It is a great pleasure to introduce this debate on some of the work of the Public Administration Committee, and in particular its work on “Ethics and Standards: The Regulation of Conduct in Public Life”. I was going to say that this is a timely debate, but I could have said that at almost any point in the recent past.

I wish to begin by paying a most sincere tribute to my fellow Committee members. They are an outstanding collection of people. I have been privileged to have a number of them as members of the Committee for some time, and then for it to have been refreshed by some excellent new arrivals. I am sure that the Committee has built up a collective spirit and a way of operating that has contributed greatly to its work. I also pay tribute to the Committee’s excellent staff, particularly our departing Clerk, Eve Samson, who managed to keep us on the straight and narrow in our dealings with Scotland Yard in the past year or so, which was not always entirely easy. We had a party for her last night, and I hope that Eve was feeling all right this morning.

The PAC’s work concerns itself with the conduct of government in a general sense, and it is worth reminding ourselves that that concern has two main aspects, and that it always has done. We can go back 150 years to the famous Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, which reformed the civil service and put it on its modern basis of appointment by merit. The importance of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms was that they concerned themselves with the proper conduct of government in two senses. One sense was propriety—that patronage was wrong. The other was that patronage was inefficient—that it produced an inefficient state. Therefore, the Committee has always concerned itself with those two elements of what the proper conduct of government is: the more narrowly defined issue of propriety, and the more general issue of effectiveness and efficiency. That is consistent with the traditions of public service reform that began in the 19th century on the back of Northcote-Trevelyan, the foundation of the system associated with the Comptroller and Auditor General, and the civil service commissioners. Those are the great 19th century reforms that we have built on in our own times.

The Committee’s recent work has ranged widely over the conduct of government in the sense of propriety—I shall leave aside the question of efficiency and effectiveness for the moment. We have concerned ourselves with the need for a Bill to bring the civil service into statute, and I am delighted that we are finally to get that. The Committee is unique in having vented its frustration at not getting such a Bill by drafting one itself and showing the Government how it could be done. I believe that this is the first time that that has happened in the modern period, but I am sure that it helped the Government to frame their thoughts, and I am glad that the Bill is to be included in the constitutional reform legislation.

The Committee has examined, and said things about, the constitutional relationship between Ministers and civil servants. We have examined prerogative powers and suggested reforms in that area—indeed, such reforms will be in the constitutional reform Bill. It is almost as though someone in government has discovered our back catalogue. We are delighted about that, because we labour on these issues year in, year out, thinking that no one takes much notice of what we are doing, but suddenly people discover the corpus of our work and we find that much of it is to be translated into legislation. This is an exciting time for us.

The Committee has examined the ministerial code and has called for an independent investigator under it. We can claim to be the people who got the code changed to insist that announcements should be made in Parliament first—that is important. We have examined the role of special advisers and made recommendations. We have reformed the honours system. We have considered the system of business appointments—indeed, we have reformed the House of Lords.

More!

If only the rest of the world would catch up with us. The Committee has examined, and recommended reforms to, the system of public appointments. We have examined the balance of interests in the publication of memoirs and made the most important and significant contribution to that matter since Lord Radcliffe examined it a generation or so ago. We are about to produce a report on propriety and peerages in the wake of the Scotland Yard investigation into cash for peerages, and we have just embarked on an inquiry into lobbying. It is clear that the Committee has a consistent track record of examining the propriety side of government in a constructive way that is designed to improve the system and to make recommendations that can be acted upon.

I must confess that the Committee is also probably responsible for some delay in the Government’s appointing a new chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, because they knew that we were about to produce a report on ethics and standards, including a review of that Committee, and I think that they probably thought that we were going to recommend single, non-renewable terms. That might partly explain a delay in the appointment.

I thank my hon. Friend for his explanation to the House. It might help him, the Committee and the House if I were to announce that the Prime Minister has appointed Sir Christopher Kelly as Chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. I am sure that my hon. Friend will be glad to know that that follows a recommendation by his Committee that the appointment should be for a single, fixed term of five years. I am sure that he will also be glad that the appointment process was regulated by the Commissioner for Public Appointments.

It is good to have that announcement. My Committee did not recommend a particular nominee, but I am sure that the appointment is an excellent one. We did recommend that all jobs of this kind—ethical regulators—should have single, non-renewable terms. That removes the silliness about whether people should be renewed in such jobs.

This whole area is necessarily sensitive, and it can be difficult for us. I remember thinking about that soon after I joined the House in 1992. I foolishly took part in a debate on Members’ travel allowances. At that time, the system was that Members who had larger cars received larger allowances, and that seemed silly to me. When I joined the House, various Members at the time recommended that I buy a Ford Sierra diesel—it was called the MP’s car because it had a huge engine and, as a diesel, did huge mileage. I did not buy a car, but I noted the suggestion. Even back in the early 1990s, I thought that rewarding people for driving the largest cars was not sensible, so I made the mistake of saying in the debate that I had been given that recommendation, that I did not think it made a lot of sense and that we should surely have a different kind of remuneration system. A Labour colleague, who is now a senior Member of the House, came up to me afterwards, looked me in the eye and said, “You know, you will never be forgiven for what you have just said.” He may have been right—I may have never been forgiven for what I said—but at that point I learned that these are sensitive areas where one has to tread carefully.

I also vividly remember the day when John Major, who had his back to the wall and was engulfed by sleaze allegations, announced that he was setting up the Committee on Standards in Public Life and that it would sit on a permanent basis—it was never going to go away. I remember being in the taxi queue down at the Members’ entrance that night, where there was a little collection of Conservative Members, one of whom was spitting blood about the announcement and saying, “Life will never be the same again, because someone is going to poke around into our affairs and identify all the ways in which Members are working for outside interests and do something about it.” That was not going to be done in the usual way of inquiries, whereby they sit for a few months and then go away. This Committee was not going to go away; it was going to keep coming back to issues time and again to ensure that we put our political system in some kind of order. Those two examples remind us that these are difficult matters.

My proposition is that we all should share a commitment to high standards in public life—that should be a given across Parliament and across parties. We know that such a commitment is crucial in maintaining public confidence, but it is also crucial in its own right, because it is what we would expect of our political system. On the whole, our system does reflect a commitment to high standards. We do not have the kinds of corruption that are seen in some other political systems. If one were to look historically—at where we have come from—one would find that things are much better now. Comparatively—where we sit in relation to other countries—we also do rather well. In terms of the hard definition of corruption, which is the use and abuse of public office for private gain, our system does exceptionally well. Even when there are lapses, as sometimes happens, they are usually lapses for party gain, rather than for personal gain. That is not to be recommended, but such lapses are not corruption in its core sense. They happened for a period in the 1990s, but only in very small measure and at the margins.

The problem is that the reality is, in some ways, less important than perceptions. There is a perception, fed by certain sections of the media in particular, that public life in this country is corrupt, and that it is a moral sewer or cesspit. That perception is poured out each day and it is thus unsurprising that some people think it is true. We should consider the judgment of Sir Hayden Phillips, who has been conducting the review into the funding of political parties. He said in his interim report that

“when compared to other jurisdictions, the British political system, taken as a whole, has been remarkably free of abuse”.

That judgment was also made by the very first report by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, and, on the whole it is correct.

I agree with what my hon. Friend has been saying, and I congratulate him on his speech. Does he agree that constantly making reference to the relative performance, both historically and internationally, of British politics compared with others is not enough? Does he agree that we need some kind of absolute standards, and we need to say, “We are going to aim at that”? We should not just say that we are not as bad as other people.

Of course we have to have standards of our own that we believe in and want to see enforced. I was just seeking to point out the need to take a step backwards from the daily headlines. Some people want to persuade the great British public that our political system is corrupt. I do not believe that it is corrupt, and we are entitled to say that. However, that is not to say that we should not be eternally vigilant. We should not be complacent and there are issues that require attention, but on the central judgment we are entitled to say that the historical evidence and the comparative evidence suggest that we do not do too badly.

These are matters of culture and structure, and it is important that we get both right. Our Committee went on a visit to Finland as part of its inquiries because that country usually comes at or near the top in league tables of good governance and lack of corruption. In structural terms, we would find much of the Finnish system unacceptable—for example, the way in which senior civil servants are appointed by politicians. Despite that, the Finnish system is wonderfully uncorrupt. The clue to that success was the remark by someone we met, who said that in Finland people only behave badly once. What he meant was that in the Finnish culture bad behaviour puts someone out of bounds. The society was so closed, tight and intimate that everyone knew if someone had behaved badly. In other words, the culture was sustaining the high standards. That is a reminder that structures matter but culture probably matters even more.

