Women and Equalities Committee
Oral evidence: Gender Sensitive Parliamentary Audit, HC 2267
Tuesday 2 July 2019
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 2 July 2019.
Members present: Mrs Maria Miller (Chair); Vicky Ford; Eddie Hughes; Stephanie Peacock; Jess Phillips; Anna Soubry.
Questions 1–82
Witnesses
I: Ian Ailles, Director General, House of Commons, Dr John Benger, Clerk of the House of Commons, Sarah Davies, Clerk Assistant and Managing Director, Chamber and Committees Team, and Sarah Petit, Lead Adviser, Cultural Transformation Team, House of Commons.
Witnesses: Ian Ailles, Dr John Benger, Sarah Davies, and Sarah Petit.
Chair: Welcome to our witnesses and to those who are watching online or in the Gallery. This is the first session of our inquiry into a gender-sensitive Parliament, in which we are focusing on the actions that the House of Commons is taking to complete the recommendations within that report.
I know that everybody is under quite a lot of time pressure this afternoon. I really thank our witnesses and members of the Committee for coming along, because this is a second meeting of our Committee this week, trying to get a time that everybody could meet in. We are not going to beat around the bush; we are just going to get straight on with a set of questions.
Q1 Jess Phillips: Who has overall responsibility for the strategy for implementing the recommendations of “The Good Parliament” report and the “UK Gender-Sensitive Parliament Audit” report in relation to the House of Commons?
Dr Benger: I am John Benger, the Clerk of the House of Commons. I wish I could give you one name and one answer, but I cannot. I think there is a very helpful guide in Alison Stanley’s review of the independent complaints and grievance scheme. She says, at paragraph 1.11, “It does not appear possible to have a single owner across Parliament given the existing authority structures and roles of each House.” I think that is correct.
The House of Commons Commission is clearly a key agent in that. I am a key agent as head of the House Service. There are various parliamentary committees, including your own Committee, which has responsibility for some parts of it, but I do not think you can say, “This will go through if this person and this person sees it through.” It needs a whole range of actors.
Q2 Jess Phillips: Do you think that there would be a benefit to having somebody who was in charge of it driving it through?
Dr Benger: The trouble is “it” is an awful lot of different things, Jess. It is everything from the design of the decanted Chamber for post restoration and renewal, to our policies for proxy voting, employment and IPSA. On IPSA, the clue is in the title—it is independent. I cannot be responsible, for example, and nor can the Speaker, for driving IPSA into a particular course of action.
Q3 Jess Phillips: Of course not. We all know here how we cannot drive IPSA to do things, but if, for example, there was somebody whose job it was to ensure that there was a gender check, or a family sensitivity going on across all that work, to make sure that that was happening, do you think that there would be a benefit in that? It sounds a bit to me, unfortunately, from what you are saying, as if nobody is in charge of it.
Dr Benger: That is because there are lots of different things to be in charge of. There is a natural human instinct to want one person in charge of things, but the things here are multi-fold.
Q4 Eddie Hughes: There is a subtle difference between “accountable for” and “in charge of”. There is a very good reason that the maxim exists: “If it is everybody’s responsibility, it is nobody’s responsibility.” Sometimes you need to be able to track things back—although blame is a dreadful word—to ultimately identify responsibility, rather than it being something that is cascaded around to many people.
Dr Benger: That is a very fair point. I do not disagree with the desire to get this stuff done. I really want to get this stuff done, and I think the Commission is the best place to start, because the Commission is as close as we have to something running this place. However, as I have said, it is everything from the Sponsor Body, which is the key agent for restoration and renewal, to IPSA, which is the key determinant of Members’ pay and conditions. We have Sarah Davies and Sarah Petit who are looking after this stuff, but that is not the same as owning it in the sense that if they do not get it right they resign. That, alas, does not work for this, and in that it is not that unusual.
Q5 Jess Phillips: We are not looking for resignations; we are looking for drivers.
Dr Benger: I think the Commission is the best place to start, and it was the Commission that responded to the IPU audit.
Q6 Chair: Could I bring Mr Ailles in here? You, like me, used to work in the private sector before you came into Parliament, and I looked at your job title and I thought, “Fantastic. I’ve found the man who probably is responsible,” because you are a director general and chair of the Commons Executive Board. You have also worked in Thomas Cook, and I think you are an accountant by trade, so you are used to complex organisations. To be honest, the House of Commons is no more complex than some of the larger corporates that you will probably have dealt with in your world, so why do we find it so difficult to get a structure where we can hold people accountable and you are able to answer Jess Phillips’ questions more directly? We are not really that unusual. It is complex, but for goodness’ sake, it is not beyond the wit of man to get something in place that holds people responsible.
Anna Soubry: Or woman.
Chair: Or beyond the wit of woman, indeed.
Jess Phillips: It’s certainly not beyond the wit of woman.
Ian Ailles: I understand the point you are making. I guess what I would say, and what I recognise as a relative newcomer to Parliament—three and a half years—is that I am still almost baffled by the governance that happens in this place, and how to get things done. good example, since John has mentioned restoration and renewal, is that we are recruiting a number of consultants to help us work with it, and we do an induction programme. At the end of the first morning, we run a test for them on how many people it takes to take a decision in Parliament, and we talk about it being a minimum of seven, because actually to line up something even across the governance in Parliament requires two Speakers, two Leaders of the House, two Clerks, and probably me as well.
Our governance processes, even to do the things within the power we have, are so complex that we cannot do them. When we look at the “UK Gender-Sensitive Parliament Audit” report and the recommendations, many of them are directed at the parties themselves, and those are also outwith Parliament.
