Parliamentary Standards Bill

My Lords, I was struck by the final remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, that there may be even more flaws revealed in this Bill than have already been exposed during the course of this debate. In all the 39 years that I have been in Parliament, I have never seen an important Bill handled in such an extraordinary way and I am tempted to say such a scandalous way. As early as Second Reading in another place, it was announced that Clause 6, which provided that the Commons should continue to have a code of conduct, was being dropped after deadly criticism by the Clerk of the House of Commons. Clause 10 would have directly excluded the operation of Article 9 of the Bill of Rights from the functions of IPSA. This, the Clerk of the Commons said, would have a, ""chilling effect on the freedom of speech of Members and of witnesses before committees and would hamper the ability of House officials to give advice to Members"." I am certain that never in my 39 years here has the Clerk thought it necessary to make a similar intervention to protect not just the rights of Parliament, but its ability to serve the people whom it represents. I very much doubt that there have been many, if any, similar interventions in the history of Parliament. Before the other place had concluded its rushed and curtailed consideration of the Bill, the Government were defeated in a Division on Clause 10 as a result of an amendment that, because of the guillotine, was not even debated. Clause 5, to which I will return, was inadequately debated, although it was the subject of particularly devastating and destructive speeches, and an important subsection was removed. Sometimes, when there are genuine emergencies threatening the state, it is justifiable to rush through legislation with minimum debate, but this is not one of them. Most of the conduct rules could have been approved by the other place without any legislation. The Standards and Privileges Committee in the other place said that there should have been a draft Bill that went through due process to get it right. Consideration of the Bill could have been held over until the autumn, with the advantage that it might then have been able to take account of the Kelly committee report. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, suggested that it was a mistake to pass a Bill to enforce standards yet to be established. The Bill could have been divided and, if it was really necessary, a one or two-clause Bill could have been put on the statute book before the Recess. As it is, the Bill is likely to leave a large number of important questions still unresolved, because it has taken apart one system, transferred some functions and left other functions spinning in an unresolved vacuum. Sir George Young’s analysis of those problems at Second Reading deserves study. I completely understand the need for new arrangements to deal with the pay and allowances of MPs. It is all too clear that the existing scheme has been a disaster. Like my noble friend Lord Jenkin, I suppose that I have to plead guilty for some responsibility, having been a member of a Cabinet that refused to increase the pay of Members of Parliament and said that it would be better if they got more allowances. As the scandal unfolded, hardly anyone has been more angry than the spouses of those of us who had to struggle in an era when expense allowances were minimal and all Ministers were deemed to have their principal houses in London. I can tell you that my wife can be extremely strong on the subject. However, I am pretty sure that in time—perhaps it will not be very long—we may come to regret the fact that so much authority is being transferred to unelected quangos and away from Members of Parliament, who have to answer to and may be dismissed by their electors. I was not much comforted by the statement by the Leader of the House in her opening speech that IPSA must have some—I am pretty sure that she said "some"—understanding of the way that Parliament works. My fear is that it may not have enough understanding of matters that are essential for good parliamentary government. I was also not entirely comforted by her intervention in the speech of my noble friend Lord Roberts of Conwy. She said that the Bill would not apply to the House of Lords, but I fear that it may be the model for a Bill that will apply to the House of Lords. I do not think that she said that IPSA would not be the body that would be responsible for dealing with the affairs of the House of Lords, either. The 18th report of the Select Committee on the Constitution, published only today, raises some very significant issues, referred to by my noble friend Lord Goodlad, about the necessity to ensure the political neutrality of IPSA. It draws attention to the fact that the statute-based prohibition of paid advocacy and the creation of a criminal offence of engaging in paid advocacy may open up a possible area of conflict between the courts and Parliament. The committee also pointed out that the decision-making powers of IPSA should be subject to the possibility of appeal. It draws attention to the complex human rights issues, also raised by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. We were given no consolation at all by the noble Baroness the Leader of the House, who said that the Government do not agree with the Joint Committee. I fear that we are getting into very murky waters. I had always intended to say some robust words about how