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Disqualification from Parliament (Taxation Status) Bill

May I just make some progress? People might ask why this provision is necessary. The House of Lords Appointments Commission identified the problem in its report for 2006-07. It concerns a Conservative peer and donor, Irvine Laidlaw, now Lord Laidlaw. He was ennobled in 2004 after promising to become a UK resident for tax purposes. Unfortunately, he reneged on that promise. This is all documented in the House of Lords Appointments Commission's annual report. He is a tax exile, living in Monaco. Lord Stevenson, the Chair of the Commission, has written to the Prime Minister to flag up his concerns about this matter. In October last year he also told my colleague, the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), who chairs the Public Administration Committee, that the commission was no longer prepared to accept assurances from people who do not pay UK taxes but would apparently do so some time in the future. He also said that it would no longer accept non-UK taxpayers as candidates for the peerage. Lord Laidlaw, who lives in Monaco, as I said, has now taken leave of absence from the House of Lords. So, new rules are clearly needed, and they need to have a statutory basis. The irony is that the House of Lords Appointments Commission is not set up by statute and is, in a sense, making up the rules as it goes along. The House of Lords Appointments Commission decided after the Laidlaw case that it was not going to wave people through to a peerage if they were not UK taxpayers, but there is nothing in statute to address the problem and that applies only to new peers, not to existing ones. Clearly, there is a lacuna in the law. There is, of course, great speculation about Lord Ashcroft. On his website, he says:"““If home is where the heart is, then Belize is my home””." No one really knows—he has not volunteered the information—whether Lord Ashcroft, a major donor to the Conservative party, is resident for tax purposes in the UK or in Belize. In 2004, in what I believe is called the House of Lords expenses register, he gave his main residence as Belize. He has repeatedly declined to say where he does reside and I do not know—no one here knows—whether he pays UK taxes.