Charles Walker – 2023 Speech on Parliamentary Services for MPs

The speech made by Sir Charles Walker, the Conservative MP for Broxbourne, in the House of Commons on 9 February 2023.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of Parliamentary services for Members.

Before I get to the substance of my speech, it is worth referring to the Administration Committee’s meeting earlier this week with officers of the parliamentary contributory pension fund—we regularly meet the House’s excellent Officers. The fund’s documentation is almost impenetrable to normal human beings. It is 284 pages long, and those who started reading it 10 years ago are about halfway through. The officers tried their best, but the upshot of our informative meeting was a joint letter from the chairmen of the 1922 committee and the parliamentary Labour party asking the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority for greater clarity on the technicalities of the McCloud judgment. That is how the Administration Committee makes progress on a weekly basis.

We are debating House services, and I will focus most of my remarks on the Administration Committee’s report, published yesterday, “Smoothing the cliff edge: supporting MPs at their point of departure from elected office.” Before I move into the substance of the report, it is important that I thank the Clerks who wrote the report and gathered the evidence. I have been a Select Committee Chair for 10 years, and it is remarkable that, wherever I go, I am always given the best Clerks. I said to my wife, “What is it about me that means I always get the best Clerks in the House of Commons?” And she said, “It’s because you require close management.” I am not sure that is entirely what I wanted to hear, but I have wonderful Clerks. All Clerks in this House serve us brilliantly, day in and day out.

I am alive to the public and media cry that we need better MPs. We have heard the cry in its various guises: “We need better MPs,” “All MPs are rubbish” and so on. When I was in business before coming to the House, I always welcomed conversations with colleagues who said, “We need to make this company more profitable.” That was not the end of the conversation but the beginning: “Okay, so we need to make the business more profitable. How will we do it?” If people genuinely want better MPs, that is the start of the conversation and we need to ask ourselves how we will do it. That is what the Administration Committee—we have members of the Committee in the Chamber today—set its mind to doing when we embarked on this report. The Committee started taking evidence about four months ago.

Most members of the Administration Committee have a business background, which is a hugely valuable resource. We learned and appreciated that Parliament is in a war for talent, and it is an employer like any other. If we want to attract some of the best and brightest 30 and 40-year-olds from their successful careers, we need to compete with business, academia, science, the arts, healthcare and education. All these wonderful careers are now not just nationally focused but internationally focused. These talented young people are working on not only a national stage but an international stage. We need to convince them that a vocation in Parliament is worth undertaking. That is now very difficult because, increasingly, a vocation in Parliament is linked to career jeopardy.

I speak to young people on both sides of the political divide—Labour and Conservative, and Scottish National party when I am up in Scotland—and they say, “That’s all very well, Charles, but we love what we do. We love to discuss politics and think about politics, but you would be mad to think that we will step out of our career to take part in politics.” I hear that too often.

As we move towards the 100-hours-a-week MP, where we expect Members of Parliament to focus every waking hour solely on their constituency, the gap between the career they have left, their vocation in Parliament and their future career—the difficulty of accessing and reintegrating with a career—becomes wider and wider. That is what we start to address in our report.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I spoke to you earlier while you were in the Chair. Every single Member is prepared to make sacrifices to serve their constituents. Some of those sacrifices are very large, and some of them are far too large. I look across at the shields on the Opposition side of the Chamber, which I know will soon be joined by another shield on the Government side of the Chamber.

We address that career cliff edge in this report. Wherever people come to Parliament from—Scotland, Wales or England; Labour or Conservative—they serve their constituents with diligence and with every ounce of energy, but there is a career cliff edge when they leave this place. Employers say, “It is all very well that you’ve been a Member of Parliament, but what skills do you have? What can you bring to our company? You are all very remote, aren’t you? That’s what we read in the newspapers.” We need to address that, because we want people who serve here to be able to take their amazing skills—I will address the skills that people secure in this place—to future employers.

Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)

It has been a great pleasure to serve on my hon. Friend’s Committee. Does he agree that, for Members of Parliament, there is a difference between working here and working in a company? Generally, one leaves a company either because one has not performed well and is sacked or because one chooses to make a different career choice. Many people leave this place not because they have behaved improperly or because they did not do the work well, but because the general tide of national politics sees them go. We saw that in 2019, when many good Labour MPs lost their seats. That was not a reflection on them, just a reflection of the national tide. Is that not why we have a duty of care to these people?

