Alberto Costa

I support the motions in the name of the Leader of the House and thank him for his opening remarks. The motion on privileges asks this House to agree with the findings in the report by the Committee of Privileges, of which I am the Chair, relating to the Charity Commission taking legal action to prevent the laying of two reports before Parliament by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration. Before I go further, I want to thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), who, as Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, first brought this matter to the House’s attention and moved the motion to refer it to my Committee just over a year ago, on 4 September 2025. Our report deals with a rather technical but very important matter that concerns us all: parliamentary privilege. We must not forget that the case arose from serious complaints and allegations made against a number of charities, including the alleged concealment of child sexual abuse. The PCA reported on those complaints and made recommendations to the Charity Commission. Having concluded that the injustice had not been remedied and was not likely to be remedied, she decided to lay reports before Parliament, as was her right under section 10(3) of the Parliamentary Commissioner Act 1967. It was not the role of my Committee to reach a judgment on the substance of the cases, and so we did not do so. Our role was to consider matters of parliamentary privilege and, in this case, the obstruction of the provision of information to Members. Before touching on the details of the case, I should acknowledge at the outset that, as the Leader of the House said, the commission has already accepted and acted on one of our recommendations. On 14 July—the day that we published our report—the chair of the Charity Commission, on behalf of the board, wrote to Mr Speaker, the Chair of PACAC and me, as Chair of the Privileges Committee, with an unreserved apology. The chief executive officer, Mr Holdsworth, apologised in writing to Mr Speaker. The letter to me has been published on the Committee’s website. I welcome the fact that the commission has finally acknowledged its error, albeit at a regrettably late stage. I hope it will not try Members’ patience if I remind them of the findings and significance of the report. Although it has seemingly technical issues at its heart, it is about the flow of information to this House and is therefore of the greatest importance to the House—to each and every one of us—and its ability to function. The Charity Commission interfered with the flow of information when it sought to prevent the PCA from laying reports before Parliament using the powers given to her in legislation. To make matters worse, the commission refused for a very long time to accept that this was a privilege matter and persisted in its efforts to prevent publication. That was despite repeated written advice, including from Speaker’s Counsel, that its legal action was improper interference with the House’s right to be informed, and could not be considered by the courts as it would have entailed impeaching and questioning proceedings in Parliament, contrary to article IX of the Bill of Rights. That is deeply regrettable, especially given that the reports related to the commission’s failure, as the PCA saw it, to implement properly the recommendations arising from its handling of the very serious complaints to which I referred. At the same time as agreeing to refer the matter to my Committee, this House ordered that the PCA’s reports be laid. That resolved the immediate issue: the interference with the provision of information to the House, as a result of which the courts ruled that the case was academic and the legal merits were unarguable. It remained for my Committee, however, to consider whether the behaviour of the commission was a contempt of Parliament and to come to a view on whether reports laid under section 10(3) of the 1967 Act are indeed proceedings in Parliament, as Speaker’s Counsel had advised. In conducting our inquiry on behalf of this House, we took evidence from Speaker’s Counsel, the PCA herself and three representatives of the commission: its then interim chair, Mark Simms; its CEO, David Holdsworth; and its head of litigation, Felix Rechtman. Although we were grateful to all the witnesses for giving evidence, our report was highly critical of Mr Holdsworth, in particular, especially for repeatedly insisting, both in his oral evidence and elsewhere in correspondence, that it was never the commission’s intention that Parliament should not see the information in the reports. The Committee could not see how that claim could be squared with the commission’s pre-action letter, which specifically sought to quash the decision to provide Parliament with that information. In the light of that, we recommended that Mr Holdsworth and the board of the commission should apologise to the House. As I said, and as the Leader of the House confirmed, those apologies have now been made. The inquiry sought to establish something that has never been explicitly considered by the courts, not even in this case, since the judge ruled that the legal merits were unarguable: namely, whether reports to be laid under section 10(3) of the 1967 Act are in fact proceedings in Parliament. That is crucial to the rights of Parliament, since article IX of the Bill of Rights confers on proceedings in Parliament protection from being “impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament.” That is one of our most foundational constitutional principles. If such a report is a proceeding in Parliament, any attempt to obstruct its laying could be a contempt of Parliament. The Committee found that such reports were intimately connected to the House and were therefore proceedings in Parliament, and so covered by article IX. It consequently found that any attempt to prevent the laying of a paper before one or both Houses was capable of being a contempt, and that in this particular case the commission had clearly committed such a contempt. It is deeply regrettable that the Committee had to consider this case at all. I very much hope that the Charity Commission, and indeed other public bodies, learn the lessons so that we avoid a repeat of these unfortunate events. I thank the other members of the Privileges Committee, the Clerks—especially the Clerk of the Journals, who is soon to be Clerk of the House—and Speaker’s Counsel for helping us to navigate what was at times an incredibly difficult subject procedurally. I hope that my speech and that of the Leader of the House have demonstrated to all of us, however, that it was also one of great importance to the proper functioning of the House of Commons. I hope that Members will agree to the motion.