this House should deal with the Bill, but then I read the 17th report of the Select Committee on the Constitution, chaired by my noble friend Lord Goodlad, which was published on Monday. The committee's language was more robust than even I had in mind, and its opinion much more authoritative. I take simply its last conclusion as my text: ""we do not think that the case for proceeding with this bill on a fast-track timetable has been established and we do not support any curtailment of the usual legislative timetable"." It is in the face of that recommendation that I heard with surprise and dismay that only one day was being set aside for Committee and one for Report and Third Reading. I understand that because Members in the other place are anxious to conclude the whole business as quickly as possible, the usual channels have concluded what I can only describe as an unholy pact and accepted a timetable that fails to meet the Constitution Committee’s requirements and will almost certainly be inadequate to complete our work as it should be completed. I very much welcome the fact that my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth has tabled an amendment to the Motion to follow this debate. I will support it, and I hope that others will. I very much hope that it will be passed. If it is not, I fear that that is a decision that we will all come to regret. At the very least, we must get a sunset clause into the Bill. The Bill has been introduced by a dying Government into a demoralised and shell-shocked House of Commons. It is likely that about half the Members of that House will not return after the election, so we will have an elected Chamber in which there may even be a majority who will be entirely new. We are legislating not so much for this Parliament, but for its successor. That means that a refreshed Parliament, with a new mandate, should have the opportunity to revisit the Bill. Earlier, I mentioned Clause 5, which has had subsection (8) removed. At a recent meeting in this building, one of my noble friends said that the original clause was aimed by the Prime Minister at the heart of the Conservative Party. I responded by saying that in my view it was aimed at the heart of the effectiveness of the House of Commons. It is true that the damage was done before the Bill appeared when, in April, the other place agreed a new code of conduct—or perhaps it was earlier, when the Nolan rules were accepted rather too easily, without enough realisation of some of their consequences. Old Clause 5 would have taken Parliament a very big step down an increasingly rocky road. Then, in the face of sustained criticism, Clause 5(8) was deleted. The overall effect of Clause 5 in the amended Bill may not be very different. It gives statutory authority to what were rules and are now a code under which Members must register the precise amount of each individual payment, the number of hours worked during the period to which the payment referred, the nature of the work, and the name of the individual or organisation who made the payment. Under the conventions that govern our conduct, I believe I should not quote the words of Members in another place unless they are Ministers. If that were not so, I would have liked to quote a large part of the speech of Mr Frank Field. I beg noble Lords to read it. He spoke of representative government, the principles that should underlie it and how the House of Commons should, through those who sit in it, be a mirror of the society that they represent. Over the centuries, Parliament has been about representing interests, but now it is judged that the great interests in this country should not be represented and that if Members attempt to do so, they might be expelled or imprisoned. He spoke of the change that had come over the other place during the past 50 years, during the course of which the pool from which MPs are drawn has become narrower and narrower. He thought that Clause 5 would further change the nature of the House and that it is unworkable. The nature of the House has changed in a fundamental way since I entered it in 1970, and not for the better. Then, it was full of people with wide experience representative of and knowledgeable about trade unions, business, industry, law, farming, the services and so many other things besides. There were many who, because of outside incomes and the ability to find employment outside, were able to take an independent stand on great issues and defy the Whips, not fearful that they might never achieve ministerial office or be able to find employment if they lost their seats. I do not think it an improvement that the number of such people there today is smaller. I do not think it an improvement that it is increasingly difficult to find Members qualified to become the law officers. I do not think it an improvement that there has been a great increase in the number of those who have no other skills or experience, except those of politics, and no prospect of obtaining jobs outside politics. I agreed with every single word that my noble friend Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market had to say on this subject. I had no private income, and I could never have contemplated becoming a candidate, let alone an MP, if I had not had another job. It is true that the pay then was far less and that the allowances that we were entitled to claim would hardly register on the scale of the modern system but, even today, I am certain that there are many capable of giving good