Parliamentary Standards Bill

My Lords, the evil that the Bill is intended to address needs to be remedied, and one can understand the Government’s anxiety to be seen to be seeking to remedy it with dispatch and urgency. I add my own tribute to the way in which the noble Baroness the Leader of the House presented the Bill this afternoon, but I wish to differ from her in one respect. She was, I think, trying to argue that the Bill has gone through all its stages in another place and that, as it applies only to that other place, it is for Members there to decide how the evil should be remedied. As we have heard very clearly this afternoon, the rights and privileges of Parliament are put at hazard in the Bill. That affects your Lordships as well as the other place. The Government are much attached to constitutional reform. This measure is constitutional reform with a vengeance. It might almost be called "constitutional regression". We should think long and hard before passing with unseemly and unnecessary haste a measure that puts at hazard parliamentary rights and privileges, which have been, as was pointed out, so long and hard fought for, and which lie at the heart of our democratic freedom. As Feste says to Malvolio: ""That is not the way"." It would not be beyond the wit of man to devise a remedy for the evil that this Bill seeks to deal with which would avoid this hazard. The Bill provides for a new independent authority, IPSA, to determine and pay the salaries and allowances of Members of Parliament and to propose and police a code of conduct relating to their financial interests. It is true that the new authority's recommendations and proposals are to be subject to the approval of the House of Commons, but that is no more than a right of veto. A right of veto may look good in principle but can well be very difficult to act on and to exercise in practice. The power of proposal and decision should remain with Parliament. It may be argued that the public anger and distrust of Members of Parliament is so great that the abdication of authority by the House of Commons proposed in this Bill is a necessary part of the remedy if a measure of trust is to be restored. However, as has been said this afternoon, it would be a very high price to pay. Members of Parliament have received a no doubt very salutary shock from the recent exposures of the uses and abuses of the system of allowances and expenses. As the Leader of the House has said, the great majority of them are decent and hardworking people and they will be as keen as anybody else to restore trust. I believe that most of them would not just accept but would positively welcome a framework under which they themselves would be responsible for setting up, approving and abiding by a new system for regulating their allowances and expenses and a new code of conduct relating to their financial interests. The system will need to provide clarity, scrutiny, transparency and sanctions. It will need to provide the least possible degree of ambiguity and the greatest possible degree of clarity in the structure of rules and entitlements; scrutiny of claims by independent scrutineers paid for but not employed by Parliament; transparency so that claims by and payments to Members can be made known to the public; and sanctions for abusive claims and breaches of the code of conduct. This system could be administered and supervised by a new House of Commons commission or committee of senior Members of Parliament, none of them from the Front Benches, chosen by the Members of the House of Commons as people of unquestionable and widely respected integrity and trustworthiness. I will not try to name any such people although I am sure they exist: I have no desire to risk damaging their reputations by doing so. This committee would in a sense resemble the audit committee in a public company. It would consist of people who had no executive ministerial or shadow ministerial responsibilities and would be immune from the baneful and baleful influence of the Whips. This committee, acting on the authority of and reporting to the whole House of Commons, would be responsible for framing the code of conduct and the arrangements for allowances and expenses. It would receive reports from those scrutinising claims and payments where rulings by the scrutineers were challenged by the Members concerned, and would make recommendations to the House when it was thought necessary to apply sanctions to individual Members. Such a committee or commission—I suppose that it might be called a Speaker’s conference—could also have responsibility for determining and proposing the salaries of Members of the House of Commons, though I entirely see that they might feel the need, and should be able if they wished, to employ the services of a review body or some such body to assist them in that work. Such a system would not infringe the rights and privileges of Parliament. Members of the House of Commons would remain masters in their own house. By themselves creating and voluntarily accepting such a system, Members would express their determination to restore, maintain and deserve a reputation for trustworthiness, and do so more effectively and convincingly than they would by grudgingly and reluctantly falling in with a system of external discipline imposed on them. It might even be possible to introduce and establish such a system without legislation. Given the criticisms of the Government’s Bill by the Select Committee on the Constitution, and by many others in the House this afternoon, and given that, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, pointed out, legislation passed in haste usually comes quickly to be repented at leisure, we should do well to allow a pause for reflection and reconsideration. The Government should desist from seeking to push their Bill through before the Summer Recess and allow time for other, less unsatisfactory remedies for the admitted deficiencies of the existing arrangements to be worked out and considered. I am sure that, in any but the shortest perspective, the Government will gain greater public credit from taking time to get it right than they will get from trying to force through a measure that is so widely thought to be dangerous and defective.