Parliamentary Standards Bill

My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Lord, Lord Neill. The commission set up by King James II under Judge Jeffreys reflected on the system that is to be set up under the Bill. I declare an interest in that, with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, I sat in the mid-1990s on the rather doleful Privileges Committee that dealt with the cash for questions issue. As Attorney-General, I was indeed counsel in the fascinating Pepper v Hart case, although I confess to the noble Lord, Lord Lester, that my recollection of it is a little different from his. As almost every Member of the House has said, the Bill is dreadfully rushed. It still contains provisions that rightly cause us great concern and need much more than one day in Committee. They need to be looked at carefully, which would be to the huge benefit of the Government. I congratulate the Leader of the House because she works very hard on our behalf. When she has been nipping in and out, I hope that it is to get authority to extend the time before we have to vote on the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth—otherwise, I shall vote for it. We need time to consider the Bill properly. There has been no time for input from public or press and we have not waited for Sir Christopher Kelly’s report. I wish to make two points. I emphasise the point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, about the unnecessariness and deep undesirability of providing for separate criminal offences for Members of Parliament when the existing offences of false accounting and fraud more than cover any relevant misconduct. Furthermore, it is bound to be observed, with proper criticism, that these offences carry much lighter penalties than the common law, which carries seven years and 10 years respectively for those other offences. The principle in relation to that aspect and the other point that I wish to make is the same: that Members of Parliament—and, indeed, Members of this House—should be treated, as far as possible, under the law and in relation to laws of taxation and remuneration, like other citizens of this country. It is the disclosure that people are suddenly getting kitchens, bath plugs and massive mortgages as part of so-called expenses or allowances that is upsetting people. In summary, the system of allowances for second homes in the House of Commons should be abolished. It should be rolled into and paid as part of a fair salary as recommended by the Senior Salaries Review Body to cover, as well as normal living expenses, the reasonable needs of Members of Parliament to maintain homes both near Westminster and in or near their constituencies. A great deal has been said about our being in hock to the press and I was heartened about three weeks ago to read a leader in the Times that said, broadly, that the expenses for this aspect should be rolled into a salary—as they always, in a sense, had been while they existed—and that there should be an overall taxable salary for these purposes of £90,000. Whether that figure is too high or too low is for the Senior Salaries Review Body and not for us—Parliament will have to consider it and take responsibility—but the principle that we should be treated the same as other citizens would do more to restore confidence than anything else. For those of us who were Members of the other place, the background to the present system is fascinatingly set out in the broadsheet Order, Order!, which former Members of Parliament receive. There is an interesting article by Joe Ashton, the former Labour Member of Parliament for Bassetlaw in Nottinghamshire, who was always a gutsy speaker. He is as gutsy today as he was then and he points out the background. It all started in July 1974, between the two elections, when Harold Wilson was faced with a revolt by 150 Members of Parliament. There are former Members of Parliament here who were there then and will know whether Joe Ashton is right or wrong. Certainly when I came in, five years later, at first I did not claim. I could not quite understand the living away from home allowance and I rented a servant’s room from Lady Airey in Marsham Court, for which I paid £40 a week, and that is what I claimed. I then asked a more experienced old hand in Parliament how it worked and he said, "No, don’t do that; it’s part of your pay". I then claimed the living away from home allowance for the next 22 years because I believed that that was what every Member of Parliament did. There is nothing party political in this because, although that system may have been started under the Labour Government, it was adopted by Mrs Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair. I am all in favour of openness—I am being fairly open in this speech—but the system began to fall apart when people saw these new kitchens and massive mortgages. It is not satisfactory to have massive mortgages as the only way in which you can get an essential part of your salary. I do not excuse the flipping of homes—it did not happen in those days; I do not think that anyone thought of it—but the complexities of changing tax law to do away with it are, I suspect, much greater than most of us have given our minds to. It comes back to this point: we should stand back and look at this with common sense and be truthful and realistic about Members’ remuneration. We should put it to an outside body, set a level of what we should get and pay tax on it. One noble Lord of great distinction said to me, when I tried this out on him, "If you make this reform, you will not need this Bill". To a great extent that may be true, because the other aspects of expenses, such as secretarial and travel allowances, are not difficult to model. Although there have been some fiddles, with people allegedly employing their sons in dubious circumstances and so on, they have not caused a major problem. We do not know what Sir Christopher Kelly is going to recommend; we are putting the cart before the horse and we are legislating in haste and in abstract. I ask the Government, even at this stage, to reflect on whether to defer the remaining stages, at least for a reasonable time, to enable us to have a proper debate and to help us to make good law, not bad law.