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Parliamentary Standards Bill

In the interest of the brevity that you have called for, Mrs. Heal, the need for which we quite appreciate, I merely point out that the very name of the Bill and the new authority are not a perfect description of what they will do. It would have been much better if they had been called something like the parliamentary payments authority and the parliamentary payments Bill. We have a proliferation of the use of the words "standard" and "standards", but this is really about money—money paid to a Member of Parliament by an allowances system and by any outside interests. The name is not perfect, and I hope that it will not be misused in our public prints in future.