Q7 Chair: We do not expect you to be responsible for political parties, but because you have started that line of thought, how would you go from being baffled by the governance of the House of Commons to having something that would actually work?
Ian Ailles: What we have done in other areas is to try to simplify it, and create around safety, for instance, a safety committee that effectively sits between the two Houses, reports to the two management boards, and has that in. However, that is at an official level; it is not within the Members’ ambit, effectively. When I come to interact with Members, I obviously interact with Committees like yours, but for instance, the key committees that sit beneath the Commission are the Finance and the Administration Committees, and they are simply advisory committees.
In the world that I come from, if you have a sub-committee of a board, you have very clear terms of reference, you approach those terms of reference, and you appraise yourself against them. We are moving into, I think, some of the debate that you had in the House recently about a much clearer governance line, and having a much clearer set of terms of reference where you can hold people and committees to account and it is much more tiered.
Q8 Chair: So you would support that.
Ian Ailles: I would. I would have thought that there is a good opportunity to simplify the governance of the House of Commons.
Jess Phillips: You should be a politician, Mr Ailles.
Dr Benger: The House tends to review its governance roughly every five years. It is four and a half years since it last reviewed its governance, so to that extent, I guess the House will take that opportunity soon enough.
Q9 Jess Phillips: Can you tell us what the strategy is for implementing the recommendations of these reports? Maybe Sarah and Sarah?
Sarah Petit: The response to the “UK Gender-Sensitive Parliament Audit”, as John said, was co-ordinated by the Commission, but we wrote to the various different actors to ask them to give their response, and the Commission committed to following that up. At official level, the Commission decided that for those recommendations for which it was responsible, it would prioritise four areas and commit to monitoring them, and we have key owners assigned to each of those recommendations.
Q10 Jess Phillips: What are those?
Sarah Petit: The first is about bullying and harassment, particularly the response to the Cox report; I am here because I work in the team to do that. The second is around a co-ordinated childcare policy and facilities to support it. The Governance Office owns that, and we have a cross-parliamentary team of the various people involved in pursuing that. That would come to Admin and the Commission for agreement eventually.
The third is around bringing together the different sources of information and advice to help Members to scrutinise gender impacts in their work. That is owned by the House of Commons and the House of Lords Libraries. The fourth is around online security threats and other threats to Members of Parliament. That is owned by the parliamentary security team.
Q11 Chair: Who decided that you would not pursue some of the recommendations in the report? I am thinking particularly here about recommendation 20, which was about working hours. That particular issue is something that this Committee talked about in our “Women in the House of Commons” report; it was talked about in the APPG report on improving the House of Commons; it was also something that Sarah Childs talked about in her report, “The Good Parliament”, so this is the fourth time that problems with the predictability of the hours of the House has been raised. It is not that you said it is not within your remit; it is just that you did not address it in your comment. I know that the Leader of the House and lots of other people have lots to say on this, but I am not talking about sitting hours; I am talking about predictability—the absurd way we run ourselves at the moment where we have UQs and statements regularly that completely throw the rest of the day. Why have you decided not to pursue that and who took that decision?
Sarah Petit: The issues that I mentioned are all those that fall within the responsibility of the Commission or the board, and therefore the House, so it is within the gift of the House Service to do those. The four that I mentioned are those that were prioritised by staff in the House Service. There would be a role for staff in the House Service working for the Procedure Committee to support that work, if that was felt to be worth pursuing by members of the Procedure Committee, the Leader, the usual channels and so on.
Q12 Chair: You asked the Procedure Committee. Did they decline to take that up?
Sarah Petit: They said that they would be happy to do so if they were given a strong indication by leaders of the parties that that would be something that was of interest to them.
Q13 Chair: Really? So the House of Commons decide what they are going to do based on the leaders of political parties? I don’t think that that can be right.
Sarah Petit: Sorry; the Procedure Committee indicated that, if they were given an indication that there was real political will behind this, they would be happy to consider an inquiry.
Q14 Anna Soubry: Hang on—sorry, but can we be clear about this? Did the Procedure Committee say “if there was political will”, or did they say “the leaders of the various parties”? There is a profound difference, as we all know.
Sarah Petit: I misspoke—I apologise. It was not the leaders of the parties, but I’m afraid I cannot remember off the top of my head the phrase that they used.
Q15 Chair: This is part of the problem, isn’t it? There is a lack of transparency about who took that decision and why, when it is something that probably exercises Members more than anything else.
Dr Benger: It exercises staff. Believe me—staff of the House would love predictability of hours. Don’t think that we wouldn’t.
Chair: It must exercise every single member of your staff, and I feel terribly sorry for them when their days get screwed up. It is just indicative of the lack of transparency.
Q16 Jess Phillips: How will you assess whether the strategy has been successful? Let’s start with you and the four areas, Sarah.
Sarah Petit: In relation to the Cox recommendations, we have a number of criteria for measuring success, primarily looking at confidence in reporting, initially, and then over time a reduction in reports of bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct, and confidence in the leaders to deal with that. They are the key figures.
As part of the development of the childcare policy, there would need to be—
Q17 Jess Phillips: Can we stop on the Cox thing for one second? Will that be made public? Let’s say, after six months or a year, that that metric will be done. How will the House of Commons be told about that?
Sarah Petit: That will be in our staff survey, which I believe is made public each year. The Commission is also committed to monitoring this.
Q18 Jess Phillips: With the greatest respect, the Commission is not public. I don’t even know who is on it half the time.
Sarah Petit: Our staff survey figures will be made public.