There is a danger that, in our preoccupation with seeking yet more structures and rules, we may end up substituting them for the culture that really matters most. We need both, and on the whole this country has been fortunate in having elements of both, not least because we have a civil service that is an in-built check on propriety in the system. It is no wonder that people still come from around the world—I know, because I meet them—to look at the British civil service as an example of independence, neutrality and propriety. I am sure that having such a system at the heart of government acts as permanent propriety check.

We want high standards for their own sake, not for other reasons. We say in our report that we should not have high standards just because we think that they will somehow restore trust in government—something with which we are much preoccupied now. In fact, the reverse may happen. Transparency is a wonderful thing and it is true, as is often said, that sunlight is the best disinfectant. However, it may illuminate areas that were previously unilluminated, and the more one illuminates areas, the more problems may be revealed. I suspect that no Member of Parliament particularly enjoys the annual ritual of the publication of Members’ expenses, accompanied by newspaper reports about snouts in the trough without any explanation in the popular media of what we do with the money that we are paid. Does that transparency contribute to the development of trust? I doubt it. Indeed, it probably works in the other direction, although that is not to say that we should not do it. The point is that transparency of itself will not foster trust: it may work to make trust more difficult.

Our report documents in some detail the recent creation, especially in the past few years, of a considerable apparatus of ethical audit and regulation. We—I mean we generally, not in a party sense—have published and made more robust the ministerial code; we have produced a civil service code, and one for special advisers; we have set up a Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards; we have established an adviser on ministerial interests; we have set up the Electoral Commission; we have had a Freedom of Information Act, with an Information Commissioner; we have a House of Lords Appointments Commission to check for propriety; we have a commissioner for public appointments; and we have reformed the honours system.

It often goes unremarked that the previous Prime Minister removed himself completely from the honours system. He said that he would no longer add or subtract any names from the list given to him by the newly independent honours committees, but would pass them directly to the palace. That was a big moment in the evolution of such matters, but it was not widely noticed. I think that the present Prime Minister has said that he will do the same.

I have given quite a roll call of reforms and institutions that have been introduced in the past few years, designed to strengthen the propriety of our public affairs. Both major parties have had a role in that. I pay great tribute to John Major for setting up the Committee on Standards in Public Life in 1994. Yes, he did so against a background of sustained allegations of impropriety, but he did it nevertheless, and it was an important, bold and brave moment. His Government also set up the commissioner for public appointments to answer the charge of the politicisation of quango appointments.

When the Labour Government came to power in 1997, they took the process further. For example, the Major Government had said that they were not prepared to invite the Committee on Standards in Public Life to consider party funding. They would not include party funding in the committee’s terms of reference, despite many requests. One of the first things that the Labour Government did in 1997 was to include party funding in the committee’s terms of reference. That is why the committee produced its great report that led to the 2000 legislation and the commitment to transparency. It was thought at the time that that was the answer to the problem, but as I said a few moments ago, transparency is not necessarily the answer, because people do not always like what they see. Therefore, they want more to be done, which is what we are discussing now.

There is a paradox in the history I have given. We have had a huge explosion in the ethical regulation of government, but trust in government, and perceptions of trust in government, have gone in the opposite direction. That is an interesting conjunction. One might have expected the growth in ethical regulation to produce a growth in trust because all the unregulated areas of public life were now being regulated. That has not happened, which suggests that other factors are at work.

I apologise for not being in my place earlier in the debate. I agree with the changes that have been made, starting in 1994 for the reasons that my hon. Friend has outlined, and extended by the present Government. However, would he agree that we took a step backwards on 18 May, when the House of Commons passed by 96 to 25 votes the wretched private Member’s Bill that would have exempted Parliament from the Freedom of Information Act? Fortunately, no one in the Lords would pursue it. Had that become law, we would have disgraced ourselves, because we would have said that freedom of information should apply to all other public bodies—and it should be extended to the private sector, too, as far as I am concerned—but not to Parliament. We were saved from ourselves by the other place.

I very much agree that that was not this House’s finest hour. The Public Administration Committee was involved in examining the draft of the original Freedom of Information Bill, and we can claim to have made it rather more robust by the time it completed its parliamentary journey than it was when it started.

There are a number of explanations for the paradox surrounding the enormous growth in ethical regulation in recent years and the seeming further decline in public trust in the system, but one should concern us directly. I am referring to the fact that it has become extremely attractive for one political party to attack the integrity of other parties. We have all discovered in recent times that there are enormous short-term political dividends in doing that: suggesting that our opponents are mired in sleaze plays to existing public perceptions, and brings huge political gains in the short term.

We on this side of the House played that card heavily in the 1990s, with some justice—although, in retrospect, that was exaggerated. Some things needed remedying, but we were wrong to suggest that the Major Government and most members of the parliamentary Conservative party were sleazebags. That was not true, but we found it extremely rewarding politically to say so.

Similarly, the Conservative party found that those attacks had been so damaging that it decided to start making equivalent charges as soon as possible after the new Labour Government came to power in 1997. As a result, the parties became involved in making mutual allegations and charges, with each saying, “You’re sleazier than we are!” To which the answer always comes back, “Oh no we’re not, you’re much sleazier than we are!” That is how the slanging match begins, and some sections of the press love to reinforce it by telling readers every day how corrupt and sleazy we all are.

That is why I was disappointed to hear the Leader of the Opposition say last week that there were questions about the Prime Minister’s integrity when it came to party funding. The right hon. Gentleman is entitled to attack the Prime Minister in all sorts of ways, but that was unfortunate. I do not think that there are any questions about the Prime Minister’s integrity, although many questions can properly be asked about current matters. However, attacking our opponents’ integrity has extremely damaging consequences for our political system and for the perception of public life.

We all have our little lists of scandals that we think that we can throw at opponents in other parties. That is what we do: I gather that there was a splendid debate yesterday when that was all that happened. The point is, though, that such an approach is based on a deception—the lie that our system is mired in sleaze and corruption. I do not believe that, but if that is what we are saying about our opponents, no wonder people in the outside world believe it to be true, and no wonder public confidence and trust evaporate. If we say such things about each other when we know them to be fundamentally untrue, no wonder public engagement in politics vanishes. By seeking advantage in making such accusations, in some measure we are responsible for the consequences that we bring about.

The hon. Gentleman is making a very powerful speech, but does he agree that the problem is that we are in an era of sound-bite politics, with too much interest shown in what the news bulletins at 12, 6 and 10 o’clock report? We need to break our slavish desire to keep in with the media at any cost, regardless of the background of what we say. Does he agree that Parliament and the media pander to each other in a relationship that means that we live in a world of our own creation?

I know the hon. Gentleman. He is a distinguished member of the Public Administration Committee, and I can tell the House that he panders to nobody. He is a person of ferocious independence—

Is that allowed?

It is one of his great charms and attractions: it is probably not greatly welcomed by those on the Conservative Front Bench, but it is hugely welcomed by someone who is trying to run a cross-party committee. He does not pander to the media; he tries to tell it like it is, and that is what we all must do. Our responsibility is not to engage in a game that we know will be taken up by sections of the media because it feeds an existing agenda or an existing set of perceptions. We must say things that we think are true, even if that is not politically convenient to our side. If we do not do that, we will deserve everything we get—and we are getting quite a lot at the moment.

I want to follow the point made by the hon. Member for Bridgwater (Mr. Liddell-Grainger), our colleague on the Public Administration Committee. It is said that Clement Attlee looked at newspapers only for the cricket results, which suggests that he had a healthy attitude to the news media. Does my hon. Friend agree that we might help our Prime Minister now by suggesting that he should worry less about what is on the front page and perhaps pursue something more harmless, such as the cricket?

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I do not want to pay huge tributes to all the members of the Committee, but I am happy to pay tribute to him. I yield to no one in my admiration for Clement Attlee, of whom it was famously said that he would never use one word where none would do. He is the antidote to the age in which we live. Some say that he would not survive for a moment now, but I think that he would be a hero, cutting through all the spin-driven, media celebrity nonsense that drives so much of our modern public life.

I may be anticipating a point that my hon. Friend is about to make, but does he agree that the ethical regulators who should be pronouncing on our conduct are simply not on the radar screens of people outside the House? That is the problem, and the result is that the public get their information from what happens in this Chamber. Should we not establish ethical regulators who talk loudly and are listened to?

