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Tag: John Penrose

  • John Penrose – 2022 Parliamentary Question on Loyalty Penalties in Insurance Market

    John Penrose – 2022 Parliamentary Question on Loyalty Penalties in Insurance Market

    The parliamentary question asked by John Penrose, the Conservative MP for Weston-super-Mare, in the House of Commons on 20 December 2022.

    John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con)

    What recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the Financial Conduct Authority in protecting customers from loyalty penalties in the insurance market.

    The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (John Glen)

    The Government welcome the Financial Conduct Authority’s pricing rules, introduced in January this year, which require insurers to offer a renewal price no greater than the price the firm would offer to a new customer for the same policy. The Financial Conduct Authority has confirmed there is no evidence of widespread non-compliance with those rules.

    John Penrose

    The FCA’s cheap and, we hope, effective measures to stop insurance company customers being ripped off is in stark contrast to the energy price cap, which was introduced for exactly the same reason, but has not held down the price of energy and has larded hundreds of pounds of extra hedging costs on to every household’s energy bills to boot. Since the Treasury is spending vast amounts of taxpayers’ cash on energy subsidies at the moment, will my right hon. Friend speak to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy about replacing the failed energy cap with a version of the FCA’s much cheaper and more effective approach as soon as energy prices return to normal?

    John Glen

    I am very happy to look at that question further. The Government previously considered, but rejected, asking Ofgem to implement a relative rather than an absolute price cap in energy markets, which would have similarly prevented energy suppliers from charging those large differentials, because it was judged that it was more likely to distort competition in the fixed-term tariff market. As ever, I am happy to continue the conversation with my hon. Friend and I know he will take the matter up further with the regulator.

    Mr Speaker

    We now come to the SNP spokesperson.

    Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)

    Subsequent to the changes to the insurance market to protect people from the loyalty payment, the Chancellor announced his Edinburgh reforms to wider financial services regulation and a great many consultations. At a quick glance, many of them closed very quickly—on 5 February, 17 February, 3 March, 5 March and 17 March. Given that the Treasury Select Committee warned over a decade ago that the Government

    “needs to take the time required to get its reform of financial regulation right”,

    how can we be convinced that the rather painful lessons of the financial crash have not been forgotten?

    John Glen

    For four and a half years, I was the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, and many of those reforms were baked up over a lot of consultation with industry over many months. The Edinburgh reforms represent an incremental advance on those reforms and have high prudential regulatory standards very much at their core.

    Stewart Hosie

    I will come to that, because the Minister is absolutely right. I did quote from a 2010 report. But in June this year, the Treasury Committee, in its report on the future of financial services regulation, warned:

    “Weakening standards could reduce the financial resilience of the UK’s financial system and undermine international confidence in that system and the firms within it.”

    Given the intention to review capital requirements, and the new remit letters and secondary objectives for the Prudential Regulation Authority and the FCA, how will the Chancellor and the Minister ensure the regulatory focus on stability is maintained?

    John Glen

    I gave evidence to that inquiry and I heartily agree with its conclusions. Stability is at the core of the regulators’ objectives, but so is the need to look at the competitive landscape across the globe and ensure that the UK, with the city of London as a global hub for financial services, evolves and remains competitive, taking account of the risks but also developing frameworks in line with expectations, so that we can remain that world-leading global hub.

  • John Penrose – 2022 Speech on the Online Safety Bill

    John Penrose – 2022 Speech on the Online Safety Bill

    The speech made by John Penrose, the Conservative MP for Weston-super-Mare, in the House of Commons on 5 December 2022.

    It is a pleasure to follow Zach’s MP, the hon. Member for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater). I particularly want to pick up on her final comments about the difficulties of platforms—not just small platforms, but larger ones—hosting extremist content, be it incels, the alt-right, the radical left or any other kind.

    I will speak to my new clauses 34 and 35, which seek to deal with both disinformation and misinformation. They are important amendments, because although the Bill has taken huge steps forward—we are led to believe that it may take a couple more in due course when the revised version comes back if the recommittal is passed—there are still whole categories of harm that it does not yet address. In particular, it focuses, rightly and understandably, on individual harms to children and illegal activities as they relate to adults, but it does not yet deal with anything to do with collective harms to our society and our democracy, which matter too.

    We have heard from former journalists in this debate. Journalists know it takes time and money to come up with a properly researched, authoritatively correct, accurate piece of journalism, but it takes a fraction of that time and cost to invent a lie. A lie will get halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on, as the saying rightly goes. Incidentally, the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) said that it is wonderful that we are all learning so much. I share that sentiment; it is marvellous that we are all comparing and sharing our particular areas of expertise.

