House of Commons Hansard Debates for 6 Nov 1995

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it would have avoided much that has followed. Strauss recommended a ban on the advocacy that is now part of the Select Committee's report.

I have watched from outside the activities of the Select Committee, and it would be churlish not to recognise the enormous amount of work that it has done in a short period. Despite the real controversy that still exists between different parts of the House, it is truly remarkable--particularly for anyone who attended the first debate on 18 May--that the members of the Committee unanimously registered agreement across a vast area in their first and second report. I particularly welcome the proposed ban on paid advocacy in the form that the Select Committee described. I am pleased that the House will ban outright practices such as cash for questions, cash for amendments, cash for early-day motions, cash for private Members' Bills and cash for speeches in the House. I am glad that those visible and objectionable forms of advocacy will be banned. Let us be realistic--other forms of advocacy will continue. The most important of them is the access that Members of Parliament have to Ministers and civil servants through deputations, letters and private approaches. An alleged example of that form of paid advocacy was widely publicised in the weekend newspapers.

The main issue today is whether the extended ban on advocacy, which the Select Committee has put forward, destroys the case for declaration of amounts paid to Members of Parliament through the enjoyment of other advisory consultancies. The majority of the Select Committee believe that the case for that degree of disclosure no longer exists. A minority strongly disagrees.

The arguments have already been rehearsed--rather well, I think--from both sides of the House, but at this stage it is worth reminding ourselves of precisely what Nolan had to say on that matter. I know that it has been quoted before, but I shall say it again. At paragraph 69, he said:

"we believe that the public and in particular members' constituents have a right to know what financial benefit its members receive as a consequence of being elected . . . We consider it right therefore that remuneration should be disclosed in these cases." The report dealt directly with the question: does the amount matter? It has already been quoted, but I shall re-quote it. It said:

"A member who gets £1,000 per year as a Parliamentary Adviser is less likely to be influenced by the prospect of losing that money than one who receives £20,000 a year. The scale of remuneration is in practice relevant to a full understanding of the nature of the service expected."

By recommending that amounts should not be declared, the majority on the Select Committee has clearly retreated a considerable distance from the Nolan recommendations. A number of points need to be stressed. May I first remind the House that the Nolan committee was unanimous in its report and recommendations, and that among the 10 members of the Committee, there were, apart from a former Clerk of the House, three members with considerable parliamentary experience, representing the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democratic parties? Apart from myself, it included Lord Thomson of Monifieth, who served in this House as George Thomson MP, and the right hon. Member for Bridgwater (Mr. King), who is in his place today.

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We all supported the proposal that there should be declared in writing not only the content of consultancy agreements but the amounts actually received, in bands of income. The issue was also raised specifically during the oral hearings of the Nolan committee, and its report noted:

"several MPs with whom we have raised this issue did not object to disclosure of remuneration so long as this related strictly to parliamentary services."

The hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Duncan Smith), whom I see on the Conservative Back Benches and who played an active part in the work of the Select Committee on Members' Interests, was asked by a Nolan committee member whether his advocacy of greater transparency "should be accompanied by the amount of Income that is attributed to that outside interest".

The hon. Gentleman replied:

"I would have no objection to that."

When pressed about the reaction of Members of Parliament in general, he said:

"I find it difficult to comment on that because I have not talked to the great majority of MPs about it. I simply give my opinion that most MPs would be happy for openness".

The hon. Member for Wealden (Sir G. Johnson Smith), Chairman of the Select Committee on Members' Interests, when asked the same question, replied, not committedly but quite fairly:

"I think there are arguments on both sides of this question". It is therefore quite wrong to allege that the proposal for the disclosure of amounts received is simply the work of partisan and ill-disposed Labour Members of Parliament. That is quite false; it is the considered judgment of the Nolan committee and of many people who gave evidence to it.

Mr. King: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Shore: I am sorry, but there is a 10-minute rule.

Of course I understand why there are strong objections to the proposals. According to the present and limited register, 168 Members of Parliament with 356 consultancies have paid agreements with outside bodies. The ban on advocacy will almost certainly lead to the termination of a number of those consultancies, and to a resulting loss of income to their recipients.

