Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 9:58 pm on 9 January 2023.
I am sorry at this hour to bring a note of dissension to proceedings. Colleagues who have braved these debates before will not be surprised, but basically what we have here is same old, same old. I notice we always employ recruitment consultants. I do not know why, really, because we still get people from the same old group moving around from quango to quango, but from a narrow basis. Of course, the recruitment consultants work on their criteria. What we are not getting in respect of either party is people who represent that vast part of the country that is not metropolitan—I include perhaps some of the metropolitan centres in Scotland and possibly in Northern Ireland—and who are not part of the great and the good. It is the same, by the way, with health authorities.
Going back a number of years, we had local businessmen and council leaders—people who were running businesses day to day and with real-life experience. We had trade union leaders—people who had come up from the shop floor and had real experience. We are dealing with the Committee on Standards; we are dealing with human behaviour.