    One person who seems to have all areas of expertise under his belt is my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), who chaired the Joint Committee. He rightly pointed out that this is a systems Bill, and it therefore deals with trying to prevent some things from happening—and yet it is completely silent on misinformation and disinformation, and their effect on us collectively, as a society and a democracy. New clauses 34 and 35 are an attempt to begin to address those collective harms alongside some individual harms we face. One of them deals with a duty of balance; the other deals with factual accuracy.

    The duty of balance is an attempt to address the problem as it relates to filter bubbles, because this is a systems Bill and because each of us has a tailored filter bubble, by which each of the major platforms, and some of the minor ones, work out what we are interested in and feed us more of the same. That is fine for people who are interested in fishing tackle; that is super. But if someone is interested in incels and they get fed more and more incel stuff, or they are vaguely left wing and get taken down a rabbit hole into the increasingly radical left—or alternatively alt-right, religious extremism or whatever it may be—pretty soon they get into echo chambers, and from echo chambers they get into radicalisation, and from radicalisation they can pretty soon end up in some very murky, dark and deep waters.

    There are existing rules for other old-world broadcasters; the BBC, ITV and all the other existing broadcasters have a duty of balance and undue prominence imposed on them by Ofcom. My argument is that we should consider ways to impose a similar duty of balance on the people who put together the programs that create our own individual filter bubbles, so that when someone is shown an awful lot of stuff about incels, or alt-right or radical left politics, somewhere in that filter bubble they will be sent something saying, “You do know that this is only part of the argument, don’t you? Do you know that there is another side to this? Here’s the alternative; here’s the balancing point.” We are not doing that at the moment, which is one of the reasons we have an increasingly divided societal and political debate, and that our public square as a society is becoming increasingly more fractious—and dangerous, in some cases. New clause 35 would fix that particular problem.

    New clause 34 would deal with the other point—the fact that a lie will get halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on. It tries to deal with factual accuracy. Factual accuracy is not quite the same thing as truth. Truth is an altogether larger and more philosophical concept to get one’s head around. It is how we string together accurate and correct facts to create a narrative or an explanation. Factual accuracy is an essential building block for truth. We must at least try to ensure that we can all see when someone has made something up or invented something, whether it is that bleach is a good way to cure covid or whatever. When somebody makes something up, we need to know and it needs to be clear. In many cases that is clear, but in many cases, if it is a plausible lie, a deepfake or whatever it may be, it is not clear. We need to be able to see that easily, quickly and immediately, and say, “I can discount this, because I know that the person producing it is a serial liar and tells huge great big porkies, and I shouldn’t be trusting what they are sending me, or I can see that the actual item itself is clearly made up.”

    The duty of achieving balance already exists in rules and law in other parts of our society and is tried and tested—it has stood us very well and done a good job for us for 40 or 50 years, since TV and radio became ubiquitous—and the same is true, although not for quite such a long time, for factual accuracy. There are increasingly good methods of checking the factual accuracy of individual bits of content, and if necessary, in some cases of doing so in real time, too. For example, Adobe is leading a very large global grouping producing something called the Content Authenticity Initiative, which can tell if something is a deepfake, because it has an audit trail of where the image, the item or whatever it may be came from and how it has been updated, modified or changed during the course of its life.

    Dean Russell

    On that point, I want to raise the work that my hon. Friend the Member for Bosworth (Dr Evans), who is not in the Chamber at the moment, has done on body image. When images are photo-shopped and changed to give an idea of beauty that is very different from what is possible in the real world, that very much falls into the idea of truth. What are my hon. Friend’s thoughts on that point?

    John Penrose

    Addressing that is absolutely essential. That goes for any of the deepfake examples we have heard about, including from my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller), because if we know that something has been changed—and the whole point about deepfake is that it is hard to tell—we can tell easily and say, “I know that is not right, I know that is not true, I know that is false, and I can aim away from it and treat it accordingly”.

    Just to make sure that everybody understands, this is not some piece of new tech magic; it is already established. Adobe, as I have said, is doing it with the Content Authenticity Initiative, which is widely backed by other very serious tech firms. Others in the journalism world are doing the same thing, with the Journalism Trust Initiative. There is NewsGuard, which produces trust ratings; the Trust Project, which produces trust indicators; and we of course have our own press regulators in this country, the Independent Press Standards Organisation and IMPRESS.

