, which has a lot of data about why people voted as they did on 23 June.
Chair: That is not really our concern. This session has overrun by at least 20 minutes, but I think that is an indication of how interested we are in your evidence. You have both been very helpful and informative. Thank you very much indeed.
Witnesses: Ian Hislop and Richard Brooks.
Q54 Chair: Could I ask each of our witnesses to identify themselves for the record?
Ian Hislop: I am Ian Hislop. I am the Editor of Private Eye, and this is Richard Brooks, who is a senior journalist on the magazine who wrote the “Revolving Doors” special. He has made this traffic between public and private sectors his speciality, and I will probably defer to him frequently.
Q55 Chair: Very good. What should ACoBA’s primary function be?
Richard Brooks: Right now it should be clearing out the office and putting up the “Sorry, we are closed” sign. I think it is not really serving a useful purpose at the moment, as it is constituted and with the rules that it is operating under. When you look at some of the appointments that get through, you can only conclude that any system that allows them to get through is serving no useful purpose. Whether that is because of the rules it is operating under or the way it applies those rules is another series of questions.
But the upshot is that the approval system is just not working when we find cases such as, for example, Dave Hartnett, who was the Permanent Secretary for tax at HMRC. He took job with Deloitte after he had routinely dealt with that firm to agree major tax deals, and with whose chairman he had met on 48 separate occasions in the previous five years agreeing big tax deals, including Vodafone, where Deloitte should not have even been in the room because they were the company's auditor. There was that kind of close relationship, and he can then get a job with Deloitte approved within a few months of leaving office.
Q56 Chair: Spell out what your fear is about that appointment.
Richard Brooks: Mr Hartnett and a chap called David Cruickshank, who is the chairman of Deloitte, worked together, as I say, on dozens of tax deals. Clearly we have no idea what conversations went on between them around the margins of all those 48 meetings, but there would appear to have been, or there is a very strong suspicion that there could have been, some expectation of a job when he retired. I would have thought that must have influenced how he behaved towards this person who was on the other side of the desk and with whom he was, strictly speaking, in opposition as the taxpayers' representative.
Q57 Chair: I have just been very clear in asking about what you thought, and you have told me what you thought. Can I make a general request that we are circumspect about making any indications about individuals? You are protected by parliamentary privilege.
Ian Hislop: Yes, and you are addressing two people from Private Eye. Attacking individuals is sort of what we do. You have had the professors in; now you have us.
Chair: Yes, I know. I appreciate that, but in some ways having you in here is like letting a wayward dog off the lead.
Ian Hislop: That is very flattering.
Chair: But given that people are not going to have the opportunity to respond in equal measure, if there is stuff you want to tell us in private please do, but I just caution you.
Richard Brooks: Chairman, there was nothing controversial about that at all. That was fairly toned down, even.
Ian Hislop: To suggest it was disgraceful for Mr Hartnett to take the job with Deloitte and with HSBC I think is pretty tame as an accusation.
Q58 Chair: We produced a report in 2012. What do you think has changed since 2012?
Ian Hislop: According to Richard nothing has changed. We produced this pamphlet that he wrote called “Revolving Doors”, and it analysed the number of appointments that ACoBA has decided were not suitable, and that total is nought. Out of 700 possibles they turned no one down. So no job that anyone has taken—no Minister, no civil servant—is in any way a conflict of interest or unsuitable. None—just none. So the system is obviously working absolutely brilliantly, and ACoBA has no reason to take any action at any point.
Q59 Mr Andrew Turner: How effective do you think ACoBA is in policing the boundary between public and private sectors?
Ian Hislop: I do not think it is effective at all. It is an advisory body. It requires people to disclose information about themselves, which they often do not do, and it has no sanctions. I cannot see that it works.
Q60 Mr Andrew Turner: Could it not be that those that would not get through decide on balance they might do better not to ask ACoBA their views?
Ian Hislop: No, because we have looked at some of the things that did get through and they are shocking, pages and pages of them—defence industry outsourcing, banking. It is pretty disgraceful.
Richard Brooks: I do not think there are many mandarins sitting there thinking, “I will not take that job because of what ACoBA might say to me” or “I will not even apply for it”. It is simply not happening. It is now routine. Your question was how ACoBA is policing the boundary between the public and private sectors. It has kind of melted away any boundaries that existed, so that we have got to the stage where the revolving door is now so accepted that there is no real distinction.
You now have very senior people responsible for very important areas of public policy who just see their public role as one part of a portfolio career. If you look at all the senior mandarins in the Treasury, for example—and we have written about a few of them recently: Sir John Kingman; Rupert Harrison; Sir Nick Macpherson; Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary who was at the Treasury as well—all these people are combining careers playing a major role in determining economic policy, the regulation of banks and such fairly important things, with working in banks. That is how they see their life, and I think that is the point that we have got to. I think that is the sort of endgame in this system.
