Parliamentary Standards Bill

The latter, of course. I read carefully the contribution of the chairman, a very distinguished member of the Minister’s party in the other place. He is anxious that your Lordships' House, in Committee, faces up to this simple recommendation. It said that, ""we conclude that the Bill, as currently drafted, is incompatible with the right to a fair hearing in Article 6(1) ECHR. To render it compatible, it needs to be amended in two ways"." Those two ways are incorporated in the amendment in the name of my noble friend and myself. My noble friend has made it quite clear that since we have tabled these amendments, we have given more thought to the actual method by which these objectives can be reached. But it is not good enough simply to say, "Let them deal with it when they can". This is an extremely important issue, and if it is not addressed during the passage of this Bill, when will it be? My noble friend has rightly said that his preferred method of a tribunal, set up within the framework of Parliament, deals with the point to which the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, referred. There is no possibility of the parliamentary privilege issue being raised. I am disappointed that the noble Lord, Lord Neill of Bladen, is not in his customary place this evening. Both the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege, which reported in 1999—I was a member of it—and the Committee on Standards in Public Life made it clear that it was essential to deal with this problem. To my mind, the legislation that was recommended by the joint committee 10 years ago would have helped us hugely had it been followed through by the Government since, but it has not been. Simply to leave this as unfinished business and hope that somebody is listening to us at 10.20 at night and that somebody in the other place will do something about it at some time is not good enough. We have to have a firm assurance from the Government Front Bench that they will bring forward, at some point—not necessarily between now and Monday—an internal procedure to make sure that the requirements of the committee and of the ECHR are being met. Otherwise there will be a serious omission in the Bill, and I entirely endorse the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, about the inadequacy of past procedures.