Sir Christopher Chope
MP for Christchurch · Conservative · United Kingdom
“When was the last time that an allotted Opposition day was withdrawn in the way that the Leader of the House is withdrawing this one? I was looking at my calendar of business, otherwise known as the Order Paper, and it says that “The selection of the matters to be debated will be made by the Leader of the Opposition (Standing Order No.”
“The Climate Change Committee has condemned the Government for failing and falling short of adapting to climate change and accepting the reality as it is, which is that by the end of this century, global temperatures will have increased to between 3.5° and 4.5° above pre-industrial levels.”
“The Minister has referred to the grooming gangs inquiry carried out by our friend, the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe), and early-day motion 380 makes a number of recommendations. Will the Minister engage with the hon.”
“The landmark 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence by the United States takes place in the week commencing 29 June. I have applied for an Adjournment debate, but will the Leader of the House enable more Members to be able to participate in marking that historic event?”
“That is exactly what I did on behalf of my constituent Paul Kenchington: I wrote to the Secretary of State about the specialist steel that he uses, and I have not had a reply.”
“Next week, can the Leader of the House produce a Government statement in response to the Hallett review on covid-19 vaccines? Lady Hallett recommended major reform of the vaccine damage payment scheme.”
The complete record
Every one of 5,444 lines we hold for Sir Christopher Chope, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 64 of 109.
“Expectations among the complainants are being raised, but they are not being delivered on by the ombudsman because a lot more cases are being taken on which probably should not have been taken on in the first place. The report states that because the ombudsman is “taking on many more investigations than before, the proportion of investigations…upheld or partly upheld has inevitably declined”. I think that the expression “inevitably declined” is a bit of an underestimate, because it has declined from 86% to 42%, which is a dramatic reduction in one year.”
“The average compensation payment that was paid out in 628 cases amounts to less than £1,000. I am not sure that anyone coming from another planet and looking at this system would say that it is financially well focused. The average cost of dealing with a complaint is over £4,000. The average amount paid to a successful complainant is just less than £1,000. That shows that there is a potential problem in relation to the funding of the ombudsman service. That may be exacerbated by the ombudsman’s decision to take on more complaints for investigation by “lowering the threshold” for investigating such complaints. As the annual report makes clear, the consequence of that is an increase in the number of complaints being investigated, only a reduced proportion of which is being concluded in favour of the complainant.”
“The amendment would add to clause 1 the words: “If the reason for the delay specified in Section 2HA is lack of financial resources it shall be the duty of the Commissioner to set out the action which is being taken to remedy that lack of financial resource.” Again, if the delay is due to financial reasons, it is surely important that the world outside, and particularly the complainant, should know about that so that they can make the necessary complaints. It is also important that the ombudsman is able to say, “Well, because of a lack of financial resources, I am not able to deal with these cases as quickly as I would have wished. Therefore, I am asking Parliament for more money to help us meet our case load.” There is a £15 million budget for this exercise. Each case currently costs some £4,000 on average.”
“When that statement is sent, it would not just explain the reason for the delay, but contain an estimate of the target date for completion of the investigation. I accept that, in itself, that would not be much use, because if there is another target date—it could be in another year—there may still be no remedy for the complainant. At least, though, it would force the ombudsman service to apply its mind to how much longer it thought it was reasonable for the investigation of the complaint to take. Amendment 5 brings us into a slightly different territory. I suspect that a main reason for the delay in dealing with these complaints is a lack of resource.”
“As it stands, clause 1(2) says: “Where the Commissioner has not concluded an investigation before the end of the 12-month period…the Commissioner must send a statement explaining the reason for the delay to the person who made the complaint.” But it does not say when the commissioner should send that statement. Unless there is a requirement on the timing of that statement, the measure is completely meaningless. It may be that that statement will be sent at the same time as the ultimate decision is made. In an effort to make the Bill do what my right hon. Friend wants it to do, which is to put pressure on the health service commissioner to deal with complaints in a timely fashion, I am suggesting a modest amendment. Amendment 4 is on the same theme.”
