Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

Non-taxable and non-pensionable. The idea of bringing in a receipt for every small bit of spending is one of the mistakes into which the House and those who have been invigilating its affairs have fallen. I examined my spending for two weeks, keeping the receipts for two weeks. If I buy 80 items in Lidl in Worthing for £120, two of which are relevant to my office expenses, I am supposed to put in the list of all 80 things—the details of everything other than those two things either will or will not be redacted—so that I can get back some money that I have spent on batteries, CDs and so on. Such an arrangement is bizarre. I shall not go into the detail of all the other allowances, but one element that I hope IPSA will consider is having part of the pay being non-taxable and non-pensionable. The Secretary of State has been very kind to the Committee, although I do not think that he understands all this all the time—I am sure that he understands much of it much of the time. I hope that the Leader of the House does not mind my saying that this is an incredibly complicated result of a suggestion that we did not need primary legislation. We may not have needed it, but this is quite a lot to have to digest quite late in an afternoon when many of the other experts are not present. I want to reach the stage where Members of Parliament can do their job without having the skills of a good accountant. We ought to have reasonable accounts. We certainly ought to reach the stage—I think we had this with the parliamentary commissioner system—where if a Member of Parliament gets clearance for an arrangement from the Fees Office, irrespective of whether it is judged afterwards to be wrong, the MP is not penalised for it. There is an argument as to what constitutes approval and what is accepted, but we need to have some way of ensuring that MPs cannot be chased back too far, too often on too many things. MPs ought to be able to take advice from the authorities, rely on that advice, make their arrangements as simple as possible and maintain them. That would address most of the fears that people have had and most of the excitement involving the media.