Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I would not have been paid at all for that, but I thought that I should offer the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire a gentle rebuke for departing from his usual ecumenical approach. I shall now come to a variety of issues raised by the right hon. Gentleman and other right hon. and hon. Members. He talked about the possibility of double jeopardy under new clause 70 and new schedule 6. Double jeopardy applies where someone has been through a criminal trial and is tried again for the same offence. There is double jeopardy: if someone commits a criminal offence, there can be consequences in respect of their employment. If someone in a position of trust with their employer commits fraud, even if it is not against their employer, and it is drawn to their employer's attention, they are unlikely to continue to be employed. There cannot be a rule to say that someone who has committed fraud against the building society that is nothing to do with his employer—let us say that it is a building firm, not a building society—cannot be drawn to the attention of the employer and has an absolute right to continue in that employment, notwithstanding the fact that it is plain that he was a fraudster from beginning to end. We all understand that, and the truth is that if someone egregiously breaks IPSA's rules, leaving aside whether he or she is prosecuted, other consequences are bound to flow from that, aside from any general reputational damage. On the firewall between IPSA and the compliance officer, as the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire knows, there was a lot of discussion about the architecture. The direct responsibility for administering the scheme of allowances and paying them and, I accept, giving day-to-day guidance and advice rests not with the authority qua the authority, but with the chief executive officer and his or her employees. The only job that IPSA has to do in respect of the compliance officer is to make the appointment. We have discussed whether there can be any alternatives, possibly to dismiss the compliance officer, but on very limited grounds. Once appointed, as the schedule 6 makes clear, the compliance officer is appointed for a fixed term of five years and then they go. So having been appointed, no purpose would be served by their toadying to IPSA in the hope of getting a further term, because no further term is permissible. That is sensible, and it is certainly something that Sir Christopher Kelly wanted. The right hon. Gentleman implied that a system could fall down if the compliance officer was asked to pass judgment on the people who appointed him. In a sense, it is not the first time that people in a judgmental, quasi-judicial position may be asked to do that. He or she will be appointed by IPSA. He or she is a separate, independent officer. Yes, it is very unlikely that he or she will pass judgment on the authority itself. He or she may well pass judgment on the chief executive officer and his or her staff. That is his or her job. I do not think for a second that the system will break down. Let us bear in mind the fact that the tribunal is run by entirely independent judges who are appointed formally by the Queen or me, but on the recommendation of the Judicial Appointments Commission. It is entirely independent, and we can go all the way up the judicial tree. So the right hon. Gentleman was right to raise the concern, but I do not accept it; I do not think that things will work out that way. On pensions, about which there has been a lot of discussion, I accept and have said that there should be the same protection on accrued rights as for anyone else. I quite understand where the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) was when I was opening the debate. I referred to provisions in the Pensions Act 1995, which provides protection for accrued rights, whereby they can be changed only with the active consent of beneficiaries or potential beneficiaries. Our officials are looking closely at whether we can introduce such provisions on Report, and I will write to the relevant spokespeople, as I normally do, when I have draft clauses or proposals. On trustees, I have already said that we will seek to replicate the provisions of the Pensions Act 2004, so that a third of the trustees will be appointed by the beneficiaries or potential beneficiaries. We should consider the other aspects of the general law that applies to pension trusts and trustees. To repeat the point that was implicit in many of the remarks, we want to be in neither a better nor a worse position than other people in the public sector and in the private sector for that matter. I looked at my payslip yesterday, and the hon. Member for Broxbourne is entirely right to remind the House and public that, although we get good benefits, the deductions are huge. I understand that civil service deductions are about 3.5 per cent., but my deduction, which I could not quite understand and on which I might seek further evidence, amounted to well over 10 per cent.