“If we pass new clause 3 and include it in the Bill, we will have a useful piece of legislation, instead of an empty vessel—although even an empty vessel with the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden on it will be cherished by many people, especially his constituents. Amendment 3 is more specific. It will require the commissioner, in fulfilling the obligations set out in clause 1, to explain the delay before the end of the 12-month period, rather than after it. At the moment, there is a lacuna here—perhaps it is a deliberate one—to ensure that the minimum pressure is applied, which will show that we are just engaged in gesture politics. I hope that that is not correct.”
“Again, my hon. Friend makes a first-class point. I hope that, when the Minister responds to this short debate, she will support the line that is being taken. We need to ensure that there is no scope for statutory bodies to avoid their responsibilities to deliver and that we facilitate the ombudsman to reach a result within 12 months of a complaint being made. At the moment, the ombudsman is dealing with about 4,000 complaints a year, some 3,000 of which are related to health. The cost of those complaints to the taxpayer is about £4,000 a time. As the taxpayer is investing that amount of money, a reasonable return on that would be to say that those complaints should be dealt with in a maximum period of one year.”
“I shall leave my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) to address his amendments 1 and 2. If some of these amendments were accepted, I think the Bill might have some worth and value.”
“That is where I would disagree with the ombudsman service’s strategy, which is to try to maximise the number of complaints. When people make complaints, it often involves quite an effort on their part and they normally make them on the basis that they expect a positive result. They do not make them hoping that their complaint will be rejected, thereby endorsing the national health service, local government organisation or other body for performing in a way that did not result in the complaint against them being justified. The best organisations are organisations that have no complaints against them and I should have thought that that was what we should be aiming for—a health service in which there were no complaints, or in which all the complaints were dealt with long before they came before the ombudsman. Those are my amendments.”
“In my constituency, for example, a head teacher of a school that was unfairly done down by Ofsted was told—or it was implied—that he could complain to the ombudsman service, but the ombudsman service deemed his complaint to be outside its scope. Although he is an individual, as he is the head of a school, Ferndown upper school, the complaint is regarded as coming from a public organisation and therefore does not come within the scope of the ombudsman’s rules. I would prefer to see the scope of the ombudsman to investigate issues widened, while keeping a focus on complaints that are prima facie likely to be well founded, to going down the road of saying that we should have many more complaints and that when we reject those complaints it means that the public services are doing very well.”
“I do not go along with that, I am afraid. It is rather like saying that we should encourage the maximum number of complaints against something, engaging bureaucracy and taxpayer expenditure to deal with the complaints, to give some perverse satisfaction to the people who want to say that the Government service, in this case the health service, is doing a good job. If we want to measure consumer satisfaction with public services, there is a much more direct way of doing it than looking at how many complaints against their services have been made and rejected. By way of an aside, one difficulty with the ombudsman service is that it cannot take on complaints from public sector organisations.”
“With the greatest respect, I think that my hon. Friend misunderstands the amendment. The idea is to increase transparency so that rather than the commissioner being able to complain sotto voce that this is all because they do not have enough money, that would have to be brought into the open, and then the very points that he and my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) have been making about the ability of many public sector organisations to get a lot more bang for their buck could be exposed to public debate.”
“My right hon. Friend refers to potential legal liabilities, but my understanding is that anybody who comes before the ombudsman with a complaint has to give a guarantee that they are not intent on taking legal redress.”
“The Minister has indicated her potential support, so perhaps she would like to intervene on me to guarantee that, should that eventuality arise, the Government would give the Bill the necessary time to ensure that it was not frustrated by that process but reached the statute book. I must say that I am tempted to press amendment 3 to a vote, because it might be easier to include it in the Bill now rather than have a promise that something will be done later. One could sum up this debate by saying, “Excuses, excuses, excuses.” It is so easy for public sector organisations to make excuses about why they cannot meet particular time limits.”
