Not at all. There is a constitutional imperative that the Prime Minister of the day, no matter what party he or she is from, must have the right to select their Ministers and must have confidence in their Ministers. That is a constitutional imperative and it is not inconsistent with the code and the independent adviser’s wishes.
Let me rest for a moment on the change that has been made in respect of sanctions, because it exemplifies the point about the Government’s considering and responding to the recommendations of others. It has always been the case, under successive Administrations, that a range of potential outcomes are available when it is determined that an aspect of the code has been broken. Some examples have been cited from previous Administrations. Members need only cast their minds back to the case of Baroness Scotland in 2009, who apologised for unknowingly employing an illegal worker and paid the associated civil penalty of £5,000, but when then Prime Minister Gordon Brown concluded that no further action was necessary, he made that determination of his own volition.
In the interests of fairness, I could equally well mention the 2012 investigation into Baroness Sayeeda Warsi under the coalition Government, or the current independent adviser’s finding that my right hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock) made a technical breach of the code in failing to declare that his sister’s company had become an approved supplier to the NHS.
The test of whether a Minister remains in office has always been the continued confidence of the Prime Minister, so I am not going to criticise previous Labour Prime Ministers for making that determination, and nor would I criticise anyone in that position. They have a difficult office to fulfil and they must make a determination. If a breach of the code is extremely minor in the eyes of most but the Prime Minister has lost confidence in the Minister in question, that will be it for that Minister. That is the way it has to work.
That is the test of whether a Minister remains, yet over time a false impression has grown that any breach, large or small, across a wide-ranging, detailed document of 26 pages, must result in resignation. Correcting that false impression has been a concern not just for the Government but for those who advise on ethics in government. In its “Upholding Standards in Public Life” report, the Committee on Standards in Public Life noted:
“No other area of public life has such a binary system of sanctions, and in both Parliament and the Civil Service there are a range of sanctions available according to the seriousness of the offence. There is no reason why this should not be the case for ministers.”