Not for the first time, my hon. Friend anticipates a point that I was going to make. Indeed, much of life on the Public Administration Committee is taken up with him doing just that, and his contributions are always extremely valuable. I was coming to precisely that point—that it is not much good to have an elaborate system of ethical regulation if it does not have a voice, or if people do not know that it exists.

Following the report that we are discussing today, the Committee convened a seminar of all the ethical watchdogs. It was very interesting, but the consistent theme that emerged was that they all believed that they were lacking a champion. The spokesmen for the bodies involved all told us that they did not feel that anyone was there to champion all the good work being done. The fact that that is what we were told emphatically makes the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice), and it is something to which we must turn our attention.

At the heart of the Committee’s interest, and its recommendations, is the fact that it robustly tries to seek solutions to the problems it identifies. That is its hallmark. The Committee is not complacent about standards and conduct, and tries always, in various ways, to strengthen the arrangements. In our report, we argue that the time has come to recognise explicitly that we have created a system of permanent ethical regulation. I have described an array of bodies: they are not here today and gone tomorrow; they are here to stay. As a political system, we have committed ourselves to having standing machinery to regulate conduct in public life.

The problem is that the bodies are often set up in an ad hoc way. In response to a passing crisis, what do we do? We set up a new body, a new commissioner or a new committee. That means that the complete network of such bodies lacks a coherent institutional design. We think it is time to remedy that. There is a rather important constitutional point: if we are serious about the permanent ethical regulation of public life we have to be serious about the status of the bodies that engage in it. The situation seems fundamentally unsatisfactory to us. Indeed, our report notes:

“It is unsatisfactory for the ethical regulators created to regulate government to be appointed by government, and funded by government.”

We have reached the point where we should express our commitment to the permanence of those bodies by putting them on a proper statutory foundation. Parliament wants to know that they are part of the permanent political landscape, so the Committee suggested the establishment of a public standards commission, which would be an umbrella organisation for the bodies that have been set up, and ensure that they all took a statutory form.

The Government have not said that they accept our argument, but they have not rejected it either. In their response to our report, they say they will think about the proposals. Given the fact that we have had a number of successes with the Government recently and they are taking a great interest in our previous recommendations, we have some hope that when the constitutional reform Bill is drafted—that omnibus piece of legislation—a place will be found to do something of the kind that we propose. It would provide an explicit constitutional commitment to ensuring that bodies charged with the regulation of public life are permanent, independent and not simply creatures of Government.

In fact, such bodies are not compromised in practice; they do excellent work and are robustly independent, but there is something unsatisfactory about their constitutional status and I think we can put that right. At the same time, we can give coherence to the system and perhaps answer the watchdogs’ charge about the lack of a champion of their role in the overall system.

I have read the report and was taken by the idea for a commission. In Scotland, we have various people—the Auditor General, the ombudsman, the Information Commissioner, the Children’s Commissioner and others—who are all approved and appointed by Her Majesty on the nomination of Parliament. Why does the hon. Gentleman think that the commission model would be better than a system in which Parliament, as opposed to the Executive, makes the nominations?

We looked carefully at the Scottish model—indeed, we visited Scotland—and we were attracted by aspects of it, but as the hon. Gentleman knows, it is not entirely without difficulties. It is being reviewed even as we speak, and there are some radical recommendations for the regulatory system in Scotland. Our public standards commission would be set up by Parliament; it would be a parliamentary creation. It would report to Parliament and Parliament would be represented on it. The analogue is the Public Accounts Commission; thus a public standards commission would say that we are as serious about public standards as we are about the regulation of public money. That is the model we advocate, although I do not say that there is not more work to be done or that other models are not available. We need to take on board the essential constitutional point, and I hope that the Government, minded as they are to introduce a variety of measures in that field, will want to go down the road that we suggest.

I should like to explore the hon. Gentleman’s interesting proposal a little further. If the suggested commission were set up, would reports from the various bodies still be put before Parliament directly, or would they come via the commission? How would the mechanics of the commission work?

The answer is that the commission would report to Parliament in its turn. Parliament would be involved in setting it up, and all the matters of funding and appointment that flowed from that would go along the parliamentary route. It would be sensible for the Government to be represented on the commission, as they are on the Public Accounts Commission. The reports would come to this place, very much as the Committee that I chair receives reports from the parliamentary ombudsman and the Public Accounts Committee receives reports from the Comptroller and Auditor General. There would be an organic relationship with Parliament, but there would also be independence for the bodies concerned.

The hon. Gentleman makes a compelling and most impressive case. His Committee clearly had some influence with the Government in the appointment of Sir Christopher Kelly. One of the Committee’s recommendations was that the names proposed should be agreed by consultation among the parties. Does the hon. Gentleman know whether that particular aspect was taken up by the Government in that appointment?

I think the hon. Gentleman may be in a better position to answer that question than I am. I have no idea who was consulted. There is a convention and I hope it was followed in the recent appointment, as it is in certain other appointments. Perhaps my hon. Friend the Minister can tell us a little more about that when she speaks.

The House has choices. We can do what I have just recommended. The Committee was particularly concerned with Cabinet Office bodies, of which there are about half a dozen. It is not satisfactory that such bodies are ad hoc, or that they can be abolished at the whim of the Government. Whatever model we choose, it is right to put those bodies on a proper constitutional basis. That is one choice for the House and the Government.

There is another choice, too. As politicians and party members we have to decide whether we think that engaging in the politics of sleaze, by which I mean attacking the integrity of one’s opponents, is so alluring and attractive, and brings such political dividends, that we would rather settle for that as a way of handling such matters—or whether we think that the time has come to state jointly, on both sides of the House, our determination not to engage in that kind of game, but to establish a system of regulation and a culture that will ensure that our public life is conducted, and continues to be conducted, to the highest possible standards. That is a real choice for the House, and for the way we do politics. I hope that the report will be a spur for the House to make the choice that I think it ought to make.

This is a welcome debate. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) and his Committee, which has done a particularly good job. It is an all-party Committee that consistently and regularly brings before us appropriate matters to consider. This report is an entirely good and appropriate thing to discuss. It is timely in the context of the wider debate about these matters, which has been precipitated by the recent allegations that were the core subject of yesterday’s debate on party funding. These things are all part of the understanding of how the political process works.

I want to start with the formalities of the Committee’s recommendations and the Government’s response, because it is important to get on the record my view and that of my colleagues on these matters. I can summarise my view by saying that I agree with all the proposals in the report. It is welcome that the Government have accepted the large bulk of the recommendations in their response, which came out on 15 November. They have accepted that

“watchdogs should, in principle, have power to initiate their own inquiries into matters of specific or general concern.”

They have agreed that

“ethical regulators need to be robustly and conspicuously independent, and the system of regulation needs to be proportionate and coherent.”

They have accepted the recommendation that

“the cost of each Independent Office and the CSPL”—

Committee on Standards in Public Life—

“be clearly indicated in Estimates and Accounts.”

They also accepted the following recommendation:

“The most effective safeguard against concerns that regulators’ independence may be influenced by a desire for reappointment is to provide for a reasonably lengthy single non-renewable term. In our view this term should not be more than seven years (nor less than five years).”

It is an indication of the Government’s good will that the Minister intervened on the hon. Member for Cannock Chase to announce not just that the Government have agreed the appointment of the new chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, but that he has been appointed for a fixed-term non-renewable period of five years. That is welcome. The Minister will expect me to say that it was not so welcome that the Government were not keen for the previous chairman to continue in office. Alistair Graham did an excellent job. We have to have a system in which the Government are not able to get angry or into a huff about such an important committee set up precisely to be a voice apart. The chairman should not find himself suddenly rubbished—I may be using slightly excessive language—by sources in Government, so that he is not able to continue in office.

I pay tribute to Alistair Graham and his team. I appeared before them and have given evidence to them. Nothing that I have seen or know suggests that they did not do their job entirely competently, professionally and with the best interests of the country at heart. I thank him and them for the work that went on under his chairmanship. I am only pleased that the interregnum has at last come to an end and we have a new chairman, and I wish him all the best in his five-year term. This is an important appointment, an important job and an important committee.

I agree with what the hon. Gentleman is saying about Sir Alistair Graham. I, too, admire him and thought that he did a good job. He was precisely the kind of robust independent mind that the report recommended. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the fact that the Government have accepted the Select Committee’s recommendation about a robust independent chairman reflects the change in Prime Minister? It was the previous Prime Minister and his Government who found Sir Alistair Graham rather irritating and did not like him getting under their skin. Will the hon. Gentleman welcome the fact that the Government have now said that they want a robust and independent chairman? That marks a welcome change.