Ian Hislop: You talk about the boundaries. I think what Richard believes, and what we believe, is that the boundary between purchaser and provider, the boundary between the regulator and the regulated and essentially the boundary between the gamekeeper and the poacher has been abolished. So you look at them and you have no idea which is which.
Q61 Ronnie Cowan: I agree that the revolving door is well oiled, spinning at an incredible rate. But if we close down ACoBA, which effectively is not doing anything to stop it anyway, then people are still going to move from the public to the private sector, so where are we? You just said we have abolished them. What did we abolish?
Ian Hislop: Again, as Richard said, why don’t they just give up? The alternative is to give them regulatory powers and to make it not advisory but legally binding. I know you have heard the previous evidence, and as usual any regulation is very complex and very costly and therefore it cannot be done. Well, that is an excuse for all regulation about everything ever. If it is worth doing I am not sure it is that complex. We are not fantastically convoluted in our argument. Most of it is common sense, and if you look at the jobs that are most shocking that people have taken I do not think it takes a huge amount of investigation, money or brainpower to guess that that is not a very good idea.
Had the person been forced, which is Richard’s suggestion, beforehand to publicly say, “I have been offered a job by this giant missile company. I was the general in charge of buying the missile. Does anyone have any objections?” then people might put in some objections and he would not take the job. That seems to be a perfectly reasonable procedure. You publicly say, “This is what I am going to do. This was the involvement I had”, and then anybody can object to ACoBA and ACoBA can say, “No, you are not allowed to”.
Q62 Ronnie Cowan: Part of the problem lies with the people who make up ACoBA, because we have already heard today that they also seem to have secondary jobs on the go.
Ian Hislop: Again, people always say it is very difficult to get people to sit on committees, and then you only ask the same group of people.
Ronnie Cowan: Absolutely.
Ian Hislop: ACoBA could include, I don’t know, former teachers possibly, some policemen—if you’re desperate, journalists.
Chair: Was that an application for the job?
Ian Hislop: Yes, I have a few revolving doors to declare.
Q63 Ronnie Cowan: When is it acceptable for people to move from the public to the private sector?
Ian Hislop: I do not think Richard or I would at any stage say, “No one can have a career”, but I just do not believe when you see these moves that anyone says, “Well, you are compromising their freedom to move”. Most of the people we write about already have knighthoods. Richard’s point is that most of these people are right at the end of their civil service careers. They are in the golden years anyway and they look ahead and see a nice autumn of very well paid employment in the private sector. We do not want to penalise the 40-year-olds who need other careers. Is that right?
Richard Brooks: Yes, that is right. I think there are two categories. There are the people who want to make a legitimate career change—I made one myself—to declare some sort of interest in their 30s or 40s. Then there are those who have had their career. They have their knighthood, very high civil service final salary pensions. They have pretty much everything, and yet they see this extra carrot of a £100,000-a-year non-executive directorship and so on, which is becoming, interestingly, much more attractive. If you look at the way, for example, non-executive director fees have gone up, they have doubled in a decade or so. The same goes for consultative day rates, so the incentives have become greater at the same time as any shame attaching to the move has diminished completely. Those are the real concerns.
Further down the pecking order, you have more junior, perhaps younger officials who want to change career for legitimate reasons, who do not want to sit in the same job for 30 years. I think you apply different conditions for those people. You say, “Yes, you can move” but you can still have strict conditions. For example, if your specialism was in contracting project management, that kind of thing, you can take a project management job somewhere, but not connected to the companies that you have been dealing with in office. You perhaps apply more of a standard condition to the junior people, whereas for the more senior people I do not see why there is not a presumption that you simply cannot take jobs in areas connected to your public sector career.
Q64 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Just picking up on that though, surely this should all happen much earlier in the process. If you are going to be a politician, like we all are sitting around this table, and if you are going to be offered ministerial office, surely at that stage there should be something that is put into the rules for ministerial code that tells you that at the end of this process anything you want to do that is outside the political arena has to pass the test, as I said before.
Ian Hislop: It used to be called a moral compass, but if you are saying that no one is now—
Q65 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I agree with you. I think it is a moral compass, but in this day and age we would like it all written down and spelled out for us, because we have to be told what our moral compass is in some cases. Do you not think that should happen—that once you get to a senior level as a civil servant it is made very clear to you that at the end there are going to be certain things that you cannot do? Of course, you can leave No. 10 and you can write a book immediately about your instances. You would not want to inhibit, I am sure, any journalist things.
Ian Hislop: Oh, I would.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Do you not think it should come earlier in the process?
Ian Hislop: Yes, but you have asked us specifically about the committee, and if they institute a set of rules, which I do not think is impossible, to say which areas you can work in and cannot work in, then those same rules would apply to Ministers.
Richard Brooks: I think you would need officials—people joining the civil service, for example—knowing full well that is what it means. There is no shortage of very high-quality applicants to the civil service at the moment. I do not see that would diminish the talent that you had applying for the civil service. But people would go in with their eyes wide open. They would know that they go into public service, and that is a noble thing to do.
