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Review of Parliamentary Standards Act 2009

I, too, will not detain the House for long. I entirely agree with the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) that there are many other things we could be discussing, but we must not lose sight of the fact that many hon. Members on both sides of the House are forced, as a result of the overly bureaucratic IPSA system, to spend hours and hours dealing with something that should be relatively straightforward. Before becoming a Member, I, like my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), was in private practice, and my organisation had an expenses system that was simple, clear and straightforward. If someone paid something out of their own pocket for which they needed reimbursement, they produced the receipt, took it to the cashiers at the accounts department, and they checked that it was in order and paid a cheque in recompense. I appreciate that the affairs of Members are far more complicated than that, but in essence the procedure ought to be fairly simple, yet it is difficult to conceive of a more complicated system than our current one. I trust that when the existing Committee is re-established, the membership will find time to look at all aspects of the expenses scheme but, in particular, two matters that I think are of specific concern. First, no distinction seems to be drawn between expenses of a capital and of a revenue nature. The revision has addressed that to an extent by providing a new allowance for new Members, and that is great for Members who are elected in the future or as a result of a by-election, but the new scheme will be of no benefit to Members elected, like myself, in the 2010 general election, many of whom face having to purchase capital items out of budgets that were set for revenue. That leads me to my second point, the publication of expenses figures on an eight-weekly basis. This provides a constant feed of information for the newspapers, which not surprisingly then use it to form league tables. Again, not surprisingly, if someone has paid a large amount out in that eight-week period, they will go straight to the top of the league table. It will be all over the newspapers that they are ““Top of the league table,”” yet they will have done nothing wrong. In fact, over the whole year their expenses may well come bottom of the table, but people will remember and focus on the fact the Member was top for that period. We are not comparing like with like if we issue figures for such a short period, so I hope that when the Committee is re-established, it will find time to look at those two matters.