Giving evidence on second jobs / mySociety

A few weeks ago, I was part of a panel giving evidence to the House of Commons’ Standards Committee on ‘outside employment and interests’ (second jobs).  Here’s the video, or the transcript. 

My evidence was based on our findings and recommendations from our WhoFundsThem project and our Beyond Transparency report. We worked with volunteers to go right through the register of members’ interests, to add new information to TheyWorkForYou, and to draw some conclusions on reform from what we learned.

The relevant section on second jobs is here in the report.

Here’s a quick summary of what the session was digging into, and what our evidence was about. 

How to handle rules

The meta-question of the session was if you are going to have rules, what form should the rules take? Should they be:

• Transparency-based – do what you like, but you have to tell people.
• Limit-based – don’t take up jobs that earn more than X, or take more time than Y. 
• Principle-based – don’t take up roles with conflicts of interests
• Role-based – don’t take up certain kinds of role

In practice, you want some combination of these – but in general we think that looking at role is a good foundation to be supported by other approaches. 

Transparency is not enough

We love transparency here at mySociety Towers – but the title of our report (Beyond Transparency) is our general message here – it’s not enough on its own even if done well, and it’s not currently well. 

If you are relying on transparency to make this system self-enforcing then the transparency needs to be really good. It’s not! We brought a group of volunteers together because we wanted humans to be able to go through the register and add extra context through research (for example, researching what a named company does) but we just ran into massive obstacles with what wasn’t there. Contradictory information, information that logically should have been updated that wasn’t. Simple questions like “is this person still a councillor” were difficult. 

Fixing this needs a systematic approach. You can’t just say it’s an MPs responsibility to do a good disclosure – you need systematic efforts (validation, prompts and audits) to make this data strong enough to be load bearing. 

Reasonable limits struggles to make practical recommendations

The limit-based approach fell apart immediately because the main proponents of “reasonable limits” (Committee for Standards in Public Life) also decided they couldn’t commit to recommending what these limits should be. Requirements on time might cause problems for medical people who need to do minimum practice, and requirements on money would cause problems for people earning book royalties. So given this, you need to have a sense of roles otherwise you end up in the situation where people do not have to defend lucrative law careers outright, but hide behind the nurses. 

Org-based risk, rather than taking people’s word 

One of the things the committee is considering was principle-based rules proposed by the Parliamentary Commissioner.

Our concern with these is they quite heavily imply that a range of activities is impermissible without actually making it so – making it vulnerable to people just actively lying or non-disclosing. 

For example, a principles-based approach: would struggle to catch an MP being given a semi-fake job, where the actual work is insider contacts and using parliamentary questions. Everyone involved is smart enough to keep what the real deal is out of the contract. They might certify there is no conflict, but there is not a good way of verifying or challenging that.

If we’re trying to prevent outright corruption (while allowing other activities), the risk is not in the role, but the organisation who is paying. The question isn’t “do you as an MP certify this job isn’t corrupt” but “are you taking a job with an organisation that poses corruption risks?” Do they supply government services? Do they separately lobby Parliament?

You want factual questions that don’t rely on any particular role, that can be independently investigated and challenged. The risk is posed by who is paying, not what they say they’re paying for.

The simplest solution (just ban things) has a lot going for it

As a TheyWorkForYou person it feels partly my job to highlight that the majority view is clearly against almost all forms of moonlighting.  By YouGov polling the only professions there was majority public support for allowing was doctor/nurse or author. And even then, a survey experiment by Rosie Campbell and Phillip Cowley found a penalty in support for a hypothetical GP decreased as the extent they continued to practice increased. The conversation in Parliament naturally reflects lots of specific examples of people this would cause problems for, but starting from the public position of almost nothing – the problem should really be trying to justify limited allowances rather than slightly increased restrictions. 

Transparency International’s position is a tight ban, with exceptions for jobs “that maintain a professional qualification, are political activity or provide an essential public service, such as army reservists”. This seems like a good starting point! There are going to be some more fiddly exemptions that need to be argued about (I’d separate out the dual mandate discussion) – but I’m much more comfortable with a list of exemptions than trying to define a list of bad jobs. 

This list of exemptions can be nuanced – and this is an area where using citizens’ panels or assemblies can be useful in really getting into the details (see other examples of select committees making use of deliberative processes). You need broad principles, but you also need to be translating that into specific rules on roles, and have processes for updating these over time. 

This needs collective decisions, not individual discretion

Whatever the approach, it is important that Parliament takes a collective view, rather than seeing this as a matter between MPs and their constituencies. This stretches from better audits of transparency, to just banning activities that are bringing Parliament into disrepute. 

Most MPs are doing the maximum individual action they can – they are not taking these jobs. Meanwhile a small number of MPs have second jobs that cause reputation problems. They get most of the private gains from this, while everyone bears the cost of the headlines. It’d be really great to have one less political trust scandal going around every few years – and a simple approach is in reach. 

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For more on the *other* problems with the current approach (especially on gifts) – please read the report!