    I urge the Government and all here present not to be satisfied with where this Bill stands now. We have all heard how it can be improved. We have all heard that this is a new, groundbreaking and difficult area in which many other countries have not even got as far as we have, but we should not be in any way satisfied with where we are now. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) said earlier that we need to approach this Bill in a spirit of being humble, and this is an area in which humility is absolutely essential. I hope all of us realise how much further we have to go, and I hope the Minister will say how he proposes to address these important and so far uncovered issues in due course.

  • John Penrose – 2022 Speech on the Energy Prices Bill

    John Penrose – 2022 Speech on the Energy Prices Bill

    The speech made by John Penrose, the Conservative MP for Weston-super-Mare, in the House of Commons on 17 October 2022.

    I have yet to hear a question to which, in the view of the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown), the answer is not more independence for Scotland.

    I rise partly to support this very necessary—albeit nose-bleedingly expensive—measure, which is essential to making sure that people can afford to heat their home over the next few months. However, while I support the fundamental underlying principle and the humanity behind it, I must register some grave disquiet in relation to the hon. Gentleman’s point about Henry VIII powers in the Bill.

    The concern is not just mine but from many in the industry. Nor is it just about the constitutional point, although that matters; the Secretary of State needs no lessons from anybody here on concerns about Henry VIII powers. Broadly speaking, clauses 13, 21 and 22 will give him the power to intervene and reach in, past Ofgem, with pretty much anything he likes and for pretty much as long as he likes, provided that he can persuade himself or a few other people that the emergency is continuing.

    That means two things. First, it means that nobody will be willing to invest in our energy industry if there is a continuing risk that the rules of the game are likely to be changed and the goalposts of the industry moved on a political whim. Secondly, I struggle to think of a measure that will be welcomed more by socialists on the Opposition Benches. It will give them carte blanche, without having to do anything in Parliament, to renationalise anything they like in any future Parliament, unless we trim these powers substantially and impose a significant sunset clause on them. At the moment, we have a programme that is supposed to last for six months and then be subject to a Treasury-led review, but these powers carry on well beyond that. That seems too broad, unconstitutional and a danger to investment in the industry. I urge my right hon. Friend to think carefully and urgently to trim that feature of the Bill.

    Finally, the one area in which there is no sunset clause —in which we are actually removing a sunset clause that already exists—is the energy price cap. It will no longer be subject to the sunset clause to which Parliament agreed when it was originally created. That means that legislation that has dramatically and demonstrably failed to do what it was originally supposed to, which was to kill off the loyalty penalty, will carry on like the undead. It will never die, yet it is the one thing that absolutely should. I hope that my right hon. Friend will think again about those important issues.

     

  • John Penrose – 2022 Speech on Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

    John Penrose – 2022 Speech on Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

    The speech made by John Penrose, the Conservative MP for Weston-super-Mare, in the House of Commons on 13 October 2022.

    I guess the simplest way to greet this Bill is with a massive cheer of hooray. Many of us in this place today have been waiting and waiting for a very long time, and it is really good to see it arriving on the Floor of the House at last, and to see it being welcomed from both sides. There is cross-party agreement on the fact that it is due and, frankly, past due to plug some of those gaps, and it is great news that it is here.

    Many of us have been pushing for a very long time to get such things as beneficial ownership transparency, so that if we want to find out who owns a particular company, we do not have to go through multiple layers of shells and other bits and pieces, and finally end up in a secrecy jurisdiction. We are, at least in theory, able to find somebody in charge or exercising effective control over that company who has a pulse, and that is the ultimate guarantee that we are getting somewhere.

    We have already heard that many further steps will be required to make that actually bite properly, but in principle is it not great that we are here and is it not great that this stuff is happening? I am delighted to be able to welcome it along with everybody else here today. However, you can probably tell, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I am working up to a but at the end of that sentence. In fact, I am working up to two buts, if I may.

    The first but is the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) about the failure to prevent mechanism or indeed any other effective mechanism ensuring that for a corporate—I am using “corporate” in the broadest sense to mean not just companies, but all corporate vehicles, including things such as trusts—there is some sort of proper personal liability for the people running it if they allow things such as money laundering to happen. Failure to prevent is probably the most obvious way to do it, and it was blessed and agreed to for fraud, as an extension of where we are now, by the Law Commission in its recently published report. However, there is a whole range of other crime and economic crime that it does not cover, and the Law Commission said that there may be other mechanisms than failure to prevent.

