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Parliamentary Standards Bill

We should get back to the Bill before long, but I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes—not necessarily with every word he said—in his opposition to my noble and learned friend’s amendment. My noble and learned friend seemed concerned that the Bill will put the future of MPs’ salaries and allowances into a straitjacket and that we should avoid doing that. In my opinion, Amendment 26, and also, to a degree, Amendment 21, would put them into a straitjacket and decide what the overall system is to be. It may be that at the end of all the discussions the system outlined by my noble and learned friend will come out as the best one, although the Inland Revenue would have views on whether it would wish to be placed in the position of having to decide on the correct costs of allowing Members of Parliament the expenses of doing their job. There are undoubtedly expenses. My constituency was 120 or 125 miles from London and so, inevitably, there were not only travel costs but accommodation costs, whatever you like to call them, that had to be allowed for somehow. They could of course be included in a salary with a tax allowance to cover the expense of doing the job. Maybe that is what my noble and learned friend has in mind. However, his amendments will put the system in a straitjacket. Whatever comes out of the second homes business, we all agree that MPs must have travel allowances, secretarial allowances and so on, and these could be properly referred to in the Bill, to be decided by whatever the mechanism is. We should not write my noble and learned friend’s amendments into the Bill because it would put it into a straitjacket for the future, which we should not do for some of the reasons given by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes.