Parliamentary Standards Bill

It is about facts but, so that parliamentary privilege is absolutely certain, as we understand it, the committee is entitled to overrule what the commissioner has found. That is going one step further than many might require. IPSA, not the commissioner, will set the procedure for investigation, so there can be no allegation that the commissioner is both judge and jury. I was asked why we need additional conditions to be specified by IPSA when a finding of a minor infringement of the rules is not referred to the Committee on Standards and Privileges. These additional conditions permit IPSA to specify additional matters before the commissioner refers a finding to IPSA. IPSA may, for example, wish to specify a threshold for the amount to be repaid and to avoid referring de minimis breaches or breaches where it was subsequently apparent that the rules or guidance were unclear. On Amendment 52, the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, may be suggesting that, by the time the Member of Parliament makes representations, any complaint has already turned into an investigation. However, this might not be the case. The commissioner may receive a complaint and want to ask the MP informally what he wants to say in response. Depending on what the Member of Parliament says, the commissioner may proceed to a full investigation. It is therefore important to have procedures that make it clear that the MP’s rights to respond to a complaint apply before, as well as after, it becomes a full-scale investigation. That is what the Bill seeks to say.