Q19 Jess Phillips: So if people find that the bullying and harassment policy post Cox is not satisfactory, that will be made public.
Sarah Petit: Yes.
Sarah Davies: Can I add to that? One of the roles that I have on the board is to act as a focal point—a driver, if you like—for the work, particularly following up Cox and anticipating what might be said in the White review, which we expect to be published next week.
Over the next three or four months or so, there will be a process. We have had the six-month review—the Alison Stanley review—of the IGCS. There has been a decision in principle to explore a new bicameral structure; the House of Lords is also signed up to this. As we develop that scheme and assess what the six-month review said, and implement it, one of the key things is going to be how we share information about it as it goes forward and how we share information that we can share about what is happening within the scheme, to give reassurance to staff, Members and Members’ staff and the outside world about how people are using it, how many people are using it and what the outcomes are. Part of that is going to be exploring metrics.
Q20 Chair: Are you going to publish an overarching strategy?
Sarah Davies: That is a very good question. We have already talked about the kind of inherent complexity here. As we progress through the next couple of months, and in the lead-up to the first anniversary of the Cox review, which will be in the middle of October, we are already working on a weekly basis on trying to converge different strategies and different action plans together into a single inquiry hub or single documents.
One of the personal objectives that I have is that when we get to that point—when we have considered all the implications of Alison Stanley’s report, subject to the House’s decisions, and the decision of the Commission on non-recent cases, when we have looked at what is in the White review and taken into account how the House Service responds to those points that affect us, and also at the Ellenbogen review in the Lords and whether there are implications for us—by the time we are in September and October, we have a real opportunity to converge these things together. Whether that is a single strategy or a single document, I would very much like it to be something that people can look at. There may be links off of that, but it is a single place of information.
Q21 Jess Phillips: On the staff survey issue, that is staff of the Houses of Parliament, so not my staff.
Sarah Petit: No. When we were doing the ICGS, MAPSA and Unite, the associations representing some Members’ staff, ran a survey and did commit to running that in the future. While that is outside my control, I think that is their intention, so they will get it.
Q22 Jess Phillips: Only for those who are union members, presumably. Or across the board, to staff?
Sarah Petit: I don’t know, I’m afraid.
Q23 Jess Phillips: Because the metric for me is if I was to say to any young woman who has come to work here as an intern, “Is it better now?” I just worry we are not going to capture that.
Dr Benger: On the survey that we have got coming up, the Commons Executive Board took a decision that we would focus specifically on bullying and harassment in a specific survey. I cannot say enough that we are really keen to make progress on this.
Jess Phillips: I don’t doubt it.
Dr Benger: We want to get to a much better place on this and we are quite happy to take the pain in that process—we accept that. Maximum transparency on the evidence is what we need to move forward.
Sarah Petit: We are also proactively publishing the data on calls to the helpline for bullying and harassment and sexual misconduct, and will continue to do that quarterly, and that covers the whole of the parliamentary community.
Q24 Jess Phillips: And, presumably, data on the number of dropouts from the process and so on.
Sarah Petit: Yes.
Q25 Anna Soubry: How does the wider parliamentary community know about the strategy and who is responsible for it?
Dr Benger: Do you mean the House Service strategy?
Chair: The strategy that you are talking about today. The strategy for implementing all the recommendations.
Dr Benger: The Cox hub sits on the intranet and that is our key communication tool—
Q26 Chair: We are talking about the gender-sensitive Parliament, which is what the inquiry is about.
Dr Benger: I think that is where we suffer a little bit from the Commons reference group not currently running, as I understand it. That was an extremely good way of focusing all the different activity. Unfortunately, the message I am giving you, which you don’t like—I understand why you don’t like it—is that there is not one owner of the gender-sensitive Parliament; there are a series of owners.
Q27 Chair: The question is, how do people who are regular Back Benchers or regular members of your staff know about the strategy that you have got for dealing with the gender-sensitive Parliament, and who is responsible for it? That’s the question.
Dr Benger: I don’t think that there is a single strategy for the House service: the Commission owns part of it, IPSA owns part of it, and I as Clerk own part of it. The way I look at it is that the original gender-sensitive Parliament report by Sarah Childs—I was involved with it when it came out, and I worked closely with Sarah—made recommendations to different actors: this actor needs to do this, this actor needs to do that and this is for this particular committee. I know the bits that we deal with at staff level—and Ian, Sarah and so on deal with at staff level—but it is quite hard to say that any one person has a coherent strategy to drive forward the gender-sensitive Parliament at staff level; it is as much for the political parties as it is for IPSA.
Q28 Anna Soubry: That would explain why no one knows about it.
Dr Benger: I think that is a fair point.
Q29 Anna Soubry: I think it is a very good point, if I may say so. Until I was a member of this Committee, I had never heard of it.
Anyway, moving on, the joint Commissions’ response to the “UK Gender-Sensitive Parliament Audit” report refers to having consulted those “across Parliament with relevant responsibilities” in order to publish a response. Can you give us more information about that consultation?
Sarah Petit: Yes. I was asked by the Commissions with my colleagues to write to the relevant actors. Most of them are listed—we tried to structure the response a bit like a Government response to a Select Committee, so we had each recommendation with the response below—and would include, for example, the Minister for Women and Equalities, and the Liaison Committees in both Houses for the Select Committees. I could certainly provide a full list to the Committee, if that would be helpful. There were also the Speakers’ offices, for example, and those kinds of actors.
Q30 Anna Soubry: Why was the consultation only with those with “relevant responsibilities”, and not with those affected by the report’s recommendations? Who made that decision about whom to consult?
