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’.