---

Parliamentary Standards Bill

Will the Leader of the House help me? The questions about judicial review will not go away. Does she agree with me, first, that decisions are judicially reviewable, as she has said already? Secondly, if that is the case, and if, for example, an officer of the House of Commons or the Commons itself were to act, through their disciplinary powers, in a way that involved a criminal charge or the destruction of a civil right, would that not raise problems that the courts would then have to resolve—a situation that is not solved by Amendment 1? This is the kind of question that noble Lords on all sides of the House are asking. That is the problem that the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege identified 10 years ago. It said that there had to be a parliamentary privileges Act, but there been no such Act—that is the problem that we face today.