In January of this year, I was interviewed for the Guardian alongside two other women who’d made complaints of sexual harassment against politicians. We were a Tory, a Liberal Democrat and a Labour activist. Supporting us was the leader of the Women’s Equality party, Sophie Walker. She looked back to October of last year, when the outermost tides of the Harvey Weinstein scandal first lapped against the banks of Westminster. “At the beginning of this, people thought this was the next expenses scandal and it was going to tear parliament apart. It hasn’t. Why? Because basically we care more about MPs who spend money on duck houses than MPs who grope, assault, harass and frighten women. And that is an absolute indictment of this system.”

House of Commons denies bullying claims involving John Bercow Read more

That may change after BBC Newsnight’s landmark investigation into bullying of female staff by male MPs. The product of months of research by the journalists Lucinda Day and Christopher Cook, Thursday’s programme exposed the uneasy power dynamic between MPs and parliament’s clerks, the professionals who both support and regulate the work of parliamentary committees.

It’s a particularly difficult relationship: among other duties, clerks are supposed to ensure parliamentary committees stick to their remit and use taxpayer resources appropriately. This is most fraught on “fact-finding” trips abroad. Like an unpopular chaperone on a school trip, the clerk is the person who coughs gently when MPs order too many bottles of Barolo on expenses or suggest a detour to a luxury resort. But in reality, MPs have political pulling power and often the ego to go with it. As Thursday’s report demonstrated, clerks who try to hold MPs to account – do their job – often pay with their careers. The allegations that the Speaker, John Bercow, is himself part of the problem mean this scandal will stay on the front pages.

The prospect of a challenge to the Speaker during a hung parliament will give whips nightmares on all sides of the House. But Thursday’s report also poses three major problems for Andrea Leadsom’s Working Group on an Independent Complaints and Grievance Policy, the cross-party committee working on new grievance procedures for the Palace of Westminster. Few with knowledge of the group doubt the commitment of its members to reforming the culture. (These are the people who signed up for the job. It’s the rest of parliament we should worry about.) Yet their initial report, published a month ago, suggests broad ideas for colleagues to finesse somewhere indefinitely down the line. The word “may” appears 75 times in the document.

Telling a politician not to exact retribution against an enemy is like telling a fish not to swim

Top of the list of its recommendations is the commitment to setting up separate grievances procedures for sexual harassment and bullying. This stems partly from a determination by Leadsom to give workplace bullying the attention it deserves: a survey for the group found that 39% of staff reported non-sexual bullying in the last year alone, compared with 19% reporting sexual harassment.

But look again at those statistics. The 39% who reported non-sexual bullying constituted 45% of female respondents and 35% of male (statistics for non-binary persons were not available.) Bullying can be gendered without being explicitly sexual – and the cases reported by Newsnight all fell clearly into this group. When men repeatedly pick on their female staff to bully, they are not always recognised as sexual harassers, often because their perceived objective does not consist of coerced sex. Parliament evidently has a problem with gendered bullying. If an MP is investigated only for bullying or for sexual harassment – with the complainant forced to pick one of two procedures, like some kind of shotgun Choose Your Own Adventure – investigators may miss clues and witnesses to a broader pattern.

The second problem for the Leadsom group is that committees of MPs set up to sanction their colleagues have clearly failed to do so. Witness after witness told Newsnight of the case of the “brilliant” Emily Commander, who left the service after an initial report found that her treatment by Paul Farrelly MP amounted to “an abuse of power or position”, but the House of Commons commission, dominated by MPs, seemed reluctant to act against their colleague. The Leadsom group has suggested that all sexual harassment and bullying claims should, if taken to the highest level, be adjudicated by a committee of MPs similar to those who already judge the cases of clerks. That seems unsustainable.

Women aren't confident abuse in Westminster has been stopped Read more

All of this appears to have led to revictimisation of those who have made complaints. This is the third problem that the Leadsom report has yet to grapple with: how to protect staff whose complaints are upheld, when the case is not serious enough to enforce an MP’s resignation. That is hard in parliament, where power is currency. Telling a politician not to exact retribution against an enemy is like telling a fish not to swim.

Back in 2009, the expenses scandal exposed a culture of entitlement. That entitlement lies at the heart of most of the cases of bullying and sexual harassment exposed in Westminster. Change may be coming – if and only if parliament recognises that it must become a professional workplace. The clerks who work with MPs, like so many parliamentary staff, are trained professionals. They, and the rest of us, deserve MPs who act as professional colleagues.

• Kate Maltby writes about theatre, politics and culture, and is associate fellow of Bright Blue