Dr Benger: I was not on the Commission at the time.
Sarah Petit: I’m afraid I don’t know.
Q31 Anna Soubry: You don’t know the answer to that, so you won’t know why it was only to those with relevant responsibilities and not to the wider community in Parliament.
Sarah Petit: One thing I would say, from being involved in the childcare work, for example, is that we will be consulting Members as part of that. Even though in the initial overarching response the consultation was limited to the people responsible for the implementation of certain recommendations, there will be further Member consultation and consultation with other groups.
Q32 Anna Soubry: Right, okay. What accountability processes are in place for delivering on the report’s recommendations?
Dr Benger: We come back to the same situation: the Commission needs to be accountable for those things that are for the Commission; I need to be accountable for those things that are for me; IPSA needs to be accountable for those important things that IPSA is accountable for; and so forth.
With respect, I don’t think that means they don’t happen, and I don’t think it means no one is accountable; I just think that it means it is a complicated picture, and it needs to be followed tenaciously. There is a lot of merit in what you are saying: that if one person was surveying this updating, and producing updates on it, that might help us to keep better track of it—
Q33 Chair: Dr Benger, I don’t think anyone is talking about having one person; it is just about having an understandable structure—
Dr Benger: A body.
Anna Soubry: Lack of accountability—that always frightens me.
Chair: It is having an understandable structure for accountability.
Anna Soubry: If I may, it is easy to say, “Well, it’s IPSA, which is of course completely independent, so we can’t look at IPSA,” but in any other organisation there are ways—even if a body is not responsible for this independent structure over here, it still sits under the umbrella—to ensure they are absolutely accountable and retain their independence. They have a duty to perform in a particular way, which has been decided by people who at the end of the day, I suppose, pay their wages. There are ways to do this.
What is worrying is that—no disrespect to any of our witnesses—it is very easy to say, “Oh well, it is awfully difficult, isn’t it?”, but we know there are hugely complex structures. I am thinking about hospitals, which might have all sorts of different independent people within a much wider umbrella, but will nevertheless have a strategy or whatever it might be. They will make darned sure that everybody who sits under that umbrella works to the strategy and is accountable in some way. So we come back to the initial thing that you said, Chair: where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Q34 Chair: It might be worth picking up on the fact that the ICGS review recommended that accountability for the regular review of the scheme should sit with you, Dr Benger. I wonder how that recommendation is being put into place.
Dr Benger: This is the Stanley report. I agree with all her recommendations, but she very systemically and specifically aligns those with different areas. I agree with that in respect of the Clerks—I think there are two or three of them that sit with me, and I completely support that.
Q35 Chair: It actually said the accountability for the review of the scheme should sit with you.
Dr Benger: The review of the scheme. The scheme will be reviewed.
Q36 Chair: And you have agreed that?
Dr Benger: Not only have I agreed, but the Commission has agreed.
Sarah Davies: It is referred to as the 18-month review.
Dr Benger: The idea of 18 months is unhelpful, because the six-month review took more than six months. What 18 months meant was one year from the first review, and that is what we will do. There will be another review finishing in a year’s time.
Q37 Eddie Hughes: The Inter-Parliamentary Union recommends that Parliaments work with gender advisers and women’s groups, develop gender equality action plans and implement training on gender equality, to identify gaps in the process. Which of those have you done?
Dr Benger: Within the House Service, we do a great deal of training on breaking bias in particular ways. Looking at the bullying and harassment training—the “Valuing Everyone” training, which is pretty crucial to this—I think about 1,000 staff have done that training already. That is in very short order. The training has been very successful and highly praised. That is staff doing a three-hour training course—half a day, essentially. That is just one example. I think 33 was the last figure I had for Member take-up of “Valuing Everyone”, with another 70 booking it in. You started it later; it was offered to you later. That has been a very high take-up, which I am pleased about.
Q38 Jess Phillips: Do you have any gender equality action plans specific to the service—on targets for numbers of staff and so forth?
Sarah Davies: Specifically, we have a House of Commons and Digital Service D&I strategy, which covers the period from 2019 to 2022. We can supply copies of that to the Committee, alongside our latest diversity monitoring report. Those things, which contain a whole series of recommendations, are regularly discussed at board level. As members of the board, we are all held to account for various metrics in our own teams as well—for example, workforce diversity is something that we discuss. The information that we have is broken down by protected characteristics and at team level, so that we can monitor progress.
Dr Benger: We have also set up a D&I steering group, which I chair. It is having its second quarterly meeting next week. That has specific action plans and measures, and we would be very happy to share with you some of the paperwork around that. Tomorrow we are going to our D&I awards ceremony, which recognises that D&I at Parliament has a really active workplace equality network that has flourished and grown year on year. There is a lot of work on this within the House Service. Underneath your question, how we influence Parliament as a whole is much more challenging.
Q39 Eddie Hughes: Specifically with regard to sex discrimination, how do we make sure that it does not happen in the House of Commons, and what action are you taking?
Dr Benger: Again, it is much easier for me, Ian and other colleagues to deal with that within the House of Commons Service than, say, the Chamber.
Q40 Eddie Hughes: Okay, let’s deal with the bits you are responsible for. What action are you taking?
Dr Benger: The ICGS covers all House staff; sex discrimination or unwelcome behaviour would be covered through the ICGS scheme. In terms of training, “Valuing Everyone”—
Q41 Eddie Hughes: Could you give us a quick flavour of what you are doing to prevent sex discrimination in the House of Commons—don’t refer to paragraph 7 of some document that we do not have—for the sake of the people in the room who are keen to know?