    It does not really matter what that the mechanism is, except that it has to be better than what we have at the moment, and we absolutely have to push forward on what is one of the biggest remaining holes in the coverage of our protections. My hon. Friend is quite right that until we do this—until we plug this particular gap—we will still end up with a huge opportunity for thieves, kleptocrats and organised criminals of all kinds to do what they do. I am afraid that they are incredibly entrepreneurial people, and they are very creative and stay ahead of whatever mechanisms we come up with. It is only by doing something like that that that we will close the gap properly and get an all-encompassing roadblock to what they do.

    It is therefore absolutely essential that, whether it is with failure to prevent or some other mechanism, we do not accept that the status quo is adequate in this area, and we must, all of us from all parts of the House, send a resounding message to Ministers and to law enforcement that this must not be allowed to persist. I may be being a little bit over-optimistic, but I think we heard from the Home Secretary earlier that the Government plan to come back to, look at and take forward—I think that was the phrase she used—the report from the Law Commission. I hope she will hear from all of us here that that is good news, but that we would like to take it forward briskly, promptly and with maximum energy, if we can.

    The second but is the point about enforcement. It is all very well to have brilliant legal structures, brilliant laws passed and regulations in place saying, “Thou shalt do this” and “Thou shalt not do that”, but it is no flipping use at all if there is no one there to actually police it and enforce it. While there are an awful lot of people working extremely hard in all sorts of organisations —the National Crime Agency and others—to try to do this enforcement, we all know that there is an enforcement gap in this country compared with, for example, America, which is an awful lot better at it than we are, in this particular area at least.

    Therefore, we are going to have to raise our game here. I wish there was a Home Office Minister sitting on the Bench alongside the excellent BEIS Minister at this moment, because the Home Office is the Department that will be under funding pressure to raise its game in order to make sure there are enough resources for these enforcement organisations to do their job, and to do it better, more effectively and more efficiently than they are at the moment. Until they do that, we are always going to be a weak link internationally. I do not think we should kid ourselves about where we are at the moment, because we are a bit of a weak link at the moment.

    That brings me on to the other half of my point about enforcement, which is that the points made about whistleblowing by the APPG chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson), really matter. As I said to the shadow Home Secretary earlier, we can turbocharge and maximise the effectiveness of our existing enforcement organisations if we get our whistleblowing regime upgraded and improved very dramatically from where it is now, because whistleblowers are force multipliers for the police. They make the police’s life easier, bring them good, warm leads, blow open cases and provide the evidence that is needed to create effective prosecutions. Without them, the job is a great deal more expensive and less effective; with them, the police can do their job much faster and better. The kleptocrats, the oligarchs and the various different crime lords are a great deal more scared of the UK with a decent whistleblowing regime than they are without one.

    That causes a problem because Ministers will say, “Ah yes, but there isn’t enough space in this Bill to provide upgrades to the whistleblowing regime.” Many of us asked that question before we got here today and we all had the same answer, which is, “Yes, it is very important, but not here, not now, and not just yet.” Frankly, that is not good enough or adequate.

    I appreciate that the constraint on space is real and I am not trying to pretend it is not, but there are other things that Ministers could do that do not require this Bill and that could be done through, for example, little bits of secondary legislation. If Ministers can commit to make those changes—ideally in the Minister’s summing up this afternoon or certainly in Committee—the pressure for primary legislation and, dare I say it, for endless rounds of proposed amendments, which people may be minded to table later in the Bill’s progress, either here or in the other place, will be greatly reduced. So it is in everybody’s interest for Ministers to say, “Yup, we are going to do that.” If the Minister is able to stand up later this afternoon and say, “Yes, we will do these four things during this parliamentary Session”, that will relieve an awful lot of pressure in this area, because we will all know that proper progress will be made.

    The things that would reduce the pressure and the need for primary legislation in the Bill are very simple. First, we could extend the Public Interest Disclosure (Prescribed Persons) Order 2014 to include all the professional regulators. At the moment, that order includes some of them, but if all the professional regulators were included that would massively improve the protection available. It would mean that when somebody says, “I have seen something that is wrong that needs to be dealt with, and I am going to blow the whistle and provide the information,” they would not be the ones who end up as victims, unemployable or completely monstered, either by their former employer or the profession in which they work. Extending the prescribed persons order would mean that those professional regulators have a duty to look after them. At the moment there are big gaps in the list, but it would be relatively straightforward and would not require primary legislation to plug those gaps. Why on earth are we not doing that? Why can we not do that now? It would only take secondary legislation, so let us get on and do it.