As for the rest, the great bulk of consultancies, there is inevitable disquiet, because publication will almost certainly lead to demands that Members of Parliament justify their consultancy earnings. If their constituents are satisfied that these activities promote the public interest and that the Members involved are able to combine those outside paid activities satisfactorily with their primary duty to represent their constituencies and to participate in national affairs, they will have little to fear, but those who cannot so satisfy their constituents will obviously be under pressure to bring the arrangements to an end.

These anxieties, while wholly understandable, do not outweigh the basic need to restore in the public at large confidence in their elected representatives in the House of Commons. The country has a gut feeling that Members of Parliament are here above all to serve them and the nation, and that anything that interferes with that must be justified rather than taken for granted.

The House will recall that the Nolan committee was set up in October last year

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"to examine current concerns about standards of conduct of all holders of public office including arrangements relating to financial and commercial activities".

No one should minimise the extent of current concerns about the standards of conduct.

Failure to disclose amounts earned from all Parliament-related consultancy agreements will inevitably lead people to conclude that Members of Parliament have something to hide and cannot justify their consultancy arrangements. Nolan was set up to restore public confidence in elected Members. It will not succeed in that task if the House rejects its major recommendation: to disclose earnings. 5.46 pm

Sir Terence Higgins (Worthing): I declare the various interests that I have recorded in the register.

Ultimately, standards in public life will depend on the talent, ability, skill and integrity of those who are elected to the House. Nolan himself recognised that the issues that he was considering could not be divorced from the issue of Members' pay. I argued at column 1193 on 26 October 1995 that we are in a serious recruitment crisis in the House, not in the sense that there would be too few candidates to fill the seats but that the number of people suitably qualified to come to the House, and more particularly to be drawn from the House to become Ministers, is likely to be adversely affected if we continue the present position with regard to Members' pay.

The situation is such--I analysed it in some depth in my earlier speech-- that, if we were to get Members back to the same relative position in relation to the rest of the country, in real terms, Members' pay would have to be doubled and Ministers' pay trebled. I believe firmly that we must also consider that issue in looking at and putting into context today's debate.

I suggested, since Nolan clearly has managed to establish a remarkable degree of independence, that the matter should be referred to him. He pointed out that it was outside his present terms of reference. I believe that those terms need to be changed, and we need a series of all-party discussions so that we can tackle that problem. The matter is urgent, because, if it is going to be done, it has to be done towards the end of this Parliament for implementation in the next. Given the interest in the debate today and the general atmosphere at the present time this may well be our last chance to get the matter sorted out. If we go on the same way in the next 10 years as we have in the past 30, I fear that in 10 years' time a large number of Members in the House will either be placemen or paranoiacs-- [Laughter.] It is not a laughing matter. I believe that it is a very serious matter indeed.

It is generally agreed, certainly between hon. Members on the Front Benches and all the members of the Select Committee, that the Select Committee worked in an extraordinarily efficient way. We were frequently reported in the press to be deadlocked, but we spent very little time on the matter on which we were deadlocked because it was apparent that we were deadlocked and that the matter would have to be resolved on the Floor of the House.

We spent 25 sittings on this report, and 39 in total, trying to clarify the overall report of the Nolan committee. With the greatest respect to the right hon. Member for

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Bethnal Green and Stepney (Mr. Shore), I must say that we had a great deal of clarification to do. As my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House pointed out, we had to examine the whole issue. He dodged the issue of consultancies; he referred it to us, and we had to come up with what I believe to be a much more sensible solution in relation to banning advocacy. We have defined it pretty precisely--and to the extent that we have not, the new Commissioner for Standards and the new Select Committee will be able to smooth the rough edges. I must express concern to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House in regard to a rather complicated point that arose in interventions on his opening speech. We spent many hours discussing how we were to deal with the problem of speaking if advocacy was banned; the results of our deliberations are recorded in paragraphs 21 to 26. I had assumed that there would be a catch- all motion saying that we approved the general tone of the report, or the general references in it, but that has not appeared.