Dr Benger: Why don’t we take recruitment as a particular area where this might rear its head? We have instituted anti-bias training for board chairs, which we require them to do. We have also trained a number of staff to be particularly skilled interview panellists—I cannot remember the name we use for that. We like boards to have those members of staff on them to ensure that fair processes take place, as well as the normal HR representatives. In our recruitment processes we have done quite a lot, but there is still loads more we can do.
Q42 Jess Phillips: In the reporting that led to the Cox report, there was a huge amount about Clerks of the House being moved left, right and centre, admittedly in lots but not all cases because of Members of Parliament. Can you tell us that if a woman Clerk of the House is put on a Committee where somebody discriminates against her on the basis of her sex, she will not be moved to a different department, sideways, or down in some cases?
Dr Benger: Yes.
Sarah Davies: Yes.
Sarah Petit: Yes.
Jess Phillips: That would not happen. The Member of Parliament would now be taken to account.
Anna Soubry: No.
Dr Benger: Well, there would be due process. That idea that people are moved because they are the problem would absolutely not apply.
Sarah Davies: We have stood in front of town hall meetings before our colleagues and my peers and have been asked the same question, and we have given exactly the same answer. We will back people up.
Q43 Chair: What is due process? I am not aware of what that is and I am a Member of the House of Commons.
Dr Benger: The ICGS is the current due process. In other words, if a member of staff wants to make a complaint about a member—
Q44 Chair: Sorry, I was not talking about complaints; if somebody had experienced some sort of sex discrimination, which they might not want to take through the grievance procedure, you implied there was a due process. Were you referring to the grievance procedure?
Dr Benger: I was talking about the ICGS process, but it is a very fair point Chair, if I may say so, that not everyone wants to go through a formal process. We need to think very carefully about what are the other routes for dealing with problems that come up—
Q45 Jess Phillips: Where Members are involved.
Dr Benger: Indeed.
Jess Phillips: Just have a bloody word with them.
Dr Benger: That can work, and it is one of the things we do.
Sarah Davies: It is something that we do.
Ian Ailles: Among the people on this panel, I would say that we have probably talked to more than a dozen MPs informally. [Interruption.] I think it is very much our role, in the absence of that formality, to ensure that.
Dr Benger: Ian is making a really important point. The Cox report quite rightly criticised senior managers for not supporting staff sufficiently, not having their back and not having those incredibly difficult conversations with Members—they are very difficult; I have done a number of them. I think we are now a lot more open about saying that those conversations have occurred. As a matter of fact, they did occur pre-Cox, but not on the same scale.
As head of service, I have been really startled and impressed by the number of times I have heard about these big, brave, difficult conversations happening. I think it will take a while to build confidence in staff that that is the case, because quite often these things are confidential and they ripple through very slowly. Stories have legs, and people still talk about things that happened five or 10 years ago as if they were yesterday. That is in the nature of an organisation. I am confident that the tone has changed on that and the culture has fundamentally shifted.
Q46 Chair: Can I ask a supplementary here, Eddie? You have mentioned some figures here that you have spoken to 12 Members of Parliament since the grievance procedure was set up, so in just under a year. In an organisation of 650 people, are you saying to us that that is the informal level of the problem and then there will be those that will be taken forward to formal complaints? You said the figures were public but I do not have them at my fingertips.
Ian Ailles: We have the formal numbers. In the informal route, one of the key issues is that when we are made aware of something, it is important to effectively strike while the iron’s hot. It is escalated principally to John and me, and we would go almost immediately to see those Members. We do it on an informal basis because it is raised informally and is not something we keep a direct record of. That is a—
Q47 Chair: So that is just an estimate?
Ian Ailles: Yes.
Dr Benger: The ICGS breakdown does not at the moment, I think I am right in saying, give a breakdown by—do you want to say that, Sarah?
Sarah Petit: I was going to give the overall headline figures, which are that there have been around 550 calls to both helplines over the past nine months and that has resulted in around 35 investigations launched. At the moment, because the numbers are small, we are not able to break down the data, but we are exploring with the providers of those helplines how much information they can give us.
Q48 Jess Phillips: And that will go to the Standards Committee.
Chair: No, not all of them will be Members.
Jess Phillips: Not all of them will be Members, but those who are Members will go to the Standards Committee.
Sarah Petit: That is the investigations launched, and because of the nature of—there was a big increase in calls over the last quarter and they take some time to investigate, so we are probably about to see them start coming through.
Sarah Davies: That’s investigations launched, not concluded.
Jess Phillips: No ruling.
Sarah Davies: The Standards Committee would come in at a much later stage. Here we are talking about investigations lodged with the ICGS.
Jess Phillips: It’s problematic if it is has Members of Parliament—
Dr Benger: It cannot be stated too often that the majority of complaints of bullying and harassment are about staff on staff.
Q49 Chair: Can I ask whether you think this is a big problem?
Dr Benger: I think it is a huge problem in terms of something we have got to deal with, yes. If you are asking me how the prevalence compares now to when the Cox report came out, we need more data. That is why the data is very important.
Bullying and harassment is a massive problem in the organisation. Like many colleagues, I have been on the wrong side of it from Members over the years, although not very often; I’m quite a resilient character and I am in a very senior position.
Q50 Chair: Just from Members—never from a colleague who is not a Member?
Dr Benger: I’ve had behaviour from one or two colleagues, which I would say was quite close to being bullying in nature, or undermining at least. When these things happen—and some of you will know this—it is incredibly stressful and depressing. It diminishes your confidence. It can induce sleeplessness and it makes you act in very odd ways. I think it is a huge problem.