    Secondly, we could expand the definition of “a worker” under the existing regulations. At the moment, employees who blow the whistle are better protected than trainees, non-executive directors or suppliers. Those sorts of people are very well placed to see wrongdoing, may know what is going on and may have good audit trail evidence to provide, but woe betide them if they blow the whistle, because they ain’t protected as they should be and as they would be if they were an ordinary employee. That seems to me and an awful lot of people to be jolly silly and a massive gap, and it would be easy to fix.

    Kevin Hollinrake

    My hon. Friend is making a fantastic speech. On that point, I talked about my constituent, Ian Foxley, who was a contractor working overseas. Those sorts of people are not covered by the existing legislation. Had they been, he would have been able to seek redress through the company he worked for. As it is, he cannot.

    John Penrose

    That is absolutely right and a very good example. Again, it is relatively simple to fix. It would not require primary legislation, it would reduce the pressure on the Bill and the pressure from all of us here trying to shoehorn extra things into the Bill. In the interest of giving the Minister an easy time, which we all want to do, if he could make these commitments for some time in this parliamentary Session, that all goes away. We would end up with something an awful lot better and quicker.

    Thirdly, there are a series of money laundering regulations that can be upgraded and improved. Again, that will not need primary legislation and, again, that will help dramatically.

    Finally, we must improve the process for raising concerns. Lots of other countries have online systems, with websites that work easily and are centralised. People know that if they raise concerns through the centralised system, they are automatically engaged with the necessary protections and have the right degree of protection, so they are much more comfortable that they will not end up on the receiving end of victimisation from the people they are trying to blow the whistle about.

    Those are the four items. They are easy for the Minister to say—nice and simple. Not only that, I am sure he will have the support of his Home Office counterparts, because they will be the ones whose budgets will be under pressure to improve and upgrade the resources available to the investigative organisations, such as the NCA. Such organisations will otherwise have to be paid more money in order to carry out investigations; they will still need a bit, but they will be able to use it much more effectively if we can make those four changes. I hope that is helpful. I look forward to the Minister’s comments. I will have my pen poised to tick these points off. I am hopeful that he will be able to be helpful.

  • John Penrose – 2022 Speech on the Resignation of Lord Geidt

    John Penrose – 2022 Speech on the Resignation of Lord Geidt

    The speech made by John Penrose, the Conservative MP for Weston-Super-Mare, in the House of Commons on 21 June 2022.

    It is a pleasure to follow such illustrious members of a series of Committees, all of which focus on this area and all of which have shown the importance and critical nature of the issue that the motion is trying to address—[Interruption.] I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will turn my phone off.

    The debate also shows that there is a high degree of cross-party unanimity on the central importance of having somebody in the position of the independent adviser on the ministerial code. It is absolutely essential that everybody, from all parties, who has spoken so far has started from that fundamental principle. Everybody agrees with it. That was why I was delighted at what was said. I think we got there in the end, but I hope that when my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister winds up, with the leave of the House, he will take the opportunity to repeat his comment, which we prised out of him after a number of interventions: that he and the Government agree that a successor to Lord Geidt must be appointed, and must be appointed as promptly as possible. I think he wants a degree of flexibility about the process through which that happens and should the role be split, for example, between people so that we ended up with a panel or something like that. I think he wants the flexibility to allow those changes to be introduced, but the principle that there should be somebody or some group of people—

    Michael Ellis indicated assent.

    John Penrose

    Let the record show that the Minister is nodding vigorously. It is essential that we get on the record the principle that the role must be pursued and continued. I think that he has said that already, but I hope that he will take the opportunity to make that clear again in his concluding remarks. It is essential that that is clarified, because a number of us were expecting it to be made clear and I hope that we have heard it and will hear it being made clear again.

    An awful lot of the concerns that led the motion to be tabled in the first place would be greatly allayed by such a clarification. People are worried, as there have been briefings in the press saying a successor to Lord Geidt might not be appointed at all, and that it might not be an important position to fill in future. I think that the Minister has already said, and I hope that he will repeat, that that is not true, it is not the way that the Government are thinking and that there will be successors appointed to make sure that that crucial role is filled. It is vital that it is filled, because it is independent, and because the independent reports are made public, it provides not just the Prime Minister but everybody in this Chamber, more broadly in society as a whole and in the press with an independent set of facts on which to proceed, to say, “This happened, this did not; this is serious, that is not,” and from which we can all start our conversations, discussions and debates about essential items of probity, integrity and, ultimately, honesty from a shared base of fact.

