Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I beg to move amendment 55, page 33, line 22, leave out ', in exceptional cases,'. Following the tortuous nature of the previous discussion, I offer brevity and simplicity. I also rise to press the merits of an amendment that I assume the Government will have no difficulty in accepting. I simply want to remove the single phrase "in exceptional cases" from the reporting requirements being laid upon the Civil Service Commission, as I can see no reason why it should be included. In the previous exchanges my right hon. Friend the Minister prayed in aid the commission and said it had raised no issues about the matter under discussion. It is fair to say, however, that it has expressed concerns about its ability to undertake investigations of code-related matters and of civil service-related matters when it thinks it is appropriate to do so and to report on those to the House. When giving evidence to the Public Administration Committee back in July, the First Civil Service Commissioner said:""I think we agreed in the end that we might well be involved in an investigation if we saw a matter so serious or in fact so systematic, and I repeat that because, if what we were hearing from any source was that there was a systematic concern, then clearly that would be exactly the kind of issue that might cause the Commissioners to launch an investigation of their own to see just what was going on."" The First Civil Service Commissioner also wrote to me very recently, on 19 October, and stated:""Despite some concerns about the potential for politicisation and resource constraints, the commissioners recognised that there may be occasions where it would be right for the commission to carry out such an investigation if there were clear evidence of a ""significant breach of the code. We would therefore support an approach which gave the commission in addition to the duty to consider a complaint from the civil servant—clause 9—the discretion to investigate matters at its own initiation. We would envisage that the commission would want to exercise this discretion only in cases where the burden of suspicion was substantial."" Therefore, we have the commissioners firmly saying that they do think it would be appropriate for them to have the ability to undertake investigations of civil service issues on their own initiative, and by extension to report on such matters under their reporting obligations. We have a similar arrangement with the parliamentary ombudsman, who is a servant of this House. We ask the ombudsman to produce reports on cases and to produce an annual report, but we explicitly give that office the ability to make special reports to the House where there are particular issues it wants to bring to the House's attention. It is entirely sensible and straightforward that we would give a similar provision to the commissioners. They want a provision of this kind and it seems sensible for them to have one, and I am sure the Government cannot think of any reason why they cannot have it. I am simply asking for these restrictive words to be removed from the Bill.