European Union (Referendum) Bill

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Adam Afriyie

Friday 8th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

rose—

[Adam Afriyie]

I will not give way any more, because I am conscious that the Opposition want to talk out the Bill, and I do not want to be part of that process.

Publication Administration Committee Report (Smaller Government)

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Adam Afriyie

Thursday 10th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

Obviously any change in this regard would have to be ameliorated by other arrangements—perhaps a more open and direct negotiation between First Ministers and the Whitehall Government and other means of representation of these interests within Government. As well as the ministerial cadre, the Cabinet is attended by 28 people and it, too, is clearly too large.

Currently, a total of 141 MPs are on the payroll vote as Ministers or Parliamentary Private Secretaries. If this number remains static at the same time as the number of MPs is cut by 8%, the payroll vote as a proportion of MPs will increase from an already staggering 22% to 23.5%.

[Adam Afriyie (Windsor) (Con)]

It seems to me, and I think there is common consensus, that the country is over-governed. Surely reducing the level of over-government means increasing the proportion of representatives in the House of Commons relative to those numbers. I therefore welcome this report, which makes that point absolutely clear.

[Mr Jenkin]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s endorsement.

The Government say that they want to see Parliament strengthened, but this increase in the percentage of the payroll vote as a proportion of the House of Commons would further strengthen the Executive at the expense of Parliament; that seems to be unanswerable. PASC urges three steps on the Government to reduce this power of patronage. First, the current legal cap on the number of paid Ministers should be the absolute limit on the number of Ministers. The increasing number of unpaid Ministers has been described as an abuse by one of our witnesses, the right hon. Peter Riddell. Secondly, the legal limit on the number of Ministers in the Commons should be cut by eight, at the very least, in line with the reduction in the number of MPs just enacted. This is, in fact, a very modest reduction.

Thirdly, the number of PPSs should be limited to one per Department. When he gave evidence to the PASC in the last Parliament, Sir John Major described the size of the payroll vote as a “constitutional outrage”. His view was that only Cabinet Ministers should be entitled to PPSs. That suggestion was endorsed by Lord Norton and others, who argued that doing so would make the post more meaningful. This would lead to 26 fewer Members being on the payroll vote.

Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Adam Afriyie

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Adam Afriyie]

That is a very good question. I have the figure 44 in my head for the number of responses to the initial January consultation. A quarter to a third of them were completely against the kind of scheme IPSA eventually introduced, while the other three quarters or two thirds raised specific issues that were not directly related to the terms of the consultation. The input from Members of Parliament in a public sense was therefore fairly minimal; only about 11 MPs actually made a contribution. That is a little concerning. I think the reason behind that low figure is that we as Members of Parliament all know that anything we write on expenses that is in the public domain is a hostage to fortune. We have to overcome that reluctance, however, because unless we show confidence and courage and make it absolutely clear that we will not tolerate an unnecessarily expensive system and an unnecessarily burdensome bureaucracy that takes us away from our constituents, we will fall into the same trap we have fallen into in the past. I therefore have a tremendous sense of déjà vu.

The expenses scandal coincided with the run-up to the general election—it was almost part of the general election campaign—so there was a political need to resolve the issue quickly. I think we all recognise that, and I think we all accept that something needed to be done fairly briskly. However, on reflection now, a year later, it seems to me that perhaps in our haste we have lost some time. Even with the best intentions in the world, there have been omissions and errors in the establishment of the current regime, and they need to be tackled.

Ignoring warnings from the Clerk of the House and others, we have created a curious beast. We have handed over control of the work of MPs to an unelected and unaccountable body. IPSA is judge and jury; IPSA is both regulator and the regulated. MPs are rightly accountable to the people who elect them, whereas IPSA is accountable to nobody, yet IPSA can control the way MPs work—it can control the amount of time that MPs have available to them to conduct their duties. That is a curious state of affairs, and if we are honest with ourselves we would never tolerate that set-up in any other walk of life, or in any other part of government or the civil service.

I do not doubt that the chairman and board of IPSA have good intentions, but is it right that the current system continues to frustrate the work of democratically elected MPs? The issue is not about us and our minor inconveniences, but about our constituents and the time that we can spend with them, so we have to be bold in what we do.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

To be completely fair to IPSA, the scheme that it had to implement had already been handed to it by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, and if I remember correctly there was a curious collision of timetables, whereby IPSA was set up at the same time as the committee was holding its inquiry. I am afraid that we politicians are responsible collectively for the mess that IPSA inherited from us, and I think that my hon. Friend is appealing for it to take charge, to fulfil its remit and to take full responsibility for the scheme that it now implements.

[Adam Afriyie]

I very much welcome my hon. Friend’s intervention. It is quite clear that the Committee on Standards in Public Life had not reported at the time when IPSA was instructed to create a scheme, so we must take responsibility for that. We were in a hurry—with the right intentions—to change the system so that an external body would set the rates of remuneration and pay, but it is widely recognised that in our haste we created something that needs adjustment.