Parliamentary Standards Act 2009

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Adam Afriyie (Windsor) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House approves the recommendations of the First Report from the Members’ Expenses Committee on the Operation of the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009, HC 1484.

It is a pleasure to open the debate. I do not intend to detain the House for too long, as there has been a lot of debate on this subject. I welcome this opportunity from the Backbench Business Committee to present the findings of our very thorough and carefully conducted review of the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009. The Committee on Members’ Expenses was tasked with reviewing the operation of the Act to work out what were its aims—what was intended by Parliament—and whether those aims were being fulfilled, and to make any recommendations that were felt necessary.

I am delighted that the House has the opportunity to debate this issue and I thank hon. Members on both sides of the House for their support and input during the process of constructing the report. I thank in particular my fellow members on the Committee. We worked very hard in very busy circumstances to try to put together a report that truly reflected the evidence we received. Hon. Members will be aware that in many cases when one is on a Committee one has to pull back one’s personal preferences to ensure that what is delivered is fair and balanced and truly reflects the evidence and information provided. I thank the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee for making it possible to bring these issues to the House in a non-confrontational environment in which we can talk about matters that relate to the House and, primarily, to Back Benchers. This is a good forum in which to do that.

The party leaders and the House in general deserve some recognition for the initiation and passing of the Parliamentary Standards Act in 2009 and the amending Act in 2010. The House clearly decided to get rid of the old discredited system, to have independent regulation of Members’ expenses and to have that level of remuneration set independently. It also decided clearly that it wanted there to be more accountability for that body and these things than there had been in the past. I thank in particular the former Leader of the House, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), for stating very clearly what the intentions of the Act were prior to its enactment in 2009. I thank also the shadow Leader of the House at that time, the current Leader of the House and the former shadow Leader of the House in the current Parliament for being entirely consistent in their presentation of the aims and objectives behind the legislation and for being persistent in trying to ensure that those aims and objectives were met.

Contrary to most media reports, the review that I present on behalf of the Committee is not particularly controversial. It is completely in keeping with the aims of the Act, as they were laid out. There are seven fairly clear aims about, for example, value for money, accountability, not deterring Members from making claims, being open about what is going on—the transparency side of things—and not creating a system that is unfair for Members who do not have independent means or who do not have families. We were very mindful of those objectives when we conducted the review and I highly recommend that hon. Members read the first section of the report, which runs through the history of payments to MPs. That section also runs through each of the Act’s aims and analyses the extent to which they are currently being met.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has thanked various people. Will he accept my thanks and those of many colleagues for all the work he has put into this report? This is an extremely controversial matter and he has shown great leadership and sacrifice in doing all he has done.

[Adam Afriyie]

I thank my hon. Friend. If I could, I would probably flush up at this moment, but luckily hon. Members would not know if I had.

The objective of the review and its recommendations was to make sure that the aims of the Act, on which the majority of the House agreed, were being met in reality. Let me dispel a couple of the misleading ideas that are bouncing around about the report before I go through its recommendations so that the House is fully aware of what we might be accepting or putting over to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority a bit later.

--- Later in debate ---

[Adam Afriyie]

That point is echoed and very well made as a recommendation in the report. IPSA is taking some steps in that direction, and I hope that the report encourages it to move more quickly.

Let us remember that all the changes we made in 2009 were about improving the public’s confidence in this institution, but that cannot happen if the way information is published misleads people into believing something different. I am concerned in particular about the new intake of MPs, and at some point I will ask IPSA, “How many members of the new intake do we honestly think have been terribly devious and tried to cheat their expenses?” I think that the answer is zero. The robust systems in place indicate as much, but every eight weeks Members are lambasted in their local press for claiming something, so something is wrong with the way information is presented, and that is what the report tries to tackle.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I very much hope that as part of my hon. Friend’s recommendations to IPSA he challenges it also to interact with our suppliers to lower the costs that we pay to some of them, such as Cellhire, which I personally think are extortionate. I very much hope also that IPSA will use bulk purchasing contracts in future to drive down our costs.

[Adam Afriyie]

The report also makes that recommendation, urging IPSA to continue in that direction and, as far as possible, like most other organisations, to do some central purchasing and secure some wholesale agreements, as it has with rail travel. It is stepping slowly in that direction, but we urge it to move a lot more quickly, so that our time and that of our staff can be spent on constituents rather than on unnecessary bureaucracy.

It is very hard to see anything controversial in our report; it is incredibly moderate, calm and analytical. It also asks that IPSA be more transparent and explain to the public—on its website, or in a letter to us—its existing system of supplements for London, for the outer London area and for mileage; explain its rationale for those items, which it has introduced, because the public need to know why it has done so; and then to show very clearly the methodology behind the calculation that enables it to arrive at its figures for those supplements. That would be a very useful exercise, because then people might see how the numbers are calculated and where they come from.

In the second part of recommendation 17, we say that if the system that IPSA has already introduced to London and the outer London area were rolled out—so we are not making a decision on it, but saying, “if it were rolled out”—let us ask a third party, not us or IPSA, to undertake a cost-benefit analysis to see whether it saves taxpayers money and provides them with value for money. Even if it does, and it may not, that is not good enough, however, so we recommend that a third party evaluate whether the system continues to meet the aims of the 2009 Act. Again, that is pretty uncontroversial: we simply, and perfectly reasonably, ask for information, and for an analysis and evaluation to be undertaken.

Recommendation 17(c) may have caused a little concern. During my discussions with the Leader of the House and others, there was some concern that it implies that Members should take control of the expenses system again and “decide” what IPSA does. May I just be absolutely clear, however, and ask Front Benchers to reflect on the fact that, if that were the argument, I have made it clear—including in the amendment that I attempted to table—that that is definitely not the intention? If a word is slightly out of place, I would just say that the report is not legislation but merely a set of recommendations, and I apologise on behalf of the Committee.

The recommendation states that, once the cost-benefit analysis has been completed and we are able to work out whether the taxpayer would get better value while accountability, transparency and everything else are maintained, the House should express its opinion, which I imagine would be in the form of a motion or an early-day motion, stating: “In the opinion of this House, we think this piece of work is jolly good and IPSA should think about it.” We would not be overruling IPSA—nothing of the sort; it would be another recommendation in a report, and that would be it.