“May I thank everybody who has participated in this debate and my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), the Bill’s promoter, for his generous offer to at least consider amendment 3? I do not mean to be churlish, but it is a problem that we are debating the Bill on the penultimate private Members’ Friday. If my right hon. Friend were to choose, on reflection, to incorporate amendment 3 in an amendment in the other place, he would, in effect, jeopardise his Bill, because we would then have to consider it again after it had been amended.”
“I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for putting that suggestion, which could help, on the record. On the issue of excuses, I fear that we are entering the territory of double standards. When my constituents who are company directors are required to submit their company accounts by a particular day and fail so to do, or when other constituents are required to submit their tax return by 31 January and fail to do so, that failure incurs a penalty of £100 and there is no room for excuses such as family bereavements, delays by accountants or third parties and all the rest of it. In relation to the excuses made by Departments, or the ombudsman in this case, on which we want to place similar obligations, we are not consistent.”
“My right hon. Friend is right to say that we are talking not about a Department but about a parliamentary sponsored organisation that tries to hold the Government to account. Yesterday, the House discussed the whole saga of Equitable Life, and what a long drawn-out saga it was. We know that the ombudsman tried desperately to get timely responses from the Treasury and other Departments, and was frustrated at every turn. Looking back at that, we can see that being able to say that she had a statutory obligation to deliver the result of an inquiry within a particular period would have helped rather than hindered her in the work she had to do.”
“I hear what my hon. Friend says. In essence, the more usual scenario in cases of bereavement is that people want what they describe as closure sooner rather than later. The Bill has been introduced to emphasise that it is the will of the House that such matters should normally be dealt with within 12 months.”
“Members for their contributions to this short debate, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion. Clause, by leave, withdrawn . Third Reading”
“My right hon. Friend gives an example of which he had direct experience. All I can say is that it is a pity that people who present their tax return late are not allowed the same indulgence—saying that their affairs are very complex, or that their accountant let them down—to avoid a penalty. There is an issue with ensuring consistency in the rules. We have had a good run round the circuit on this matter. As in the previous debate, this again emphasises that, as Eric Forth said, Bills should never go through on the nod without proper discussion. Although people may have looked at the Bill and thought it a pretty minor piece of legislation, even such a Bill—I have not seen many that are more minor—is worthy of discussion to work through its implications. Having said that and thanked hon.”
“I fear that the Bill is in danger of raising expectations, because it does not require the health service ombudsman to do anything to bring forward a resolution of complaints within 12 months. All it does is to say that if she does not, she has to include references in the annual report and communicate with the complainant. Even on the basis of the summary in the explanatory notes, I fear that the Bill falls short of the expectations of its promoter. Obviously, if we are in the business of littering the statute book with more pieces of legislation, there is no reason why this one should not be added to the others.”
“I hope that I have not been too harsh on my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) in the course of this debate. In preparing for Third Reading, I looked at the explanatory notes to the Bill. The summary states: “The Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill seeks to increase the effectiveness of the Commissioner (known as the Health Service Ombudsman), who is the final tier of the NHS complaints system. It does so primarily by requiring the Health Service Ombudsman to take action with a view to concluding investigations of complaints within 12 months”. The Bill does not actually do that. That is my concern.”
“Under my proposals, it would not be possible to use the extensive powers in the Bill other than in respect of breaches of the code of conduct in the other place. It is important to put that safeguard in the Bill, given comments bandied around by Members of the other House. On Report, when discussing clause 2, the noble Lord Wallace of Saltaire—”
“Subsection (4) reads: “A resolution passed by virtue of subsection (1) must state that, in the opinion of the House of Lords, the conduct giving rise to the resolution…occurred after the coming into force of this Act, or…occurred before the coming into force of this Act and was not public knowledge before that time.” The clause does not, however, spell out what that conduct should amount to, and that is why new clause 3 would link the provision to breaches of the code of conduct of the other place: “Standing Orders of the House of Lords may provide for the adoption of a code of conduct… A resolution passed by virtue of section 1(4) must include a reference to the relevant provision of any code of conduct which the House of Lords may have adopted and which has not been superseded by a subsequent decision of the House.” Amendment 18 would insert at the end of line 6, page 1, clause 1, the words “on the ground of that member’s conduct as set out in the resolution”.”
