Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I welcome the spirit of the exchanges that have taken place. I am sure all Members will agree that it is vital for us to resolve these detailed matters before the new Parliament, difficult though that task will be. As was pointed out by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), some of them will be harder to resolve than others. The hon. Gentleman also stole one of my lines. In my evidence to the Kelly committee, I recommended that all its members should read Plato's "Republic". I thought that that was not bad, coming from a secondary school boy. It seemed to me that this challenge had been in existence for 3,000 years and would continue, and that it was therefore important for us to try our best to give the right powers to IPSA and the compliance officer. I, too, struggled with the issue of the way in which the post should be filled, although I accepted one of the arguments of the academic lawyers in one respect. I believe that the compliance officer should, as far as possible. be at arm's length from the IPSA membership. I am still struggling to come up with fresh ideas about exactly what should be the nature of the beast, but I think we all understand what we are seeking to achieve. I intervened on both my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor and the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) on the issue of pensions. Before I became a Member of Parliament, I spent a good part of my time negotiating on pension funds with large companies. In the context of accrued rights, the right hon. Gentleman spoke of the situation that occurs when a company is taken over. He may recall that in the dim and distant past I tabled a private Member's Bill, some of whose proposals were incorporated in the Pensions Act 1995. I think that he made a fair point, and I agree that issues relating to accrued rights should be dealt with separately. Rights involving benefits that people have earned here and have transferred to the scheme, and the application of those benefits to family members—the potential of death in service, for instance—must be protected, as they are in the rest of the pensions world. I think that we have dealt adequately with the question of trustees. I am sure my right hon. Friend accepts that, except in very few exceptional circumstances, Member trustees can be appointed and dismissed only by members of the scheme. The number of such trustees is, I think, a matter for discussion, and it may need to be clarified. Last week an article was published in my local press suggesting that IPSA should be responsible for determining the sitting days of the House—on the basis of a crass misunderstanding on the part of the person who wrote to the media assuming that when we are not here we are on paid holiday. All Members throughout the House surely agree that the issue of sitting times must be determined by the House itself. I have some sympathy with what the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire said about informal advice. None of us has enough time—or, in most cases, enough background skills—to make some of the finer judgments that are needed for the running of our offices when it comes to issues such as employment law or procurement. For example, I found myself needing to renew a lease for a photocopier in my constituency office whose terms caused me to want to take advice. We currently have a mechanism for that, although people have suggested that it is not very satisfactory. I agree that that should not be a function of the compliance office, to the spirit of whose role it would be entirely contrary, but it should be possible for a Member to say to someone, for instance, "I have been confronted with the following situation. Would you advise me to enter into this contract?" I believe that those issues can be fine-tuned in time for Report. I hope that all Members will pull together to try to ensure that we create a mechanism that does not just work in practice, but provides the degree of confidence that the public rightly demand of the systems that we put in place.