I accept that it was not the current Prime Minister who took the view about Alistair Graham. The current Prime Minister has indicated nothing to suggest that he is not willing to have people who are independent, robust and effective doing the job. I hope that that marks a sea change. In general terms, I welcome all the comments that the Prime Minister has made on such issues since he took office. Comments made in “The Governance of Britain” Green Paper, which was published just before the summer, and elsewhere suggest that he is determined to try to make sure not just that we, as a body politic and a set of public institutions, clean up our act where necessary, but that we are seen to do that. I do not doubt his integrity in that regard.

Before the hon. Gentleman gets carried away with his praise for the Prime Minister, will he recognise that the Prime Minister has not conceded to the ministerial adviser the right to initiate inquiries on his own account? The ministerial adviser has to wait for the Prime Minister to invite him to do so.

Absolutely—what I am saying is not unqualified. That is one of the specific things that has not been conceded, and one of the things in the Government’s response that is wrong. There are other things that go much further that I hope the Prime Minister will do. Let me end my comments on the report’s recommendations and the Government’s response, and then I will pick up on one or two of the sorts of points that the right hon. Gentleman has just raised.

The next of the Committee’s recommendations that I want to mention is:

“We think it inappropriate that any body fulfilling the remit of the CSPL…should be subsumed into a body consisting of those it may have to examine.”

The Government made it clear that they accepted that recommendation without qualification.

Those were the good things—the positive steps forward—but there are still substantial areas where the Government have not yet come to a view. I hope that this debate will help them to come to the view that the Select Committee proposes. There are several significant areas. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase mentioned the recommendation that we need a new system to give all the ethical regulators independence from the cradle to the grave. We need to ensure that they are funded from Parliament, not Government, that they are appointed by Parliament, not Government, and that they are staffed by people appointed by the organisation itself, not civil servants—although people might be seconded from the civil service. There should be a collegiate structure for the bodies to make things clearer for the public, rather than confusing them. That is the right way in which these things should happen.

There should be accountability from Parliament and to Parliament, irrespective of the difficulty. I heard the intervention from north of the border that reminded us that that is what happens with the Scottish Parliament. There may be some difficulties, but I am not persuaded on the basis of anything I know that they are overwhelming. That must be the right principle. The response stated:

“The Government will give further consideration to the issues raised in these recommendations as part of its work to take forward the commitment in the Constitutional Reform Green Paper for legislation for the Civil Service.”

I hope that that proceeds relatively quickly.

My next criticism of the Government is that we have had reform of the civil service and a civil service Act on the agenda since 1997, with repeated commitments that they were coming soon, but they still have not arrived. Unless the independent constitutional position of the civil service is upheld in statute, the confidence of the public will not be commanded in the way that it should be. Almost without exception, we have excellent civil servants, but their constitutional position needs to be safeguarded.

Another significant criticism that comes out of the recommendations was brought up by the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) in his intervention. The recommendation in question is:

“We believe that all constitutional watchdogs should, in principle, have power to initiate their own inquiries into matters of specific or general concern. They should generally consult before doing so, as a matter of good practice, but the decision as to whether an inquiry is warranted should remain theirs alone.”

Sadly, the Government have not bought that proposal yet. Their response simply says:

“The Government will consider this recommendation further in relation to work on legislation for the Civil Service…The Ministerial Code, published in July 2007, sets out arrangements whereby the Prime Minister may refer an allegation about a breach of the Code to the independent adviser on Ministers’ interests.”

If we are to have a system that is seen to be completely above party politics, there cannot be a block by the Prime Minister of the day. Where there has been such a block, it has brought discredit on the system, irrespective of the motive and the explanation for it. I am clear that the Committee’s recommendations are right.

For completeness, let me add that I noticed that the Government ducked the issue on this recommendation:

“The normal rule should be that chairs and board members of key constitutional watchdogs should only be dismissed following a resolution of both Houses”—

a recommendation that I again support. The Government gave a response, but did not say what they thought of the proposal. I urge them to reconsider the matter and to come to the conclusion that the Committee reached.

My party, like all others, has regularly thought about the matters that we are discussing. We did so again this year formally through our internal processes. We considered reform of government and governance. We debated the issue at our conference in the early autumn and came up with various proposals. I want to say what they are, by way of a summary of where we are coming from, and then I will end with a couple of comments on the major issues of the day.

As time has passed and as experience has provided us with evidence, the Liberal Democrats have become absolutely clear on one point, and have argued it: the system of governance is much less corrupt than it was, and we have a very high standard, but many people in the press have more opportunity to have a go at the public service, the Administration or the establishment, and enjoy doing so. That makes good copy, but it undermines the whole system every time they do it. None the less, we clearly have further to go if we are to win the battle for the hearts and minds of the British people. I am not saying that the press is not right to seek to expose what goes wrong; of course it is right to do that. However, I fear that it has over-succeeded, giving the impression that there is very much wrong in the governance of Britain, whereas compared to those of other countries, whether or not those countries are like ours, our standards are still very high.

We Liberal Democrat Members absolutely believe that a written constitution would be helpful as part of a new constitutional settlement.

Hear, hear.

I may not get as much of a “Hear, hear” for my next proposition, but we will see how we go. We believe that until we have a representative Parliament, there will not be confidence in the political process. I am not arguing for a prescriptive form; I am saying that Parliament has to be representative of views expressed locally, regionally and nationally across the UK. We have to complete reform of the House of Lords, so that we have a modern second Chamber that is elected, or nearly wholly elected, by the people on whose behalf it does its job.

I will not go into the point at length, but as was said yesterday, we need further work on the funding of political parties, so that the many, not the few—ordinary people, who are the bulk of the electorate—are put in charge of the political process. I am talking about the low-paid and the unpaid, as opposed to the very well-paid or the very rich. In our book, that means capping the amount that a person can give over the political cycle of a Parliament, and the amount that they give in any particular year. As the Power report proposed, the electorate should be able to indicate that they wish some money to go to local parties—and not necessarily the party for which they vote. That way, if there is to be more public funding, it will be at the behest of the electors. They will be able to see where it is used, and to see that it is not lost in a system that spends a lot of money on adverts before a general election.

I am clear that the collective talks that have partly stalled must get back on the rails, with the Conservative party on board. We should finish negotiating on the trade union issues, although I understand that they are quite tricky. We will do the public no service if we continue to allow the arms race of expenditure on campaigning, particularly nationally, to increase. We need to have that public standard in our sights. The Americans deal with the issue badly; the result is dreadful, and it is almost normal for the advertising to be negative. It is rarely positive. We need to reverse that and go in the other direction, so a cap on the total that can be spent would be valid, too.

I want to pick up the challenge that the Chairman of the Public Administration Committee gave us, and respond positively in two ways. First—this view is not subscribed to by every member of my party; I am not speaking from a party brief—I have long thought that national advertising by political parties ought to be subject to the Advertising Standards Authority rules—that is, it ought to be decent, honest and truthful—and that there should be a penalty for any breaches, decided by an independent arbiter. I refer to national advertising only because the issue becomes too complicated at a local level. If we start on a national level, at least we will get somewhere. It seems to me that if we are telling everybody else that they have to tell the truth in what they advertise, we need to make sure that we do the same.

Secondly, in political party campaigning, there is frustrating inconsistency between what is said nationally and what is said locally. I am up for robust campaigning; in my constituency, we took on the Labour party and beat it. We have managed to see it off, by and large. It is a much smaller player than it was 20 or 25 years ago. The same is true of the Tories—well, they have not been much of a player for the past 50 years, but we have managed to keep them in that position. It is bizarre; the Government say in Parliament, often rightly, that crime has gone down, and they show all the indicators. They say the same thing in every Labour-held seat in the country, or in every seat where the local authority is Labour. However, where there is a Conservative, Liberal Democrat or independent council, or a joint administration that is not Labour, they frighten the hell out of people by making them think that crime is going through the roof, because they think that that is what should be done to win votes. Ministers try to wind up the local press and to get them to say that that is the case. We really must have an end to that double standard.

I wish the world was as the hon. Gentleman describes it. Perhaps he could explain why I got a Liberal leaflet through the letterbox of my London flat entitled “Menzies Campbell’s crime survey”, about how crime had gone up when the Liberal Democrats were not in charge of the council. Does not every party do such things, or is it only some parties?

I am sure that we all do it. I do not remember that survey, but I am not pretending that anybody is immune from taking such actions. I am making the point that when people are in government, they have a chance to do something, and they tell us how wonderful things are, but they do not appear to reflect that locally. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase made the same point: we need to make sure that the messages given out in Parliament are relayed elsewhere, and that we do not spend our time being negative, but try to be positive.

