CCTV cameras ‘would stop abuse of Commons clerks’

CHRIS BRYANT has said that House of Commons clerks were bullied and “touched up” by MPS and that installing CCTV in some areas of Parliament would put an end to such problems.

The Labour MP alleged that scenes in the division lobbies during last month’s chaotic vote on fracking that helped end Liz Truss’s premiership amounted to bullying because MPS were physically manhandled. An inquiry by the Serjeant at Arms and senior clerks found no evidence of bullying or physical pressure to vote.

Mr Bryant, who has represented Rhondda since 2001, said: “In my 21 years as an MP, the worst behaviour by MPS I have seen has either been in the bar, all of which is quite well documented, or in the division lobbies.”

But, he added: “If there had been cameras in the lobby, nobody would have had to look for evidence, the evidence would have been there.”

Insisting that MPS were physically manhandled in the division lobbies during the vote the night before Liz Truss resigned as prime minister, Mr Bryant said: “Maybe I have a lower threshold for that than some others.”

He also told House magazine that some of the clerks, who until recently tallied votes in the lobbies, had complained of inappropriate touching.

“It is striking the number of clerks who said to me that they are delighted that they no longer have to sit in the division lobbies for counting … we now do it with our passes … because the hectoring attitude, the bullying and sometimes even the touching-up of clerks by MPS in the division lobbies

was just beyond,” he said. Mr Bryant, chairman of the Commons committee on standards and privileges, added that at the start of his career as an MP he was regularly inappropriately touched in the division lobbies by older, senior men in Parliament who were not openly gay.

He said he would not report their behaviour retrospectively, because, of the five men he says were involved, “one is still around ... two are dead” and two more were troubled.

“I don’t want to add to all that,” Mr Bryant said.