Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I will give way in one second. Various suggestions were made informally, including that we could perhaps ask the Judicial Appointments Commission to appoint the compliance officer. I should say, given that I am responsible at arm's length for the Judicial Appointments Commission and have a role in the appointment of members of the judiciary, too, that we did consider that option seriously but decided that it was not appropriate to give the JAC an one-off responsibility for a position that, although it has to follow principles of natural justice, is, at best, quasi-judicial rather than judicial. The solution on which we landed was that the IPSA board would appoint the compliance officer. There is nothing unusual about that, and Sir Christopher Kelly explicitly drew a parallel between the compliance officers of the Department for Work and Pensions who deal with benefits and those of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs who deal with tax. Those departmental compliance officers are certainly not subject to any sort of elaborate arm's length appointment procedure, as in this case, but, as we all know when we take up complaints about benefits, they can still operate at arm's length from those who are responsible for the day-to-day administration of the benefits system. We also pointed out to Sir Christopher—it was, frankly, merely an omission from his scheme—that, these days, if there is an appeal against a decision by a compliance officer in DWP or HMRC, it goes to a first-tier tribunal. Appeals on tax used to go to the commissioners, but they now go to a first-tier tribunal. They can then proceed up to the appeals tribunal and, if there is a serious point of law, to the senior courts. We are proposing exactly that arrangement for decisions reached by the compliance officer in terms of parliamentary standards. I think that must be right. The schedule sets out how the compliance officer will be appointed and the powers to remove him or her from office are very tightly constrained. Once appointed, the compliance officer will be an independent office holder who will not be accountable to IPSA for the decisions that he or she might take. Kelly, whose recommendations we are seeking faithfully to implement, did not want an arrangement by which the compliance officer was appointed by some other third party. I commend to the Committee where we have landed on that point. In new clause 87 tabled by the right hon. Member for Hampshire North-East, one issue—