Another issue on my agenda is the size of government and the relative amount of elected, as opposed to appointed, governance. The point came up yesterday, but as I feared, it did not get much attention, because of other matters. I have been given some figures, but I do not know whether they are completely accurate. Simon Jenkins recently said that at the turn of the previous century, in 1900, there were 1,200 elected representatives helping to run public services through councils and boards in London. Recently, the number was 2,000. On the other hand, there are 10,000 people in quangos. There has been a growth in the number of people appointed to do salaried jobs who are not elected by anybody.

Ultimately, public confidence is best ensured by people knowing that they can kick out those in charge. That is often one of the frustrations about hospitals. A hospital trust might do terrible things, but nothing can be done about it. That is important if we are to change the culture of standards in public life.

The hon. Gentleman was hinting that he favours proportional representation or something like it to get a more representative Parliament. Is not one of the problems that people cannot make those choices? There might be a significant shift of opinion, and they could end up with the same pattern of parties forming a slightly different Government afterwards, but they cannot get rid of that Government. With our system, they can kick the Government out and put another in their place.

That is a real debate. I shall deal with the matter briefly, or you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, will bring me up for going down a byway of the debate.

There are two elements to a resolution of the issue. One is that the electors must know that locally they can hold their elected representative to account. That is why I personally have understood the arguments for a Jenkins report solution, which entails single member seats and top-up, rather than entirely multi-member seats. The second element is that although the present system often produces a majority in the House, even though the Government have not won anything like a majority of the public votes, that is a smaller advantage than a system that means that what people vote for is what they get. It does not mean that they will not get a strong and stable Government, although it may mean that they will sometimes get coalition government—two parties having to work together—because that is what the electorate believe will produce a better outcome. I hope that that is an adequate answer for the time being.

On the smaller Government agenda, the more people think that public decisions are taken by the growing number of special advisers, the more unhelpful it is. We need to cut down relatively not just the whole size of Government—the number of Ministers and Parliamentary Private Secretaries—but the number of press officers and special advisers. The growth in their numbers is an unhealthy development.

Lastly, we must make sure that the situation on the other side of the coin is sustained. I thank the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) for his timely intervention. One of the real threats in the past year to the progress that we had been making, as we still are, occurred when a colleague put to the House a proposal that then had tacit support, if not more, from those on the Conservative and Labour Front Benches, to take this place out of the law on freedom of information that we had not long before agreed. People cannot be expected to have faith and confidence in public life if they are not allowed the access to information about our activity that we expect of all other public bodies, with the safeguards that already exist in legislation. I hope that we never again even contemplate going backwards with respect to the freedom of information legislation that we happily passed.

The report that led us here today is full of good proposals, and the Government have accepted most of them. We will achieve a system of good management and independent accountability in our public and political life only if they take seriously the big proposal calling for an independent system of regulators from top to bottom—regulators brought together in a way that looks coherent, and able to make their own decisions and not depend on a prime ministerial trigger. The age of patronage should be over. The age of the prime ministerial prerogative derived from the royal prerogative should be over.

It is Parliament, not the Executive, that should have the controlling authority in these matters. I am certain that when Government are willing to let that power transfer, the public will get a service, including a public service, in which they can have even more confidence, and that our reputation in the eyes of the voters will be slightly restored, and they will think that they are getting value for money in the process.

I shall pick up some of the points that have been made in contributions to the debate so far, before filling in some of the cracks in the picture that has been painted by my friend who chairs the Committee, the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright). By that I mean the details of the system that we are proposing and how it would work.

The Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) made some astonishing statements—for example, when he suggested that political statements should be subject to some kind of Advertising Standards Authority test to ensure that they are decent, honest and truthful. That is bizarre. I wonder how the “Calamity Clegg” document would be scrutinised by such a body.

We have an independent Statistics Board, which was introduced by the present Government because we all recognise that we can have a great deal of debate which gets us nowhere if we do not accept the basis. We should have clean statistics that both sides are prepared to accept. That is why the Government established the Statistics Board, which is independent of Government.

My friend spoke about declining levels of trust in politics and politicians. I am not being prissy, but I hate to think what people outside made of our debate yesterday on party funding. I tried to intervene a couple of times, unsuccessfully. The image that would have been presented to people outside was appalling, but what is important for me is of no consequence for other Members in the Chamber.

For example, I think it is important that we clear up the business of tax exiles. I think it is fundamentally wrong that people who are not paying United Kingdom taxes should sit in the United Kingdom Parliament. That is the case at present. I am not talking about speculation about Lord Ashcroft. I am talking about Lord Laidlaw, a Conservative peer who gifted over £6 million to the Conservative party. This is all on the record. The House of Commons Appointments Commission has reported on it.

I think that that is completely unacceptable, but Conservative Members may not think so. They may get fired up about trade union affiliation to the Labour party. I may say to myself, “Well, the Labour party is a product of history. It is federal party. It grew organically from the trade unions,” and I can explain that away. So we have a big clash of ideas and sometimes, like yesterday, it spins out of control and the House of Commons becomes a big growling bear pit.

As so often, I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. Does he agree that the moneys collected in small amounts from trade unionists in an honest way and given as political donations is clean money, in a sense that money from Lord Ashcroft trying to buy whatever is not clean money?

I am prepared to defend the trade union-Labour party link, but we are not talking about that today. We are talking about the report on ethics and standards.

I am slightly surprised at the hon. Gentleman’s comments. Is it not the case that Lord Ashcroft has done nothing illegal? Much of the debate yesterday focused on illegal payments, which are in an entirely different division from the perfectly legitimate ones that have been made by Lord Ashcroft and other patriotic British citizens.

Order. I hope the hon. Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) will not be diverted down that route, as he just recognised what we are debating today. If we go into personalities, we shall veer off course badly.

I follow your strictures as always, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I would say only that I could not get the information that I wanted about person X using parliamentary procedures and tabling parliamentary questions. It is bizarre that I, as a Member of Parliament, am forced to use the Freedom of Information Act to try to get the information that I require about person X. We wait to see what happens. I am expecting a reply to my information request in a few weeks.

The Committee’s report was not about sleaze; we did not document sleaze or pinpoint individual instances of it. However, it is part of the background that we are having to cope with—the feeling that British politics and politicians are sleazy. As my friend the Member for Cannock Chase said, perhaps we have contributed to that.

I am sure that we all watched the three-part documentary on Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister. While reviewing his time in office, he said—I am just paraphrasing—that, on reflection, he regretted making such a big deal about sleaze in the mid-1990s. It was not, as my friend said, that there were not things to complain about. However, in the campaign to become the Government, I remember well that not a day passed without the Labour party banging the drum about how sleazy the Conservatives were. Tony Blair regrets that now; I regret it too, I suppose, because it is contaminating our politics and bringing us all down. It does not do us or the system any good if people look at the House of Commons and the British Parliament and dismiss us as sleazy. We are not.

I did not agree with Tony Blair and, rarely for me, I do not agree with my hon. Friend. Surely we were right to take up the exposure of the corruption that was taking place under the Tories—payment for questions, brown envelopes and the rest of it. I am a frequent critic of the media, who are criticising our side at the moment, but I believe that The Sunday Times, for example, did a public service in exposing payment for questions. I said so at the time.

I do not want to dwell on the issue; I have said what I wanted to say. My friend the Member for Cannock Chase talked about transparency, and I suppose that sunlight is the best disinfectant for all such matters, as he said. However, we also need ethical regulators that people listen to, and for those regulators to report to Parliament, not to the Executive. People who serve in such regulators should not be appointed by the Prime Minister of the day, but by an independent, arm’s length body; we have suggested the public service commission. Those people could report through that commission to Parliament. That is the way forward.

I want to say one or two words about the inquiry that produced the report. When we started our work on the issue, it was a revelation to me to see the constellation of organisations involved in ethical regulation. There are a huge number, ranging from the really big ones, such as the National Audit Office, whose budget is £65 million, to the little minnows such as the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which costs us about £200,000 a year. There are other organisations that we did not consider but are worth mentioning, such as the Information Commission and the Electoral Commission. The parliamentary ombudsman reports to our Committee anyway. There is also the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, whose job is to regulate standards in this place.

A huge number of ethical regulators had grown up, and there was no coherence. However, we had to start somewhere. In our report, we considered the ethical regulators that are sponsored by the Cabinet Office and whose existence is not set out in legislation. We considered the role of the commissioner for public appointments, the Civil Service Commission, the House of Lords Appointments Commission, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which I have mentioned, and the Committee on Standards in Public Life.

