Speaker’s Committee for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority

Debate between Chris Bryant and Cheryl Gillan

Monday 7th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I, too, commend the Minister for his latest outing at the Dispatch Box. Many Members of the House think of him as a very nice man, and it is nice to see him here with us today.

I wholly concur with the points that have been made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Dame Cheryl Gillan)—I return the favour—and my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) in relation to Bronwen Curtis. In fact, one of the keenest points that she made repeatedly in SCIPSA was that if IPSA wants a significant increase in capital expenditure to pay for a new IT system, it had better prove it is worth it. If I am honest, I think an awful lot of Members this year would have said, “Well, actually, the way it was introduced, with too few people to answer the telephone—the answers and the conversations you had to have were sometimes so complicated that they went on for 45 or 50 minutes—there are some serious questions about whether public money is being spent properly”.

This goes to the heart of something I think was wrong with the original legislation that was introduced. The Minister said that SCIPSA—the Committee—has two roles, and that is absolutely right, but IPSA itself has two roles as well, and I think they are mutually exclusive. One is to support Members in doing their job of trying to ensure that all those letters from our constituents are responded to quickly and all the rest of it, and that we are able to do our job of representing our constituents well. However, the second part is regulating Members. I think that all too often IPSA relies too much on the regulating element, rather than the supporting element. That, for instance, is why decisions that should have been taken swiftly about providing finance for security measures in Members’ constituency offices and in their homes—where it is not primarily about ourselves, but actually about our families and our staff members, to whom we have a duty of care—have been delayed far, far too long. All too often, it is left to the House authorities to take up the slack. That is a shame and a mistake, and we need to rectify that in the future.

[Dame Cheryl Gillan]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

I will give way, but I was hoping to come to an end very soon.

[Dame Cheryl Gillan]

I was just going to ask the hon. Gentleman whether he was supportive of seeing those two functions split into different bodies at some stage in the future.

[Chris Bryant]

I think I argued at the beginning, when the whole thing was set up, that the two should be in separate organisations. I understand that there is a model of regulation, which we have adopted in many areas now, where the regulator is intimately involved in the industry. I think that that is a mistake. It would be better to separate the two, but that requires primary legislation. It would be a brave Government at the moment who introduced legislation in this particular area—well, introduced any legislation at all. We in SCIPSA need to make sure that we enable IPSA to do a better job to recognise the two halves of its role, supporting and regulating.

I am very confident that Mr Blausten will be a very significant addition to the Committee. We take our job very seriously. I say to hon. Members that, if they have issues that they feel need to be raised with IPSA, all the members of SCIPSA are available. I am sure that Mr Blausten will do a good job. The independent people sometimes say to us, “You know what, MPs? You should be arguing for better support, not the opposite, because you need to be able to do your job properly. If you were in any other industry you would quite simply expect to be able to do your job properly.”