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Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority

I should like to associate myself with all the compliments that have been passed to the hon. Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie), who has done us all a great service in initiating this debate. I thought, tantalisingly, Mr Deputy Speaker, that you were going to call me after the hon. Member for Worthing West (Peter Bottomley). Since I was first selected to stand against him in 1989, we have seldom seen eye to eye on anything, but today I agreed with every word he said. The fact that IPSA has managed to bridge that chasm should be a serious warning to it indeed. One of the ironies of the debate is that what initiated this process was a desire to deal with MPs who were in some way feathering their nests at public expense, but what we finished up with is the taxpayer paying out more money to solve the problem of people saying, ““Woe betide these profligate and self-serving MPs.”” We even had the involvement of Sir Thomas Legg, who barely washed his face in the amount of money that he brought back compared with what his investigation cost the House. What we really want from today's debate, as everyone has stressed, is for IPSA to listen. When my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Tony Lloyd), the Chair of the parliamentary Labour party, and I met Sir Ian Kennedy, we felt that everything we put to him was not sticking, and that he was not listening to anything we said about what is necessary for MPs and how MPs conduct their business. He just dismissed everything—he felt that he had all the answers and that he knew what MPs were about. I wonder whether some of the more Eurosceptic Members recognise that the system is akin to the EU. I am neither Eurosceptic nor Europhile, but there is a complete lack of public accountability and civil servants have been let rip, and we have ended up with a huge edifice. Every solution requires more expenditure and yet another department—someone mentioned that there is a new department for dealing with the media and press. Each problem that IPSA comes across seems to mean that it needs to spend more money, so we have now ended up with a very expensive edifice. My hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) was absolutely right to warn us about losing the principle of the independence of IPSA and said that we would do so at our peril. We would be wrong to dismiss that as an attempt by him to create headlines and to be obstructive. We have suffered in the past from fiddling and interference from the Government and Opposition Front Benches—over the years, that created the mess that we got into. We should remember that, under the previous system, somebody felt it appropriate to apply for payment for a duck house. The fact that that claim was not paid is often overlooked, but that someone felt it appropriate to apply in the first place shows how far gone and how wrong that system was.