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Review of Parliamentary Standards Act 2009

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. This is a good opportunity to leap forward to a point I was going to make later, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) when he talked about the publication of data. I know that it can be uncomfortable for hon. Members when information is published, but we are going to have to get used to it, and there is no going back. My hon. Friend makes a good point. There is a debate to be had, and these are matters that IPSA can think about. There are ways of publishing information that make it comparable and deal with the league table problem, but also make it very matter of fact and not very interesting to the press. There is an argument that if we publish the information in real time as we go along, and do not save it up and publish it in lumps—the point made by the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire—it becomes normal, matter-of-fact, routine business that is not of interest to the media. I think it is fair to say that it has become much less interesting to the national media; we do not tend to see the front page stories any more. I know, however, that individual hon. Members often have to deal with local newspaper stories where their papers drill down into particular claims that, in isolation, take a fair degree of explanation but are perfectly reasonable claims for carrying out their work.