    I venture to make a suggestion to my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister as he goes around trying to find the successor to Lord Geidt. A number of people have said that that might not be terribly easy at the moment and I have a couple of gentle suggestions that might make it a simpler and easier succession. It might be easier for the Prime Minister to find successors if he were to upgrade the role further than the power enhancements that have already been made. I think he should consider two further enhancements of the role. The first is that the adviser or advisers, whatever format the thing takes—[Interruption.] Sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker. I definitely turned my phone off, but it keeps coming on.

    The problem is that at the moment, the adviser believes that they must resign if their advice is not followed. I do not think that is the right approach at all—just take the case of Chris Whitty, who was advising the Prime Minister throughout the pandemic. If he had had to resign every single time his advice was not followed, he would have been resigning every week and we would not have got anywhere. Advisers advise; Ministers decide.

    Jackie Doyle-Price rose—

    John Penrose

    I will give way in a second.

    This is an advisory post, and if the adviser’s advice is not followed, they may decide they want to resign if they are fed up, but they should not feel constitutionally required to do so. [Interruption.]

    Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)

    Order. The hon. Gentleman needs to bring his remarks to a close, but we will take one intervention.

    Jackie Doyle-Price

    I hear what my hon. Friend is saying, but the difference is that ultimately, Chris Whitty’s advice was based on policy. What we are talking about here is behaviour, and whether there are breaches of the ministerial code. That brings the whole area of ethics into much sharper focus.

    John Penrose

    I take my hon. Friend’s point. All I am saying is that it should not be axiomatic and automatic that the adviser should feel they have to resign every time their advice is not followed. Their advice is made public and is clear, and therefore it should not be automatic that they have to stand down.

    Equally—this is also crucial—Lord Geidt said that he did not feel he could offer an independent set of advice on the behaviour of the Prime Minister, alone among all Ministers. Lord Geidt would have felt able to, and did, offer advice independently to the Prime Minister about other Ministers’ behaviour, but he felt he could not do so when the Prime Minister’s behaviour was in question. That is clearly wrong: there should be no free passes for any Minister, up to and including the Prime Minister, and in the same way that the adviser should not feel duty-bound to resign if their advice is not always followed, they should feel able to offer public advice on whether or not the Prime Minister has erred and strayed. If the adviser’s role is improved in those two ways, I believe that finding a successor to Lord Geidt will be a great deal easier, because the role will be a great deal clearer and more practical to fill.

    I will just add one further point about the motion. It seems to me that it does not actually confer any extra powers on PACAC, and the Chairman of that Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg), has already said that he is delighted and honoured to be offered these opportunities, but would politely decline them anyway. He does not want this set of powers, and is politely declining the offer that is being made. Because the motion does not offer any extra powers, it would be perfectly acceptable, constitutional, and within the rules of this House for PACAC itself to launch an inquiry into the ongoing discussions and investigations, should it wish to do so. If it felt the position was not being filled fast enough, it could fill that gap.

    Lloyd Russell-Moyle rose—

    John Penrose

    I will happily give way to a member of PACAC.

    Lloyd Russell-Moyle

    PACAC has requested a number of times that Sue Gray come in front of our Committee, and we have been declined that opportunity through being blocked by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State. Is that not a problem of parliamentary scrutiny that this motion might help to prevent?

    John Penrose

    As I read the motion, it does not confer any fresh powers on the Committee, and therefore it would not solve the problem that the hon. Gentleman has rightly pointed out. There may be a broader question about whether some people can be compelled to come in front of Select Committees—not just PACAC, but others as well—but this motion does not solve that problem either and therefore, I am afraid, will not move the ball down the pitch at all.

    None the less, Madam Deputy Speaker—with apologies for my phone misbehaving throughout—there is an essential point here that I think everybody agrees on. A successor to Lord Geidt must be appointed. I think we have heard that one will be appointed; I hope we will have that reconfirmed in words of one syllable, and while we can allow the Government a little bit of time to decide precisely how and in what form that successor will be appointed, it must be a proper replacement, ideally with the additional powers I have described.

  • John Penrose – 2022 Statement on Voting Against Boris Johnson

    John Penrose – 2022 Statement on Voting Against Boris Johnson

    The statement made by John Penrose on 5 June 2022.