Safeguards need more teeth, says PM after incidents including Tory minister who admitted getting assistant to buy sex toys

Theresa May has insisted that she is determined to take tough action to protect Westminster staff against sexual harassment as MPs in both major parties predicted more sleaze allegations would emerge in the coming days.

The prime minister wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, calling on him establish an independent mediation service for staff wanting to raise concerns about MPs’ behaviour and to enforce a grievance procedure which is currently voluntary.

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority recommends that a grievance procedure is included in employees’ contracts. However, parliamentary staff work directly for MPs, who are in effect self-employed and do not have to adopt the policy.

“It does not have the required teeth as contractually an MP does not have to follow the procedure. I do not believe this situation can be tolerated any longer,” May said in her letter.

A series of claims about the behaviour of senior politicians have emerged in recent days, after the Harvey Weinstein scandal encouraged women in other professions to share their experiences.

The former work and pensions secretary Stephen Crabb apologised for “sexual chatter” with a 19-year-old who had applied for a job in his office, while the trade minister Mark Garnier admitted asking a former assistant to buy sex toys and calling her “sugar tits”.

Labour MPs believe more allegations will emerge on their own side. The Sheffield Hallam MP Jared O’Mara was suspended from the party last week for a series of misogynistic and homophobic remarks on social media.

“We’re not going to be immune from it,” said the Manchester Central MP, Lucy Powell. “It’s the attitudes and the power inequalities, whether it’s Hollywood, the BBC or Westminster.”

May’s call for a mediator follows demands from the Labour MPs John Mann and Sarah Champion for staff to be able to report allegations to an independent authority, particularly when the person harassing them may be their boss.

MPs warn that the risks to young staff are intensified by late working hours, the fact that many politicians lead a double life – with one home in London and another in their constituency – and Westminster’s many bars.

The shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, told the BBC’s Andrew Marr that the culture was even worse 30 years ago when she was first elected.

“You would have sort of micro-sexual aggression. So women would get up in the chamber and Tories opposite would do this gesture like they were weighing their breasts,” she said.

“There was harassment, there were jokes which weren’t that funny – it was partly to do with the fact it was a very male environment – 650 MPs, when I went there just 20-odd women.

“It was partly to do with idea of all these men away from home, it was partly to do with the fact there were eight bars and the very long hours and the bars were open for as long as we’re sitting, and partly with the notion that what happens in Westminster stays in Westminster. It was worse – it’s a little bit better now – but there’s a long way to go.”

Mann has threatened to name a parliamentary colleague who he said was thrown off a foreign trip for harassing women.

The Conservative MP Anna Soubry praised May’s action, but said the proposed new system must go further. “What it must do, of course, is to protect all workers at the Palace of Westminster,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday.

“At the moment it looks like it’s only going to deal with those situations where a member of a team wants to make an allegation against a member of parliament – it must encompass any workers raising a grievance against anyone else.”

Powell told Today that politics was vulnerable to such abuses. Like the film industry, it was “an environment where you have many, many, many people desperate to work in a place” who relied on others for work.

“When you have that mix of lots of desperate people in that environment, this sort of power abuse – and that’s what it is, it’s about a power inequality – can thrive,” she said.

Separately, MPs were sharing stories on Sunday about a Conservative MP who allegedly takes pictures of young men in compromising positions and uses them to extract sexual favours. The Sunday Times reported that an unnamed senior cabinet minister had grabbed a woman’s thigh and said: “God I love those tits.” One former Tory minister said: “The whole culture needs to change.”

Downing Street flatly denied reports that the prime minister receives regular updates from the whips about the sexual behaviour of her MPs. Instead, they said she had requested on Friday to see the chief whip, Gavin Williamson, and her chief of staff, Gavin Barwell to ask if more should be done about sexual harassment.

Katie Perrior, formerly May’s head of communications, said such information was often “kept away from the prime minister” but used by whips to enforce party discipline.

She told BBC One’s Breakfast: “The information is held by the whips, because they use it to make sure that MPs know that other people within the party know exactly what they’ve been up to, and that behaviour either is not acceptable, or it will be used against them – you will vote in a certain way or we will tell your wife exactly what you’ve been up to.”

In her letter to Bercow, May said parliament should be a safe place for young people to work. “I believe it is important that those who work in the House of Commons are treated properly and fairly, as would be expected in any modern workplace.” She called for other political leaders to work on a cross-party basis to tighten up the rules.

A spokesman for the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said: “There must be robust procedures inside as well as outside parliament for dealing with abuse and harassment. Jeremy is ready to meet the Speaker and the prime minister as soon as possible to strengthen those procedures and parliamentary staff employment conditions.”

However, Labour accused the prime minister of “washing her hands” of the harassment claims against Garnier, after she asked the Cabinet Office to investigate the circumstances in which he had asked his former assistant to buy sex toys.

The Cabinet Office oversees the ministerial code, which demands “the highest standards of propriety”. But the events in question took place in 2010, before Garnier was a minister.



The shadow Cabinet Office minister, Jon Trickett, said: “By referring wrongdoing to the Cabinet Office, the prime minister appears to be attempting to narrow any judgment on her minister’s behaviour to whether or not he is in breach of the ministerial code but this is limited in scope. The prime minister – as party leader – ought not to wash her hands of these matters in this way.”

Garnier, the Conservative MP for Wyre Forest in Worcestershire, did not deny the events detailed by his former assistant Caroline Edmondson in the Mail on Sunday.

“I’m not going to be dishonest,” Garnier said. He insisted that referring to Edmondson as “sugar tits”, as she says he did, was a reference to the BBC comedy Gavin and Stacey, saying: “It absolutely does not constitute harassment.” Neither did he deny encouraging her to buy two sex toys in Soho, standing outside the shop while she made the purchase.