No civil servant who went through the complaints process against the former justice secretary Dominic Raab would ever want to go through it again, such was the ordeal, MPs have been told.
There was “zero confidence” in the process of raising complaints about ministers and the ministerial code was “completely inadequate”, trade union leaders representing civil servants told the Commons standards committee.
Party leaders were “failing to get their house in order” when it came to protecting employees from the behaviour of MPs and excluding accused figures from the parliamentary estate, Dave Penman and Mike Clancy, the general secretaries respectively of the FDA and Prospect unions, told the committee.
Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the House of Commons, later told the same committee that MPs had complained that the threshold for triggering a recall petition was too low.
Under current legislation, any MP who is suspended from the Commons for 10 days or more can be subject to a recall petition, which triggers a byelection if it is signed by 10% of the MP’s constituents.
Mordaunt said several MPs had complained to her that the 10-day threshold meant there were no “middle options” for censuring misbehaving MPs short of them potentially losing their seat.
Earlier, Penman told the committee that the ministerial code was “completely and utterly inadequate” for the purpose of regulating conduct among ministers and civil servants, citing the cases of prime ministers who he said had refused to sanction investigations against political allies or acknowledge evidence.
“There is one individual who decides whether there will be an investigation and what the outcome of that investigation will be and there is zero confidence in the process of raising complaints. Ask anyone involved in the recent high-profile complaint against the former justice minister and they will say they will never go through that process again,” he said.
Clancy said when it came to the need for MPs to undergo training to make them better employers, “MPs need to own the desire to have that training and as an overall cohort stand up to what I think would be criticisms of this from certain elements of the media that this was a form of ‘woke’ behaviour forced upon them reluctantly.”
He said: “We don’t want add to that particular bonfire but if MPs are able to approach this positively it will make them better parliamentarians and improve our democracy.”
In their written evidence to the committee, the trade unions said they had been pressing over the past two years for parliament to adopt a formal mechanism by which MPs arrested on suspicion of a sexual or violent offence would be prevented from accessing the parliamentary estate and from undertaking parliamentary-funded travel.
“But there is a growing fear that institutional inertia – as opposed to outright resistance – might delay further progress on this until after the election,” they added.
