---

Legislative Process

I agree entirely. The hon. Gentleman has correctly discerned the motivation of the Leader of the House in tabling the motion. The situation regarding envelopes and stationery is curious, as Members have already observed. The rules say, in principle, that Members are not supposed to use those facilities to send out unsolicited mailings. The Committee on Standards and Privileges, the Serjeant at Arms and the commissioner found some difficulty—I choose my words carefully—in picking their way through the regulation. It is absurd that if a post office was due to close in a village of 100 houses in a Member’s constituency, he or she could not write about the closure to the 200 residents who live in those houses—yet if the Member received a petition on the future of the planet signed by 30,000 people, it would be perfectly in order to use the crested stationery and pre-paid envelopes to correspond with them. That is clearly nonsense. Whatever else happens, if we leave in place a system that allows unlimited use of post and stationery, we need far clearer and more definite rules than we have at present. If anything, the rules are rather over-prescriptive; I should prefer a more sensible regime, but with a clear cap on the expenditure. We cannot have our cake and eat it—it must be one way or the other. I come now to annual reports and similar communications sent out by Members that can be funded by the IEP, where there are also some strange rules. For example, the content of those reports is rightly supposed to be non-partisan, but if we include a direct quote of something said in Parliament, it becomes possible to refer to our own speeches in Westminster Hall, during which the most scandalously partisan points may have been raised. Such comments could be passported straight into the report with no infringement of the rules. That is clearly absolute nonsense, which makes a complete mockery of the system, and it needs to be tightened up. The motion before the House invites us to consider the communications allowance and the Members Estimate Committee is invited to bring forward regulations that would allow us to address all the anomalies to which I have referred. Some have asked why we need a communications allowance and why we are not simply allowed greater use of envelopes and stationery. For one thing, that is an incredibly expensive way for MPs to take proactive communication out to the constituency. Each item sent will incur the full postage rate whereas there are, as hon. Members will know, much more economically viable ways of communicating with large numbers of people. Rather than use ordinary postage of the Royal Mail, it is far better to have a communications allowance through which Members can use their own ingenuity and ability to manage a budget—to refer back to an earlier point—in order to get the best solution that best suits the communications that they want within the rules that are rightly understood as necessary to exclude party political purposes.