Parliamentary Standards Bill

I am starting to run out of time, so I simply respond by saying that that does not invalidate the proposition that I have made. It is all germane to this Bill and we should have a chance to reflect on what the Clerk says. However the Clerk produced this paper, I have never before seen anything like it circulated so widely beyond the Committee that commissioned or asked for it, and it makes some extraordinarily important points. Thank goodness the Secretary of State has at least listened to the Clerk's strictures on clause 6; we are grateful for that. Clause 8 is also significant, and the Clerk states that""if the Committee declined to act on a recommendation, that could presumably become the basis of legal proceedings in which the Commissioner (or anyone else) sought to require the Committee to comply."" That section is important, and my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire has already quoted what the Clerk said about clause 10:""This could have a chilling effect on the freedom of speech of Members and of witnesses before committees and would hamper the ability of House officials to give advice to Members."" I have already referred to the Clerk's comments on our Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege, which have not been tagged for this afternoon's debate but, frankly, should have been because they are highly relevant. I end where I was not going to end, but I am tempted to do so by the perceptive, thoughtful and, frankly, very compelling speech of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, who talked about the implications of clause 5(8), which deals with outside interests. Those of us who have some outside interests have been put in a position recently whereby we are almost ashamed to talk of them. Well, I am not. I think it important that one should sometimes share these things with colleagues in the House, and I am tempted to do so by the frank way—no pun intended—in which the right hon. Member for Birkenhead shared his experiences. For many years, I have been involved in helping to run an annual reward for responsible capitalism. It must be thought to be a good thing, as the first award was presented by the current Prime Minister when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Two years ago, it was presented by the present Chancellor and last year by the Foreign Secretary. It is a highly respectable and, I think, a good thing; the chairman of our judges is the former Lord Chief Justice, who succeeded the late great Lord Dahrendorf, who sadly died just a couple of weeks ago. I believe that this is immensely worthwhile and I think it good that Members of Parliament should be involved in it. I am proud to be involved with it. Where does my parliamentary interest begin and end? It is very similar to what the right hon. Member for Birkenhead said about his egg timer in his conversation this morning. It would be very sad indeed if the regulations that we pass and are supervised by this new body were so interpreted and applied that Parliament became an assembly of nerds, anoraks and the very rich. That would be an extremely bad development for Parliament. It is important that we have people who have interests outside—relevant interests, interests that help to inform their contributions to debate. We are all answerable to our constituents for the time we spend on our parliamentary work and in our constituency. I do not think anyone would ever suggest that I was less than a "full-time Member of Parliament" or a "full-time constituency Member", and yet I find a little time to do other things, and I believe that it helps me—and, I hope, indirectly—helps my constituents and the House. It is most important that we recognise this and that any body set up to look after our interests recognises it, too. I hope that the Kelly committee will recognise it. Above all, I hope that the Government—or, if not this Government, a future Government—will put aside the oppressive parts of the Bill before us today. To have parliamentarians in a free country answerable in any way to an appointed quango is to diminish Parliament and to diminish those who sit in Parliament and to deter people from coming into Parliament in the future. What we want is an institution that truly attracts the best, and not just the best from the young but from those of all ages. A parliamentary intake that includes men and women in their 50s and 60s, as did the 1970 intake when I first entered Parliament, is all the better for that. It should not be composed only of those who come here motivated by the ambition to carry a Dispatch Box and be driven in a ministerial car—it is good that some should do so—as there is no higher calling than representing a part of the United Kingdom in this place. I fear that the Bill militates against that. I thus beg the Secretary of State and Lord High Chancellor—both of them!—to recognise what has reasonably been said about the amount of time that Ministers have to spend, quite properly, on their duties, but to concentrate too on the financial part of the Bill and have it ready for Kelly so that his committee can indeed supervise and implement. Most of all, however, I beg the right hon. Gentleman to shy away from the establishment of an organisation that can in any way seek to dictate either directly or indirectly to the elected representatives of the people of the United Kingdom in Parliament assembled.