I should like to say a little about that latter committee. Sir Alistair Graham, now retired, took his job very seriously and was always on the front pages of the newspapers, berating the Government for some transgression, misdemeanour or slip-up. He was always on “Newsnight”. In his final report, he told us that

“My greatest regret has been the apparent failure to persuade this Government to place high ethical standards at the heart of its thinking and, most importantly, behaviour.”

That is what the chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life thought—it was a hugely serious charge. I think that I speak for all members of the Select Committee in saying that we were astonished that in all his years as chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, he did not formally ask to see the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to discuss those matters of concern. It was bizarre. I hope and expect that if the new chairman, who has just been appointed, has problems or reservations about the ethical standards pursued by the Labour Government, he will make an appointment to see the Prime Minister to talk about it, rather than rush into public print.

When the chairman appeared before the Select Committee, he was operating under a 40 per cent. budget cut, which has been going on for some time. He was filling in staffing gaps by borrowing people from the Cabinet Office. I wonder to what extent my hon. Friend thinks that his reluctance to approach the Prime Minister, or raise concerns about the ability to operate, were connected with that dependence on the Cabinet Office to resource his activities.

That brings me neatly to a point that I was going to make later. It is all very well for the Government to say—I think that they say it in their response to the Select Committee report—that the ethical regulators are independent. However, if the Government of the day can cut the budget by 40 per cent. or 50 per cent., the idea of independence becomes fanciful. That is why we propose that the ethical regulator should be set up at arm’s length from the Government and that the responsibility for its funding, starting and operation should be given to the public standards commission—the arm’s length body that would report to Parliament.

I should like to spend a couple of minutes on the key recommendations of our report; my friend the Member for Cannock Chase has alluded to them already. We believe that the ethical regulators should be permanent. They should not be able to be abolished by ministerial fiat, and there should be no going back to the position of the Government being able to decide on a whim that they want to abolish a regulator. The Minister could tell the House this afternoon that the House of Lords Appointments Commission or the Civil Service Commission were going to be abolished. Any of those bodies, which were set up not by statute but by the Prime Minister under prerogative powers, can be abolished. That is wrong—they should be set up on a statutory basis. I welcome the fact that we are going to have a civil service Act, but what a dance of the seven veils we have had over it. In July 1998, the Government said on the record for the first time that we would get such an Act, and 10 years later we just might—I hope so. The second and third characteristics of the regulator should be neutrality and independence. It cannot be right that bodies that regulate the Government in some way are accountable to the Government, and that should change.

On the Government’s response to our report, it is a big step forward for them to accede to our recommendation that constitutional watchdogs should have single non-renewable terms—that is self-evidently the right thing to do—but many of their other responses are opaque.

It is not clear what will end up in the constitutional renewal Bill, but it is a big opportunity for the Government to look closely at how the ethical landscape can be reshaped. The Committee has made one proposal; there may be others. The system should be put into a legislative form, and the opportunity to do that will occur when the Bill is introduced early next year.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice). I agree with him that sleaze should not be the currency in which Members of Parliament trade.

Today’s debate is a much more constructive and calm discussion of standards in public life than the one that we had yesterday, and for that reason it will doubtless have much less coverage. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), not only for this report but for the heroic way in which he has ventured on to a whole lot of territories from which he might have been discouraged by the Government. At the beginning of his speech, he gave an indication of what might have been when he said that as a junior Back Bencher he made an injudicious speech about the mileage allowance that could have led him to fall out of favour with the Whips. Had it not been for that incident, he might now be at the Dispatch Box taking credit for a whole range of innovative and radical constitutional reforms that he still has to advocate from the Back Benches.

The report is unusual because it deals with abstract issues such as ethics, which are difficult to define and rather intangible, and various principles, structures and concepts. This debate therefore takes place on a somewhat different plane from many debates in the House. That does not excuse a rather thin and very belated Government response that ducks some of the major issues raised in the report.

Let me begin by confirming what was stated by the hon. Member for Cannock Chase, by the Lord Chancellor yesterday, and in the report: our standards of conduct in this country are generally high. As Chairman of the Standards and Privileges Committee, I spend a lot of time talking to visiting parliamentarians, who are amazed at the high standards that we set ourselves and the procedures that are in place to monitor them. In many countries, MPs have immunity from prosecution. We do not have that, nor should we, but on top of the criminal system we have superimposed a ministerial code and the House of Commons code, breaches of which can lead to career-ending decisions. While we should of course always strive to do better, I believe that our politics here are cleaner than almost anywhere else.

Let me say a word or two about the Committee on Standards in Public Life. On 25 April, Sir Alistair Graham’s appointment ran out. No Chairman has been reappointed for a second three-year term, so the Government knew well in advance that there would be a vacancy in April. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase heroically said that he might be responsible for the delay because the Government were hoping that his report might recommend abolition. I am not sure about that, given that his report was published on 29 April and it was only today that an appointment was announced. Indeed, the Government did not advertise the vacancy until October. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that that body is being penalised for having had, in Sir Alistair Graham, an outspoken Chairman who was sometimes inconvenient for the Government.

It is important to have a Chairman, and I welcome the appointment of Chris Kelly, who worked in the Treasury when I was there. That is a very good appointment, and I applaud it. We need a new Chairman to focus on exactly what the Committee’s role should be. It is difficult, against the background of today’s controversies, to argue that the mission of the Committee on Standards in Public Life has been achieved and that there is no role for it. However, when we look at some of its recent activities, it is difficult to see how it envisages its mission. We need a new Chairman and a new focus, which underlines the point made in the report about the appointment being in the hands of the Government. They have the capacity to weaken the ethical regulator simply by delaying an appointment, as has happened in this case. If Parliament had been in charge, as proposed by the Select Committee, that would not have happened.

In passing, I would like to mention the constitutional watchdog about which I get the most complaints, the Standards Board for England. There is a passing reference to it in paragraphs 21 and 29 of the report. It is not quite clear who reviews that body—the Public Administration Committee or the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government—nor how it fits into the proposed structure, but someone needs to get a grip on it so that it is more focused and effective, and does not drive all my parish councillors into a rage.

I want to make one point only in my contribution, which concerns the relationship between the Prime Minister and the adviser on ministerial interests. The hon. Member for Pendle spoke of the dance of the seven veils, and that is what has happened in the dialogue between the Public Administration Committee and the Committee on Standards in Public Life on the one hand, and, on the other hand, this Prime Minister and the previous one.

By way of background, the behaviour of Ministers is just as much in the limelight as that of MPs, so enforcement of the ministerial code should be as robust as it is for the MPs’ code, but it is not. Three years after the CSPL recommended it in 2003, in March 2006, Tony Blair took off one veil and appointed an independent adviser on Ministers’ interests. That followed the row about loans not declared to the Electoral Commission. Another veil came off a bit later when Tony Blair, who resisted the appointment of an investigator into alleged breaches of the ministerial code, finally conceded that point. But having conceded the principle, he did not make the appointment until some time later. Having made the appointment, he never asked the adviser to investigate any breaches of the code, although there have been, to put it mildly, a number of opportunities to do so.

I welcome the appointment of Sir Philip Mawer as the new adviser on ministerial interests—another inspired appointment—but there is still a serious and indefensible gap. His terms of reference permit him to establish the facts in certain cases concerning the ministerial code and provide private advice to the Prime Minister, but he can do so only if the Prime Minister invites him to. The design principles for a constitutional watchdog in the report make it clear that the ground rules for the ministerial code watchdog are seriously non-compliant with the report’s recommendations. He does not have the freedom to initiate his own inquiries; he is not appointed by the House; he does not have secure funding arrangements beyond the control of the Executive; and he does not have a secure legal foundation. In those four respects, it is a non-compliant appointment. Crucially, he does not have the right to publish his report when he makes an investigation.

The new Prime Minister could have taken a trick, by acceding, in the Green Paper “The Governance of Britain”, to all of the recommendations in the report. But he did not. Paragraph 121 of “The Governance of Britain” makes it quite clear that the adviser can act only on the Prime Minister’s request. Therefore, the regime we have for enforcing the ministerial code is much weaker than the one we have for MPs, and I see no reason why the Government should have a weaker and less effective regime than we in this House do. We have a Parliamentary Commissioner For Standards who can initiate his own inquiries if he thinks that there has been a breach; his report is always published; and he is appointed by the House for a single, non-renewable term. I hope that when the Parliamentary Secretary replies, she will say that there is some room for manoeuvre, and that as the years roll by, some more veils may come off.

