Parliamentary Standards Bill

I, too, think that the Bill will be much improved as a result of the efforts of the Committee and of the Leader of the House and her colleagues on the Front Bench. This has been unfortunate. The fuss and the difficulties in the Commons have all been related to the allowances system; they have not, in the past few weeks, been related to MPs’ outside interests. We ourselves had a little problem with outside interests and paid advocacy not long ago, but that was at this end of the Corridor, not the other end. This part of the Bill, dealing with paid advocacy and the registration of outside interests, seems to me to be much the more difficult to get right. We all—well, most of us—want MPs to be able to continue with outside interests. That is the more difficult bit of the Bill to get right, yet that is being rushed through alongside the bit that is important to do quickly, which is the bit relating to allowances, where all the trouble and damage have been to the House of Commons in the past few months. I am sorry that that is the way that it has worked out, but that is the way it is heading and I feel it right to put that on the record as my opinion.