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House of Lords: Financial Support for Members

My Lords, one can understand people getting worked up about expenses. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, recalled that when he was a member of the Top Salaries Review Body, the expenses were £11 a day. When I came here they were £3 a day; in fact, there was nothing to start with. All you got was a first-class rail fare, provided you attended a certain number of sittings. If you got flu during the fourth week of the month, you were not paid anything because the expenses could not be carried over. There was great excitement when the expenses were increased to £3. The newspapers went wild and said that the bluebloods—they were bluebloods in those days—would be taking their girlfriends out to London nightclubs on expenses. That was absolute rubbish. I am afraid that I do not think that mine will be a particularly helpful intervention. I hope that that does not matter, but sometimes it is a good thing to stand back and survey the scene from a distance. What does one see? The House of Commons is being destroyed, and why is that? Because a court ordered that all the files in the Fees Office should be published. It was too great a problem to be done in-house and so the task was, as the Americans would say, outsourced to a contractor. There, the disk concerned was copied by an employee who hawked this property, belonging to someone else, around Fleet Street. No one wanted to touch it but the Daily Telegraph, which purchased a copy of the material that rightly belonged to someone else for, I understand, £300,000, and then published it drip by drip, day after day, rightly or wrongly—and so it continues. What was the result? Another place has been turned into turmoil. The Daily Telegraph has had Parliament running scared. Many people who have spent their lives honourably working for their constituents and for their country have been blackguarded, characters have been assassinated, and many who are giving up as Members of Parliament are saying that they are thankful that they are leaving. What a terrible reflection of years of hard work and pride—and what a reflection it is of what is happening to Parliament. Now another place is to be administered by a quango costing £8.5 million per year. The chairman is to be paid twice the salary of a Member of Parliament for a three-day week just to ensure that Members of Parliament are not paid too much. That is a good old mix-up. I think that people have gone off their heads. The whole point of Parliament is that it should be separate from the Executive and not run by it. Members of Parliament are elected to run the country and to keep a check on the Executive, not to go to Parliament and be immersed in the web of the Executive’s regulations. We certainly do not want it run by the media. There is nothing which some alteration and clarification of the rules could not have put right. Your Lordships may say, "What on earth has that got to do with us?". I shall tell your Lordships: everything, because in my view, "they" are trying to draw your Lordship’s House down through the same pipe. It was thought better, therefore, that we should be ahead of the game, and so the Senior Salaries Review Body was asked to look at your Lordships’ House. It would have been too much to expect the Senior Salaries Review Body to say that everything was fine, so it has made some recommendations, and odd ones they are too. The overnight fee is going to be reduced by £45. Why is that? As the noble Lord, Lord Gordon of Strathblane, said earlier, it was only last year that it was put up to £174. Did the Senior Salaries Review Body consider that it had made a mistake, or that it was too much, or that your Lordships have been living in too much luxury? Now your Lordships will have to produce receipts. This means getting two bills from the hotel or club—one for the room and one for the telephone call to the wife, the newspaper and the bedtime drink if you feel inclined to have one. What does this mean? As I understand it, the finance department, which at the moment has around five people looking after Peers’ expenses, will now have to take an extra eight people—just to check. The department will have to be, as they say, relocated because there is not enough room where it is. All those extra people, as well as their salaries and accommodation, become a huge additional cost which in turn becomes a part of the cost of Peers’ expenses. The administration of Peers’ expenses has always been simple and it ought to be kept that way. Then, as we have heard, the report says that, in time, those expenses should be taxable, and that in order to cover the tax, they will have to be increased. So the Government are going to provide more money for your Lordships’ expenses in order to enable them to pay it back again in tax. It seems a pretty crazy thing to do, but that is typical Civil Service accounting. Last week, the Prime Minister said that he was concerned that we should get value for money in everything. Whatever else this does or does not do, none of it provides value for money. It will just make a good and simple arrangement expensive and complicated. The report goes on to say that if you rent a room in, say, your son’s flat, this should be discontinued because it does not seem to be correct. You will have to