There is a motion stating that the drafting will be difficult, and that there will have to be a code of conduct; but, if we pass the motion as it is currently drafted, we shall end up with an interregnum in which speaking in the circumstances in which we envisage it to be permitted will be prohibited until the code has been established by the new Committee. We are constrained by time, as we have been throughout our proceedings on this matter and as the Nolan committee was; but perhaps we can try to resolve that problem this evening.

We have little time for debate. I am sorry that we cannot have a series of separate debates on the various issues--the question of deputations, for instance. Let me conclude by picking up the points made by the right hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Stepney. The fact is that Nolan viewed the question of disclosing amounts in relation to the confused scenario that he envisaged. He did not envisage, as we do, the total banning of advocacy. Clearly, in that context the question of disclosure simply does not arise any more. One of the main evils--perhaps the main evil--with which Nolan sought to deal was the idea that people exert influence on this place from outside by paying money to hon. Members. We have now ruled that out, so in that context it does not arise.

As for the provision of advice, as the report points out, the amount paid is likely to reflect either the resources of the recipient of the advice or the quality of that advice; but it will not affect the performance of hon. Members in the House. If it does, it will be caught by the rules and suitable sanctions will be applied. Another point made by the right hon. Gentleman needs to be dealt with, however. He said that we should reveal the amounts that are paid to hon. Members as a result of their election to the House. The implication is that hon. Members are spending considerable time outside, dealing with consultancies and so forth, rather than being in the House.

We all know perfectly well what the position really is. Many hon. Members with large outside interests are among the most enthusiastic and hard- working parliamentarians; probably no hon. Member works less than would be regarded outside as a normal working week. On the other hand, there are hon. Members--including some of those who are keenest to suggest that Members of Parliament should be full time--who do not,

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perhaps, serve as much as they might on Standing or Select Committees. The amount that is paid is no indication of the amount of time that Members spend in the House. I believe that we are all full-time Members, regardless of whether we have other occupations outside.

Let me return to the main issue. I do not believe that disclosure is necessary. I disagree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Shropshire, North (Mr. Biffen); I take his point about public limited companies--no doubt his and my remuneration as directors are recorded in the annual reports--but I do not think that that justifies the extension advocated by Opposition Members. I hold that view not least because it is difficult to define whether a particular interest arises from membership of the House. Many hon. Members are now doing, on a much smaller scale, what they did before--probably in return for a much smaller income than they received then. Any statement of what they are receiving as a result of membership of the House should perhaps also take into account how much they were receiving before, and the amount by which their income has dropped as a result of that membership.

For all those reasons, I do not think that we should go along with the idea of disclosure of amounts. It has been overtaken by developments advocated by the Select Committee, which I consider a substantial improvement. Because disclosure has been the sole issue on which the press and, to a large degree, the Opposition have concentrated, we are overlooking the great extent to which we are tightening the rules with regard to the Commissioner, the new Committee and the banning of many practices which I-- along, I believe, with many others--regard as completely wrong.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Shropshire, North said, the atmosphere has changed; but I believe that we should be able to support the changes that we are now proposing in front of our constituents. I hope that the House will not accept the Opposition amendment.

5.55 pm

Mr. Alfred Morris (Manchester, Wythenshawe): Inexplicably, the right hon. Member for Worthing (Sir T. Higgins) excluded the possibility that Members of Parliament can be both placemen and paranoiacs. I think the House might have spared him a minute or so more to explain why.

I have long had the honour of being sponsored by the Co-operative movement, which does not make secret donations in any form--directly or indirectly-- to any Member of the House. My interest is one that I declare with pride. There is nothing hole-in-corner about Co-operative sponsorship. No payment is made to the Member of Parliament and the contribution made to her or his allowable election costs is there for all to see. It is out in the open, fully disclosed and fully accounted for: a model of open dealing and political cleanliness.

Along with the hon. Member for Shipley (Sir M. Fox), I am also joint parliamentary adviser to the Royal British Legion, which is a wholly honorary role, both in my case and in his.