Q51 Eddie Hughes: The six-month review of the independent complaints and grievance scheme found that the amount and complexity of work to implement the scheme was “substantially underestimated”, meaning that “far too little resource” was put into implementation and there was a lack of the experience and capacity needed to deliver such important work. What lessons have been learned from this for wider work on gender equality in Parliament?
Sarah Davies: On our response to Alison Stanley’s review, we take those recommendations very seriously and we are pleased that the Commission has already endorsed the next steps in terms of an action plan for implementing the Stanley review’s recommendations. It is going to look again in July at the staffing model for the ICGS scheme going forward and some ideas on governance of that scheme.
Your point on resourcing is right there. There are some concerning comments in the Stanley review about the length of time to conclude cases, for example, the length of time people have had to wait. If one can imagine: if somebody has gone to make a complaint and there are then long delays while they are waiting to hear, that is a horribly stressful time already. I cannot imagine what it is like then waiting and waiting and waiting to find out what is going on. We take that constructive criticism very seriously.
I look forward in my role to working with the ICGS scheme director over the next few months to ensure that we have got the right level of resourcing for the next steps in the scheme. I think your point was not just about the ICGS, though, was it? It was about learning wider lessons. That is a very important point. The scheme was clearly introduced at considerable speed. We wanted to get this in as soon as possible, and resources are always tight. We are spending public money and there is always, I guess, a likelihood of underestimating time or resources.
I would hope that in the next steps taken both in terms of the six-month review and more widely, we look and say, “We should put more resources into that from the start.” Perhaps it responds to the point that has been made about complexity—that one of the ways to cut through complexity is to ensure that you are front-loading some of the strategy work. You are doing it early on; you are realising what the links are and what the interdependencies are and what the unforeseen consequences might be, and you are thinking about that at the start, rather than trying to work it out as you go along.
Q52 Stephanie Peacock: What efforts are being undertaken to learn from best practice from other Parliaments across the world and perhaps from international research as well?
Dr Benger: Shall I start on that? The thing that has struck me most powerfully was a recent report, conducted by Debbie Francis, into bullying and harassment in the New Zealand Parliament. It is a fantastic piece of work, I think. I am married to a New Zealander. It is the nice country. As she says in the report, everyone says New Zealand is a really nice country, so how can they possibly have this problem? When they looked into it, they had a very serious problem of bullying and harassment.
She makes a number of very specific and very interesting recommendations and the Commons Executive Board has all had a look at that report and we are reflecting on some of the actions she has taken there. Some of them mirror things in the Cox report and in the ICGS review, so there is work going on there.
In terms of where we want to get to, I would say—and I talk to a lot of colleagues, particularly from Commonwealth countries but also other Parliaments in Europe and so on—that we aim to have the most ambitious and comprehensive bullying and harassment policy of any Parliament in the world.
We are already—for what it is worth—way ahead of most Parliaments. Most Parliaments have nothing on this but this is an issue that many of my colleagues are just beginning to wrestle with. That is partly a societal thing. Society as a whole has woken up on lots of these issues. I particularly commend the New Zealand report because I thought it was very thought-provoking, and there are some specific actions I have taken away from that.
Sarah Petit: Are you interested in wider than bullying and harassment?
Stephanie Peacock: Yes.
Sarah Petit: In relation to childcare, for example, in my previous role I visited Scotland to look at the crèche in their Parliament and talk to the people who run that. We also make use of a network whereby we can learn from others around, so we can try to establish what kind of childcare facilities there are.
Picking up the point about the New Zealand parliamentary report, one of the interesting things that struck us was around conflict resolution. Going back to Jess’s point about trying to nip things in the bud, that is something we have taken away to think about as well.
Q53 Vicky Ford: When we had that amazing “Women of the World” conference with women from 100 different countries, one thing that many of us had in common was the harassment that we as women politicians get online. Are there any workstreams happening in that area?
Ian Ailles: I guess there are two areas that I would point at specifically. The MSSS scheme that sits in the parliamentary security department supports all parliamentarians but particularly the 650 Members, and is aimed at supporting around social media harassment, effectively. I would also point to what I think is called PLAIT, which is a Commons department with the police where we look at harassment—the mixture between the online and the physical world—to support Members both here and in their constituencies.
Q54 Vicky Ford: I understand what is happening here. Are there any workstreams happening internationally that we are involved in on that?
Sarah Petit: Not that I am aware of.
Ian Ailles: I am not aware of that.
Q55 Vicky Ford: It would be a really interesting action to take.
Dr Benger: Yes, that is a good point.
Q56 Stephanie Peacock: Other than this inquiry, how will work to create a gender-sensitive Parliament be scrutinised?
Dr Benger: Probably by your Committee. The demise, or suspension, of the reference group is a shame from that point of view, because that was a fairly active group. We are very lucky to have a Women and Equalities Committee—one of the few green lights in the audit was the creation of this Committee. You are a scrutiny body. At staff level, then yes, as head of the service I am determined that we drive this agenda forward.
Q57 Anna Soubry: Can I just pick up on this again? I am slightly concerned about why—given that most countries have parliaments, presumably with some of the difficult structures we have heard about—almost the first port of call has not been to go to others and say, “So how do you do it?”
Dr Benger: Is this the social media monitoring particularly?
Q58 Anna Soubry: All of it—the whole kit and caboodle.