public service who would not feel able to sacrifice their own and, more importantly, their family’s standard of living if it became impossible for them to hold down other jobs as well as fulfilling their parliamentary duties. Still more will be deterred by a system that is intrusive and unworkable. The language being used about those with other jobs is frequently offensive and nonsensical, born of ignorance or jealousy. "Moonlighting" is one such description. I won a seat not held by my party for 42 years, and I held it in every subsequent election that I fought. I did not win it or retain it by neglecting my constituents. I did not establish a reputation in the House, become a Front-Bench Opposition spokesman, a shadow Secretary of State and, in due course, a Secretary of State by neglecting my parliamentary duties. In those days, we sat for far longer hours—frequently through the night—and we were not provided with the plethora of secretaries and political aides now available. I did not give up my principal outside employment until the last months as the shadow Cabinet prepared for the election we won and for office. As a Minister, like other Ministers, I then had to work harder and for longer hours than I had ever worked before, but I still had to nurse my far-flung constituency and look after my constituents. Like Mr Frank Field, I strongly oppose a measure that makes a mockery of what he and I thought public service was all about and provides for stopwatches or egg timers to be started every time an MP undertakes anything outside his parliamentary duties. The scheme is preposterous. On the one hand, we are asked to believe that every MP without an outside job is endlessly engaged on political work. Does he or she never enjoy the sun on the Terrace, spend long hours drinking in the bars, watching television in his or her sumptuous offices or just gossiping in the Tea Room? Back in the constituencies where MPs now spend so much time, do they really spend all their time in frantic political activity? I do not believe it, and if they do, it is curious how little many of us observe of those activities. In the real world, it is virtually impossible to disentangle minute by minute the time spent on each activity. In the days when I had a job in the City, I might have been able, on a weekly basis, to produce a very rough approximation. In the days when I was chairman of the National Rivers Authority, when I was sitting in this House, I was paid on the basis that I would do at least three days’ work a week for the authority, I would have found it impossible, though I am quite certain that the NRA got a full three days from its chairman. If the Bill passes, those approximations would be open to challenge and possible penalties. What are lawyers and other professionals to do if they are required to identify their clients and how much they have paid, which would breach their duty of confidentiality? As Mr Dominic Grieve pointed out, that conflict of duties could end up in the European Court of Human Rights. What is the farmer to do or the individual running a small private business? Every time a transaction is completed, it will have to be declared with the gross receipt set out in full and the time devoted to obtaining the contract. The public are never going to know the expenses of running the business or obtaining the contract, so the real net income will not be revealed. Imagine the scene: the farmer sits by the sale ring for most of the morning and buys 20 heifers towards the end of the sale. What has been the time spent? How can it possibly be relevant? Surely, all that is needed is a simple declaration: "I am a farmer". Already, a significant number of very capable and conscientious Members of Parliament have announced that they are no longer prepared to put themselves and their families through this invasive and humiliating nonsense. I fear that in the future a very large number of able men and women of the kind that we desperately need will come to the conclusion that they too must abandon any thought of serving their country in Parliament. Parliament will be the poorer for it and, more importantly, the people of this country will pay a heavy price. Ironically, one result is likely to be a House containing more of the very rich with private incomes. A number of noble Lords referred to the misunderstandings about the privileges of Parliament, many believing that they simply provide protection for a whole lot of cosy rights for Members of Parliament and Lords. The reality is that those privileges are there to protect the most basic rights of the citizen. There are clauses that make changes that go to the very heart of Parliament’s independence and what the Bill of Rights 1689 was all about. There are questions about the ability of individual Members to be treated justly with the proper protection of the law. The report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights is as relevant to our consideration of the Bill as that of the Constitution Committee. I finish my remarks as I started them, by expressing a sense of outrage at the way in which this Bill is being handled. We must do our best to give it the examination it needs. I hope that my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth’s amendment will be carried. We need to insert a sunset clause to give a new House of Commons the opportunity to carry out wider scrutiny and consultation in order to prepare a Bill more likely to serve the interests of both Parliament and people.