Sir Charles Walker

My hon. Friend makes a fantastic point that gets to the crux of the report. I was going to say that he encapsulates the report in a short sentence, but it was a brief intervention of more like three sentences. I will address his points more directly in a moment.

We did not just sit down and write this report. I did not grab a pen, drag my colleagues into a room and say, “Let’s just write a report. Let’s put down on paper the first thing that pops into our heads.” No, we went out and consulted academics, leading headhunters, outplacement specialists, retired senior Army officers and senior officials from Sport England. We went out and talked to people who know how to transition people from one all-encompassing vocation or career to another, and they all said that the way an institution treats people at their point of departure impacts that institution’s ability to recruit bright and talented people. That is because people watch this place closely now—30, 40 and 50-year-olds watch closely—and they know what is going on here. We also took evidence from former colleagues, who, as my hon. Friend said, largely lost their seats through no fault of their own.

Although we have a wonderful parliamentary democracy in so many ways, it does not score highly when it comes to the way it treats departing Members, so the Committee came up with a number of key recommendations, and I will go through them briefly—our report is actually brilliantly short, and while many Select Committee reports are 200 pages, ours is a little more than 50.

First, Members of Parliament should be preparing to leave this place from the day they arrive. That is a really difficult thing to get your head around. When I was elected in Broxbourne and handed the envelope that the winning candidate gets, I went white with fear, but never once did it occur to me that I would ever leave this place. Now I have announced that I am going, and I am preparing for my departure, but I wish I had thought about it a little harder over the past 17 years.

I am lucky, because I am leaving voluntarily, from what is notionally a safe seat, although if we read Electoral Calculus at the moment, that may not be the case. The average tenure of a Member of Parliament is nine years, but this is an uncertain career and vocation. However, even if a Member of Parliament serves for just one Session —for two, three, four or five years—they build up a huge skillset: mediating, negotiating, communicating and dispute resolution, to name just four. The Committee’s report suggests that those skills are not just captured but accredited by top-flight universities—in a sense, they are micro-qualifications. In this busy and complicated world, those are just the types of skills that industry needs. Members of Parliament are brilliant at juggling a whole range of complex issues and seeing a way through quickly. I am talking not just about those at ministerial level, but about what we do day in, day out with competing interests in our constituencies. So there is the issue of micro-accreditation and micro-qualifications.

Secondly, Members of Parliament must have access to ongoing career advice while they are here, and to outplacement services before, during and after their point of departure. That is absolutely critical. When I say “point of departure”, I do not mean the ballot box—I do not mean just those MPs who lose at the ballot box in a general election. I mean that all Members of Parliament need access to good, ongoing career advice and outplacement services. Again, the Committee did not make that up; it is what all the expert witnesses told us. They said, “You need to support people out of one workplace into another.”

Thirdly—there is no way of dodging this for an easy life, and I do not want an easy life—there should be better financial support for those leaving Parliament. Winding up a parliamentary office with tens of thousands of bits of casework does not take a couple of months; it can take many months. The way we financially support leaving Members is, again, an area where we score really badly. We score really badly against the Scottish Parliament. We score really badly against the Senedd in Wales. We score badly against almost every major, mature western democracy.

Let me put this into perspective. Since I announced I was leaving, I have had—possibly this is a slightly made-up number, because I have not kept a close record—511 conversations with people who know that I am leaving. Two of those were extremely positive: “Oh my word, Charles, you’re leaving. You’re going to be a huge success at whatever you do.” The other 509 have been, “Oh my word, what the hell are you going to do when you leave? What can you do?” It will be no surprise to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, because you know these two people, that the two positive conversations were with my mother and my wife. The other 509 were with people who are quite worried for my future welfare. It is that difficult. I am smiling, but I am making a serious point.

Although I cannot prove this, I suspect that some, although by no means all, long-serving Members of Parliament would love to leave, but are frightened and put off leaving because of the financial uncertainty—the financial cliff edge—and the career cliff edge they will face if they do go. With perhaps six months’ resettlement grant and some outplacement advice and career advice, we could actually free up seats, which would be to the benefit of those who want to leave and certainly to the benefit of their constituents.

