Parliamentary Standards Bill

Let me emphasise that we do support the principles of the Bill, and want to make it work. It is for precisely that reason that the creation of criminal offences, which may be an essential part of the Bill, requires special scrutiny. I know that we shall return to the issue on Wednesday, but the Secretary of State mentioned that other bodies had been regulated. I could not agree more. One could use the phrase "the biter bit". We have been imposing criminality on all sorts of organisations over the last 10 years—I believe that 3,000 criminal offences have been created in that time—but we have not imposed the provisions of clause 9(1) on the Scottish Parliament. We have relied on the general law. I flag that up now, because the Secretary of State may wish to return to it in greater detail.