Q66 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: You could shut a loophole that you do not get investigated by having a five-year career break, which I gather was what happened in the case of the director general of DECC.
Ian Hislop: That is right.
Q67 Chair: Before we go on, can I ask a question about moral compass? How do you encourage people to rely on their moral compass if there are more and more rules, maybe even laws, that prescribe what they can do and cannot do? How much are we in danger of encouraging people to substitute rules that will never be adequate for their own moral judgment? How do we deal with that?
Ian Hislop: Presumably we are sitting here and talking about putting rules in because the moral compasses have failed. The analysis Richard offers is that this has come down from the top and it is led by Prime Ministers who say one thing and then do something entirely different.
Chair: I accept that.
Ian Hislop: This is not a political point. I am including the ones on both sides. Can I just give you this quote? This man says, “I am going to end crony capitalism, ex-Ministers and ex-advisors for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its own way”. That was David Cameron. This is not a controversial Dave Spart outburst.
Chair: I am not defending anybody, and I am not making any comment, but the point is that the more you—
Ian Hislop: No, and you asked me a question. My answer is that the lead comes from the top. The Prime Minister and the Cabinet could themselves abide by what is absolutely clearly a set of assumptions that the public would have, that you do not make a set of decisions when you are in office and then go and work for the beneficiary of those decisions when you are out of office. That is one sentence. I have just put it down. It is not that complex.
Q68 Chair: I am asking a different question. I accept everything that you say, but the more you codify how you expect people to behave, the more the code will determine what people do. They will say, “It does not say you can’t do this, so it must be allowed” and they do it. We have seen time and time again regulated industries and regulated professions use the absence of a particular rule to justify what they do.
Ian Hislop: Then exactly the same people plead for light-touch regulation and say, “Back off”, and then the entire capitalist system blows up. I do not buy the argument. I do not think if there are a lot of rules people say, “I do not have any morals anymore. I only do what it says there”.
Q69 Chair: I am not arguing against rules. I am asking how you encourage people to exercise their own moral judgment at the same time as looking at rules. Sometimes they will look at the rules and say, “That is allowed, but that is obviously wrong and I am not going to do it”.
Richard Brooks: They might even say, “If it is allowed within the rules I am allowed to do it and I am encouraged to do it”. So, I think you do not have hard and fast rules; you have principles. Your code has principles and you have commissioners, or Committees like yours that can pass judgment on whether those principles have been followed. You say that a principle, for example, is that you do not take a job in an area where you have had influence in public life. It is pretty simple.
Q70 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Again, I declare an interest in respect of HS2 Ltd, which is putting a high-speed rail link through my constituency. Is it not difficult when Government are moving civil servants out of a Department into what is essentially the commercial operation that is itself lobbying Government to get its way on how it builds a project? You have Government encouraging officials to move across into a commercial operation.
Ian Hislop: Perhaps it should not do that. Perhaps it should make it fairly clear what the difference between the public and the private sector is.
Q71 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Those lines are getting merged so much that it is difficult to tell sometimes what is private and what is public when you have a project like that.
Ian Hislop: Who is paying for it? The public.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: The taxpayer.
Ian Hislop: Then the lines are not too difficult to spot. You act in their interests.
Q72 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: But then you look at the range of consultants that are taken on board—because the project relies on a whole load of consultants— and there is a seamless ability to move between those consultancies and Government.
Ian Hislop: That is not a good thing.
Q73 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: No. I think you were in here when we were talking about lobbying before. How effective do you think ACoBA’s proposal on the strengthening of the definition of lobbying was?
Richard Brooks: I had a quick look at it. I think the definition is fine, but it is not really the point. People know what lobbying is. It doesn’t matter exactly what this sentence says. The point is whether you can see it happening, whether information about meetings and so on is publicly available. It is about visibility, and at the moment there is not any. Alongside whatever this Committee works on, I think you need some major changes in the openness of Government about who is meeting who and what they are talking about.
Your previous witness, Alexandra, mentioned that so many records of meetings say “catch-up”, “discussed industrial topics” and so on. What does that mean? In today’s issue, which has probably hit the newsstands now, we have a story about the former chief executive of UKTI Defence and Security Organisation, which is the big arms seller, Sir Richard Paniguian, who has become chairman of Raytheon in the UK—one of the most astounding revolving door moves going. But he, incidentally, did not go through ACoBA, because he was judged to be a grade too low. I think there are some big questions about whether they are covering the jobs they need to cover. But within a few months he was meeting Sir Martin Donnelly, who is now Permanent Secretary of the International Trade Department and was BIS Permanent Secretary. What were they discussing? All we know is, it was a general catch-up.
