The
Use of Allowances and Facilities by Members
1.13 While a good deal of the time of the Committee
on Standards and Privileges and myself is inevitably taken up
with the handling of individual cases, we have also seen ourselves
as having a wider duty to assist the House in strengthening its
systems and processes to ensure compliance with high standards
and to avoid the damage to its reputation which failure to comply
can cause. This is consistent with the responsibilities laid on
us by the House under Standing Orders Nos. 149(1) and 150(2) respectively,[8]
and with the proactive emphasis on preventing problems wherever
possible which we have together adopted. We have therefore both
identified scope for improvements when reporting on individual
cases and used wider opportunities for change as occasions on
which to feed in appropriate suggestions for consideration by
other responsible bodies inside and outside the House.
1.14 In the autumn of last year, the Chairman of
the Committee and I received an invitation to make a submission
to the triennial review of Parliamentary pay, pensions and allowances
being conducted by the Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB).
Our evidence was published as the Committee's First Report of
Session 2006-07.[9] In
it we sought to emphasise both the right of Members to be reimbursed
reasonable expenses necessarily incurred in performing the duties
of their office and the need for reassurance to the public that
the allowance regime is fair and reasonable, and effectively policed.
1.15 As I write this the report of the SSRB's review
has still to be published. I hope that, when it is published,
it will afford an opportunity for a more soundly based public
discussion of these matters than is sometimes evidenced. Public
comment often overlooks the differences in the nature of the various
allowances, and frequently presents them as additional to a Member's
salary, part of the 'perks' of the job rather than reimbursement
of, for example, the costs of employing staff, running an office,
etc which are a necessary part of a Member providing the service
their constituents expect. Equally, some Members can on occasion
appear overly defensive about these matters, resistant to the
application to themselves of disciplines (in terms of accounting
for the expenditure of public money) which are accepted as a matter
of course in other walks of life.
1.16 I am sure that the answer lies in both paying
Members fairly and properly in comparison with others for the
work they do and applying to them reasonable disciplines similar
to those which apply elsewhere. I hope that the debate which follows
the publication of the SSRB's report will result in further steps
to treat Members equitably in both these respects.
1.17 On 28 March this year the House approved the
introduction from 1 April of a new Communications Allowance
(CA) for Members. The purpose of the new Allowance is to enable
Members to communicate proactively with their constituents. It
incorporates some of the features, relating for example to the
production of newsletters or Parliamentary reports by Members,
which were previously part of Members' Incidental Expenses Provision
(IEP).
1.18 I was glad to be able to assist the Chairman
of the Committee on Standards and Privileges in contributing some
of the benefits of the Committee's experience in dealing with
complaints about newsletters and about alleged misuse of House
stationery to the discussions preceding the development of the
new allowance. The extensive guidance promulgated to Members by
the Members Estimate Committee following the introduction of the
allowance is to be welcomed, as is the fact that, for the first
time, this brought together in one place revised guidance on the
use of House stationery and guidance on the new allowance. One
consequence of the introduction of the allowance has been the
introduction of a financial cap on the amount of House stationery
and pre-paid envelopes made available to each Member at no cost
to them, which will in practice impact only on a small number
of Members hitherto making very free use of this facility. The
facility is now not only capped in volume terms but the restriction
of its scope to reactive communication with constituents has been
reaffirmed (proactive communication being covered by the new allowance).
1.19 Finally, the use by Members of the facilities
of the House for the purposes of party fund-raising was the subject
of two reports published by the Committee in March 2007.[10]
I describe these more fully in section 3 of this report. In the
second of these reports, the Committee recommended a tightening
of the Banqueting Regulations, the rules governing the use of
the House's private dining facilities, with a view to ensuring
that their use as an indirect as well as a direct means of fund-raising
was prohibited. This recommendation is currently under consideration
as part of a wider review of the Banqueting Regulations.
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