“I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) for introducing his new clauses and emphasising the importance of natural justice. New clause 3 and amendment 18 link in with the theme already established in our discussion of new clauses 1 and 2. The Bill essentially concerns the conduct of Members in the other place—the noble Lady Baroness Hayman on Report called it a disciplinary Bill—and it was in that context that I tabled my new clause and amendment. At the moment, there is a lacuna in the drafting: there is no linkage between the provisions in clause 1 on conduct and the House of Lords’ code of conduct. Subsection (1) reads: “Standing Orders of the House…may make provision” to “expel…or…suspend a member…for the period specified in the resolution”.”
“It is extremely difficult for an employer legally to control the actions of an employee outside their employment, and there is often little reason why an employer would wish to do so. However, the notion of an employee bringing the company into disrepute following actions in their personal life is one situation in which the parallel might occur.”
“Rather than venture into an area of controversy, he decided to stick to the principles contained in his Bill, which enable expulsion on the ground that a person has been convicted and sentenced to a period of imprisonment in excess of one year, rather than go into this linkage with the code of conduct or conduct defined more widely, as it might be in due course by the noble Lord Wallace of Saltaire. People are talking about bringing the House of Lords into disrepute, so in preparation for today’s debate I tried to establish how this could be viewed as analogous to the disciplinary processes in some firms where it is a disciplinary offence for an employee to bring the company for which the person works into disrepute. Case law in this area is fraught with difficulty.”
“Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) inquired earlier why the provisions of this Bill were not included in the private Member’s Bill proposed by our hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles). The answer is—it was given by our hon. Friend—that he did not want these provisions in his Bill because he thought they were far too controversial, and he wanted to get his Bill on the statute book, which he succeeded in achieving, before he retires from this House after one term in our Parliament.”
“I hope that the promoter and indeed the Government, who have hitherto been slightly underwhelmed by the contents of the Bill, will accept that the wording needs to be much more precise than it is at present. When the ill-fated 2012 legislation came before this House, it was withdrawn by the Government because of the threat of it being properly considered; they did not want it to be properly considered, so they decided that rather than have it considered without a guillotine, they would not have it considered at all. That Bill was withdrawn, but it made reference to suspension and expulsion on grounds of conduct, and it was linked with breaches of the House of Lords code of conduct. However, in this Bill, that has been dropped. My hon.”
“I think this issue should be considered in the Bill. If we are to enable expulsion or suspension from the other place on the basis of breaches of conduct, we need to know whether the conduct needs to be linked in with the code of conduct under the Standing Orders or whether the provisions apply, as the noble Lord put it, to “egregious conduct of other sorts conducted by Members of this House”. —[ Official Report, House of Lords, 21 November 2015; Vol. 757, c. 650-51.] In discussing these issues, people sometimes bandy about expressions such as “bringing the House of Lords or Parliament into disrepute”. Judgments about areas of conduct or behaviour can be extremely subjective.”
“I am delighted to hear that he is one of my hon. Friend’s constituents. I am sure it is just as well he does not have the chance to vote for my hon. Friend. The noble Lord Wallace of Saltaire said: “I read the latest Code of Conduct again this morning, thinking that we need to be sure what we are on about”— I think that is always wise advice. He continued: “One of the issues that perhaps we need to discuss informally off the Floor is how far this measure is intended to refer only to conduct that is mentioned in the Code of Conduct or to egregious conduct of other sorts conducted by Members of this House. However, that is a question that we need not have in the Bill itself, but it is certainly a question that the Committee for Privileges and Conduct and others will need to consider at a later stage”.”
“Such Members are suspended, or the whip is withdrawn, which is exactly what happened to Lord Rennard. It is clear that we are increasingly moving away from a system whereby we rely on the rule of law to a system whereby the dictates of public opinion determine the outcomes of cases. That is why I think that we need to be extremely careful before we introduce legislation that would give the other place significant scope to introduce its own house rules, which could deny those Members who have been appointed or are in the other House as a result of their election as hereditary peers the opportunity to participate in the legislative process and other proceedings of the other House.”