Was that lobbying? Almost impossible to tell. If you ask for the details under the Freedom of Information Act you will have no joy at all. It would be “commercially confidential” or “private information” or something. We simply do not know, so whether he has breached this fairly long definition of lobbying is not really the point. The point is that he has met them, and maybe that is the thing we should stop. Maybe we should say, “We are never going to tell whether you were lobbying or not, but we can tell you were sitting down and this was a lunch. Whether you were having a lunch or a meeting or whatever, you do not do that”.
Ian Hislop: The previous academics have said that it is very difficult to know whether lobbying works. I would say: do companies still pay extremely large amounts of money to these people? Yes. My guess is, then, that they think lobbying works. The minute they do not offer this distinguished civil servant a job on the board, then you will know that lobbying does not work or they are not doing it.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I think that speaks for itself.
Q74 Chair: Our predecessor Committee produced a report in 2012 that made a number of recommendations. Do you have any comment on those recommendations?
Richard Brooks: The main recommendation, as I saw it, was that ACoBA should be abolished and replaced with something much stronger, and I agree with that. I think the need for that is now greater even than it was four or five years ago. This phenomenon has accelerated. We know from ACoBA’s own last report that the proportion of people going into jobs in areas they were covering in the public sector has increased too.
I think it is as if a grip on the subject has been lost. It is as if a battle has been lost. It is as if now, in the upper echelons of Whitehall and Westminster, that is what you do—you just go through the revolving door. You need to start again. You need to say ACoBA is not working, which is what you said four years ago. It is still not working. It is working even less well, and we need to start again with a much tougher regulator.
Ian Hislop: Richard’s more general point is that as it accelerates we can see that not only is it open to corruption and ethically undesirable, but there is no evidence that it is effective. Are large projects in this country better managed because we have this traffic between the public and private sectors? The MoD wastes unbelievable amounts of money, gazillions of pounds on military projects that are always over budget, late, fighting the wrong war much later. They are fantastically useless.
The record of G4S, for example—I know you do not want me to be rude here—is total incompetence on any number of public and private projects. Where is the evidence that these people who are paid this large amount of money are contributing to the public good by this merging of the boundaries? There is none. I do not want to be rude about HS2, but is it up and running yet?
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Not quite.
Ian Hislop: No.
Richard Brooks: One point on that. I think there is an assumption that rarely goes challenged that somehow it is a good thing for expertise to be shared, and we need to get expertise in. But I think there is a danger that individual institutions lose their identity, and the healthy tensions you get between regulated and regulator, and between Government Departments that are setting policy and those who are affected by the policy. They ought to be making conflicting arguments, sorting it out between themselves. When you get this continual crossover you end up with groupthink, for one thing. I think that is a big problem.
Another problem is that you end up with a lack of ambition within Government Departments. They do not see expertise as being something for them. They think if they need expertise, “We get it in from a company”, or “We need expertise on contracting, we will get someone in for that”. You end up weakening public institutions and probably private companies themselves.
Chair: I think you are making a very profound point.
Q75 Kelvin Hopkins: First of all, I am an avid reader of Private Eye, of course, and I have mentioned the Dave Hartnett case more than once in the House of Commons, so thank you for that. But my question is very simple and open for you. You have said in your recent “Revolving Doors” Private Eye podcast that PACAC regularly looks at ACoBA and it is forever saying, “Look, this is useless”, and yet nothing has been done since its 2008 report on lobbying. Why do you think nothing has been done?
Richard Brooks: It is the lack of political will, I think. We can probably relate it to the revolving door itself. Your recommendations have been rejected by people—we will have to track them through—one or two of whom, I suspect, have taken jobs through the revolving door. It is essentially a political question. Ian mentioned David Cameron’s comments about ending this great whatever it was. Theresa May has much more recently made some promising comments on irresponsibility, improving standards and so on. I think it is over to you to hold these people to account and to make sure they follow through on these things.
Ian Hislop: I noticed David Davis said, “Cabinet Ministers and senior civil servants are not underpaid. It should not be that they can just go off and take work where they use their influence and contact network”. It is absolutely there in black and white, and that is a member of this Cabinet, so we can only hope that Mrs May, who has announced a number of new brooms, will take on board what the academics keep calling the public perception that this is unhealthy and not good for the public.
Q76 Paul Flynn: When did David Davis say that?
Chair: Not since he was reincarnated as a Minister.
Ian Hislop: No, but people do not necessarily change their opinion, particularly when I agree with it.
Q77 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: We were talking earlier about this being a function of culture, but also age, because there are so many people now who come into politics who think it is a means to an end and not an end in itself. For me it was the pinnacle of my career. Maybe I lack ambition, but I see so many people who want to get into it at a young age and think this is the stepping stone to something that is going to open further riches. But that happens both at the civil service level and at political level, and surely to change that culture is a really big ask.
Ian Hislop: I do not think it requires that much imagination to see a particular period of your life or a particular job you do as being for the public good and not for another stepping stone on your CV. I guess that underestimates a lot of people. I know a lot of retired military people who did not join large defence contractors. They went away and one of them worked for a hospital, one ran a charity. There are other things to do in life apart from join very large well known companies that you have acted for. This is coming from me: it is very cynical to imagine that no one would ever take any other career path and would not understand that public service is slightly different.
