I will return to that matter, but when my right hon. Friend employs the word “privilege” in that context, he is not employing it in terms of parliamentary privilege. It is not a parliamentary privilege that protects our ability to write to Ministers on behalf of our constituents. That is not covered by parliamentary privilege.
With the indulgence of the House, I wonder whether I might quote the Lord Chief Justice when he made it clear that we should, if possible, avoid legislating on matters regarding privilege. He said:
“Parliament has to decide whether it has sufficient privilege to be able to conduct its business in the way that Parliament wishes. If you have reservations about that, you have to produce a system that enables you to have the conditions under which you can perform your responsibilities properly. If you had no real reservations about it, I would not go down the legislative route that defined, semi-defined, subdivided, allowed for, or exercised this and that, because you would end up in interminable discussions, and, in court, interminable arguments, about what that really meant. Unless you are dissatisfied with the way in which your privileges operate, I would leave this well alone.”
By that, I think he means that the courts are predisposed to defer to proceedings in Parliament, whatever statutes may say.
The 1689 Bill of Rights is one of those special statutes in our legal system that is implicitly present in every statute. We do not need to repeat what is in the Bill of Rights 1689 in every statute in order to immunise it for the purpose of parliamentary privilege. The one exception that we have made is in respect of the IPSA legislation—the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009—in which we inserted the words that I am proposing in my new clause:
“Nothing in this Act shall be construed by any court in the United Kingdom as affecting Article IX of the Bill of Rights 1689.”
I submit that the House of Lords put that clause in the Parliamentary Standards Bill in rather extreme circumstances. When that Bill arrived in this House, it seemed that it was going to go into areas that were previously considered part of the exclusive cognisance of this House. It was going to refer to disciplining Members for what we did in this House, and that was going to draw parliamentary proceedings into the consideration of the courts in a way that was unprecedented.
All that was eventually taken out by the House of Lords. In those exceptional circumstances, when the courts were under enormous public pressure to take more draconian action following the expenses fiasco, it was reasonable for Parliament to put that clause into that Bill, but generally we should try to avoid putting any reference to the Bill of Rights 1689 into legislation.
My amendment 1 suggested that we delete paragraph 1 of schedule 1. I note that the Government have now proposed that we remove both paragraph 1 and paragraph 2 of schedule 1. Paragraph 1 removes language which is lifted from the Bill of Rights 1689, without referring to the 1689 Act. Because there is no reference to it, paragraph 1 does not place the wording in the special category in which the Act exists.