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Legislative Process

At the outset, may I say that I agree with my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House that the quality of scrutiny in the House has improved considerably during the past 25 years? I am anxious to see continued improvement—there is scope for further improvement. I wish to address just two of the motions before us: motion 6 on the communications allowance and motion 7 on September sittings. Starting with the communications allowance, I do not welcome that. On the contrary, I am wholly opposed. I believe that it is a misuse of public money and I intend to vote against it. Some of our discussion earlier this evening has confused two issues. There are legitimate constituency issues, some of which do require quite large-scale mailings. I have no problem with that. The other issue is the recent growth in thinly disguised party propaganda paid for out of the public purse, which I am wholly against. As I see it, the purpose of the proposed allowance is to legitimise a practice whereby Members increasingly spend public money, which is rightly made available to us to provide a service for our constituents, on what amounts to vanity publishing for the purposes that I described. It consists usually of unsolicited glossy brochures, often in party colours, advertising the good works of the Member concerned, who acts as a sort of fairy godmother to his or her constituents. As I mentioned, I have seen examples that contain 16 or even 20 photographs of the Member concerned. The brochures are often indistinguishable from party political propaganda, except that, if the Members concerned are sensible—and not all of them have been—they take care not to mention their party or to criticise their opponents. They are not only printed but, often, distributed at public expense. We need only consider the huge discrepancies in Members’ spending on postage to recognise that there is a rabbit away somewhere. I read recently that one Member would have to be sending out 680 letters a day to justify his postage bill. It is hard to see how that could be justified. Some such brochures sail very close to the wind. I sit on the Standards and Privileges Committee, which receives a steady trickle of complaints, often from other Members but sometimes from members of the public, alleging abuses of the postage and incidental expenditure allowance. Were I a candidate for Parliament running against an incumbent who was using public funds to publish and distribute what looks to most people like campaign literature, I would be mightily upset. It is only a question of time before the practice is challenged in the courts.