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Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd). May I add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) not only on bringing this debate to the House today but on the considerable amount of hard work he has put in over many months to seek to redress what indubitably has been and remains a wrong? My hon. Friend has studiously given IPSA, perhaps appropriately, until all fools' day to come back with a better scheme. Personally, I would prefer to see a change now, but I shall support his motion in the Lobby, if necessary, later. I want to pay tribute to the staff of the former Fees Office, many of whom have been reviled—shamefully, sometimes in this House, but more particularly in the press—because of the systems that had developed. Those staff, known to many of us in previous Parliaments, were in the main diligent, courteous and careful and did a very good job. Some are now working for IPSA, but I happen to know that some of them are acutely disturbed by the climate of mistrust in IPSA that has been inculcated into them and imposed on them from the top. By the top, I mean the chairman and the interim chief executive. Let us now call a spade a spade and understand what we are talking about. The hon. Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) said it was up to those of us who have knocked around for a bit to speak up for the newer Members of the House. It will not have escaped your notice, Mr Deputy Speaker, that I am practically halfway through my parliamentary career—[Laughter.] Did I hear somebody say ““shame””? On that basis, I believe that some of us have a duty to say things that young men and women who entered this Parliament for the first time in May need to have said for them but do not feel able to say for themselves. There has been a climate of fear and of mistrust. There is a feeling that if we complain our constituents will not understand and the local and national press certainly will not understand. There are some things that we must get on the record. In introducing the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor said that he was trying to stimulate a measure in the interests of our constituents and in the interests of saving money. He is absolutely right. The system that has been imposed on us is wasteful, costly and bureaucratic and it is failing. We have to get that right. The interim chief executive of IPSA, in one of his many issued statements, said that"““the core of our mission is to support parliamentary democracy.””" Mr Churchill might have used the phrase ““round objects””. I am sorry, I do not accept that. Our job goes to the core of parliamentary democracy, and parliamentary democracy is being interfered with by the scheme that has been imposed on us. Let us be absolutely clear about this: not just in the last Parliament but probably in the two or three before, things went very badly wrong. Some former Members behaved in a way that can only be described as less than honourable, and we all need to understand that there was, and remains, a need for change. But change for the sake of change, on the basis of ““My shirt is hairier than yours””, is not a way of taking the House forward. The hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) asked how many Members had been consulted before the new scheme was devised. The answer is none or very few. We have to accept that IPSA found itself faced with a well nigh impossible task, and I do not demur from that at all. It had to try to put together a scheme within the time scale that our Front Benchers on both sides of the House demanded—we need to be clear about where some of the responsibility for that lies. That was very difficult, but having said that, the people at the top of IPSA have chosen—I believe partly through arrogance—to ignore the fundamentals and not to do the groundwork and research necessary to put in place not just a scheme, but a scheme that worked. I have invited the interim chief executive of IPSA, courteously and on three separate occasions, to visit my parliamentary office. It is located in my constituency, but it is not a constituency office. That is a fundamental difference. I have chosen to locate my entire business in the constituency. I have tried to impress on the interim chief executive the point that if a Member of Parliament has his or her office based within the parliamentary estate, and if all their staff are based there, all their bills for telephone calls, office equipment, heating, lighting, cleaning, office rental, rates, fire precautions—the whole kit and caboodle—are paid for by the House authorities. That represents a difference of about £17,000 a year between that Member and another Member with his or her parliamentary office in the constituency. That means, of course, that the information published today is hopelessly distorted. My telephone bills for my parliamentary office will be much higher than those of colleagues who use the phones here. The interim chief executive wrote back to me and completely missed the point, saying, ““Well, if you've got a problem with this, we're quite prepared to review the amount that you're allowed.”” I do not want the amount that I am allowed reviewed, and I do not want to spend any more money. Over 27 years in this place, I have already subsidised my office costs to the taxpayer to the tune of a quarter of a million pounds, and I have done so uncomplainingly. However, I do not want to be misunderstood by people who have devised a scheme without taking the trouble to get out there, visit offices and really understand what the job of a Member of Parliament is about. I asked when the interim chief executive had visited a constituency or a parliamentary office in a constituency, how often and where. Hon. Members may be dismayed to learn that the answer, which came after a freedom of information request because I was not initially told, stated that the chief executive's first visit to any office was on 9 July, the election having been in May. That was to the office of the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), where he spent two days. More recently—very recently—the man who told me that it was not possible to visit my office visited South Thanet, which is four miles down the road.