I spent nine years as a parish councillor. As a statutory consultee on local planning decisions we were required to review and discuss all applications in our parish. Mrs Brown wants to convert her garage. Mr Black wants to trim his protected tree. Ms Green wants to build a house in her back garden. Let me tell you, we took our responsibilities very seriously. At the beginning of the agenda item we were required to declare if we had any personal or pecuniary (‘financial’ in any normal person’s language) interest in the application. Discussions were held into the level of intimacy of a relationship that was required in order for someone to consider themselves to have a personal interest in an applicant’s extension plans. Just being friends wasn’t close enough; we live in a village and lots of us are friends. We decided that if we were a close enough friend to have been invited to their wedding then that was the appropriate level of familiarity required. If we had a pecuniary interest we left the room for both the discussion and the subsequent vote. If we had a personal interest we took part in the discussion and left the room for the vote. Bear in mind, we were not the decision makers, simply one of the many statutory consultees. We all genuinely took this seriously. You can read plenty more about the standards for councillors here.
As an NHS worker I am also bound by extremely high standards of propriety with regard to gifts from patients. This is obviously to prevent people thinking that they can bribe their way to better hospital care. We are required to declare gifts of more than £50 and refuse to accept cash or vouchers below this amount [i], though I have never been offered either a valuable present or a wadge of cash. As a midwife though, I have to say that the boxes of chocolates and bottles of wine I have been given over the years were much appreciated and I treasure all my thank you cards!
Contrast this with Westminster. Members of parliament only need to declare gifts of more than £300. With regard to their share holdings the requirement is to decare those only if they hold more than 15% of issued shares in a company or more than £70,000 in shares if this equates to less than 15% of issued share capital.[ii][iii] Any changes must be updated within 28 days of them occurring. But repeatedly, this doesn’t happen, and the penalty is little more than the need for an apology. Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage all failed to declare some of their interests on time.[iv] So if you’re tardy then you’re in, urmm, good company?! When asking a parliamentary question or participating in a debate then interests need to be declared but there is no obligation to abstain when voting on legislation. So essentially when you wield the most power within the system you don’t need to change your behaviour. It makes our parish council rigmarole seem quaint and provincial.
One assumes that requiring MPs who have a conflict of interest to abstain from a vote would be universally popular but a 38 Degrees poll set up in 2017 has only received 68 votes so far, perhaps we could get it to 100?
[i] https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/managing-conflicts-of-interest-in-the-nhs/#4-declarations
[ii] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmcode/1083/1083.pdf
[iii] https://members.parliament.uk/members/commons/interests/publications?sessionId=40
[iv] https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/register-members-financial-interests
Leave a Reply