Parliamentary Standards Bill

My hon. Friend has made that point in the House a number of times. The loose use of the phrase "full-time MP" is increasingly vacuous. It does not mean much. The Prime Minister and other Ministers are Members of Parliament, working for their constituencies, and have very busy jobs as Ministers. Members who are paid as Chairmen of Select Committees also have that as an extra job. So the notion that we are either full-time MPs or not requires us to help inform people about how this place works. If ever there was a time when educating people and helping them understand this place were needed, now is such a time. We will have to consider all these issues very soberly over the next few days. One issue that has been discussed and is of great importance is the question why we need to create special new offences for MPs, as in clause 9, for example, for providing "false or misleading" information when making an expense claim. As my hon. and learned Friends the Members for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) and for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) said earlier, and as was pointed out by a QC in the letters page of The Times last week, such behaviour is already punishable under section 15 or 15A of the Theft Act 1968—dishonestly obtaining property by deception—or perhaps under the provisions for false accounting in section 17. There has been a perverse consequence of the Government's attempt to define a special offence for us. I suspect that it was not the Government's intention to limit the maximum sentence for which an MP could be imprisoned to 12 months, rather than the 10-year sentence that can await members of the public found guilty under the Theft Act, but that is how it appeared to the correspondent in The Times. Creating different rules just for Members of Parliament cannot hope to fill the public with confidence in the new system. The Government's unworthy briefing to the press today suggests that they are more interested in propaganda than in a proper Parliament. A Second Reading speech is to do with the principle of the Bill. The key principle at stake here is not only the external determination of our allowances, but the relationship between Parliament and the courts. As mentioned before, we had concerns about the obligation to have a statutorily enforced code of conduct; we were perturbed that the justiciability of the code would move our focus away from the legitimate concerns of our constituents towards the vexatious concerns of litigants. These are tough times for Parliament, but they are also times in which the House needs to keep its collective head. We need a simple Bill that deals swiftly and effectively with the problem of our expenses. Let us not try to solve that problem by creating other problems, whose magnitude might dwarf even the hideous situation of the past two months.