Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Can Parliament really end its toxic culture of bullying and harassment?

How could the sort of bullying and sexual harassment detailed in Dame Laura Cox’s report on the treatment of House of Commons staff really have gone on for so long? There were policies in place for dealing with complaints, and on paper everything looked as though it was working well to prevent the rise of the ‘serial offenders’ that Cox refers to. This was the very defence initially mounted by the parliamentary authorities themselves when the allegations first came to light in the press earlier this year, but Cox’s report shows how structures and cultures can be very different indeed.

The problem, she writes, was largely one of culture so that even though there were formal mechanisms in place for a member of House staff to complain that an MP, for instance, was bullying them, the risks associated with approaching that formal process were considered too high. Subtler than this was what one person who spoke to the inquiry described as a ‘toxic environment of deference and impunity, which some members have exploited’. MPs would expect not just to have priorities in queues or certain lifts when a vote was on, but also to be able to call staff members ‘useless’, or to make unwanted sexual advances, without any consequences at all.

Toxic cultures can develop unheeded, but those in senior positions do have a choice as to whether they perpetuate them or not. And in this case, the senior leadership of the House of Commons is guilty of allowing the toxic culture to flourish. Cox repeatedly states that this team is not fit for purpose and that many staff argued that any new complaints procedure would probably be pointless. She writes:

‘Having commissioned this inquiry, I fear that the House may fail those it is trying to help and sustain further damages to its reputation and to its credibility as an employer if this reports leads only to another series of initiatives and process changes.

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