Sarah Petit: We do regularly meet with other parliaments to talk about these issues. I was talking to some colleagues from the Canadian Parliament who were here a couple of weeks ago about the work they are doing on cultural transformation. We do have all kinds of different networks.
Anna Soubry: But it’s not having a chat. It’s—we’ve got this report, which is looking at how we can sort things out and make things better. These may well be common problems shared with other parliaments, for the reasons I have just explained. It just seems quite an obvious thing to go and say, “Have you got this problem and that problem? How do you do it; what can we learn from?”
Vicky Ford: To be fair, having been on the audit, that international comparison was a large part of it—it was run by the Inter-Parliamentary Union. It was only the particular element of the online impact and how that is affecting certain aspects.
Q59 Chair: I’m really conscious of pressure on time. Could I just move us forward on our questioning? Other than this inquiry, how will you work to create a gender-sensitive Parliament being communicated to the House more widely? Is the answer that you don’t see that as your responsibility?
Dr Benger: Parts of it are my responsibility, Chair, and parts of it are responsibilities here. But it needs a lot of people working together to achieve that.
Q60 Chair: But it’s not your particular responsibility?
Dr Benger: It is for the House Service. There are elements of that which apply to the House Service, absolutely.
Q61 Chair: Who is responsible for the House Service?
Dr Benger: I am responsible for the House Service.
Q62 Chair: So do you see it as your responsibility to communicate within the House about the gender-sensitive Parliament?
Dr Benger: As an abstract concept, it will have less bite with staff than specific things. It is the specifics that we need to make. For example, if we take flexible working—
Q63 Chair: No, I’m not making you responsible for that. I am just talking about communicating about it—about what the progress is. We haven’t seen any communication, other than your response.
Dr Benger: I think the specific recommendations from the IPU audit—
Sarah Davies: Were more for the Commission.
Dr Benger: The Commission, than for me. Yes.
Q64 Chair: We will come to the Commission in a moment. I have got another couple of questions before I come onto that. Though this inquiry is focused on matters related to gender equality, those working in and visiting Parliament experience other forms of inequality. What plans have you got to tackle those?
Dr Benger: Again, within the House Service we have talked about the D&I steering group. There is a massive amount of work going on there, which is really bearing fruit. For example, if you look at our gender pay gap, it is incredibly low by public sector standards: 1.6% or 1.5%. That is really low, and I am very proud of that. Our workplace equality networks are thriving. I did a series of grade-level staff consultations when I was heading CCT, the role that Sarah now has. They had to say three bad things about working here and we beat ourselves up and said, “What’s one good thing, so we don’t go home completely miserable?” The thing that came through again and again, and the good thing, was our flexible working policies, which were seen as having dramatically improved.
Chair: You can work till 2 in the morning if you want to.
Dr Benger: That’s changed dramatically since I arrived: it is hugely different. We have a vast number of people who work flexible hours, compressed hours, different arrangements and so on. It seems to be a very good place to work flexibly.
Q65 Chair: Although, going back to my earlier point about the lack of predictability of hours here and the response that you gave me, for some members of staff, particularly your Clerks, it is horrendously unpredictable, and that is difficult.
Dr Benger: You are right, but as head of the Chamber and Committees Team, I took the brave decision to say that they could take leave when the House is sitting. I thought that that was not that big of a deal. It was hugely popular.
Sarah Davies: Can I just add something very quickly? You mentioned visitors to the estate. We have already spoken about the D&I strategy that we have, and there is a whole section on involving and inspiring the public. That includes specific actions about ensuring that all visitors are able to access on-site engagement activities and about reviewing participation team policies to ensure that services are inclusive and so on. There is quite a detailed action plan in place about visitors in particular.
Dr Benger: R and R will be the real game changer.
Q66 Chair: What is the role of the House of Commons Commission in implementing the gender-sensitive Parliament report and recommendations?
Dr Benger: It has given a number of areas where it has responsibility. I think that the simplest thing is to look initially at “The Good Parliament” report and then at the audit, and extract from those the things that are for the Commission, of which there are a number.
Q67 Chair: Do you ever discuss it on the Commission?
Dr Benger: In the abstract, not since I have joined the Commission. I have only been on the Commission since March—Ian has been on it longer—but if we looked at the Cox-specific issues, which are right at the top of my agenda, I would say—
Q68 Chair: If I could bring you gently back to the gender-sensitive Parliament—that is what we are talking about.
Ian Ailles: We discussed it when the response was constructed. That was the one time, so I think that was in October or November of 2018.
Sarah Petit: It was published in December and you would have discussed it in February.
Q69 Chair: So it is not the body that monitors the recommendations and whether they have been implemented?
Ian Ailles: Yes. Clearly I am not the Chair of the Commission, but we would push strongly that for reports such as this we would come back every six to nine months to monitor how the outcomes are. That is what we have done with other reports that have come to the Commission.
Sarah Petit: In the published response, the Commission commits to following up annually. As you are probably aware, Chair, there is also a recommendation in the audit that there might be a role for this Committee and the Joint Committee on Human Rights to monitor data on various aspects of the gender-sensitive Parliament. That was the audit panel’s view of who might perform that. As I say, the Commission is committed—
Chair: That is very small.
Sarah Petit: To monitor annually the recommendations.
Q70 Chair: We are just moving to the end of our session given people’s time limitations. We invited you because we thought that you were responsible for this report and we wanted to find out who was responsible and how it was being implemented, for no other reason that we think that it is really important and we have a scrutiny function. Without wanting to appear at all facetious, could you each tell me in turn who you report to so that I can get a sense of who might be responsible for all this? As Anna and I have been saying, if there is a fundamental problem with the structure of the management, I guess, because we fiercely protect this place, Members are ultimately responsible for that, aren’t we? Sarah, who do you report to?