Richard Brooks: I think you are also likely to improve politics if people come in. If people know that they cannot exploit their political experience they might think, “Maybe I will go and do something else before politics. I will do it that way round instead”. You may end up with better representation in Parliament.
Q78 Chair: One of the problems we have been told about in our previous inquiry is that the lobbying ban of two years is about as long as you can make a lobbying ban, because in any normal contract of employment you cannot bind people in perpetuity not to do things just because they have worked for you. How long should the lobbying ban be for someone who has been in public life?
Richard Brooks: The two-year lobbying ban may be acceptable, but the bigger question is whether the job should be taken in the first place. If you have prevented inappropriate jobs being taken then the lobbying ban is not such a pressure chamber.
Q79 Chair: How long should a ban be on someone taking up a particular job?
Richard Brooks: In a case where there is a clear conflict of interest there is a good case for a permanent ban.
Q80 Chair: So if you have let a contract to a company then you can never go and work for that company?
Richard Brooks: That is right, yes. I do not see how that restricts people’s lives so much. It is a small restriction, that is true.
Q81 Chair: How do you think the courts would deal with that measure if people challenged it and said it was unreasonable?
Richard Brooks: They would take a view. It is worth testing. It is no good saying what a court would think. It is definitely worth testing.
Q82 Chair: You can see the part that legislators have in this.
Richard Brooks: Yes, of course.
Ian Hislop: They should take a really obvious case like Mr Hartnett’s, and I would like to see that in front of a jury. “Do you think it was fair for the man who was meant to be collecting tax to go off and then work for HSBC, one of the companies that were in trouble about not paying tax?” I am no QC, but I do not think it would take much to convince a jury that this is not an appropriate job.
Q83 Kelvin Hopkins: You said earlier that you do not think it is difficult to do these things, and I have to say I agree with you, but what do you think we should say that could improve the system—I have many thoughts myself—to make a system really work? I can think of much tougher sanctions than even you suggested just now. What do you think we ought to say?
Ian Hislop: I think, as Richard said, the recommendations last time were good, but they ignored them, so you should go further this time.
Richard Brooks: Apart from the bigger questions about what jobs are allowed and what are not, there are also some improvements you could make with the rules as they are and the policing of the rules. The big one I would suggest is opening the process up, because at the moment it looks to be failing. I have investigated a handful of cases where it appears that ACoBA is either acting on unreliable information or summarising the information it has been given unreliably. In the case of Mr Hartnett and Mr Harrison, what ACoBA said about their prior involvement with their proposed employer simply did not match other information that was available, if you looked hard enough. Mr Harrison had had several meetings with BlackRock. He had lunch with them around Budget time. He was George Osborne’s special adviser. All ACoBA’s summary or approval letter said was that he had not dealt with the policies they were concerned with, which simply was not true and ignored the direct involvement. Mr Hartnett’s case—I do not need to go into detail—was even more blatant in the disparity between what had happened and what ACoBA said had happened.
Of course, there is an incentive for officials not to give the full picture on their application. The form says, “What involvement have you had with this company?” so you say, “Well, I have met them, but I met other similar companies too”. You downplay it. We need to be able to see what applicants are saying at the point they say it so that we, and possibly their colleagues who know what they have been up to, can say, “Well, hang on a minute, that is not right” or, “Hang on, there is this big conflict that ACoBA are not being told about”. ACoBA are making decisions on a less than full picture of what has happened, and that is a big reason why the system does not work. That is one point. I will leave it there.
Q84 Kelvin Hopkins: I would say that we would hopefully go further than that and make it stronger. People have the prospect of vast sums of money, even when they are in office, for something they are doing now that may bring rewards later on. Serious financial sanctions on them might be a way of dealing with it. Very serious financial sanctions.
Ian Hislop: In what circumstances?
Kelvin Hopkins: If a civil servant has, for example, worked on a contract and then clearly seems to have been influenced by the prospect of employment with that company afterwards, forfeiting his state pension, for example, or having to repay it. He is betraying a state trust.
Richard Brooks: If there were clear conflict that should be put in the application, but we shall see. In that case the job should not be approved. If the information is not in the form and the applicant has lied then that is clearly very serious, and sanctions like that would be justified, absolutely. That kind of system could work quite well, where you have tougher rules banning certain jobs, tougher rules about the conflicts you declare and then if you are not honest some serious sanction, possibly a criminal sanction.
Q85 Kelvin Hopkins: How would you measure success in monitoring the conduct of former and current holders of public office? Do you have any knowledge of other jurisdictions where there are sanctions that work?
Richard Brooks: I don’t, really. I was interested to hear about the Canadian system. I think that Canadian system does show that you can at least have those rules. This is not beyond the bounds of possibility.
