Parliamentary Standards Bill

Perhaps I may enlighten the Committee as to how previously we went about looking after our own interests. When I ceased to be the Chief Whip, I became the chairman of the Labour Peers Group in 1997. We would have to respond to invitations to submit evidence on behalf of Labour Peers to the Senior Salaries Review Body. I quickly found out that the review board received evidence from the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Cross Benches as well as Labour, which invariably presented an opportunity to divide and conquer. We quickly established that we would make joint, rather than separate, submissions on behalf of the whole group. We are talking about the 1980s and the 1990s. Each time there was an opportunity to alter our allowances, they went up by a pound or two. The regime at the time said that anything to do with public expenditure relating to Members of the House of Lords had to be clamped down on. I discovered that the best way to achieve an increase worth having was to produce a well researched paper. I went to the Library and obtained evidence, the most telling of which as far as the overnight allowance was concerned was a league table published every year by the RAC of the cost of a night’s stay in a London hotel, from one-star to five-star. I believe that the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, was a member of our little committee; he shakes his head, but not in the way that I wanted him to. Is he prepared to reshake it? Yes, he is. I discovered that while overnight allowance at the time was in the region of £70 or £80, the actual price of a three-star hotel was about £120. I recommended to the committee—six or eight of us, meeting informally—that we should go for the three-star option, which would give us a big increase of £20 or £30. A member of the committee who I am sorry is not here, the noble Lord, Lord Marsh, said that he would not agree to that. I asked him why. He said, "We are not three-star people; we are five-star people, and we should go for five-star". We managed to persuade him that to go for five-star was too big a jump, so we went for three-star, and the overnight allowance, instead of going up by two or three pounds, in one fell swoop went up by £34 a night thereon. I often think that when colleagues in the House are asked what Ted Graham will be remembered for, they will say not the maiden speech, the ambush or the victory, but the fact that he had a major part to play in increasing the overnight allowance. There is nothing wrong with the sense of the amendment, but we need to keep in mind the fact that colleagues in the Commons have already passed this Bill—this is their Bill. I shall not go into the politics of the speed at which it is going or the circumstances—everyone has had their two-pennyworth on that that and I do not want to muddy the waters—but we need to be very careful, because the amendment is telling the Commons what regime we believe they should be under. My understanding is that this House will get its opportunity to look at the generality of the regime and fit it to our circumstances. Most people here who like me have friends in the other House will know how sick at heart the majority of them are at being landed in the middle of a dreadful situation. That goes for all parties—I am very pleased that no one in this House has ever sought to make fish of one and fowl of the other as far as responsibility is concerned. However, we need to work together, not only as two Houses but as four Benches within this House. If we do nothing more than recognise that the Commons are entitled to their view, it does not mean that the Bill cannot be amended—it is being amended sensibly to meet the situation—but we need to be careful to lay down the law for the Commons. I believe that we will come to a point where there is very little difference between the Houses. We know the major difference: that is a salaried House; this is an unsalaried House. How this House is reformed remains to be seen; for example, whether it should be elected or appointed. We should tread very carefully in trying to influence the process, even on the margin, knowing that the Commons can put it right. We do not want to create an atmosphere between the two Houses where they eventually say, "We are trying to get a Bill which suits our circumstances, and when it goes down there, people try to get their own back for what we’ve done up here". The Leader of the House has the difficult job of persuading us to agree not only to the Bill as we have it but to amendments as they come forward. She deserves the utmost support, and she certainly has mine.