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PMQs live: Johnson faces Rayner after Speaker allows vote on move to stop Paterson suspension
UK politics live: Rayner accuses Tories of ‘wallowing in sleaze’ after Speaker allows vote on move to stop Paterson suspension
(32 minutes later)
Latest updates: crunch vote - which will see Tory MPs told to shelve a report from the cross-party standards committee - will go ahead after 3pm
Latest updates: crunch vote – which will see Tory MPs told to shelve a report from the cross-party standards committee – will go ahead after 3pm
Rayner says she is from a military family herself. She says the government’s words are not matched by their actions. She says she knows of veterans being sanctioned after not being able to travel to an interview. Will the PM match Labour’s plan to give veterans more support?
Ruth Edwards (Con) asks if the PM supports her campaign for new healthcare centre in Rushcliffe.
Johnson says, because the government has been able to run a strong economy, it has been able to invest in the NHS and support the armed forces. He says he enjoys his discussions with Rayner. She has more energy than Keir Starmer, he says. But it is the same old labour - no plan, no ideas.
Johnson says he is sure the health secretary will do his utmost to help.
Rayner says the budget included a £4bn tax cut for banks.
Johnson says he would oppose a “checkpoint Chigwell” proposal to charge cars coming into London.
She says the budget also included a £1bn cut to day-to-day defence spending. Will the armed forces have to take a pay cut?
Johnson says the government has helped people on universal credit with a “£1bn tax cut”.
Johnson says it is incredible that Labour says this when it wanted to take the UK out of Nato. And he claims one of Rayner’s colleagues wanted to abolish the army.
He is referring to the lowering of the taper rate, which is a benefit increase not a tax cut.
Rayner says the Resolution Foundatoin says by 2026 people will be paying £3,000 more in tax. What tax cut was given to the banks?
Johnson says it would be massively in the interests of Iran and its people it it were to return to the international nuclear energy agreement.
Johnson says the banks are paying more in tax. And Labour voted against more money for the NHS, he says.
Mike Wood (Con) asks if the PM agrees stop and search is necessary to keep the streets safe.
Rayner says this would not be allowed in the case of a policemen or a teacher.
Johnson says he made this point recently in a meeting with Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London. He says Khan did not share his support for stop and search.
Johnson says in cases like those, people have a right of appeal. He accuses Labour of playing politics.
Paul Blomfield (Lab) asks about a constituent who is a victim of the cladding crisis. When asked about her case recently, the PM said she had an unnecessary sense of anxiety. Will the PM meet her to explain this?
Rayner says this is not about playing politics. It is about playing by the rules. She says the PM from learn from Donald Trump; if you break the rules, it catches up with you. She says the Tories are “wallowing in sleaze”.
Johnson says he has every sympathy for this person. But it is unfair if people are made to feel anxious unnecessarily. He says systems like waking watches are making people worried. Many millions of homes are not unsafe. Blomfield should have the courage to say so, he says.
Switching to tax, she asks how much the tax take is rising as a result of the budget.
Sarah Green (Lib Dem) says global warming makes epileptic seizures more common.
Johnson says the budget took cash from those who can afford it most to help people in need.
Johnson says this issue is very interesting. The government will look into it, he says.
Angela Rayner says all MPs should agree that an independent standards procedure found an MP broke the rule on paid lobbying. Yet it is reported that the PM backs attempts to overturn this process. In no other professon could a person be guilty only for their mates to be allowed to vote them back into their job.
Jill Mortimer (Con) asks about a constituent whose two-year-old daughter went missing almost 40 years ago. Will the PM meet the father and reassure him this case has not been forgotten?
Johnson says that is not going to happen. Paid advocacy in this house is wrong. People should pay the price. But that is not the issue in this case. He says the Owen Paterson case involved a family tragedy. And the issue is whether the procedure was fair.
Johnson says he will have this meeting “father to father”.
Rupa Huq (Lab) asks the PM what he will tell his grandchildren when they ask him what he did about climate warming. And she calls for a fresh vote to cancel plans for a third runway at Heathrow.
Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative chair of the health committee, asks if the PM agrees that Health Education England should do regular forecasts of the number of new medics who need to be trained.
Johnson says he wants to get to net zero aviation. “That’s the future for this country - clean, green aviation,” he says. And he says he thinks this will arrive a lot earlier than the third runway at Heathrow (which he famously opposes personally, although it is still government policy).
Johnson says the government is already hiring more doctors and nurses.
