Dear Mrs Badenoch

Whilst I wrote to you only four days ago, so should not normally and am indeed not chasing you for a reply today, I think I am justified in writing again owing to the rapidly changing situation since Wednesday the third.

I must ask whether you now feel that it would have been better had you not voted on Wednesday for the short-lived (though not yet formally rescinded) amendment to pause Mr Owen Paterson’s Standards process and so to establish a review of the process itself by a newly appointed committee.  

One of the issues and apparent motives behind the review was said to be to address the claimed absence of a Standards appeal system. Is there an appeal process or is there not? The Chair of the Standards Committee, Mr Chris Bryant, has said that there is. After all, as I understand it, judgments follow a three-stage process: Standards Commissioner – Standards Committee – Floor of the House of Commons.

That is one stage further than in local government. A decision would go nowhere near a Full Council meeting, which would probably be viewed as a party-political arena. Why so at Parliament? I would not be surprised if there were no appeal route at Westminster after the Standards Commissioner has proposed a decision, the Standards Committee has carried out further investigation work, including receiving additional representations, and has then agreed the same (or different) verdict and determined a sanction where appropriate. 

In July 2012, the relatively new Conservative-led coalition government put into effect a new Standards regime with local Standards Committees for local authorities. The new regime did away with local Standards Boards and the appeal process to a national/regional First Tribunal. I recollect that Conservative MPs thought the old system was too bureaucratic. In fact, the attached document from 2010 suggests that the then government even thought that “the requirement for local authorities to have standards committees will be abolished”. Such was HMG’s apparent lack of concern about standards of behaviour by politicians just over eleven years ago. 

Do you agree with me that there are some similarities between the events of 2010-12 and those of November 2021?   

Do you not think that to attempt now to bring in an extra stage to the process that would partially reintroduce a system for central government that was less than ten years ago deemed superfluous for local government has a ring of opportunism to it? Do you agree that it was foolish and worse for the government now to attempt the same in the closing stages of a particular MP’s Standards decision that went against one of this government’s own Members of Parliament?

I would be most grateful were you to respond as the Member of Parliament for Saffron Walden and not as a spokesperson for HMG or for Ten Downing Street. I say that because it has been refreshing to hear independence of thought from some Conservative MPs from Wednesday last and that is continuing to today and, I foresee, for some time to come.

Kindest Regards, Alan Dean     

[*]  NOTE 1: Quotation “We need to find a moral compass”, by Conservative MP Tobias Elwood.

NOTE 2: Mrs Badenoch replied by email in 12th November 2021. The email can be read here.