Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority

Debate between Nadine Dorries and Lord Mann

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Commons Chamber

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

I am just wondering which category I fall into: the rich or the junior anoraks with no experience of life.

New Members will have read the previous debates. They will have seen that there was a debate not only in January 2009, but in July 2008. They will have studied that debate. One need not read it for too long, however, because one is rehearing it today. I tabled an amendment on 3 July 2008. Unfortunately, my amendment did not manage to persuade the Speaker that it should be selected. So it is today, but there has been some progress, because today I have been called to speak in the debate, unlike in 2008. In that debate, a year before the expenses scandal became a public issue, the same arguments were made. That was exactly a year before—well, not exactly: it was nine months before—The Daily Telegraph got that leaked information, and the rest, as we say, is history. That debate of 3 July 2008 is therefore of significance and relevance. The same Westminster club, with its desire for a special status in society, was eloquently defended then in the same way that we have heard this afternoon. The rich or the junior anoraks with no experience of life? Well, I am not rich: I have no inherited wealth, no wealth siphoned away—

[Nadine Dorries]

And no friends.

[John Mann]

We hear the same kind of abuse that I got following that debate—some of it to my face; some was behind my back. My proposal then—new Members might want to listen carefully to this—was that the House should debar the practice of flipping. If that had been agreed, it is eminently predictable that the issue of mortgages would not have been resurrected in the way that it was the year after. An acceptable solution would have been in place as would a coherent system of mortgages. However, the House was not interested in listening to that, because, despite the fact that my resolution was passed, even though I could not get a seconder—I had read “Erskine May” and I knew the procedures—the powers that be managed to bury its implications. It was not enacted and a high price was paid.

The principle at issue is simple—this is why I back the independence of IPSA: should we cede our ability to determine how the rules on expenses are set and managed to an independent body or not? I can criticise how things are done; indeed, I have and some of my criticisms were listened to but some were not. We can all take a view on what the system should be, but the principle remains: should we cede the authority to determine these matters to IPSA—an independent body—or not? That was the basis on which we legislated, and the motion, which would have been improved by my amendment, which unfortunately has not been selected, breaks that principle.

I oppose and shall vote against the motion because it says that MPs should have the power to determine such matters. That was the fundamental weakness in the previous expenses system. There is a lot of history and reason behind all this, but there is also reason for the state we are in. I remind the House that we are about to go through a series of court cases and that others might follow. The media will be full of that and so will our constituents. We are in that state of play because of the previous expenses system. The fundamental weakness was not just in the detail but in the principle: the public rightly hated the fact that we set our own terms and conditions.

We rightly broke with that principle and it was inevitable that a new system starting from scratch would have a lot of problems—some of us said so at the time and feared it. Whoever set up the system, whether it was this chap Kennedy with his IPSA, Sir Christopher Kelly with his committee and his review or any other body, it would have had significant problems because of the complexity of the arrangements. Arbitrary decisions will be made, as they are in every expenses system. When I ran a business, I set the system for my employees and contractors, and when I was a union representative, I negotiated and tried to improve expenses systems. Of course, there were arbitrary decisions that I thought unfair when I was operating within other systems, but there always will be in any independent system. This all comes back to whether we set the system. That is the breach point; the motion would break that principle and that is why it is fundamentally wrong.