Full disclosure of what is spent by private interests to influence decisions of the House--in particular, what is paid to individual Members-- is now essential to the health of our democracy. If the mandatory declaration of

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Members' earnings for work done in a parliamentary capacity for outside interests is not secured today, the battle for transparency must go on--and go on it will until no organ of opinion has cause to write, as one not unfriendly to the Government now does:

"Do Tory MPs realise how grubby they make themselves look? By fighting tooth and nail to keep secret how much they earn on the side, they give the impression they have something to hide. They should stop acting like Arthur Daleys and realise that the public has the right to know what extras they are raking in."

That is not from The Guardian , New Statesman and Society or The Observer ; it is from a leader in The Sun and, as every test of opinion shows, it reflects the view of the vast majority of the British people. They now no longer request, but insist, that backstairs payments for political favours must cease.

Mr. Rupert Allason (Torbay): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Morris: I have a time limit.

Mr. Allason: I shall be very brief. Those of us who advocate complete transparency accept what the right hon. Gentleman says, but does he agree that it would be a good idea to extend that transparency to payments to constituencies by trade unions?

Hon. Members: It is already happening.

Mr. Morris: As has been explained to the hon. Member for Torbay (Mr. Allason), what he seeks is happening now. I am saying that backstairs payments for political favours must cease.

The response of some hon. Members will be to say that what they decide to keep secret about their outside earnings for parliamentary work is their business, and their business alone: that it has nothing to do with The Sun , with hon. Members who take a different view or with anyone else. I implore them to think again before we vote tonight. In particular, I ask them to stop being so self-indulgent, to the detriment not only of parliamentary colleagues but of the institution of Parliament itself. Taking and concealing money for parliamentary favours is demeaning to us all and puts an undoubted stain on the reputation of this House. That is why what they do in the matter that we are debating today is our business too. The vast majority of the electorate also insist that everything that we say and do here must now be said and done in the open. As the House knows, I serve on the Privileges Committee. I made plain, from the moment the Committee was reconstituted in July 1994, my view that it should never meet again in secret except where, for some compelling reason, more especially one involving any possible breach of natural justice, it unavoidably had to do so. Yet we still meet wholly in secret even when there is no conceivable legal or other reason for so doing and even if a witness specifically requests to be heard in public, as Peter Preston did in the case of his appearance before the Privileges Committee earlier this year.

The Prime Minister has told me that his support for secret meetings of the Committee is based on respect for precedents. "That's how it has always been" is his justification. But in the light of the seven principles of acceptable conduct in public life that were enunciated by Lord Nolan-- selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership--the Prime Minister's stance is no longer tenable. The Nolan

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committee puts precept into practice and I hope that its example will very soon bring the proceedings of the Privileges Committee out of the shadows and into the 20th century while there are still a few years of it left. That would help to cleanse the reputation of the House and, at the same time, improve the quality of justice that is dispensed by its most powerful Committee.

The public now want not only to hear talk about principles but to see them rigorously applied. They are entitled to see beyond the doors of the Committee Rooms of the House, to know what is happening as it happens, and to expect the Nolan committee to bark ever more loudly for the highest achievable standards in public life. I find it a matter for deep regret that the decision by the Special Select Committee on full disclosure of earnings that arises from membership of the House was taken by a casting vote, and that members of the Committee divided wholly on the basis of party allegiance. I hope that, after this debate, the divide on full disclosure will no longer be one between right and left but will be seen in all parts of the House as one between right and wrong. It is not too late now for us to unite in the cause of open dealing and restoring the reputation of this honourable House.

6.2 pm

Sir Edward Heath (Old Bexley and Sidcup): I declare all my interests as entered in the Register of Members' Interests. None of them has any connection with parliamentary affairs.

Madam Speaker was kind enough to call me in our earlier debate on these issues, and I was hesitant about taking part today. However, there are one or two matters that I should like to mention. First, with the greatest respect to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, the whole of this affair has been appallingly handled and today has been an excellent example of that. We are squashed into a three-hour debate on an important, controversial and complicated subject. There has been little discussion of the other major issues in my right hon. Friend's speech and in his report simply because there is not enough time.