Boris Johnson starts by saying, since the Commons will be in recess next week, he wants to pay tribute to people who lost their lives for the country ahead of Armistice Day.
Florence Eshalomi (Lab) asks about a constituent who killed herself after being abused. But her abusive partner is set to inherit her estate because she had not got divorced when she died. Will the government fix this loophole?
PMQs is starting shortly.
Johnson says MPs will share Eshalomi’s revulsion at this. He agrees to a meeting to consider this loophole.
Sir Keir Starmer is still isolating after testing positive for Covid, so Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, will be leading for the opposition.
Andrea Leadsom (Con) welcomes the support for early years development in the budget.
Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.
Johnson says Leadsom, who has been campaigning for better early years spending for many years, is entirely right.
Tory MPs are now under a three-line whip to vote for the Leadsom amendment, PA’s Sam Blewett reports.
Kate Osborne (Lab) asks when the PM will get serious about levelling up in the north-east.
The Speaker’s office has confirmed that Sir Lindsay Hoyle will select the Andrew Leadsom amendment. But the Julian Lewis one will not be put to a vote. (See 9.55am.)
Johnson says the north-east will benefit from the biggest investment in rail, outside HS2, for a century.
This means that the crunch vote, which will see Tory MPs told to shelve a report from the cross-party standards committee, will go ahead, at some point after 3pm.
Peter Gibson (Con) asks about the eastern leg of HS2.
Given that the government has a working majority of around 80, the chances of the amendment being passed must be high. According to Commons officials, this would be unprecedente. Since the second world war there has never been a successful atttempt to block or water down a proposal to suspend an MP for breaking rules.
Johnson says Gibson should wait until the integrated rail plan comes out.
Downing Street has just issued a statement essentially confirming that Boris Johnson wants Tory MPs to vote for the Leadsom amendment. Until now the government has not said this on the record.
Neale Hanvey (Alba) says the rest of the UK is dependent on Scotland for carbon capture and storage. Does the PM realise that his rejection of this is seen in Scotland as an act of deliberate vandalism.
A No 10 spokespeson said:
Johnson says the government will come back to the Scottish cluster bid. The spirit of cooperation and joint enterprise on display across the whole of the UK is encouraging, he says.
This statement calls for cross-party agreement on a new system. But the Leadsom amendment does not have cross-party support.
And it also ignores the fact that there is an element of review built into the current system, because it involves the parliamentary commissioner for standards doing an investigation and compiling a report which is then reviewed by the standards committee. The committee includes lay representation, and it can - and sometimes does - overturn findings from the commissioner. This happened when the commissioner said Boris Johnson broke the code of conduct for MPs in relation to his holiday in Mustique, but the committee itself cleared him on this point.
Steven Swinford from the Times says Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, is expected to allow the Leadsom amendment (see 9.55am) to be put to a vote.
But he says some Tory MPs will refuse to back it.
This is from Hannah White, deputy director of the Institute for Government thinktank, essentially agreeing with Chris Bryant’s argument (see 10.57am) about public reaction to the Tory proposal to protect Owen Paterson.
White also points out that what is being proposed today, effectively a retrospective change to the standards rules, was something that Downing Street explicitly ruled out in the Rob Roberts case. Roberts is the Tory MP who was suspended from the Commons for six weeks for sexual harrassment but who avoided the potential recall election because of an unintended technical loophole in Commons rules that has now been closed.
In an article for the Daily Telegraph (paywall) Chris Bryant, the Labour MP who chairs the Commons standards committee, says the claims from Owen Paterson and his supporters about the inquiry into him being unfair are unfounded. Bryant says:
Bryant says that if MPs vote down his committee’s report, or try to water it down, they will be doing “great damage to parliament”.
He says that “the biggest problem for Mr Paterson is that the facts that he provided speak for themselves” and he urges people to read the report into the case published by his committee last week. It is here (pdf).
Lisa Nandy, the shadow foreign secretary, told Sky News this morning that what was being proposed by the Conservatives today in relation to Owen Paterson was “appalling double standards”. She said:
She also said that what the Tories were doing was undermining trust in politics.
John Glen, a Treasury minister, was doing the broadcast round for the government this morning. He would not confirm that Tory MPs will be whipped to support the Leadsom amendment, but he suggested that the inquiry into Owen Paterson may have been unfair. He told Sky News:
Sir Bernard Jenkin, a Conservative MP who has put his name to the Andrea Leadsom amendment (see 9.55am), told the Today programme this morning that the system for policing the conduct of MPs had been flawed for years and that today’s vote was an opportunity to fix it. He insisted that the amendment was not designed to let Owen Paterson off. Jenkin said:
Asked to confirm that the government will tell Tory MPs to back the amendment, Jenkin replied: “I have had various discussions with ministers, nothing has been decided.”
