The Commons Select Committee of Privileges is a Committee appointed by the House of Commons to consider specific matters relating to privileges referred to it by the House.
It came into being on 7 January 2013 as one half of the replacements for the Committee on Standards and Privileges. The latter committee was divided into the Committee on Standards and Committee of Privileges in order that the Standards Committee might employ lay members.
Membership
As of November 2023, the members of the committee were as follows:[1][2]
Investigation into Boris Johnson
The Privileges Committee of the House of Commons had a parliamentary injury over the investigation into Boris Johnson's breach of lockdown rules during the COVID-19 pandemic, concerning four specific assertions made by the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson at Prime Minister's Questions about "the legality of activities in 10 Downing Street and the Cabinet Office under Covid regulations", events commonly referred to as Partygate. The investigation is concerned with whether Johnson misled the Commons when he made these statements.
The Committee published their final report on 15 June.[3] Johnson resigned over the investigation after having been sent a draft copy of the committee's report. The Committee had voted on the final report text and unanimously supported it. They concluded that Johnson had deliberately misled the House, a contempt of Parliament. They said that, had he still been an MP, they would have recommended a 90 day suspension.[3] If that had happened, it would have been the second longest suspension since 1949.[4][5][3][6]
The Committee concluded that Johnson's actions were "more serious" because they were committed when he was Prime Minister. They noted that there was no precedent for a PM being found to have deliberately misled Parliament.[7] The report stated that Johnson tried to "rewrite the meaning" of COVID rules "to fit his own evidence" for example that "a leaving gathering or a gathering to boost morale was a lawful reason to hold a gathering."[8] They concluded he was guilty of further contempts of Parliament and that he breached confidentiality requirements by criticising the Committee's provisional findings when he resigned. They said he was complicit in a "campaign of abuse" against those investigating him.[3]
The Commons debated the report on 19 June 2023. Labour forced a vote and the Commons voted 354 to 7 in support, with a large number of abstentions. This was an absolute majority of the Commons. 118 Conservative MPs, including 15 ministers, voted for the report and 225 abstained. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had earlier said he had other commitments, and did not attend the debate and refused to say how he would have voted.