Ian Hislop: You ask what would be success: just some job blocked. The Chairman is right, they would immediately go to court and claim that it is a breach of their human rights to stop them taking a job, but then that does mean ACoBA is entirely pointless. If you cannot ever stop anyone getting a job because you are worried about court action afterwards, then you cannot have ACoBA.
Q86 Kelvin Hopkins: If one case went to court it might open a Pandora’s box, with all the previous cases then being cited, and it might be a question of going back and looking at those cases as well.
Ian Hislop: Yes.
Chair: We want to ask you about the Prime Minister’s Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests.
Q87 Paul Flynn: First of all, just in balance to the Chairman’s less than gracious welcome to you, I have been a beneficiary of Private Eye since almost your first edition, and you have provided a unique source of information over those years. I believe that in this instance, and in many others, you are doing a job that politicians have failed to do—politicians of all colours—either out of cowardice or, in this case, self-interest. We have a very dangerous situation, which you are doing a great deal to expose, in the way that our political system is becoming more deeply corrupt than it has been at any time in my life.
The question I want to ask you is on the Prime Minister’s Adviser on Ministers’ Interests. You have certainly covered this issue. What do you think the function is of the present holder, other than being a lord grand Poo-Bah?
Ian Hislop: That sort of covers most of it. You would judge success, again, by whether they have taken any action. I thought the previous panel was right; it is not that difficult to spot the difference between a vexatious claim that is politically motivated or motivated by malice, and one that is very blatant. I thought your example of Mr Fox was one such example where perhaps parliamentary oversight, rather than just prime ministerial, would have allowed some investigation into Mr Werritty’s business cards and all that sort of detail, which I know we do not want to get into on a personal level.
Q88 Paul Flynn: Why not? I would be very happy to get into it on a personal level. There are two views on the Committee. Richard, what do you think?
Richard Brooks: I think again the answer is more independence—more teeth and more independence. This should not be a Prime Ministerial appointment.
Q89 Paul Flynn: Have you studied why Philip Mawer resigned? He told this Committee that he thought that Liam Fox should have been investigated. Is there not a lesson there? I think this Committee decided at a hearing that his successor was not a fit person to do the job, and said so in a report. Here we have the conscience in Parliament, expressed by Select Committees and yourselves, being ignored by Government who have an interest in continuing a corrupt system. Is that not true? You have written very eloquently, I believe, about the detrimental merging of Government and private interest. We end up with things like the PFI, the privatisation of the health service and so on.
Ian Hislop: It has been the Select Committees on the whole that have got it right, in our experience, in the period we are talking about.
Richard Brooks: That might be a more general lesson—that Parliament, and the parliamentary Committees in particular, maybe need to have more powers in all these questions on propriety and ethics rather than simply having them left to Government and the Prime Minister’s office. There is a long history of independent and effective watchdogs, or watchdogs showing some independence and effectiveness, being quashed or pushed aside. Elizabeth Filkin was another one many years ago. There is this problem that as soon as someone starts doing their job properly they are out. How do you deal with that? I think the answer is probably through Parliament. Again, we always have to go through Parliament rather than the Government and the Prime Minister’s office.
Q90 Paul Flynn: Elizabeth Filkin was sacked for having the courage of trying to do her job properly. It is not political in any way; Gordon Brown set up this reform and he reported two of his Ministers. Do you accept that it was a genuine reform that has just withered on the vine and is totally ineffective now? It just does not happen. One case in five years, and the man is getting £50,000 a year for doing that.
Ian Hislop: It is not impressive, is it?
Paul Flynn: It is not good, no.
Q91 Kelvin Hopkins: You touched on our leaders, our Prime Ministers. We could talk about two recent former Prime Ministers, one of whom had a loathing of the chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, one Alistair Graham, because he was a Scottish Puritan and believed morally that politicians should behave properly, and he was disliked intensely by that regime. Subsequently, another Prime Minister, when a name for a public body was put forward, said, “We can’t have him. He is a rottweiler”. Do we need more rottweilers?
Ian Hislop: I could not agree more. It is a very nice tribute from Mr Flynn. I would just say that I think my colleague, Richard, should take most of the credit for that, and he is, I would say, a classic example. He was a fairly senior civil servant and he decided that rather than go and work for a leading accountant or a missile company he would work for Private Eye, which is a terrible career choice and just shows that it is possible not to take the money.
Q92 Chair: Was that a poacher turning gamekeeper or a gamekeeper turning poacher?
Richard Brooks: I think it was turning from one sort of gamekeeper to another, I hope.
Ian Hislop: The first recorded example. The revolving door is very sticky.
Q93 Paul Flynn: You have made a profound point on the deepening corruption in our systems here and the danger that we all see in public life, and it is deteriorating. We get these pious sermons from Prime Ministers on the day they are elected, and we recall the one on lobbying by David Cameron a fortnight before he was elected. Nothing happened. It seems to have become worse and more corrupt than it ever was. What is your view, with your unique situation, on what the reform should be? Is the 2012 report on ACoBA a good starting point, or how should we do it? An entirely different setup?
