Parliamentary Standards Bill

The past few months have been desperate ones for Parliament: the reputation of this House has taken some pretty heavy knocks and Members of all parties have been left reeling. The crisis has arisen from the fact that Parliament has stood still while the world moved on. For more than 30 years we have worked under a system of remuneration that would never have stood up to scrutiny in the commercial world, and while political cowardice at the top maintained the headline rate of pay at an artificially low level, political deceit—I think it is fair to call it that—has invented an allowance scheme that was less than acceptable, lacked any transparency and was corrosive to public trust. One of the most important political trends of the past two decades has been the movement towards greater openness, so when the facts came out, as they were bound to do, it was always going to end in tears. The truth that now must haunt us all is that when the House had the opportunity to fix the system, it signally failed to seize the moment. We must not fail this time around.