Labour is to force a Commons vote later this week on whether MPs should be barred from holding paid directorships or business consultancies, as Keir Starmer argued there should be a wider ban on almost all second jobs for MPs. Labour sources say they believe the vote, to happen as part of an opposition day debate on Wednesday, would have legal force. Even if it did not, holding it focuses attention on an issue that primarily affects Conservative MPs, and could be embarrassing for ministers.
Starmer first announced the plan during his regular phone-in appearance on LBC radio, saying he wanted to find a way forward from “a terrible two weeks” prompted by the government’s decision, soon U-turned, to block punishment for Owen Paterson after he lobbied on behalf of companies who were paying him. MPs will on Monday vote to overturn the previous Commons decision, instigated by the government, to protect Paterson, who has since resigned as an MP, and introduce a new standards committee with an in-built Conservative majority. The vote would be on whether MPs should no longer hold paid directorships or commercial consultancies, Starmer said. “We’re putting that down,” he said. “It’s for every MP to decide how they want to vote on that. But that will perhaps be a measure of where people are on how we actually move this forwards. “I strongly believe that paid consultancies and directorships should just be outlawed. There’s pretty obviously a potential for a conflict of interest, and we’ve seen that in the past few weeks.” More widely, Starmer said, there was a strong case for outlawing all second jobs for MPs, aside from a handful of exceptions with a “public service element”, such as MPs who do shifts as doctors, or who are in the army or police reserves. “We can have a debate about where that line is drawn,” he said. “But beyond that, I think, the time has come, really, to say that second jobs must go.” On Wednesday, Labour will table two separate motions. One will be on ending paid directorships and commercial consultancies. The other will demand the publication of any official papers relating to lobbying done by Paterson for Randox, the healthcare firm that paid him as a consultant, and which won £500m in government contracts connected to Covid, and on the contracts Randox received. Speaking earlier on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the Conservative party co-chair Oliver Dowden rejected the warning from Lord Evans, the chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, that the Paterson case showed that the UK could “slip into being a corrupt country”. Dowden said: “I think we are an exceptionally long way from that. Of course we have to learn lessons and of course we have to uphold the high standards in public life. “But the fact that you are subjecting me at a little after 8 o’clock in the morning to a forensic going over in terms of what the government has done – in a corrupt country you don’t find this kind of level of free press scrutiny and accountability.” Dowden also defended the decision, taken when he was culture secretary, to re-run the application process for the new chair of the media and broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, after the candidate widely assumed to be the government’s pick, former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, was turned down. The job description was then rewritten to favour a candidate more like Dacre, while the new interview panel will include a former Tory adviser who is married to a Conservative MP. Dowden defended the government’s actions, saying: “There were various issues with that process which led me to re-running it.” He added: “If this had been this corrupt process you would be looking at an individual, who you allege was preferred by the government, currently in that role.”