Indeed. From reading the minds of Members who are interested in, and sympathetic to, a provision of this kind, it is not clear to me that they intended to have different regimes in different parts of the United Kingdom, given that all of us have the common characteristic of being returned to serve in the United Kingdom Parliament after election by our constituents.
I want to address Opposition amendment 24 on the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009. The legislation was brought forward following the expenses scandal, and it deals directly with dishonest claims for MPs’ expenses. It is fair to say that that issue obviously provided some of the impetus behind the recall proposals in the first place. The offence in section 10 of providing false or misleading information in claims for allowances is intended to deal with the situation in which an MP provides information that he or she knows to be false or misleading. It does not cover innocent mistakes; we are talking about deliberately providing false information. So far, no prosecutions have been brought under the Act. I remind the House that the former MPs and peers who were convicted of fraudulent expenses claims were all sentenced to terms of imprisonment.
It seems to me that the question before the House on amendment 24, and indeed on the territorial aspects of amendment 15, is whether certain criminal convictions should be singled out as requiring treatment that is different from the treatment of other convictions. The trigger relates to imprisonment for other offences, many of which—including the Theft Act 1968—have been used to prosecute Members of Parliament. In considering this matter, the question in colleagues’ minds should be, to put it crudely, whether theft from a member of the public is less worthy of automatic sanction than theft through the IPSA expenses system. Treating those offences differently introduces a distinction that currently does not exist.