Jenkin is a member of the Commons standards committee, but he did not take part in its inquiry into Paterson because Paterson is a close personal friend.
Jenkin and Paterson were also prominent Vote Leave campaigners, as were Andrea Leadsom and many of the other Tories who have signed her amendment. At times Paterson and his supporters have claimed there is a political dimension to the inquiry against him. The inquiry was triggered by this article in the Guardian in September 2019, and the involvement of the pro-remain Guardian is seen by Paterson’s allies as evidence that there is a Brexit dimension to the row.
There are two amendments on the order paper today to the motion saying that Owen Paterson should be suspended from the Commons for 30 days, as recommended by the standards committee. You can read the both in full here (pdf).
The main one has been tabled by Andrea Leadsom, the Conservative former leader of the Commons. It “notes concerns expressed about potential defects in the standards system and therefore declines to consider the [standards committee] report at this time”.
Instead, the Leadsom amendment says a new committee should be set up to consider changes to the current standards system. The committee should be chaired by John Whittingdale, the Tory former culture secretary, and it should include four other Conservative MPs, three Labour MPs and one SNP MP, the motion says. It also says this committee should consider whether the case against Paterson should be reviewed.
In total 59 Conservatives have put their names to this amendment.
The second one has been tabled by Julian Lewis, the Conservative chair of the intelligence and security committee. It “notes” the standards committee report but says the Commons should resolve “on compassionate grounds, that no further action be taken”. This is a reference to the fact that Owen Paterson’s wife, Rose, took her own life last year. Paterson says the parliamentary inquiry into his conduct was a “major factor” in his wife’s decision.
The Lewis amendment has been signed by 15 MPs – all Tories except for Sammy Wilson, who is a DUP MP.
Good morning. It is almost 30 years since the cash for questions scandal, which revealed how MPs were using their status as parliamentarians for personal gain. It led to the creation of the committee on standards in public life and a major overhaul of the rules governing what MPs are and are not allowed to do. Over the last three decades the system has been criticised, and amended, but by and large it has survived with cross-party support. But today Boris Johnson and the Conservatives seem ready to blow that consensus apart by voting for an overhaul of the system that would protect Owen Paterson, the Tory former cabinet minister, from a 30-day suspension for breaking lobbying rules.
The cross-party Commons standards committee recommended the punishment, on the basis of the findings of an investigation from Kathryn Stone, the parliamentary commissioner for standards. Since the end of the second world war, disciplinary recommendations from this committee or its predecessors have almost always been accepted by the Commons as a whole, normally without a vote. For a standards committee finding to be rejected as comprehensively as is being proposed today is thought to be unprecedented.
Here is my colleague Aubrey Allegretti’s preview story.
It is not at all clear yet, though, how today will pan out. It is up to the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, to decide whether he will allow a vote on the Tory amendment, tabled by Andrea Leadsom, essentially rejecting the Paterson findings, and it has been reported that Hoyle believes that, if MPs were to reject the standards committee report, that would do “real reputational damage” to the Commons.
If Hoyle does not allow a vote on the amendment, Paterson’s supporters could simply try to vote down the proposed suspension. But that would look even worse, because they would be voting to protect him without launching a review of the case. The proposed suspension could end up being approved after a division showing MPs split, probably largely along party lines. This would be damaging too, because it would show the process in place for policing the conduct of MPs no longer commanding widespread cross-party support.
Labour has accused the government of wanting a return to “the worst of the 1990s Tory sleaze culture”. Last night, after it was reported that Johnson wants Tory MPs to back the Leadsom amendment, Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow leader of the Commons, said:
Here is the agenda for the day.
9am: Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, holds a press conference at Cop26. For full coverage, do read out Cop26 live blog.
10am: Nadhim Zahawi, the education secretary, gives evidence to the Commons education committee.
12pm: Boris Johnson faces Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, at PMQs. Sir Keir Starmer is still isolating because he tested positive for Covid.
After 12.30pm: Johnson makes a Commons statement on Cop26.
After 1.30pm: MPs begin the debate on the standards committee report about Owen Paterson. The voting will come 90 minutes later.
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