It has not been possible to interrupt some hon. Members because they can immediately say, quite rightly, "I have only 10 minutes." This is no way to conduct the business of the House of Commons. I do not blame the Leader of the House, because he is under tremendous pressure, above all from Opposition Front Benchers who have been screaming the whole time for rapid decisions because they want a decision on the revelation of Members' incomes.

I adhere to all the points that I made in my earlier speech and, in particular, to what I said about the appointment of a commissioner. I do not think that the House altogether recognises the problems that will face him. Any political agitator in the country will be able to write to him making allegations about Members' conduct in the economic sphere, and the commissioner will be bound to investigate them. In the course of that, all the allegations will become public.

Mrs. Ann Taylor: No.

Sir Edward Heath: Of course they can become public. The hon. Lady cannot simply think that, when the

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commissioner starts investigating, the chap who put the allegations will not give them to the press. It will all come out and be published. If the allegations are irresponsible, there is no reason why they should be thrown to the public, and that is the problem that the commissioner will face. [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman likes to indulge in unjustifiable allegations. We have had infinite examples of that, but perhaps he will desist for a moment. I say to the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan), that the proposed bands if incomes are reviewed are absolute nonsense. What justification could there be for that? Are we to say that, if an hon. Member is only mildly dishonest, we should do so and so, but that, if he is tremendously dishonourable, we should take certain other actions? The hon. Gentleman is also wrong to say that, if an hon. Member had only his parliamentary income to live on and is offered £1,000 or £2, 000, that is important to him. If he is a barrister earning £250,000 a year from fees, £20,000 is neither here nor there. We cannot categorise people's morality and honesty by trying to move financial barriers up and down. That is a great failure of his argument. The argument with which I agreed was about the difficulties of industry, and in some cases the professions, in dealing with the Government. In this country there is an enormous gap between them, and people in industry do not know how to deal with Government Departments. I discovered that 30 years ago in the European negotiations, when I found out how close businesses in the other European Union countries were to their Governments and Ministers. Business men flew to Brussels to brief them while they were carrying on negotiations. If I mentioned that I was going to Brussels, business men would ask, "What for? Where is Brussels anyway?" That is a weakness in our structure and that is why business takes the view, "These people can help us and advise us and tell us how to do things." That is why the market has grown in such a remarkable way. I shall now deal with the question of the public having a right to know. Of course people have a right to know about our public salaries, but we have a right to privacy. Why should people have a right to know about the financial rewards for our individual private activities? That does not stand up to any examination. It has just become a cry, "They have a right to know about us." The public have a right to know about our public position and public rewards, but not about our private activities-- [Interruption.] That argument has gone out of the window. What is the point of publishing the private income of hon. Members?

Mr. Bryan Davies (Oldham, Central and Royton): We are not proposing that.

Sir Edward Heath: In that case, the hon. Gentleman disagrees with the hon. Member for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor), who says that it has to be published if someone is registered at the moment.

Mrs. Ann Taylor: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for allowing me to correct the impression that he is giving. I am not saying that everything that is registered at the moment should be declared in terms of

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the amount earned. At the beginning of his speech, the right hon. Gentleman said that none of his outside interests was related to parliamentary activities. In that case, none of them is covered by my amendment requiring disclosure of amounts.

Sir Edward Heath: The hon. Lady is on two entirely separate points. The first is about activities related to parliamentary activities, and they are registered. She went on to say that of course those that are not related must also continue to be registered. But what is the point of registering them if they are not connected with parliamentary activities? There is no relationship at all.

On activities concerned with parliamentary activities, what is the argument for publishing the private income that a Member receives? There is no argument for it--none at all. It is just that the Labour party wants and has always wanted to publicise what Conservative Members are earning because it has always had a doctrine of envy and hatred. We know it--we have been dealing with it for a long time. The Labour party cannot produce a single valid argument for publishing those incomes connected with parliamentary activities.

Whatever Nolan may have said, he justified this House as being a very honourable House, and so it is. No justification exists for getting into the complicated arrangements that are set out here. That is why I have continually objected to these things and to the way in which they have been handled here. There has not been proper time to examine them. The Leader of the House will agree that his Select Committee has not had proper time. It has had to sit all through the summer recess. That is no way to handle the business.

