Parliamentary Standards Bill

The House will be grateful to my noble friend for moving these amendments in the context of the European situation. I intervene because, when we discussed Amendment 1, which was accepted by the House, I made the point that, although it would provide a safety net, it would not be 100 per cent secure, and that it was therefore important that we should, as we went along, make sure that any other infringements on parliamentary privilege would be dealt with. My noble friend’s amendment seeks to deal with one such possible loophole. We have moved on since then. The Leader of the House has been immensely helpful, as we have gone along, in sending out "Dear Colleague" letters. These do not appear in the Official Report. It may be that, if the matters come before the courts, the doctrine of Pepper v Hart that states that the courts can take into account the proceedings of the House will not apply, so we will not be able to quote the noble Baroness’s letter unless we read it into the record. When we discussed the matter earlier—I think that my noble friend was overoptimistic on this point—we thought that the position was protected, except perhaps in the European context. This appears from the noble Baroness’s letter—I apologise for reading it out in extenso for the reason that I mentioned—not to be the case. The letter states: ""I should make clear that the Government considers that the new IPSA and the new statutory Commissioner for Parliamentary Investigations will be in a different position concerning privilege to the non-statutory Standards Commissioner. In particular, the Government does not consider that the functions of the Commissioner established by this Bill will be protected by parliamentary privilege"." I confess that I had assumed that the operation of the new commissioner, and the operation generally, was a proceeding of Parliament. What the commissioner does is something that might reasonably, on any definition, be regarded as a proceeding in Parliament. The noble Baroness seems to be saying that the commissioner is not subject to privilege in the way that we expected. The letter goes on: ""However, the Government considers that this is as it should be. The IPSA and the Commissioner are to be administering an allowances scheme and a register of interests established outside of the House"." It seems to make it absolutely clear that the allowance scheme and the register of interests are not within the House. The Government’s argument continues: ""These are therefore not privileged matters. The Commissioner will investigate only breaches of the allowances scheme rules and the rules in the code relating to the register. These, again, do not concern privileged matters. Accordingly, it would be very unusual to extend the scope of protection of parliamentary privilege to protect non-privileged matters"." It seems to me that they ought to be privileged and that, if they are not, it would be possible for the courts to look into decisions and actions that have been taken by IPSA and the commissioner. Finally, the next paragraph states: ""For this reason, the Government considers that the IPSA and the Commissioner will be subject to judicial review on ordinary administrative and human rights law principles. This, however, does not pose a risk to privileged matters as the IPSA and the Commissioner will not be concerned with such matters"." It seems to me that this deals with matters in Parliament that ought to be privileged. Therefore, my noble friend, in rightly extending his concern to the European context, seems to have been overoptimistic with regard to the domestic position and the extent to which Amendment 1 will operate. It is not clear in the least how the points that I have made will be affected by Amendment 1, which we have passed.