Parliamentary Standards Bill

Hon. Members in all parts of the House are making valiant attempts to improve this part of the Bill. I support most of the amendments, but this is essentially a fruitless exercise because we are trying to improve a Bill that is irretrievably broken. The debate we have had on this clause highlights that; it shows the problems caused when an attempt to fix the allowances system becomes, during the course of the Bill's passage, an attempt to reform large chunks of the British constitution. If that was the aim, it should have been admitted right at the start, and the attempt to achieve it should have been approached with due humility and after a good deal of deliberation. Instead, we are now stumbling around the constitution, touching on very delicate matters of immunities, rights and privileges. If such reforms are necessary, they should be the subject of an entirely different piece of legislation. What we are doing in this Bill is setting up new bodies and creating new appointments with new powers and responsibilities, but the relationships between them all are very unclear. They overlap, and they conflict in a number of important respects. That is very well illustrated by subsection (6), under which this entire matter is to be postponed to a "protocol" to be drawn up by one of the new bodies—the super-quango itself, IPSA—to try to find a way of ordering the relationships between the bodies, both old and new. If the protocol is to be effective, it will have to be an extraordinarily long document. I do not know who in IPSA will do this work, as I do not know what the staffing arrangements will be, but they are going to have to try to order the relationship between the police and this House, for instance. We all know that that is a very difficult matter and we glimpsed that in the police raid on an hon. Member's office. One aspect of that was that a computer that was seized probably contained material that touched on matters of the House and proceedings in the House; it certainly contained files that held material relating to other hon. Members. Wisely, the police did not proceed with that prosecution, but that matter of privilege was said to be the subject of an extensive document—which I have not seen yet. That is just one tiny example of the problems under an unwritten constitution of ordering the relationships between the external enforcement authorities—the police—and this House and its Committees. So if we are to codify the entire relationship, not only the one between the House and the police, but the one between the Director of Public Prosecutions and other persons unknown, and the relationships involving IPSA and the commissioner, that will require a real volume in itself and it is all unnecessary. The dangerous part is that the protocol will, by definition, restrict this House. If it were not to do so, it would be a completely pointless document. There is no point having a protocol that does not do something, because it, thus, merely becomes a declaration. It becomes a bit of a new Labour totemic label: something that is desirable but has no effect. If something is in an Act of Parliament, it is designed to bind and to impose obligations, and one of the bodies on which this Bill will impose obligations is the Standards and Privileges Committee. It is wrong that that should be done in a protocol drawn up by an external body. If the Bill is intended to bind this House in this way, that should be openly admitted by those on the Treasury Bench. Of course, our Committees work to rules in Standing Orders, but this Bill means that they will obtain instructions in a protocol drawn up by other people. If that is intended, it should be admitted. If it is not intended, it should be withdrawn.