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Parliamentary Standards Bill

I was going to come to him. The editor of the Daily Mail, for goodness’ sake, gets over £1 million. I also found out during an interesting exchange on television that even young girls like Carrie Gracie on morning television which no one watches get paid £92,000 a year. I could not believe it. It is about time that people at the other end of the corridor said, "We are doing an important job and we deserve to be properly paid". The amendment should not be accepted for a number of reasons. In what was again a penetrating intervention, my noble friend Lord Gordon said—with respect to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lyell—that the situation for someone who represents a London constituency is very different from that of someone representing a Scottish, Welsh or northern English constituency. The costs are much greater for people coming from long distances. Maintaining a home here has legitimate costs, but unfortunately they have been abused. A number of Members of the House of Commons, but only a relatively small number of them, abused the system with things like duck houses and cleaning out moats. We know all of them.