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Parliamentary Standards Bill

I agree entirely with my right hon. Friend. At some point in the next hour, we may or may not get Third Reading. However, the reality is that the Bill in its present form is incoherent and filleted. It will have to be put back together again, but it is extraordinary that it is in another place that that will happen. Yet again, a Bill that intimately concerns this House will, at the end of the day, leave this House in a form in which it could never go on the statute book. If ever there was a lesson to be learned about the failings of our procedures, which, as has rightly been said, are just as important as any other failings in our allowances in diminishing the standing of this place, it is that. Although I welcome the one or two amendments that we are dealing with to tidy things up, the truth is that we are tidying something up that, at the moment, is a hovel of a piece of legislation. A great deal will have to be done to it before it is inflicted on the world outside.