Sarah Petit: I report to Julie Harding, the independent director for cultural transformation. We are responsible for translating the Cox recommendations into a programme of meaningful lasting change.
Sarah Davies: I report to Ian.
Dr Benger: I do not report to anyone. I am a Crown appointment.
Chair: You report to the Queen.
Dr Benger: She has not called me in for my annual review yet.
Ian Ailles: I report to John, but our slightly strange governance means that I chair the board on which John sits.
Q71 Chair: That is interesting. I had not appreciated that.
Dr Benger: That was a Straw committee recommendation.
Q72 Chair: Who do you think is responsible for the running of the House?
Anna Soubry: Which House?
Dr Benger: That is a good question, Anna. Which House?
Chair: The House of Commons. This is not a trick question.
Dr Benger: The House of Commons Commission is the most obvious. If you are going to have one answer, that is it.
Q73 Chair: So if we are going to try to find a solution to this problem, would I be right in thinking that the solution might be in the way in which the House of Commons Commission works? I was being a bit facetious by asking that question, because I know that the House of Commons Commission is responsible.
Dr Benger: I think in the debate the issue was raised about whether there were governance issues that needed reviewing. I think that was a very fair observation. It is not unusual, as I said before, for the governance structure to be scrutinised every few years, so maybe we are reaching that point.
Q74 Chair: So the Speaker is the chair of the House of Commons Commission. What is the Speaker’s role in the running of the House?
Dr Benger: He is the chair of the House of Commons Commission. He is a member and chair of that body, which is, for example, the employer of our staff. That is a pretty fundamental role.
Q75 Chair: Okay, so the Speaker really has a fundamental role in the running of the House. `
Dr Benger: Yes.
Q76 Chair: Yet there has been no mention of his role in any of the proceedings today, which is interesting.
Dr Benger: I think we have mentioned the Commission as a collective body that he chairs, but he has a distinct role in other areas, obviously. For example, he is one of the formal consultees for IPSA, as is the Leader of the House. I think I was treating the Commission as a body, rather than saying, “The Speaker and the rest of the Commission,” if you see what I mean.
The Speaker also has a role in enforcing order in the House. Some of the stuff in “The Good Parliament” report about conduct, manners, orderly language and so on obviously sits more with the Speaker.
Q77 Chair: Forgive me—I have a couple of other questions. The D&I strategy is very broad. Do you think that it is going to be appropriate to develop a specific gender equality strategy and action plan, just so that you can throw a really sharp spotlight on to this?
Dr Benger: I have the strategy steering group meeting next week, so I will ask them what they think the advantages are. We have a head of diversity and inclusion, Jennifer Crook, and that is her area. She probably would not welcome me immediately deciding how she should go about something, but I think it is a fair question and I will raise it at that meeting.
Q78 Chair: It would be remiss of me not pick up with you recommendation 28 within the gender-sensitive Parliament report. Your response sort of implies that the Equality Act does not quite apply to the House of Commons—at least that is the way I read it. You will know that the Equality and Human Rights Commission takes a very different view from you on that: that the House of Commons is a public body exercising public functions, other than those exempted under schedule 18 of the Equality Act 2010, and therefore is subject to public sector equality duties under section 149 of the Equality Act.
The EHRC indicated in writing to you at least seven months ago that they might use their power to conduct an assessment, which is one of their statutory functions, of the House of Commons, given the evidence that has been put forward under the Cox report in terms of bullying and harassment. There have also been other issues about your policies, or the policies put forward around non-recent cases of bullying, which I know have been resolved. For the House of Commons to have two issues of lawfulness is not great, and Members, when they are made aware of it, are very unhappy. What are you doing to address this?
Dr Benger: I have to say that I think that their legal view is entirely wrong. I checked this with the Speaker’s Counsel just today, because you helpfully tweeted that you were concerned about this, and the Speaker’s Counsel and I can submit the note to your Committee. It is therefore quite clear that section 149 does not apply to the House of Commons. It is absolutely clear about that. This is our primary legal adviser.
Q79 Chair: So you don’t think that the Equality Act applies to you?
Dr Benger: There are areas of the Equality Act that apply to the House, but section 149 does not apply to the House of Commons.
Q80 Chair: So you don’t think that you have a public sector equality duty?
Dr Benger: No, no, no; I think there is a distinction between the legal requirements and responsibility and what we want to do as an organisation, which is absolutely to foster diversity and inclusion, and equal opportunity. That is not the same as saying that we are subject to section 149 of the Act, because we aren’t.
Q81 Chair: Okay. Given that the people sitting on this side of the table are the ones who make the laws, we need to look into this, because I don’t think that your interpretation was the intent of the law.
Dr Benger: I dare say that that is right.
Q82 Chair: Therefore your legal adviser is interpreting the law in a way that is different from the interpretation that was in place when this was put into place.
Dr Benger: It is specifically excluded in schedule 18. There was a conscious decision to—
Chair: Not for all of your functions. Anyway, that is genuinely really helpful of you to give us that view because, if that is the legal advice that you are getting, I suppose we can go away and clarify it for you. Fantastic. Any other questions from Members?
Anna Soubry: I’m afraid I do need to go. I am conscious of the quorum—forgive me.
Chair: No, no. Thank you very much. That is the end of this evidence session. I ask our witnesses to leave, with our enormous thanks for eating into your day. I know you are busy. I also ask people in the Gallery to leave as well. We will just have a short private session. Thank you.