This House has always been known as an honourable House and Members have been known as honourable Members. That is the way that we should behave in future and the matter should not be tied down with the machinations of Labour Members. If we want to know their real purpose, one has only to consider their handout which was released last weekend, entitled "News From Labour". What does it say? They are going to write to 125 Members--I have not received a letter--and say, "You must tell us what your income is."

Mr. Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock): Read it.

Sir Edward Heath: I am not going to take up time reading out the handout--Labour Members have got copies anyhow. It says, "Unless you tell us what your income is, we shall come time and time and time again, demanding that you reveal what you are being paid." What does that mean?

Mr. Bryan Davies: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Sir Edward Heath: No.

That means that the next election will be fought by Labour party agitators going to meetings and interrupting the whole time with only one question, "What is your income?" They want to fight an election not on policies but on envy, greed and dislike for the people in politics.

6.11 pm

Dr. Tony Wright (Cannock and Burntwood): The most devastating paragraph in the Nolan report is paragraph 58, which deals with the failure of the House over the years

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to put itself into some sort of order. It says that, if the House had only done that, had attended to reports such as the Strauss report and to recommendations such as those of the Salmon commission in 1976 and had dealt with the need to have an effective Register of Members' Interests and bring it up to date, it would not have brought the present situation on itself. At the end of paragraph 58--this is the one sentence that I want to quote because it is a consummate understatement of the position in which the House finds itself--the Nolan report says:

"The overall picture is not one of an institution whose Members have been quick to recognise or respond to public concern." That surely is the root of all that we are talking about today. I welcome the advocacy ban, because it is an attempt finally to get to grips with things that the House thought it had established almost half a century ago, in 1947. It turned out that it had not. The House failed to respond, which is why we are at this point today. The ban as described in the motions is not effective enough without the amendment, because it leaves open all the ways in which, informally, hon. Members can still make representations on the part of interests for which they are paid. That cannot be right. That gap must be closed to make the ban effective, but it is nevertheless important.

There are two principles in all this. One is prohibition. The House should say clearly, without any room for doubt, that it is not acceptable for a Member of Parliament to do certain things such as taking money from outside organisations to promote causes in this place. That is what the advocacy ban will do.

The second principle is that of transparency. People must be able to see what is going on here, how we conduct ourselves and what we are doing. The right hon. Member for Shropshire, North (Mr. Biffen) caught the essential mood of the moment when he said, "We have to take into account not what we say about these things but what people outside are saying." If hon. Members cannot recognise the country's mood now, they do not really understand what people are trying to say to them. People want to see that we are able to clean up our act. If we seem unable to do so, they will reach conclusions that will take us into ever more desperate circumstances.

I do not believe that some of the distinctions that the Select Committee on Standards in Public Life has tried to make are ultimately tenable, as the distinction between multi-client and single-client organisations was untenable: it fell away once it had begun to be scratched. The distinction between Parliament-related activities and non-Parliament-related activities is not effective and it will begin to disintegrate when the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards begins to consider it, which is why I tabled an amendment that I suppose stands as "the income tax return" amendment. It is not that--it does not require that--but that is what it stands as. People want to know the answer to certain questions. First, they want to know whether Members of Parliament have other jobs and, secondly, if so, what those other jobs are for. Thirdly, they want to know how much they get paid for those other jobs and, fourthly, how much time they devote to them. No doubt our constituents and the people of this country are awfully naive about these things, but those are precisely the questions that they are asking of us. They happen to think that they elect us to be Members of

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Parliament and to represent them, and that it is a job in itself. If that is not true, now is the moment for the House to tell the people of this country that it is not true.

I notice that, over the weekend, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster stumbled into that matter when he said that being a Member of Parliament was a part-time occupation. I congratulate him on the direct way in which he approaches the issue, but, if that is the House's answer to those questions, let it answer openly and not in terms of arguments about spurious distinctions that do not stand up. Having said that, I have been prevailed upon and persuaded that Conservative Members would not understand if I were to press what is called "the income tax return" amendment-- amendment (n). They say that they are confused about all this and that their confusion will be increased if the amendment is allowed to stand. From the interventions that were made earlier, it was clear that Conservative Members were mightily confused about what was proposed. In the interests of enlightenment and the reduction of confusion, I am prepared to withdraw the amendment.

