Parliamentary Standards Bill

I shall be brief, but there are two points that I would like to put to the House. Parliaments tend to get known by particular names. The other week in the Chamber, the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) talked about how this Parliament would come to be known in the future. I fear that it may go down as the tarnished or tainted Parliament. Among those of us who have sat in this Chamber in the past few weeks, it will certainly go down as the depressed Parliament. I look forward to the next Parliament and hope that its Members can perform their duties untrammelled, both here and in their constituencies. However, we must have regard to one overriding fact in that context. The new Parliament, no matter who decides to go or stay, will contain many new Members. Some papers calculate that half the new Parliament could be composed of Members who have never sat here before. However many new Members there are, it will be a lot. Those new Members will come here, as we all did at one stage, somewhat overwhelmed by the honour of being here, I trust, and somewhat perplexed by the rules of our procedures, which we all have to try to learn. There will be a new dimension, too, provided by the Bill, which the House is rushing through this week. It worries me very much that that new Parliament could come to be known as the frightened Parliament, or the blighted Parliament. Just think of the enormous scope that there will be for vexatious and frivolous complaints, yet according to the Bill, every one of those complaints will have to be investigated. My right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) made an excellent speech when he moved amendment 9. He referred to the fact that when a Member is under investigation, he or she is under a cloud until it is completed. We all know from our constituencies that if we read that somebody has been arrested on a particular charge, a question mark automatically flashes up in our minds about the integrity of that person, even though we all subscribe to "innocent until proven guilty". How dreadful it would be if 50 or 60—the number could even run to three figures—new colleagues in a new Parliament were subject to some form of orchestrated complaint, or to a series of complaints. That is quite possible. I was very impressed by the speech of my friend, the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), who talked about his payback. Just think of the deterrent to saying "Mea culpa." A Member may say, "Oh, good gracious me. I didn't look sufficiently carefully at that, and now I have signed it off and all those letters have gone out. Let's be quiet about it." Members could be frightened, their careers could be blighted, and they could feel deeply self-conscious. All those factors will make it less easy for them to be effective Members of Parliament. When we finish considering the Bill today—I deplore the fact that we are dealing with it in such haste—we must bear in mind that we are agreeing a piece of legislation that will not particularly impinge on many Members in the House at the moment. By the time that it is fully in force, it will probably be the turn of the year; the Justice Secretary made that point. However, by May or June next year, there will be a new Parliament. If the Act, as it will then be, hangs above that Parliament like the sword of Damocles, just think of the effect that that could have. I therefore beg the Secretary of State to accept the amendments—or, at the very least, their spirit—and to try to inject into the Bill a note of discernment and discrimination between the trivial and the serious. If he does not, we will pass an Act that will have a very bad effect on the next Parliament.