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Communications Allowance

The right hon. Member for Streatham (Keith Hill), who obtained the debate, has made a huge contribution to this place. He is one of the outstanding Members of Parliament I have come across in my time here—somebody of unfailing humour, whether things are going well or badly for him. He has never rubbed my nose in it when my party is doing badly, and he has always had a big smile on his face, even when his party seems to be on its uppers. Having said all that, I am a little surprised that the right hon. Gentleman should choose this of all subjects for his parliamentary swansong. As far as I could tell, he adduced six points in defence of the communications allowance. The first was democratic accountability. That is the sort of the phrase that is bandied around quite cheaply, but generally means very little. By listening to him, I did not really discover where exactly accountability would be increased as a consequence of the allowance. The right hon. Gentleman then said that the allowance would act as a counterweight to Lord Ashcroft's "attempted purchase of parliamentary seats." I understand his point, and I will discuss it in a little more detail in a moment. The right hon. Gentleman then said that it would rebuild trust. But I take the view that spending large sums of public money on self-promotion—I think that that is how people perceive it—is more likely than not to have the opposite effect, if it has any effect at all. The right hon. Gentleman said that the allowance was important for seats with transient electorates, but that seems a rather curious point. Does it mean that the grant should be graded, so that Members in seats with the lowest churn have the lowest grant and those in seats with the highest churn have the highest grant? I found that idea extremely bizarre. The level playing field we need is not between seats, but within seats between people campaigning. Presumably, a transient electorate is as difficult for the challengers to handle as it is for the sitting MP. In a very revealing phrase, the right hon. Gentleman said that the allowance is at least—I hope that I have got this exactly right—"needed to remind people that they do at least have an MP in place". I should hope that any MP who is doing his job would find a way of enabling at least some of his constituents to discover that they have representation at Westminster, so I do not find that argument convincing either. The right hon. Gentleman's final argument was that the allowance is a modest means of achieving balance, which goes back to the point that I made a moment ago. I hope that I have already answered that argument a little. It is the balance within the constituency, not between constituencies, that matters. I think that the communications allowance is a scandalous waste of public money. it was right to abolish it. It is a form of incumbency grant. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), the Chairman of the Public Administration Committee, has said as much in unequivocal terms, and I agree with him. Incidentally, the incumbency value is measurable; it is a statistical fact. It is between one and three percentage points.