Richard Brooks: I think it is a good starting point. You were recommending a different setup. I think that is a good starting point, but I think that better, more independent setup needs to be policing better rules as well—stricter rules on the jobs you can take. ACoBA at the moment, and presumably any successor body if there were one, would be operating under the presumption that the revolving door moves are a good thing in general, and it is just the exceptions that are not. I think the rules need to change so that that is reversed, so that the presumption is that it is not a good thing and that only in exceptions would it be acceptable.
Q94 Paul Flynn: What is your judgment on why there have not been these reforms? We know it is necessary to get a system where there is some control over the revolving door, some way of jamming it or improving it. There is a case for a limit on the time, because the information gets less valuable. Do you think that politicians have not instituted reforms, and is it for one of the two reasons I suggested—either out of cowardice or out of self-interest?
Richard Brooks: I think it is both. David Cameron promised reforms and yet rejected your recommendations, and look what has happened to all his office, as they leave with various gongs and go into very lucrative new jobs. There is clearly self-interest.
Ian Hislop: There is that and, as the Chairman says, there is a worry that the lawyers will come in and say that any restriction on Ministers or civil servants’ freedom to take whatever jobs they like will end up in court with huge costs and then will become unpopular with the public, rather than popular. Again, I think you need to test that, because I do not believe what the previous panel referred to as a public perception can be changed by doing nothing. I think you have to do something.
You were very interesting about lobbying. I do not believe that the only way to sell hardware to Government is to employ someone from Government on your board. Can people on this side of the divide not go along and say, “We need the following hardware”, and “Well, it needs to do this, this and this to serve the purpose we want”? Why is that not a reasonable operation? Why does it have to be done behind closed doors over lunch with people on the board being paid £200,000?
Q95 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: That is another huge discussion, though, which we have been preoccupied with here—the skills of the civil service in procurement and how good our procurement skills are. Maybe that weakness in the civil service lends itself to this system being more—
Ian Hislop: That is a suggestion that the civil service cannot develop or sustain a culture of expertise and that you have to get in an accounting firm who are largely employing 25-year-olds who have not worked anywhere. They come in and tell the civil servants what to do. I do not buy this.
Q96 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: We are very keen on this Committee to make sure that the civil service does have the right skills, that it does have the procurement skills and risk analysis skills, which it seems to have to buy in or go to someone else for. Those should be inherent in our civil service. They always were, and I hope they will be again.
Ian Hislop: The skills they buy in, which is our earlier point, have resulted in a series of Government procurement scandals. The hospital IT scandal was all about experts brought in. That was millions down the drain. The aircraft carriers, all of these things, they are disasters. Where is this expertise?
Q97 Paul Flynn: Can I ask finally about the point you made about whether it is only the great and the good who are appointed to these bodies?
Ian Hislop: I didn’t put it that way. I am all for the good being appointed.
Paul Flynn: A little anecdote. Lord Stevens explained to me patiently that you could not have people who were bus conductors or waitresses on this committee, because they would not be able to express themselves. I had the joy of telling him that I had spent many years working as a bus conductor and I had married a woman who was a waitress. Both of us can string the odd few words together. Do you not think that this endemic snobbery among the elite class is a constant danger, and we should be expanding these committees?
Ian Hislop: Particularly if you are talking about ethics, we have a jury system that is not only for former civil servants and distinguished Members of Parliament. Other people are allowed to sit on juries and work out who has been good or bad, so why can we not have some of them on a more elevated committee?
Q98 Kelvin Hopkins: You touched on IT. This Committee has done a report on IT and suggested that there should be big in-house IT capacity, because Government have been ripped off time and time again by IT companies. When they get it wrong they say, “Give us another contract and we will do it again”.
Ian Hislop: Richard wrote about it in one of his first big stories; that was £12 million down the drain.
Richard Brooks: £12 billion.
Ian Hislop: This is why I need expertise.
Richard Brooks: Easy to get them mixed up.
Q99 Chair: Government has established an IT fast stream intake.
Richard Brooks: On that point, I think there is a big point about civil service expertise. When I was in the civil service I spotted this drift towards expertise beginning to go out of fashion. If you wanted to breast the upper echelons you did that by showing how good you were at delegating and all sorts of nebulous kinds of things, not having expertise in your subject. That really became undervalued, and I think it has been for at least 20 years. We have some serious work to do on that, and the whole revolving door system does not help, because if you want expertise you just buy it in. It is just like living on takeaways—eventually you get pretty unhealthy.
Chair: We could continue in that vein for a very long time, because we are very sympathetic to that view. If you read our reports we have made many recommendations about creating more specialisms and specialist capabilities in the civil service so that it does not have to rely on contractors for that kind of expertise.