move out, go to an agent, find another flat and move in. Meanwhile, your son will have an empty room, so he will also have to go to an agent, find a new tenant, and have an unknown stranger move into his flat. What on earth is the purpose of this? It is totally bizarre. Your Lordships are going to be allowed to go first class in a train provided that they work. If you want to read a thriller, you will have to go standard. But if you stuff a copy of the Sun in your pocket and go into first class, you can have the pleasure of looking at the Page 3 girl if your Lordships like to do that. You are allowed to go first class because you will be reading up about what is going on in the world, and therefore you are working. I cannot think what the Senior Salaries Review Body was thinking of when it concocted that idea. A first-class rail ticket should be automatic. It always has been, ever since rail fares were first allowed as expenses in the early 1950s. Why has it got to be changed now? If a noble Lord lives in Scotland, it has always been the practice that you can travel with your wife in a first-class sleeper. Now, it will be all right for the Peer to go first class but, as my noble friend Lady Shephard observed so graphically, "the wife" has to go in the guard’s van with the baggage. That hardly seems to be a delicate way of running expenses in your Lordships’ House, and it is pretty insulting to the wives. Recommendation 26 of the report proposes that the new quango, IPSA—it sounds like the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals—should extend its activities from another place to your Lordships’ House. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, wants that too, but then the Liberals always want something quite absurd and unsuitable. I hope that that will not happen. We must remain independent from another place and not become subject to this expensive and wholly inappropriate quango. Your Lordships’ House and another place are different. This House is simply run and is inexpensive—indeed, it is the least expensive second Chamber in the world. In all ways it has been good value for money. We must beware of the great temptation of being drawn into this spider’s web of bureaucracy on the apparent altar of transparency and openness and accountability, which have nothing to do with common sense or the duties of Parliament. Your Lordships might recall that Archbishop Fisher once said: ""There is no unreasonable argument which cannot be proved reasonable by reason"." Payments should be simple: so much for a day or a night. If you claim an overnight payment and decide to sleep on the Embankment, that is fine. It should not be the business of the powers that be to inquire about that. If people cheat or break the rules, that of course is a different matter, and they should be subject to the appropriate discipline. However, I find it unacceptable that your Lordships, many of whom are very distinguished, who have contributed in a variety of different ways to the life of the nation, some of whom—unlike me—may not be in the first flush of youth, and who come here to continue to give their best without payment, should be treated like fifth-form schoolboys over expenses. Most people are upright. Not everyone is a baddy, and it is offensive to see proposals put forward which insinuate that this is the case. Mr Speaker said the other day that Members of Parliament have never worked so hard. That may be so, as far as their social worker duties are concerned. But they work only three days a week in another place: Monday, Tuesday and on Wednesday mornings a football shouting match at Prime Minister’s Questions, and then home. The real job of the House of Commons is to look at legislation to ensure that what gets on to the statute books is right and reasonable, and to keep a check on the Executive. But another place only looks at 10 per cent of each Bill which comes in front of it. The rest of the Bill passes to your Lordships' House from another place just as the parliamentary draftsman had drafted it. It is here, in the unpaid House, where the whole of every Bill is subject to scrutiny on which the country depends for the integrity of its legislation. If it were not for this House, much more bad legislation would appear on the statute book than is the case now. I therefore find it extraordinary that the Senior Salaries Review Body can produce such a nit-picking report. As if that is not bad enough, we are asked to approve the architecture—that famous word—of the report. What on earth does that mean? I agree with my noble friend Lord Strathclyde that architecture normally refers to houses. You might just as well ask your Lordships to approve the "general drift" or the "building blocks" of the report. I remember an amendment tabled to a Bill once that referred to putting in the building blocks of a report, but you cannot use that kind of language when dealing with Parliament. In this case, architecture is a dilettante word which does not fall easily from the lips of the noble Lord the Chairman of Committees. Your Lordships are normally asked to "take note" of or "approve" a report, not to approve its architecture. I do not know what it means—except that it insinuates something fishy—and, like the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, I do not propose to vote for something which I do not understand.