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Communications Allowance

No, there is not time. Proactive communication, such as the letter I sent to my constituents, is not currently supported, which is a pity. My right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham gave a short history of the allowance. As he said, it was introduced after a period of increased interest in Parliament's engagement with the public. It came in with that new cap of £7,000 on pre-paid Commons stationery, which had previously been unlimited. In many cases that effectively meant an overall reduction in expenditure, which is important to note. It was a move to proactive communications. Many items that have been discussed in the debate were previously allowed under office costs, such as websites, printing and distribution of reports, newsletters and so on, but not petitions, questionnaires or mailings that can be targeted at certain areas in a constituency. They were included in the scope of the communications allowance for the first time, so it was a positive development. To be clear, the decision to suspend communications expenditure was taken to ensure consistency with the new regime for the regulation of parliamentary candidates' election expenses, which was brought in by the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009. Those restrictions were agreed by the Members Estimate Committee on 23 November. It is important to note that the restriction of expenditure under the communications allowance was judged at that point to be a necessary and short-term measure to avoid any perception of electoral advantage stemming from the use of a publicly-funded allowance. Let us now look at the future decisions on communications expenditure that could be made. In its report, the Committee on Standards in Public Life was critical of what it saw as the self-promotion contained in some of the materials produced using the communications allowance, a point to which Members have already referred. My right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham commented that it is difficult to see how that could be entirely omitted from materials designed to report on activities of Members. Indeed, local authorities do much the same by producing the newsletters and communications we have heard about. As right hon. and hon. Members have discussed, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, in its initial consultation document, took a more restrictive view than the Committee on Standards in Public Life, chaired by Sir Christopher Kelly. In fact, IPSA has proposed that communications expenditure should be allowed only for advertising meetings and surgery times and for contact cards. It is important to note that the Committee on Standards in Public Life recommended that the allowances scheme should continue to support proactive communications funded from overall office costs, rather than from a separate allowance. That is a key point, as Members have referred to a decision to close that down, which has not yet been taken. The Government accepted the Committee's recommendations but expressed a consistent view in their evidence to IPSA. That evidence stated that the new allowance system should provide Members with adequate resources to carry out their work effectively on behalf of their constituents and that allowances should recognise and underpin the vital link between an MP and his or her constituency. My right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham made some interesting points on the need to safeguard against the advantage of a wealthy parliamentary candidate over candidates of average means. It has been argued that communications expenditure could give that advantage to incumbents, but I think that it has been useful for the House to hear that advantage can lie elsewhere. My hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) also raised the possibility of a more effective limit on pre-election expenditure, and I trust that Justice Ministers will consider that. Final decisions on a new allowances scheme are now being made by IPSA. A powerful case has been made in the debate to consider the resources needed by Members to communicate effectively with their constituents, and my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Martin Linton) underlined that important point. I trust that board members of IPSA will note the views expressed today, and I will ensure that a copy of the Hansard report of the debate is drawn to their attention.