On any view, we are at a moment when the House and Parliament must take a view on whether they want to start the process of fundamental reform, of which this is only a part--indeed, it is only the beginning and, in some ways, the least significant part--or watch themselves decline ever further in public esteem.

The right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Sir E. Heath) said that people effectively had no right to know certain things. People do have a right to have confidence in their public institutions and, above all, in Parliament. At the moment, Parliament is getting dangerously close to eroding that confidence. What it decides today will decide whether it starts to restore it.

6.19 pm

Sir Timothy Sainsbury (Hove): I hope that the hon. Member for Cannock and Burntwood (Dr. Wright) will understand if I do not respond in detail to what he said, much as I am tempted to do so, because we are limited by time. I rather agree with those who have said that it would have been better to have a longer debate on these issues. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Shropshire, North (Mr. Biffen) said, that would have enabled us to put the issues into a wider context, and they would then have been more easily understood. If we are to achieve our objective--which I hope we all share--of protecting the good name of Parliament, it might have been better to consider all the issues together. Instead, we are dealing with only one of three closely related issues--the advocacy or consultancy services provided by Members of Parliament in their capacity as Members of Parliament. I recognise, as have others who have spoken, that there are difficulties of definition. However, I believe that the Select Committee is broadly right in its proposals on advocacy and that the Nolan committee and the hon. Member for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor) are broadly right in what they say on consultancies. I have some reservations. Indeed, the hon. Lady's amendment would attract more sympathy from me--and, I suspect, others--if it dealt with several other issues. First, there is the issue of timing. Before we began our debate, several hon. Members tried to establish whether

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we could consider implementing full disclosure at the start of the next Parliament, rather than the next Session. That would be a fairer and simpler system, which would allow a new Parliament to start with a new set of rules. I am not saying that we should not implement other aspects of the Nolan recommendations immediately, but full disclosure, which is a radical change, should be introduced with the next Parliament. The Opposition would attract more sympathy if they accepted that.

It would be helpful if we could have a clear declaration from the Opposition Front Bench that there is no longer the intention to move to the "income tax return" suggestion of the hon. Member for Cannock and Burntwood, and repeated several times, from a sedentary position, by the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner). They rather contradicted the hon. Member for Dewsbury.

The second issue that I believe the House should be debating today is the need unequivocally to declare support for the Nolan committee on another point. I refer to paragraph 19 of the first report, where the committee states clearly that it is desirable for the

"House of Commons to contain Members with a wide variety of continuing outside interests."

I sincerely believe that we will do this House and the country a grave disservice by any suggestion that all outside interests should be banned or fully disclosed.

The third issue that should be debated now has already been raised many times, but no more eloquently than by my right hon. Friend the Member for Worthing (Sir T. Higgins). I refer to the absurd and wide disparity between the pay of Members of Parliament, especially Ministers, and the salaries and remunerations that can be obtained outside the House. When I was a Minister at the Department of Trade and Industry, I found it bizarre to be spending much of my time in negotiation and discussion trying to help industrialists being paid five, 10 or even more times the salary of a Minister of State. Again, the House will do itself and the country a disservice if it does not agree now to deal with that issue before a general election and on an all-party basis.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Worthing set out the reasons, facts and figures clearly. However, I want to contribute a few ideas. Perhaps it might be possible for pay to be improved in part by a much wider range of Members receiving additional payments. For example, perhaps all Opposition Front-Bench spokesmen, not just a small number, should receive additional payments. Perhaps additional payments should be made to the Chairmen of Select Committees, as they clearly carry a considerable burden.

I think that the whole matter has been a little rushed and we have not had sufficient time to debate it. We are not dealing with the whole range of issues. It might have been better if not only the proposals put forward by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, but those put forward by the Opposition had been taken away for more thought.

6.25 pm

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