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Dishonourable members? Exploring patterns of misconduct in the contemporary House of Commons

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British Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

Parliamentary misconduct is a recurring feature of British politics. It has a long history and a broad meaning: some transgressions are relatively trivial; others encroach on the territory of political corruption. This article systematically analyses instances of officially recognised misconduct in the House of Commons since 1995. It explores recent institutional changes in the way that the House seeks to maintain Members’ propriety and analyses incidents of misconduct by coding every critical report about a named MP published by the House's Committee on Standards and Privileges. The article identifies eight general types of misconduct: breaching parliamentary privilege, failing to register an interest, failing to declare a relevant interest, engaging in paid advocacy, personal misbehaviour, making an improper private gain from official resources, making an improper political gain from official resources and obstructing the House's investigative procedures. It finds that failures to register financial interests were initially the most common form of misconduct, and it also finds an increase in the number of cases involving the misuse of allowances in the years before the 2009 expenses controversy. It discusses possible causes for these patterns and concludes by pointing the way for future research.

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Notes

  1. Parliamentary misconduct may, of course, occur in the House of Lords. This article focuses exclusively on the House of Commons, partly because it is the directly elected pre-eminent chamber and partly because instances of misconduct involving MPs are more frequent than those involving peers.

  2. This definition adapts the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of misconduct as ‘improper or unacceptable conduct or behaviour’.

  3. For an analysis of disorderly conduct in the chamber, see Judge, 1992.

  4. In December 2010, MPs agreed to empower the Commissioner to conduct inquiries without having first received a complaint, as was current practice for the period analysed in this article.

  5. Misconduct in the chamber, which is policed by the Speaker, is excluded from the analysis, which focuses on behaviour that has a more immediate bearing on the integrity of the parliamentary process. Misconduct involving all-party groups or parliamentary researchers, which falls under the Commissioner's remit, is also excluded, simply because the article's focus is on misconduct by individual MPs.

  6. The examples are drawn from Committee reports, which are listed in the appendix.

  7. The figure of 16 per cent – or 15.96 per cent – is based on the author's calculations.

  8. In some cases, an individual had an interrupted career because of electoral defeat. Their time outside of Parliament has not been counted; if it were, it would only increase overall experience. In cases where an MP had been subject to more than one critical report, the MP's experience at the time of the first critical report was included.

  9. For details of the audit, see Members Estimate Committee (2010). Nearly 50 individuals successfully appealed against the amounts they were asked to repay.

  10. The three cases not involving allowances were Peter Hain, Stephen Byers and Adrian Sanders.

  11. There is relatively little information about the use of the rectification procedure during this time, but on the basis of figures reported in the Commissioner's annual reports (and calculated by the author), a total of 50 cases were dealt with by the procedure between 2002–2003 and 2009–2010: one in 2002–2003; one in 2003–2004; 10 in 2006–2007; eight in 2007–2008; 16 in 2008–2009; and 14 in 2009–2010.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK

    Nicholas Allen

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Appendix

Appendix

Table A1

Table a1 MPs subject of an adverse report by the Standards and Privileges Committee and the types of adverse finding, 1995–2010
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Allen, N. Dishonourable members? Exploring patterns of misconduct in the contemporary House of Commons. Br Polit 6, 210–240 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2011.6

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