Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mr Winnick]

I totally agree.

I mentioned IPSA’s chair and interim chief executive. A communications director is also being advertised for, with a salary of up to £85,000. Apparently, one is not enough, and the intention is to appoint two others. Inevitably, one asks oneself why on earth IPSA requires three, or indeed any, spin doctors. My debate is about Government policy on IPSA, and I know that the Minister will do his duty by explaining what that policy is. However, it would be interesting to know why it is necessary to have three spin doctors, with the salary of the most senior being advertised as £85,000.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is a serious impact on Members’ families as well as an effect on staff? One of the most serious issues, in addition to all the points about administration, is that once children reach the age of six the entitlement to accommodation is cut off and spouses are given no travel allowance. Does my hon. Friend agree that IPSA is behaving not only independently but above the law? Is it not clear that that discriminatory rule will impact on not only the way we do our jobs but who can be elected and who can do the job?

[Mr Winnick]

My hon. Friend could not have set out better the effect on family life. We could go back to the situation that we had many years ago when only those with independent means could become Members of Parliament. That would be a very undesirable state of affairs to say the least, and I am sure that that view is not confined to Labour Members. I see no reason why family life should be undermined in that way.

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[Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

I wish to declare an interest as one of the many Members of Parliament who have been deemed to be a London-area MP with a constituency outside London. I also wish to state that I am among the many MPs of all political parties who were not asked to pay one penny back by Sir Thomas Legg.

I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) on initiating the debate; he has done a great service to parties in all parts of the House. New Members, in particular, might well ask how it is that they arrived in the House on 6 May to find the expenses scheme creating such enormous difficulty for them and, indeed, for returned Members. It is therefore worth stating that that occurred because the final IPSA scheme was published only on 29 March. On the very same day, it was brought into being, when the Speaker laid it before the House without debate, consideration, the opportunity for amendment or a vote. I hasten to say that that comment represents no criticism whatever of the Speaker; that was the procedure laid down by the House in the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009. That is why we are in this situation, debating a scheme that has hitherto been wholly undebated and that is incapable of amendment or vote by Members of the House.

I want to focus on one fundamental issue, which has thus far, I believe, received no consideration inside or outside the House, although I drew it to the attention of IPSA’s chair, Sir Ian Kennedy, in my letter to him of 21 December last year. That issue is the interface between parliamentary privilege and IPSA’s decisions. I should make it absolutely clear that the aspect of parliamentary privilege to which I am referring has nothing whatever to do with the application of the criminal law to MPs’ expenses. I am referring to a quite different aspect of parliamentary privilege—the privilege of freedom from obstruction in the performance of parliamentary duties.

I have taken advice from the Clerk of the House as to the ambit of that privilege. He has drawn my attention to page 75 of “Erskine May”, under the heading “What constitutes privilege”. He has also drawn my attention to page 143, under the heading “Obstructing Members of either House in the discharge of their duty”, the first paragraph of which reads:

“The House will proceed against those who obstruct Members in the discharge of their responsibilities to the House or in their participation in its proceedings.”

He has also drawn my attention to the report of the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege, at paragraph 264, where, among the contempts of Parliament that are listed, are

“assaulting, threatening, obstructing or intimidating a member or officer of the House in the discharge of the member’s or officer’s duty”.

I do not, of course, suggest that IPSA is in the country of assault, but there are serious issues to be raised about obstruction.

The Clerk of the House has made it clear to me that the privilege of freedom from obstruction applies only to work in connection with parliamentary proceedings. It does not apply to constituency work. However, he has also confirmed to me, in writing, that the protection of MPs from obstruction in connection with parliamentary proceedings applies whether the House is sitting or not. So, just as the IPSA scheme and any obstruction occurring under it applies throughout the year, the protection from obstruction for MPs applies equally throughout the year.

The issue before the House is whether IPSA is obstructing Members of Parliament in the discharge of their parliamentary duties, other than their constituency duties, by, for example, forcing them to spend many hours a week travelling, when they could be working in connection with their parliamentary duties; or whether in countless other ways, as we heard from the hon. Gentleman and in interventions, it is obstructing Members in the efficient and effective discharge of their parliamentary duties.

[Helen Goodman]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a fascinating and pertinent point. Is he aware that some of our colleagues have been told that they cannot recoup the cost of going to conferences on subjects that are of relevance to their work in the House and their constituencies? Is not that precisely the sort of issue that would be covered by the points he has made?

[Sir John Stanley]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making that important point.

No one can say with certainty at the moment whether IPSA is violating the privilege of freedom from obstruction; that is a matter for the House of Commons only. Equally, no one can reasonably deny that the issue must be addressed by the House, as early as possible in the life of this Parliament. We are in an unprecedented situation. Never before in the history of Parliament has a statutory body outside Parliament been created with the ability to introduce rules that directly impact on the ability of Members of Parliament to perform their parliamentary duties. It is clear that the boundary between the authority of IPSA and the ambit of the parliamentary privilege of freedom from obstruction needs to be defined. It is at the moment wholly undefined. For that reason, the issue must be placed at an early date before the Select Committee on Standards and Privileges. I intend to achieve that, with, I hope, the support of other Members. I hope the Minister will agree that the issue of the boundary between the authority of IPSA and the privilege of freedom from obstruction needs early consideration by the Committee.

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[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr McCrea. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) on securing the debate.

