Parliamentary Standards Bill

It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack), who is the only man in the House who pronounces "Parliament" properly. I am still learning. I want to make some general points about the establishment of an Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. They will be much wider than the points that have already been made today, although those were extremely important. Like others, I am concerned about the fact that the Bill is being rushed through in this way. Given that it is being dealt with in a mere three days and that we were told only last week that it was to be debated, I do not think we are being given enough time to debate a measure with such potentially far-reaching consequences not just for the House but for those outside. Understandably, we all feel that we must act decisively to deal with what has been revealed about our discredited expenses system. An absolute scandal has been caused by the way in which we make our claims and the way in which they are agreed, and we all understand the public outrage that that has prompted when we go back to our constituencies and talk to people about it. What angers them so much is that we make rules by which they must abide and then seem to make separate rules for ourselves, and what worries me about the Bill is that we seem again to be making rules for ourselves that are different from the rules that we require our constituents to observe. They used to be more lax, but now they are much more severe. We should not make rules that are different from those applied outside the House. What got us into this mess in the first place was our failure to recognise that, as many other Members have pointed out, what we do here is about representation. Much of the expenses scandal has concerned the way in which we represent people. Like a number of other Members, I have taken the opportunity to talk to people about what we do on their behalf, and I have been staggered by how little they know about it. It has been good to go out and discuss that, but it is clear that we have not been good enough at doing it. Unless people know what we do here in their name, how on earth can they understand the basic facts that we need second homes, that we need to furnish them, and that we need travel expenses? When I intervened on the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan), I was trying to make the point—I do not think I made it very clearly—that if people really do not understand what we do here on their behalf and find it hard to comprehend how they influence the decisions that we make, we are putting the cart before the horse if we discuss tweaking the expenses system, how we are paid, who pays us and how much we are paid. If Parliament is about anything, it is about our representing people in constituencies in the United Kingdom. We should be talking to them about what we do, but we should also be hearing from them what they want us to do. Until we know what sort of Parliament the people out there want this to be, it will be much more difficult for us to create an appropriate system of remuneration and reimbursement. We have had any number of opportunities to go out and talk to people, but we have failed at every turn.