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Members' Salaries, Pensions and Allowances

It is a privilege to follow the right hon. Member for Warley (Mr. Spellar), with whose speech I agree entirely. All colleagues have begun their contributions by congratulating Sir John Baker and the SSRB on the report that has been produced, but it has been noted already that one or two little difficulties remain, especially with those parts of the report that deal with allowances. I suspect that more difficulties will be highlighted as the debate goes on. May I suggest, in the nicest possible way, that the SSRB has not grasped some of the intricacies of our allowance system? The result is that there are difficulties with what is being proposed in the report. I cannot comment on behalf of the Directorate of Resources—what used to be called the Fees Office—but I suspect that its excellent staff would encounter enormous difficulties in implementing and enforcing some of the recommendations that the report makes about constituency offices, space allocations, costings and incidental expenses provision—IEP—changes for some colleagues. The proposals are almost unenforceable. We cannot have transparency in our allowances if we cannot devise a system to enforce the changes, or understand what the SSRB is recommending. The Leader of the House is therefore right not to implement the recommendations verbatim and to refer them to the MEC. That Committee is supported by the Advisory Panel on Members' Allowances that is chaired by the right hon. Member for Warley, and it will be able to sort out what amounts to a bit of a mess in the SSRB report. Who are the dangerous men and women on the MEC who have been given that responsibility? They are exactly the same people as those who make up the House of Commons Commission. They meet at the same time, but the agendas are different: sometimes a person is a member of the MEC, at others a member of the Commission. The MEC is chaired by Mr. Speaker. Its next most distinguished member is the Leader of the House, followed by the shadow Leader of the House, the hon. Members for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell) and for North Devon (Nick Harvey) and myself. The MEC does not leak, so I cannot reveal what we discuss, but I can say that we meet regularly. The Leader of the House has entrusted us with making sense of that bit of the SSRB report that deals with allowances and, in conjunction with the right hon. Member for Warley, that is what we will try to do. We will be served by some incredibly clever people in the Directorate of Resources. I have had the privilege of serving on the MEC and the Commission for two years, slightly longer than the Leader of the House. When I say that, I am not being arrogant: I simply mean that I have had the privilege of seeing more papers produced by the men and women in the Directorate of Resources than she has. I have been delighted by their excellence, and can say that the MEC is exceptionally well served. If the House gave the MEC authority to produce its own suggestions for a suitable pay and allowances mechanism, we would rely heavily on the Directorate of Resources staff, and we would look to the Library's research department for background information. We would also lift some stuff from the SSRB report, given that much of the relevant work has been done already and makes sense. It is possible that we could produce some reasonable suggestions for the House's consideration. If the recommendations in any memorandum, report or little review that the MEC might prepare turned out not to be sensible, colleagues would be very quick to bin them and our names would be mud. However, I believe that we could produce some sensible suggestions, as we might be able to consult hon. Members of all parties more thoroughly than the SSRB.