Parliamentary Standards Bill

I rise to support my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) in all that he says about the detail of the amendments, which would go some way towards abating the problems with clause 8, and in what he says in general about the need to keep Parliament in charge of disciplining Members of Parliament. I find the wide-ranging debate that the Government have opened up on this clause and this Bill quite extraordinary. I have not heard any criticism of the Committee on Standards and Privileges. I have never heard of a great public controversy because it was doing its job badly. We have not been told that its justice has been inadequate. We have not felt that people have been hard done by under it. We have not felt that those who deserved to be punished have gone unpunished. It is not an issue. It is extraordinary that we are being asked to overturn that and to make the Committee subsidiary to an outside body when there is no case against it and no charge sheet that anyone has heard about. I would like to concentrate on the need, as my hon. and learned Friend said, to recast the clause, if it has to stay at all, in a way that deals with the big issue of how IPSA appears to be superior to the Committee on Standards and Privileges and how it seems to have overturned the Bill of Rights. If we look at subsection (6), we can see that the Government themselves acknowledge that the clause is a comprehensive muddle and a huge mess. As currently drafted, it does not make clear the relative powers and responsibilities of IPSA vis-à-vis the commissioner or the House of Commons Committee on Standards and Privileges. The subsection invites us to agree to a form of words whereby, although we know as legislators that it will not work in its current form and that the Government have not had time to work out how it might function, we would ask IPSA to consult the Speaker's Committee on the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority in preparing a statement saying how all these different bodies could work together smoothly and harmoniously in a way that ensured that no difficult case fell between the gaps and that people were not put through double and triple jeopardy for no good reason. Under the list in that subsection, IPSA has to consult the commissioner, the House of Commons Committee on Standards and Privileges, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, the Speaker's Committee on the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, and any other person that they may have forgotten about. We can see what an absurd, burgeoning bureaucracy this is.