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House of Lords: Financial Support for Members

My Lords, I hope that the House will forgive me for making a brief intervention. I do not share all the outright criticisms that some colleagues have made of the SSRB report. I began my submission to the SSRB by saying: ""The present system of financial assistance to members of the House of Lords is in my view seriously out of date"." I gave a number of the reasons, and concluded: ""It is no longer fit for purpose"." My starting point was that in today’s world—and I stress, in today’s world—we could not continue with the system as it is now, particularly in relation to being recompensed for expenditure without having to prove that the expenditure has been incurred. That is, in fact, the basis of the expenditure system. My noble friend Lord Crickhowell was very kind in relation to a speech I made about the House of Commons about a couple of weeks ago in this Chamber, in defence of Members of Parliament. One point that I made was that the rot set in there when, in 2003, the House of Commons increased the SSRB recommendations for allowances by 40 per cent because the salary was simply inadequate. That is how the current crisis has been caused. I do not want us to be in the same position. So I support some of the key recommendations of the SSRB—the "framework", as my noble friend Lady Shephard called it, which I much prefer to the word "architecture". Later I shall say something strongly in support of my noble friend Lord Crickhowell, but I do not share the criticism that the SSRB wholly followed the Kelly report. I have some very serious criticism of that report, in that it did not understand the role and responsibilities of Members of the other place; but this SSRB report acknowledges in chapter 2 the role and realities of today’s House of Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, acknowledged. Above all, it recognises that we are not salaried and that the great strength of this House lies in the experience, expertise and diversity that it offers. The report makes a reasonable attempt at recognising those points in its recommendations, given especially—and this is the crucial point—the expenditure constraint that the SSRB had to operate under. That was not recommended by the House Committee but was added by the Prime Minister. From chapter 8, you can see why it was that some of the recommendations came out as they did, having been compelled to follow that request by the Prime Minister. One particularly important point, which is a key point of the framework, is the proposal for a daily fee. I have to say that I recommended this. Chapter 3 refers to the fact that around half of all the Members who responded to the consultation favoured the payment of a fee or allowance for each day of attendance. That is important, because it would overcome the biggest problem that we have with the present system. Like my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, who also recommended the daily fee, I did not suggest the same two ingredients as the SSRB put forward, but I am prepared to accept them. The importance of this is that it overcomes the kind of issue that I warned would be a criticism. Annex 7 of the report shows that the daily fee recommended is way at the bottom and much the cheapest of the daily fees for any other public body for which daily fees are paid for the contribution given.