Parliamentary Standards Bill

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for that comment. The central provision in this Bill—clause 1—will create what is, in essence, the independent Fees Office that we have been discussing. Conservative Members welcome that, because we support the principle that MPs should no longer determine their own pay and allowances. The public anger to which Members have been exposed originates, in part, from taxpayers' increasing alienation from a political system that is seen to waste money—that feeling has intensified during the recession. While many people are losing their job and seeing their income reduced, MPs are seen to be being paid in luxuries. We feel that people will never have confidence in Parliament if we continue to vote on our own remuneration. It is true that in recent months the House has adopted a much more rigorous regime. I chair the Members Estimate Audit Committee, and it is good that significant progress has been made on creating three levels of audit and assurance and on ensuring that all the standards that we set are akin to those of any public body or the most strictly regulated plc. However, as such decisions are still viewed by the public as made by MPs for MPs, we think it better that there should be a dedicated external body to determine our pay and rations. I should make another point in passing. The House has just elected a new Speaker. All sorts of labels were given to the contest by the press; particular mention was made of the desire to promote a Speaker who would "reform". If this Bill goes through—let us leave aside the Speaker's involvement in the selection process for IPSA itself—the framework of the new body would have a significant bearing on the office of Speaker and his ability to have any say in reforming this side of our parliamentary life. All the arguments about expenses would be removed from his responsibility. Likewise, there are consequential implications for certain Committees of the House, for instance in relation to the function of audit. The Bill might result in my having to relinquish the chairmanship of the Members Estimate Audit Committee and retain only the audit function for the House estimates, which deal with the parliamentary buildings and the wider estate. Having established IPSA, the Bill, through clauses 2 to 5, would provide that body with the powers to set our allowances—with reference to the inquiry by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which I have mentioned—to administer our allowances and our salaries and to codify and maintain the Register of Members' Interests. Clauses 7 to 9 would create a Commissioner for Parliamentary Investigation, who would work with but separately from the authority, to look into alleged misuse of allowances or breaches of the registration of financial interests. The House will be aware that that would create duplication with the work of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards—currently John Lyon—so we will need to give detailed examination in Committee as to exactly how to untangle those roles. In just these respects we would like the Bill to go further. The historic response to the continuing controversy about our remuneration has always been safety valve politics; it has always been about letting just a little more air out of the system in order to buy a little more time. However, by fending off a bad headline one day, we have not avoided 10 bad headlines the next. We have delegated both pay recommendations and a review of our pensions to the Senior Salaries Review Body, and the Committee on Standards in Public Life is investigating our expenses. Those are ultimately three elements of the same overall package, and what has been depressing about the past few months has been the lack of public debate about what impact the final package, whatever it might be after those bodies have made their separate reports, will have on the make-up and identity of Parliament. We need someone to piece together all those fragments and draw together all those different threads. Perhaps if we equip IPSA properly and make it capable of taking rigorous intellectual decisions, it might one day be the authority that succeeds in taking a comprehensive, overarching view to determine our entire pay and rations.