Parliamentary Standards Bill

The shadow Leader of the House had a great deal more time than has been allocated to me. I want to give detailed answers to the points raised. If I cannot, they will need to follow in the next couple of days, or be put in writing to the hon. Members who asked the questions. My hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell) talked about this being a time of crisis and of opportunity. He also talked about the too-close relationships between Members and those who were administering the system. As he rightly said in supporting the Bill, we have two days in Committee to discuss, to press and to probe, but he is also right to say that this is no time for parliamentary drag. We have ceded authority on the matter, and we should accept that. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) talked about representative government and whether the House mirrored the people it is elected to serve. I must correct his view that no Members of this House played a role in the information technology revolution, to choose one example from the long list that he gave. I thought that that was an astonishing thing to say. For a number of years before I entered this place, I worked in a variety of roles for one of the largest IT companies in the world, latterly as a field systems engineering manager. In fact, of the 2005 intake of Labour MPs, not only were a majority women, but a majority were people like me, who had worked in other roles before we came to this House—who had worked in IT, who had run their own companies, and who had been teachers. One had been a miner, and many others had other roles in our society. We need not have everything, when it comes to outside interests. People can have a career before they come to this place.