“We are talking about a part of the legislature of our great nation, and if we are going to restrict people’s ability to participate in it, we need to do so on a clearly defined basis rather than resorting to the ad hoc pandering to public opinion of which I am afraid we have seen a great deal recently. For example, a number of political parties—I shall not mention any cases that may have arisen quite recently—now take the view that the best thing for them to do is distance themselves from any Member who is accused of a certain type of conduct and whose membership of his party is taken away from him, because, although it may not have been established that that conduct is in any way illegal, it might be regarded as potentially embarrassing that the accusation has been made.”
“My hon. Friend makes a very good point. I fear that the sort of conduct to which he refers could be regarded as conduct that brought the House of Lords into disrepute and that the person accused of such conduct could be sanctioned under the terms of the Bill. The Bill refers to the Standing Orders of the other place—it does not even cover the code of conduct—and we know that their lordships are understandably jealous of their reputation and want to maintain it in the eyes of right-thinking members of the public. I suspect that a number of them would regard the sort of tax avoidance to which my hon. Friend referred as behaviour that redounded to the detriment of other Members of that place. However, we are not talking about a firm of accountants.”
“The implication is that when they reach a particular age, they too should choose to retire. That is entirely outwith our constitution. However, if the Bill were passed, any Standing Orders passed by their lordships requiring Members not to stay on beyond the age of, for instance, 70 or 75, could mean that a Member who refused to give up their seat would be the subject of the sanctions specified in the Bill, namely expulsion or suspension.”
“My hon. Friend has made another good point. When we look beyond the immediate subject of the debate, we see that there is pressure to reduce the numbers in the other place because the Government have been increasing the number of appointments to such an extent that I have complained. Indeed, my House of Lords (Maximum Membership) Bill is on the Order Paper today, although it is, of course, being blocked by the Government. It would restrict the Government’s ability to increase inexorably the membership of the other place. At present, because of the pressure of numbers, the House of Lords is creating what is almost a culture, aided and abetted by the current Lord Speaker, who has said that she will retire at a particular time in an attempt to set an example to others.”
“The fact that most members of the general public will not be writing letters saying how outraged they are by the potential consequences of the Bill does not mean that we should not pay great attention to its implications, not least because it impinges on our constitution. At one stage during the current Parliament, the Government were taking the line that they did not want any more piecemeal reform of the other place, but they seem to have shifted their position a bit. Perhaps the Minister will explain a little more about the Government’s policy in a moment, but I think that, unless it is amended, what we have before us could be very dangerous to our democracy.”
“We have had exactly that problem with senior police officers. As soon as they are brought to book or accused of anything, they run for cover. They retire or resign, and are then able to keep their pensions. When we deal with the next group of amendments, we shall discuss the question of whether the Bill should apply to both expulsion and suspension. I think that there should be a distinction between them, but I will not anticipate that later discussion. As is already clear from the short debate that we have had so far, this is an extremely complex matter, and the idea that it could become law without being properly thought out fills me with horror.”
“I think it is important for us to get this Bill absolutely right, even if that means it is delayed for a few hours or days.”
“They are the rules that we have in the House of Commons, applying to Members who have been convicted of an offence and sentenced to more than a year in prison. However, whether we are talking about expulsion or suspension, it needs to be dependent on bad conduct, and that is where there is a big gap in the Bill. It obviously enables people such as Lord Wallace to hope that in due course they can bring within the ambit of the Bill all sorts of egregious behaviour, some examples of which we have been discussing this morning. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire will respond to the concerns that I have addressed. In our earlier debate, we discussed the balance between delay and getting things right.”