It is almost a year since the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009 went through its Commons stages. I remember it well. The Act created the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority and gave it a number of administrative and regulatory functions, including payment of MPs’ allowances, dealing with allowance claims and revising the allowance scheme for MPs. The key aspect of the Act is that it gave IPSA those functions in relation to Members’ allowances, yet when IPSA published the first scheme for consultation, it changed the word “allowances” to “expenses”.

Most right hon. and hon. Members understand the anger and annoyance generated in the public by the term “MPs’ expenses” following the scandal of last year. It therefore seems to me to be incorrect and somewhat provocative of IPSA to describe allowances designed to support MPs in carrying out their parliamentary functions as expenses. We could debate the different definitions, but the definition of “allowance” is money defined or set aside for a purpose—in the case of MPs, to pay essential costs such as staff salaries and national insurance, rent, business rates and utility costs. It includes the sense that the sum specified in the allowance may or may not be used, but IPSA seemed to react to the term “allowances” by suggesting that if it made an “allowance scheme”, MPs would use all of the allowance allocated. That has not been the case in the past.

There is a wide variety of definitions of expenses, but a common one is that of costs incurred by an employee that are payable by an employer. As other Members have said, that does not fit the situation of MPs as we are not employees of the House. I strongly feel that “expenses” has overtones that work to hamper Parliament’s recovery from the scandal generated by the discredited system used in the previous Parliament. As my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North has said, we all want to get over it. In my view, IPSA would be well advised to describe the scheme as an allowance scheme, as the 2009 Act laid down.

Interestingly, IPSA uses a different definition of expenses when it comes to its own reporting. It states on its website that it will publish all expenses and hospitality incurred by the IPSA board and senior staff. If it used the same definition of “expenses” for its own staff, it would report its office costs and the salaries and other support costs of its staff, as well as personal expenses. What it actually publishes is travel and accommodation costs.

What was called the office costs allowance is now split by IPSA into two allowances: constituency office rental and general administrative expenditure. The previous allowance was more than £22,000 and could be supplemented by transfer from other allowances if office running costs were higher than the allowance. The IPSA scheme split the allowance into two parts and reduced it by £1,300. One part of the allowance has to be used to pay office rent, business rates, utility bills and office insurance, and the other for office furniture, computers and printers, phone systems and bills, stationery and postage. Why does IPSA feel that it is right to reduce the total amount of allowances for running an MP’s constituency office?

The Committee on Standards in Public Life looked at the previous allowance and, in its report, recommended no change. Not only has IPSA reduced the allowance, but it has arbitrarily split it and insisted that office rental and associated costs must somehow fit into the reduced half, with the other part of the allowance not able be used for rent, rates or utility bills. Apparently, the level of rental used by IPSA to set the constituency office rental cap is about £5,000 a year, which is meant to pay the annual rent of offices for the MP and up to three and a half staff, plus filing space, printers and space to meet constituents. It is not adequate. The cap is said to be the average office rent paid in the previous Parliament. The concept of an average rent is strange—rents vary up and down the country and probably half of the MPs in that Parliament had a higher cost than the £5,000 average. Many MPs are able to rent office space at low cost from constituency associations or have subsidised offices from their local authority, but for other MPs such subsidised and low-cost offices are not available. There is a danger that IPSA’s splitting the allowance and setting such a low cap on the office rental element could drive MPs out of their current constituency offices and into unsuitable premises.

[Helen Goodman]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is even more absurd to put things over which no one has any flexibility into one budget. We sign up to all the things included in the rent five years beforehand—they are not under our control—and all the flexible things are in another budget. Putting those two budgets together would make management of the money far easier.

[Barbara Keeley]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. My hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North referred to new MPs setting up their offices from scratch. Some new colleagues have told me that they cannot afford the offices used by their predecessors. The rent will last for a number of weeks and then they will be pushed out of those offices.

On the same day that my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Mr Timms) was stabbed at a constituency surgery, I challenged a person whom I thought was breaking into a property neighbouring my constituency office. The police advised me that challenging would-be burglars is not a good idea and that I should desist from doing so in future. My current constituency office is a place in which I feel that my staff and I are safe—it is not a shop, it is not on the ground floor and we have good security protection in the building—but I am very aware of the possibility of crime in the area and the other security threats posed to MPs and their staff.

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[Mr Straw]

No. We could no longer continue with a system of allowances whereby we set the allowances ourselves. And yes, my right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) is absolutely right to say that all of us felt humiliated by that situation, and still do. It was and is a collective humiliation, but we cannot place responsibility for that on the board or the staff of IPSA. I am afraid that we have to look to ourselves.

There is now, however, this other factor, which hon. Friends and other colleagues have referred to this morning, that almost every one of those who transgressed the rules is now outside this House, so the 400 returning Members and certainly the 260 new Members are now paying the price and the penalty not for their own offences, because they have not committed those offences, but for the offences of predecessors who have now left the House. That is a point that I continually make to members of the IPSA staff and board. They have got to recognise that, collectively, the Members of the new Parliament are not the culprits; those culprits, with perhaps one or two minor exceptions, have left Parliament.

[Helen Goodman]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Straw]

No, I am afraid I cannot, as my time is very limited.

I just remind the House that we had to set up IPSA, because that was a requirement put on us by all parties in the Commons, in double-quick time.