I disagree with the report’s suggestion that all the decisions should be subject to judicial review. Making the decisions of the ethical watchdogs subject to the courts and judicial review is a recipe for disaster. If the Select Committee has a moment, it might like to consider the output of the democracy taskforce, which my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) chairs. It has produced a readable document entitled “An End to Sofa Government”, which has some exciting comments to make about the ministerial code and how it might be enforced.

The authority of Government and the perception of their integrity is weakened if they continue to fail to respond positively to the recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life and the Public Administration Committee.

We have heard many excellent speeches, notably that of my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), who chairs our Committee. He generously praised not only the members of the Committee but the staff, and I entirely concur. However, he could not mention himself, so let me say that he is exceptional, even among Select Committee Chairs. Although we sometimes disagree about issues, I defer to his skill and energy and his commitment to the Committee and its work. Serving on the Committee has been the most worthwhile, interesting and significant work that I have done in my 10 years in Parliament. That probably reflects the views of many other Committee members.

I hope that I will not upset my hon. Friend by mentioning Plato, which I do from time to time, again. Plato saw the dangers of linking money and politics 2,500 years ago. He suggested that those who governed—the guardians, the philosopher rulers—should be men of gold, entirely separate from money. They should be there merely to enjoy the pleasure of good governance. He said that the civil servants should be men—they were always men, unfortunately, not people—of silver, and that the moneyed people, the merchants, should be men of bronze, very much in third place. I believe that that is where we should keep the moneyed people—they should not govern or be in power. The dangers were therefore recognised a long time ago, and we should remind ourselves that they are not new.

Public trust has decreased. That is partly to do with our attacks on each other and partly to do with the media, but we could do things to regain that trust. Our report contains a graph of the collapse of public trust from a high point in 1987, when 47 per cent. of the population said that they always or mostly trusted the Government, to 26 per cent. in 2005. Public trust halved in that time. It fluctuates between elections, but at each election it is lower than it was at the one before. Even in 1997, when we believed that there was a great renewal, with the Camelot of Tony Blair, and that somehow everything would be all right, it was not. Turnout, too, has been affected.

I believe that people have become confused about and disappointed in politics, not only because some hon. Members and some members of the Government have not always behaved well with money, but through disillusionment in politics. Research by Professor John Curtice and others shows a correlation between the collapse of interest in politics, with lower turnouts, and the apparently diminishing difference between the parties. There is a perception that we all—certainly at leadership level—share a culture and that we have almost fallen into a Francis Fukuyama-like “end of politics” position because we all essentially agree. Let me say that I do not agree with the prevailing philosophy, which appears at times to be shared by the leadership of all three parties. I believe that a division of views still exists. If we who are in politics start to recognise that the people want a genuine choice, and parties that represent different philosophies and ways in which to run society, people might be more interested and begin to trust us a little more.

Our party always had a moralistic streak. It was concerned about equality, social justice and the interests of the poor. The Conservative party was perhaps more concerned with patriotism, the Queen, preserving the old order and so on, but the parties were at least identifiable. We have confused everybody by almost eliminating those differences. We should re-establish those differences, so that people have a genuine democratic choice. Democracy without choice is no democracy at all.

It is pleasing that the Government of the new Prime Minister have broadly commended many of our report’s recommendations. However, the Government have not accepted the recommendations detailed in quite a long section on pages 2 and 3 of the response, saying:

“The Government will give further consideration to the issues”.

One of those issues is who will appoint the ethical regulator or regulators. My hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase and others have talked about Parliament doing that through a commission. I entirely agree that that is how the appointment should be made. However, although one does not want to cast aspersions on one’s colleagues, we are all influenced to an extent by our Whips. They can have a word in someone’s ear and say, “Well, actually this is the name we want, because they’re basically on our side,” or, “The Prime Minister rather wants this particular person.” We need a body that is slightly separate from the Whips and not prone to their influence.

A conspiracy involving the Whips from the two main parties is even a possibility. The Opposition might not want too energetic, strong, robust or independent-minded a regulator, just in case they ever get into power and suffer the irritation of having to face them, so there is always the possibility of a conspiracy of the Whips on both sides, as well as the risk from Government Whips. What our report recommends is sound.

I do not want to say very much more, because most of what I had wished to say has been said by others. I wholeheartedly support the report. I would have liked it perhaps to go a little further in driving a wedge between money and politics, but that might have to wait for another day. Such reports are necessarily consensual and I am happy with the consensus that we achieved; but perhaps in time we will go further in driving that wedge between mammon and politics, to the benefit of our politics and in order to rebuild higher levels of trust among our electors.

I read the report with great interest, and it is a timely report. The public feel growing concern about the standards in public life, and they have every right to be concerned. They increasingly regard politicians as remote and sleazy, and Members of Parliament as belonging to an aloof political class.

To some extent the public are right to feel disillusioned. Some of the loss of trust in politics and in the political process is merited. I would not want to go overboard, however, despite recent examples of rather squalid and tawdry deals. Most people whom I have come across in politics in my short career here are decent and well-meaning people; indeed, most of those whom one comes across in public life at almost any level in Britain are well-meaning, honest people trying to do the decent thing.

People’s real concerns are not so much about what politicians may or may not do with this private donation or that source of private funding; rather, they are about what the political class does with taxpayers’ money—with public money, not private money. The real scandal is not caused by hidden donors paying for this or that leadership, and does not involve private money so much, but rather public money. The concern felt by the public is caused when big corporate interests meet big government. When we examine standards in public life and consider what structures we can put in place to regulate them, I very much hope that we will consider how public money is spent.

I want to talk about three areas where I have concerns. First, I hope that a future watchdog will examine the awarding of defence contracts and the influence of the defence lobby in Westminster and Whitehall. Some £32 billion a year is spent on defence. I believe that it is increasingly possible to prove that it is spent largely in the interests of defence contractors and not of our armed forces. I am not some sort of left-wing, hippy peacenik; I am not against the arms trade. But I am against a few big corporate interests controlling the public policy agenda and shaping it in their interests.

I do not allege overt corruption—I am sure that the Agusta scandal that occurred in Belgium a few years ago is not being repeated by Agusta-Finmeccanica in the UK today. I merely note the following. Contractors spend large sums of money buying influence in Westminster and Whitehall. There is not always full disclosure as to how that money is spent. BAE Systems has admitted to me that it engages a number of consultants with passes that give them access to Parliament. It will not say precisely who they are.

The armed forces parliamentary scheme, which is a great scheme of which I am part, and which has the aim of educating Members of the House about the armed forces, is largely funded by a few privileged defence contractors. Again, they refuse to disclose who is paying what. At the same time, the armed forces parliamentary scheme has very definite views on defence procurement, or rather on MPs who make a song and dance about certain procurement issues, as I found out.

The defence contractors put a lot of money into various forums and lobby groups, and it is only fair that we have proper disclosure. Contractors have a vested commercial interest in the defence industrial strategy and a protectionist policy that precludes a broad-based supply base. The taxpayer and the armed forces pay a very high price for that protectionist policy and lack of full disclosure. I would like a future watchdog to have an inquiry into how defence contracts are made and the interests and influence of lobbyists in this institution and Whitehall.

Secondly, I would like a new watchdog to be able to investigate what one might call certain elements of the British establishment’s indulgence of tyrants who happen to be very rich. Why do we treat Saudi Arabia as our key ally in the region? When we impose sanctions on Burma or Zimbabwe, why do we parade the Saudi elite down the Mall? Why has our judicial process been traduced by halting an inquiry into whether BAE Systems bribed Saudi princelings? Has Saudi Arabia bought a large section of our foreign policy establishment? Could it be that there are those in public life, perhaps at the Foreign Office, hoping one day to take their places on the boards of Saudi-funded companies? Again, I would like an inquiry into standards in public life to look at why the Serious Fraud Office investigation was halted and the inquiry into BAE Systems abandoned, and to examine the role of officials and retired officials.

Thirdly—this is not a partisan point; it is a critique of the Executive, not of the party that happens to be in office—I want us to look carefully at how public money is spent in marginal constituencies. In this country, we like to think that we do not do pork-barrel politics; we like to be able to sneer at those Americans who do it differently; we like to think that we are not some sort of third-world, third-rate grubby country where public resources are allocated on the basis of political calculation. Really? Local government funding formulas seem to me to favour certain parts of the country with certain political complexions rather than others. In some parts of the country, a largesse with public money seems to have created a class of people dependent on high state funding.