“Actually, having discussed the Bill with my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young), my understanding is that the most important part is the part that deals with suspension, which enables the House of Lords to suspend a Member for a longer period than until the end of the Parliament. There are all sorts of anomalies. If a Member of the Lords chooses to misbehave at a late stage in a Parliament, they can be suspended for only a few weeks, whereas if they misbehave at the beginning of the Parliament, they can be suspended for up to five years. That is the part of the Bill with which I have sympathy. I am much less sympathetic when it comes to the issue of expulsion. At present, there are very circumscribed rules relating to the ability of the other place to expel.”
“I recognise that the Minister has picked up this brief at very short notice, but does he not recall that when the Government introduced the House of Lords Reform Bill in 2012, they referred in their own Bill to a code of conduct?”
“With the greatest respect, my right hon. Friend has not addressed the issue raised by Lord Wallace of Saltaire, who expressly contemplated that this Bill was going to go wider than the existing code of conduct. The purport of my new clause 3 is to ensure that it cannot do that. In so far as it is a belt and braces, why will my right hon. Friend not accept my new clause?”
“I imagine that my right hon. Friend was much associated with the drafting of the 2012 Bill. It was a Government Bill and it made a specific link with breaches of the code of conduct. Why can we not make that link? Clause 1(4) currently refers only to the “conduct giving rise”; it does not say that that conduct has to be conduct that is in breach of the House of Lords code of conduct.”
“My new clause 3 is in the same grouping. As it is well precedented in the 2012 Bill, which did not make much progress, I wish, if it is possible, to test the will of the House on it.”
“We were told, when certain legislation was originally introduced, that it would be used only to proceed against terrorists, but as the years went by we found that the rules became rather different. People forget the basis on which the law was introduced. The lack of safeguards in this Bill about the conduct that would give rise to expulsion means that it would be much cleaner to remove references to expulsion from it. Some of my amendments would therefore ensure that the Bill was called not the House of Lords (Expulsion and Suspension) Bill, but the House of Lords (Suspension) Bill.”
“Under the suspension powers in this Bill, the other place would be able to suspend Members for five years or more. If a Member was suspended for that length of time and felt that justice had been done, they might well choose to resign. That is a different issue, but given the constitutional implications, it would be a step too far to give the other House the power to override our constitution by expelling somebody who has been appointed a peer of the realm for life, or an elected hereditary peer. If we want to go down that route, we should not do so on a Friday through a private Member’s Bill. As with so many powers that have been taken, people say that they will never have to use these powers.”
“Friend, the promoter of this Bill, to drop the expulsion power. As was said on Second Reading and Report in the other place, this is a power that the Lords hope that they will never have to use, but the danger is that if it is available and can be used in relation to a wide range of conduct, people might be expelled from the Lords in circumstances in which they would not be expelled from this House. Let us consider the interaction between this Bill and the recall Bill. The recall Bill gives electors the power to vote when a Member’s conduct falls short of what is expected but would not give rise to a sentence of imprisonment of more than one year. If we are to link in with that, it would be best to do away with the expulsion provisions and rely on the suspension provisions instead.”
“A number of people, following critical newspaper reports, have chosen not to stand again, or even in extremis to resign their seat, but expulsion is a draconian sanction. Introducing it in this Bill is unnecessary; it is over-egging the pudding. That is why I hope that my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire will accept my amendment. Essentially, all the amendments in the group deal with the same issue, which is the conduct that gives rise to potential expulsion from the House. Amendments 2, 7, 6, 19, 8, 9 and the others are worth considering because they tighten up the Bill and bring it more into line with what would be regarded as fair and reasonable. Rather than spending a lot of time going through them, I would prefer to see whether we can persuade my right hon.”
“The power to expel Members from the other place is a fundamental interference in the constitutional arrangements of our country; people are appointed to the other House for life, or they are elected as part of the cohort of elected peers. To expel such a person is an extreme measure. Following the House of Lords Reform (No.2) Bill, which was introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles) and passed into law, the House of Lords and this House effectively have the same powers of expulsion. That includes ensuring that anyone who is convicted of an offence that results in imprisonment for more than one year is expelled. In this House, we have not expelled anyone for a very long time.”