The Committee’s fourth key recommendation—it makes me extremely sad that we had to make it—is to do with the security of Members of Parliament. In most cases, when you leave this place the personal risk to you—I mean you, Mr Deputy Speaker, as well as me and all colleagues in this place—diminishes very quickly. However, for some it does not. In the past, as soon as someone ceased to be a Member of Parliament, responsibility for their security was handed to his or her local police force. That is not ideal. We took some powerful evidence in private from Members of Parliament and ex-Members of Parliament who faced an ongoing and real risk. I was really pleased that we had the head of House security before us, and we are definitely going to do something on this issue—and we need to.

Fifthly and finally—there are more recommendations after five, but this is the final one in my speech—we need to give MPs better advice throughout each Parliament about Dissolution, winding up their offices, the expectations placed on them, the expectations they can place on the House, and the support services they will be able to access. All those things need to be thought about. I know we do not like to think about leaving, but we must have the opportunity to think about it and to understand what is expected of us and what we can expect of the House. Provision for that needs to be updated on a six-month basis and regularly notified to not just Members of Parliament but their office managers.

I want to touch on something briefly. There was a sentence in the report—I think the shadow Leader of the House knows where I am going with this, because I can see her smiling—suggesting that Members of Parliament should receive a medallion from the Speaker in recognition of their service to democracy. This has been positioned as a medal of the type that changes one’s name or means one gets letters after one’s name, but that is not what we are suggesting; this is about workplace recognition. A decade ago, I was awarded the president’s medal by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. It gives me no standing anywhere, and it does not mean that I get to the front of the queue anywhere. It gives me huge personal pleasure and satisfaction to know that the royal college recognised my contribution to mental health, and I may just wear it if I am invited to one of its events. That is what I meant, and what the report and my colleagues on the Committee meant, about a medallion of service. It is something that we could be presented with by the Speaker, and that would mean something to us.

Dame Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)

I thank my hon. Friend for such a powerful speech. He is reminding me of the medallions that my councillors wear—perhaps former mayors, aldermen or people who have served with distinction—and surely what he is talking about is similar to that. Many hundreds or thousands of people have those sorts of medallions.

Sir Charles Walker

That is exactly what I am talking about. It is a nice and kind thing to do, and there is nothing wrong with being nice and kind. Workplace recognition is a good thing. I received a lovely pen when I left my first substantive job. I received a lovely decanter from the 1922 committee to mark my 11 years of service to it. Is it going to change my life? It is not going to change my life at all. Is it something that I will enjoy and that, I hope, my family and children will enjoy? Yes, it is. I just wanted to put that into context.

Treating people well is important, and it will encourage good people to run for office. As I have said, I entirely concur with the idea that we need better Members of Parliament. I suppose I should not be surprised that, when the Committee and my wonderful colleagues on it went away and thought about how we could do that, they got criticised for having done it, but the people criticising them are the very ones saying that we need better Members of Parliament. Excellence in this place should be the norm, not the outlier.

I will conclude by saying this—

Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)

Before my hon. Friend concludes, may I just put it on the record that I would like to think on both sides of the House there could be no better Member of Parliament than he has proved to be during his time here?

Sir Charles Walker

I absolutely thank my right hon. Friend for that. He and I have been friends since I got here, and that means a huge amount to me. I thank him.

This is what I want to conclude with. We will never in this place struggle to attract the shrill, the loud and the raucous. We will always be inundated with the practitioners of the clear thinking of the totally uninformed. That is what makes this Parliament so wonderful. There are those who believe there are simple solutions to complex problems. If there were, we would have found them, Mr Deputy Speaker. I promise you that we would have found them. There is always space for that, and at times I have been one of the raucous, the loud, the shrill and the emotional—I celebrate that. But we also need the thoughtful, the considered and the intellectually inquiring. Their numbers really are thinning, and we in this place have a duty to reach out to them.

We have a duty—not just to ourselves, but to future generations of Members of Parliament—to make this place the greatest Chamber with the greatest vocation someone can pursue in this country. A President came yesterday, welcomed by literally thousands of people, and he referred to our Parliament as the greatest in the world. I take great comfort from that, and I want to prove him right day in and day out.

Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)

Before I call Dame Maria Miller, may I too put something on the record? Many of you will not know this, but when I was a rookie Member of Parliament, I employed a young Charles Walker as my researcher. I knew then that he was a bright lad, and I was thrilled when he became a Member of Parliament. He has been an outstanding Chair of the Administration Committee. I salute your bravery, Charles, in the way you have promoted mental health issues at a time when it was a taboo. You have been remarkable. I am so proud of you.