HR department to rein in sleazy MPs

Speaker plans shake-up to tackle ‘Pestminster’ scandal as more sex and booze claims emerge

MPs could be banned from employing staff and Parliament could get an HR department following a fresh wave of ‘Pestminster’ claims.

Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has called for ‘radical’ reform to working practices to counter allegations of drunken behaviour and sexual misconduct.

Claims have emerged that a minister had ‘noisy sex’ in his office, a senior MP ‘licked the faces’ of junior staff and drunken researchers vomited on a parliamentary bar.

Sir Lindsay’s move follows Tory MP neil Parish’s resignation after admitting watching pornography in the Commons.

Tory co-chairman Oliver Dowden is also taking action by promising half of the

‘Bullying and impropriety’

party’s candidates at the next election will be women. The figure was one in four at the 2019 election – compared with more than half for Labour.

Culture Secretary nadine Dorries last week suggested ensuring ‘a majority of women’ in Parliament could help tackle westminster sleaze.

Among the allegations are claims that a senior Tory MP pestered a female staff member for ‘sexual favours’, according to The Mail on Sunday.

There were also suggestions another MP offered a member of his staff a taxpayer-funded pay rise but only on condition that part of the increase came to him.

in recent weeks, an MP is said to have become so drunk on champagne that the person had been escorted out of the Pugin tea room, according to The Sunday Times.

Other claims include that an MP was warned over his use of prostitutes, while one male Tory MP is said to have sent a picture of his anatomy to a female colleague.

But a minister branded plans to close parliamentary bars as ‘excessively puritanical’.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told Times Radio: ‘This idea that we are going to go into some sort of US prohibition-style lockdown in the House of Commons where there are no bars, i think that is huge overreaction.’

Mr Kwarteng also told the BBC’s Sunday Morning show that Parliament was a safe place for women to work, adding: ‘we’ve got to distinguish between some bad apples, people who behave badly, and the general environment.’

Sir Lindsay said yesterday that he would appoint a ‘Speaker’s conference’ which would be made up of MPs and take advice and consider whether there was a case for change.

‘i take recent allegations of bullying and sexual impropriety very seriously, which is why it is time we reviewed our working practices, particularly whether it is right that individual MPs are the employers of their staff,’ he said.