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Parliamentary Standards Bill

The hon. Lady attaches great value to giving the public an opportunity to talk to us and learn about what we do. Will she explain to whom the new authority will be accountable? It is being vested with a vast panoply of powers, and will handle huge sums of public money. If a member of the public is not confident that the money is being handled competently, or even thinks that the chairman of the authority is being rather lavish in his expenses claims, to whom will that person be able to make a complaint? It seems to me that we are replacing a very imperfect system of representative democracy with a system that will be accountable to nothing and no one.