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Administration Committee

Before I aggravate anybody, I commend motion 15 to the House. I have a selfish interest as I want to be a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. I extend thanks in good measure to the Government Chief Whip and, I suspect, to the elected Members of the parliamentary Labour party who worked hard to draw up the list of Labour nominees. Sometimes, I think that the holy spirit may have intervened, as I understand that it was a close-run thing as far as I was concerned, so I am grateful to be on the list. However, the process gives rise to questions about the way that Select Committees are set up, as other Members have pointed out. My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) is not in the Chamber, unfortunately. I disagree with his proposal, although I share his objective in taking decisions on all these issues away from Front-Bench Members. We should be looking ahead four years, and the negotiations on the apportionment of Chairmen between the political parties and the size of Committees should be determined by the chairman of the parliamentary Labour party, the chairman of the 1922 executive and/or an appropriate officer and appropriate representatives of the other political parties. There are two reasons for that. First, it would remove, or reduce, the feeling that there is patronage, especially when the payment of Chairmen is involved. Secondly, it would help in the expedition of business. With the best will in the world, after a general election Government and Opposition Whips are preoccupied with other things. After a general election, all Members could indicate to their parties which Committees they are interested in from day one, and the necessary processing would be expedited if it was dealt with by the party secretariat and Back-Bench representatives of the political parties rather than the Whips, which only delays things and creates jealousy and suspicion about patronage. I confess to emotional swings as I listened to the debate, especially the speeches of the two Front-Bench speakers. At one point, I thought that I had my whole career before me, but then I swung the other way and thought that my wilderness years were going on for rather a long time. There would be so many people who would have the opportunity of receiving enhanced payments and so many distinguished people who would have to find a role. I am confused. We are elected to this place as Members of Parliament and it is part of our job to decide how we discharge that duty. I can understand that the principal Officers of the House and senior members of the Government should receive substantial payment, but the whole drift towards extra payments is unhealthy for democracy. There is vast disparity in the pay of Ministers and we are aggravating that situation by paying Chairmen of Select Committees—and we now propose to extend that further. That is unhealthy. We should be working towards a situation where every Member of Parliament is deemed equal. He or she should defend stewardship of their office before the electorate when they seek re-election. There should be no additional payments such as those we instigated in the last Parliament and are likely to extend this evening. That will make things extraordinarily difficult. Nobody has noticed that one aspect of government on which we are not setting up a Select Committee is security and intelligence, for which there is no parliamentary oversight. We must be unique among democracies in not having a parliamentary Committee providing such oversight. There is a Committee made up of parliamentarians, appointed by the Prime Minister, who is in charge of the security and intelligence services, but it is not a parliamentary Committee. Indeed, I can make a double whammy and draw attention to the perversity of the fact that that Committee, which I do not recognise—indeed, the Clerk of the House made clear to Hutton that it is not a parliamentary Committee—has a Chairman, my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Mr. Murphy), who will not be paid a penny. He cannot be paid, because if he were, it would be an office of profit under the Crown and there would have to be a by-election in Torfaen. Nobody seems to have thought about such ridiculous anomalies. As we are only doing half our job, perhaps we should propose a motion setting up a parliamentary Committee on security and intelligence. If there are payments for Select Committee work then no doubt the Chairman of that Committee could receive payment, too. There is a big void in our scrutiny arrangements. People pray in aid the Senior Salaries Review Body. Has there ever been an occasion when a reference to that body met with the reply that not a penny extra should be paid? Of course not. Its members are the great and the good—the glitterati—who enjoy being part of that body. When they are invited to make a recommendation they always do so. I can give no credence to the fact that the SSRB has said that there should be payments. In any case, who are they to say that? They are not Members of Parliament. They do not know what goes on here or what the duties of a Member of Parliament are—the diligence, dilatoriness or otherwise of individual Members. My hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) is not in the Chamber, but she is relevant to the debate. Motion 6 is absurd. Its genesis goes back to when the hon. Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) was a constant irritant to the Thatcher Government. The convention of service for two Parliaments was instigated at that time, but I cannot escape the conclusion that the Labour Government found the conduct and stewardship of my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich an irritant, too. We should not go about things as the motion proposes. Soon there will be a casual vacancy of Chairman of a Select Committee in this Parliament. The expectation is that this Parliament will run for a long time. I am an optimist and I hope that after the next two elections Labour will win and that the next two Parliaments will be for four or five years. The person who fills the first casual vacancy as a Chairman could continue in office for 14 or 15 years.