Commons standards committee recommends 35-day suspension for Scott Benton, who had Conservative whip suspended in April
Scott Benton is being punished in relation to lobbying, but not because he directly broke the rules banning MPs from engaging in paid lobbying when he spoke to undercover reporters. The committee said that, because he indicated that he was willing to break the rules, and because he claimed over MPs had done so in the past, he damaged the reputation of the Commons.
Here are some extracts from the report setting out what Benton said, and why it was considered damaging to parliament’s reputation
One of the reporters then asked Mr Benton what assistance he could offer by way of “insight and kind of getting a bit of a sense of behind the scenes, what’s going on and what’s likely to come”. Mr Benton responded:
“Probably real time information. If I want to speak to a minister urgently, I can probably arrange that, have her call back within a day. Failing that, again it’s a voting lobbies issue. So if you were, for example, to write to her today, and you needed an urgent answer within a week and somebody hadn’t got back to her with that week period I could literally sit outside her office until she appears. Which is something only MPs can essentially do to try and get that real time flow of information and answers back.”
Mr Benton spoke to the undercover reporters about the willingness of Members to accept paid hospitality such as hiring a box at Cheltenham Races or offering them a private dinner (“Talk about pushing at an open door. In fact you’ll have people chasing you saying colleague X, Y and Z wants to come, is there any more room. And that works very, very well”). Mr Benton immediately followed up these comments by saying, in reference to those Members who had accepted hospitality, “And those specific asks you would have, they would be able to yeah take those on board and try to do something as a bit of a return”. Mr Benton also told the reporters that he was willing to “call in favours” to “bring colleagues along” to meet company representatives to “talk them through those certain asks”, and to host a dinner for that purpose at the House of Commons “where we can go through some of those particular issues as well” with “colleagues who would be more than happy to support you.” In context, the “specific asks” and “certain asks” referred to by Mr Benton must allude to the services to the company offered by Mr Benton, which as we have seen would have breached the House’s rules. There is no other plausible interpretation of Mr Benton’s comments. The implication is clear that the other Members referred to had engaged in such behaviour in the past and would be willing to do so in future …
At the meeting one of the reporters continued these exchanges by asking, “[i]f we invite someone along, is it reasonable to then expect them, we’ve given you a nice day out, we kind of expect something in return? Is that how it works?” Mr Benton responded:
Having considered the evidence, my findings are:
a) Mr Benton did not attend the meeting as part of his “purely private and personal” life because the fictitious company was presented as being interested in employing Mr Benton on account of his connections to the House of Commons and its members.
Continue reading…
