Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority

John Spellar Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

As regularly on these occasions, I say to the House that I have no particular knowledge of the individual concerned or any animus towards them, but I have huge concerns about the process.

I hope that, when the Leader of the House is looking at rigorous analysis and making tough decisions about IPSA, she looks, for example, at why it has expensive offices in the Strand in London when nearly all the staff seem to be working from home, and why the experience of individual Members in dealing with IPSA staff is that they are not facilitators of the work of hard-pressed and hard-worked Members of Parliament, but most of the time—with one or two individual exceptions, but certainly as an institution—are just incredibly obstructive. It creates a huge amount of unnecessary and bureaucratic work not just for Members of Parliament, but for our members of staff. I know that this is echoed across the Chamber from the number of Members who come up to me after speeches such as this to say so, many of whom may even have been watching in their offices while grinding through their IPSA returns.

I very much object to the process. The Parliamentary Standards Act 2009, which was brought in in haste and in response to a crisis—and in a panic, I would argue—specifies that at least one of the members of IPSA

“must be a person who has held (but no longer holds) high judicial office”.

Why? What does the requirement to have held high judicial office or to have been an eminent barrister have to do with deciding how efficiently to deal with people’s expenses? I would argue that somebody from one of the big corporations, who actually understands something about running a salaries and expenses scheme, might be a lot better at doing that, but such a person is not specified. I suspect that someone who has been a trade union official or a convener in a major company would have a much better idea about how to run such a system efficiently and effectively than someone who has never had such responsibility. I note that this individual has been a head of chambers, which would give them some understanding, but not of dealing with several hundred people in the way that IPSA has to do.

One of the problems we seem to have at the moment—this is what I want to highlight to the House—is that we have now erected a new priesthood. I find it very interesting that people complain about having bishops of the Church of England in the House of Lords, but almost everything now has to be allocated to a senior judge. These people have a lot of training and many of them are extremely intelligent, but that does not make them the only people in this country who have good judgment, are able to assess a case or are able to run something. Almost everything now seems to be delegated to the lawyers and to the judiciary. I find it really rather amusing, entertaining and slightly surprising from the Conservative party, given that its supporting newspapers are regularly castigating the judiciary on their front pages, that for everything that relates to this House, it somehow seems to allocate them a special place and a special privilege.

When we look through appointments not just to this board, but to the boards of so many public bodies that come before this House, time and again the only people who are chosen are the great and the good from various non-governmental organisations that get awards—that is another tick in a box—or those who have served on a number of quangos. It is not someone who is actually running a business day to day, someone who is doing the real job of working as a nurse or a doctor in a hospital, or a figure from the car industry, for example. None of those people gets a look in, because we hand over this process to search consultants who keep fishing in the same pool. We need to call that out and say that there is a great wealth of talent in this country. Our class system, time and again, ignores that pool of talent in all walks of life, and we have even institutionalised it in the legislation setting up the IPSA board.

So I end as I began—had we been closer to 10 o’clock, I might have felt the need to expand further, but we are not—by saying that this is nothing to do with the individual concerned. It is really to do with a self-perpetuating system that is basically about looking after chums, and it is about time we changed it.

Question put and agreed to.