Q100 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I have a simple question for you both. What can we, as a Select Committee, do ourselves and recommend in this report to improve the system and to ensure it is independent and to take it forward?
Ian Hislop: Reiterate the points you made and then do it harder. We try to get a certain amount of publicity for the points that are being made, but you have to push it with your colleagues. We think it has to come from Parliament.
Richard Brooks: I hope that you are arriving at the subject again at a good time, given the new Prime Minister and certain statements being made. I think that is really something to trade on—I hope.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I hear that with the Prime Minister it is less about jobs for the boys but that she might be thinking about the girls as well.
Q101 Chair: Are there any other points you want to make? You have listened to a substantial part of the earlier session. Is there anything arising from that? I think we have covered quite a lot of the ground in that session as well, but I do not want to short-change you.
Richard Brooks: I have one small point. We have been very rude about ACoBA, which is really directed at the system. I would add that as a journalist I find day-to-day dealing with the officials who represent ACoBA, and the press officers, very good. They are very helpful and very quickly provide you with the information that they can. They are limited by the system, but there are some people there, notably their press officer, who are very helpful indeed.
Ian Hislop: I suppose all I would add is that I think it would be possible to look at Mr Gove’s relationship with Mr Murdoch, and you may come to the conclusion that it is fine, but that would be up to ACoBA.
Chair: They have looked at it.
Ian Hislop: Already? Have they approved him?
Chair: He has been approved.
Paul Flynn: One of the advantages is that it means that Mr Gove spends less time in the House, which I think the nation should be grateful for. If he spends his time twittering away in The Times, it will not make any real difference, because nobody sensible would read The Times, would they?
Q102 Chair: Are you seriously suggesting that someone whose profession is journalism should not be allowed to carry on their profession if they are no longer a Minister?
Ian Hislop: I sat through the entire proceedings in Leveson, in which one of the main points was the closeness of the relationship between senior members of the Conservative Party and Mr Murdoch. Mr Gove had a number of meetings with him when he was in various of his Departments. I think there is a question there about when you are in office, which is what we have talked about, imagining a future when you might need the generosity of, say, Mr Murdoch, to sustain your career and whether that would influence the decisions you made. That would be absolutely bang on what we have been talking about so far. I think there probably is a question, yes.
Q103 Chair: But in my colleague Mr Gove’s case, how readily do you think he was anticipating being where he is now at this particular moment?
Ian Hislop: Judging by the look on his face on the morning of Brexit he was not, but we are saying that it might have been in the back of his mind.
Q104 Chair: By what criteria would you expect ACoBA to have refused his proposal?
Ian Hislop: I am not saying they should have refused, but I hope they looked very closely at it. I am sorry, I missed the full report, but I think it would be very interesting to go through.
Richard Brooks: On that point, I have not really covered it, but I think whatever body you have that ought to replace ACoBA needs powers to investigate, because the questions you are looking at here are who did what and when. Those are matters of detail that any watchdog needs to be able to look at.
Chair: It is about verification of the evidence with which we are presented, and how complete that evidence is and whether it is corroborated. I think we get the point.
Q105 Kelvin Hopkins: Can I just say that the public have a strong view about MPs having second jobs? I personally do not have a second job, and I put all my energies into this one. There still are a number of MPs who think it is perfectly alright to have a second job, which is sometimes more lucrative than even their very generous parliamentary salary. Is that not an argument we could make?
Ian Hislop: I am not terribly purist about that. It just depends what the job is and whether it conflicts with your primary job as an MP.
Q106 Paul Flynn: A final question, and perhaps I should point out that I do write books but I make no personal financial gain from them.
Ian Hislop: Is that deliberately?
Paul Flynn: They do make money, strangely enough; astonishingly, because of their high moral tone. The money goes to a charity.
Mr Brooks, you are an exception in the civil service, and we have been led to believe that the overwhelming ethos of the civil service is the unimportance of being right. Civil servants who say, “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” to their political masters are the ones whose careers flourish, and the ones who are caught in possession of an intelligent or independent idea see their careers wither. That is a process that is getting worse and more obvious in the civil service. Is that your view—that there is deterioration in the ethos of the civil service?
Richard Brooks: I think so. I left 11 years ago, but I did sense that the civil service was becoming more politicised, not in the sense of left or right but in the sense of going along with what the political master said. The people who progressed to the upper ranks were the ones who said yes, and we ended up with a lot of disasters because of that. Ian has mentioned a few of them, not just big projects but policies as well; big policies like light-touch regulation of the financial sector, for example. People who bent with the political wind were not going to say, “That might not be such a good idea, Minister”.
Kelvin Hopkins: Is this one of the reasons why HS2 is still surviving despite it being a monumental waste of money and a complete white elephant that most people do not want?
Chair: I think we should draw the matter to a close. I have my own hobby-horses, and I am studiously avoiding the temptation to ride them right now.
Can I thank you very much indeed for coming in front of us? I hope you will follow the work of this Committee with interest.