Parliamentary Standards Bill

My intervention in this debate as Chairman of the Justice Committee follows contributions from the Chairmen of the Standards and Privileges Committee and the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and all three Committees have serious concerns about aspects of this Bill. If that, combined with speeches such as that which we have just heard, does not make the Government realise that they have got to rethink substantial parts of it and step back from this great rush, I do not know what will. It was the Justice Committee that sought the memorandum from the Clerk of the House that has been at the centre of the debate, and we will take evidence from him and others tomorrow at 5 o'clock. As the Lord Chancellor has pointed out, the programme motion defers some of the relevant clauses until Wednesday and we intend to see that Tuesday's oral evidence is printed overnight so that it will be in the hands of Members on Wednesday, but that is still not a satisfactory way of dealing with a matter of this kind. I welcome the transfer of responsibilities for allowances and pay effectively to what is at this stage a combination of this new body, the Senior Salaries Review Body and the Committee on Standards in Public Life. We need to put that work outside Parliament—to contract it to somebody else—as it should not be done by us. The new body needs to be a more effective paying and withholding body for pay and allowances. I say "withholding" because I do not regard the refusal to pay an allowance as a disciplinary measure. I think that is the proper application of a scheme of allowances and expenses. The role I see for the body set up under the Bill is to operate the scheme, to pay allowances when it considers they have been appropriately claimed within the rules and not to do so otherwise, and to be in a position to be entirely firm about how it handles such matters, which has not always seemed possible for the Fees Office in the past, and has led to this very unsatisfactory situation. Protection, however, needs to remain around the rights of Parliament. That protection is underpinned in one respect in the Bill by the recognition that Parliament should take any disciplinary processes that arise from things going wrong in the system once the existence of a possible disciplinary offence has been identified. I am glad that principle is recognised, as it is a very important one, but that does not solve the problems. The inclusion of new criminal offences has raised the problem of double jeopardy, which needs to be considered seriously, and several aspects of the drafting impinge on rights in the European convention on human rights, as the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights has explained. Several clauses appear to infringe the principle that Parliament and the courts do not call into question each other's decisions, as stated in article 9 of the Bill of Rights. I want to turn to the constitutional areas that the Clerk identified in his evidence to us. Happily, I can dispense with what I was going to say about clause 6 because of the Government's welcome decision not to proceed with it. Clause 7 raises questions, however. As the Clerk says, for example:""If the House were to punish for a failure in respect of a requirement which was found by a court to have been unreasonable"—" a Member might have taken the matter to court, the court might have found the initial reference to be unreasonable and Parliament might have then taken action on it—we would be a short step from""review by the court of the exercise of disciplinary powers by the House."" Even clause 7 presents a problem.