It is strange to agree so much with Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg. I think that he is a bit shocked that I agree with him as well—I see that he nods.

Let me return to two central things. First, this is about Parliament being like every other workplace in the country. Of course there are ways in which we are exceptional—we often emphasise those too much, perhaps—but what was fascinating when we debated the original proposals from the Commission in the Standards Committee was that the lay members all said that in every line of work they were in, this would be standard practice. It would happen in various different ways in different organisations, but certainly in every part of the public sector and in any major employer in the land, this process, in some shape or form, would be absolutely standard. We are simply trying to ensure that this workplace, like any other in the land, is safe not just from external threats but from behaviours that could put staff, members of the public and colleagues at risk.

Secondly, the proposal is about assessing the seriousness of the risk in any given set of circumstances—which heaven knows could vary enormously from the case of one person to another—and then taking proportionate and only proportionate measures to mitigate that risk, as any responsible employer and workplace surely should, and as any other workplace would be required to do, in law written by us. It is about the assessment of risk and proportionate measures to deal with the risk; it is not, in my mind—and I think that it is a terrible shame that it has been billed as such—about exclusion. Exclusion should be, as it is in nearly every other business, the very last point to go to. It would be at the extreme end, when an assessment had been made that the risk was relatively extreme.

Many other things could be done that fall far short of exclusion. For instance, one of the oddities about this building and all the buildings on the parliamentary estate is that we often work, as an MP, with a single member of staff, or two members of staff, behind a big oak door. Somebody might want to make a risk assessment if a Member were, I would say, arrested for a sexual or violent crime relating to a member of staff. They might want to make an assessment that that Member should no longer be in that kind of office and that their office should be one shared with other members of staff, other Members of Parliament or in a more visible space. That might be the perfectly proportionate decision to take, and that could be done entirely without the public knowing and entirely as a neutral act.

This is a really important point: the court of public opinion has no formal rules of evidence, operates entirely to its own agenda, and—in my experience—rarely delivers justice or anything that we would think approximates justice. That is why, notwithstanding the point made about how rumour spreads around here, it is so important that any measure taken should be done confidentially. I think that in nearly every case it would be taken with the agreement of the Member concerned. It should also be considered an entirely neutral process. My worry about the obsession with exclusion as the endpoint of what we are looking at is that it starts to look like a punishment rather than a neutral act.

That is why, in nearly every case, if the assessment of the panel were that there was a significant risk that could be mitigated only through a suggestion of exclusion, the Member would be well advised to follow that advice voluntarily. I think they would in nearly any set of circumstances. However, I agree with the right hon. Member for North East Somerset that, in the end, it must be a matter for the House if there is to be forced exclusion; otherwise, there is a danger that we bring the whole process into disrepute and it will not last for more than five minutes.