I do not know whether this is in order, but in relation to the Abrahams affair and the question of what Wendy Alexander knew at what time, it seems to me that the real outrage is not what a few individuals do with private money, but what is being done with our public money. Standards in public life do not mean investigating only how private money is spent. We need to examine not merely how private money relates to the political class, but how public money and its expenditure relates to that class.

The lazy assumption that the UK is somehow uniquely incorruptible is, I think, dangerous. We have not yet reached European levels of corruption in public life, but I think we are not far behind. I would like to see us focus more in future on improper behaviour between big corporations and big Government. I hope that any new commissioner appointed to investigate will look at those areas, because when big Government meets big corporate interests, the taxpayer almost always loses out.

I begin to draw my comments to a close by responding to a point raised by the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright). Politicians on both sides seem to be aware of voters’ growing contempt for the political process. We recognise that voter turnout is falling and that the “none of the above” party seems to be doing ever better. Many of us will recognise on the doorsteps that voters increasingly despise politicians, but I think that the political establishment needs to stop blaming the voters for holding its politicians in contempt. We also need to stop blaming the press, which I believe reflects rather than shapes what its readers think. We need to recognise that it is we, not the voters, who are at fault.

It is not so much that MPs are corrupt with private money; our failure is that we are no good at holding the Executive to account for what they do with public money. We are monumentally useless at holding the quango state to account. If MPs were better at holding the Executive to account for how they spend public money, there would be no need for a public standards commission, and we MPs would be less despised.

How, then, can we ensure that MPs have the appetite to hold the Executive to account? I shall touch on a point raised by the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes). Part of the problem is that there are too many “safe seats”, as they are termed by political academics. Very many people in the House stand no realistic chance of ever losing their seat in a general election. That is what makes them more accountable and answerable to what the Whips and the party system tell them to think and say than to the voter. I have been changing my mind during my two and a half years as an MP, and I have come to recognise that we need a more competitive system that will ensure that people elected to this House are held to account more by the voters and less by the Whips. That might best be done by some form of open primary selection, and possibly some form of multi-member competitive constituency system.

I finish by saying that elected MPs currently have little appetite to hold the Executive to account. That is because they are inclined to act as cheerleaders either for the existing Executive or for some future one. That means more talk of regulation by ethical watchdogs, but if we rely purely on such ethical regulators and watchdogs to hold the political system to account, we will replace conscience with compliance. The best way of regulating public life is to have a House of Commons that is accountable to the electorate, and a political system in which the legislature holds the Executive to account.

The debate has been a good one, rather better tempered than yesterday’s exchanges. That is appropriate, because the truth is that the vast majority of people who come into public life—whether they be in Parliament, local government, the civil service or other public bodies—do so for the best of motives, and never lose sight of that during their careers. Indeed, every day in this House, we start proceedings with a prayer for ourselves and others in positions of authority within Government. The prayer says:

“May they never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals but laying aside all private interests and prejudices keep in mind their responsibility to seek to improve the condition of all mankind”.

Irrespective of whether people are religious, that is a pretty good code of conduct for Members. I am certain that all who speak those words mean them, whether or not they have any religious faith. I do not believe that they have their fingers crossed behind their backs. The very first line of the Committee’s marvellous report makes the point very clearly. It states:

“A rule based system should never substitute for a culture of high standards, rooted in the traditions of public life and shared by all those who participate in it.”

Whatever reforms of procedures and institutions we may discuss, we must never lose sight of the importance of that culture.

I do not believe—many hon. Members have said this—that in general standards are not high, but that is clearly not the public’s perception. As the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) said, trust in Government, and indeed in politicians more specifically, has declined. In the first line of her brilliant 2002 Reith lecture, Professor Onora O’Neill, now a peer, said:

“Confucius told his disciple…that three things are needed for government: weapons, food and trust. If a ruler can’t hold on to all three, he should give up the weapons first and the food next. Trust should be guarded to the end”.

That is very important in our civic life. If we are losing the trust of the people who send us here we need to do something about it, because it is a major problem.

We should also note that this loss of trust has taken place during a period in which—as the appendix to the report makes clear—14 ethical regulators have been established, half of them during the last five years. The Committee has done us a service by focusing on this issue, 12 years after John Major established the Committee on Standards in Public Life. While we are discussing the origins of that Committee, I think it appropriate to record our condolences to the family of Lord Nolan, its first chairman, who died earlier this year.

The Committee has made suggestions for reform, many of which we consider sensible. We hope that the Minister may be able to associate herself with them more clearly than the Prime Minister has so far, but I think we should now pause to consider, in overview, whether our present system is working. I was struck by evidence given to the Committee by Professor Dawn Oliver of University College London, who said in one of her contributions:

“The existence or creation of watchdogs signals the collapse of a trust based system…If trust and trustworthiness have broken down watchdogs may…generate even more mistrust and possibly unethical behaviour and legalism”

by encouraging people to

“focus on the letter rather than the spirit of the rules”.

We have a paradox: the more regulated we are, the more the perception of trustworthiness may be affected, and the more standards of behaviour may decline. It is almost as if we are being infantilised, and becoming like children responding to the admonitions of a parent. It is important for us to recognise that if all the decisions are in the hands of an ethical regulator, that parent-child relationship will become standard. I think that we should conduct ourselves, in this place and beyond, as adults. I say that lest we be tempted to establish new regulators in the years ahead. Regulators are nearly always established in response to a particular concern that has arisen: that is true of most of the regulators we have had in the past. The Committee’s report may make us pause to consider that in future.

As Lady O’Neill said,

“Elaborate measures to ensure that people keep agreement and do not betray trust must, in the end, be backed by trust…Guarantees are useless unless they lead to a trusted source, and a regress of guarantees is no better for being longer unless it ends in a trusted source.”

I agree with my hon. Friends that ultimately, that trusted source must be the people themselves. It must lead us back to democracy. These things cannot be contracted out; trust must come from the electorate. Too much of the direction in public life has moved away from that ultimate accountability to the electorate, and I am not convinced that the public trust in unelected representatives—unelected appointees—is any more than their faith in elected guardians of the public interest. That is why the Committee breaks important ground in recommending a system for ethical regulators to report in a collegiate way to Parliament. Even today, that would give greater independence than we currently have from Ministers. That would be an important step forward.

In respect of the special ethical regulators that we have, we should take heed of the Committee’s view that sometimes it is hard, or even impossible, to exercise a distinction between the ethical and the administrative. It behoves us all to be temperate in our consideration of reports from those regulators, because they find it difficult to distinguish between the two, and we damage trust in politics if we are seen to react too hysterically to reports before they have been properly investigated.

The direction of travel is clear. We need to have more parliamentary accountability. That is why I am a little critical of some of the Government’s initial reactions to the clear recommendations of the report. It is good that we have established the principle that fixed-term appointments are to be encouraged, but the Government can still delay appointments. We have seen that in the case of today’s appointment, which has been months in coming. It is also the case that that appointment did not conform exactly to the principles that have been recommended.

In an intervention earlier, I asked the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) whether the appointment was the subject of consultation between parties, as his Committee rightly recommended. My understanding is that that was not the case—that my party was not consulted. This is an important appointment; we are dealing with people’s confidence in standards in public life, and we have waited so long for the appointment to take place. It is disappointing that in making this apparently confidence-building appointment, the recommendation of the Select Committee was not followed. I therefore fear that the Committee that the hon. Gentleman chairs was not quite as influential as he might have hoped.

To move on to other areas, the hon. Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) rightly described the Government’s response to some of the recommendations as opaque. The Committee recommended that:

“Funding and operational challenge should be provided by a body independent of government”

and that:

“Appointment should be by Resolution of the House, and the names proposed should be agreed by consultation among the parties.”

All the Government have said on that is that they will give further consideration to the issues raised. The Committee’s report also recommended that all constitutional watchdogs should have the power to initiate their own inquiries. All we have heard from the Government is that they will make a commitment to consider the recommendation. Therefore, if we are to move to a new system of greater transparency and confidence, we have further to go.

If we are to be genuinely accountable to Parliament in the way suggested, the Government must start taking Parliament a bit more seriously in general terms. For example, it is important when we ask questions in Parliament and hold the Executive to account that we have the information made available to us, but my recent experience in questioning the Minister’s own Department—which is responsible for promulgating to civil servants across Whitehall the rules which say that parliamentary questions should be answered promptly and named day questions answered on the named day—is that it gives holding answers that prevent us from exercising that degree of scrutiny. It is important that we live up to the standards that we set ourselves.

As for how to move forward, I do not want to rehearse the well-made arguments of yesterday—I am sure I would be brought to order if I were to try—but it is incumbent on us all to be clear about some of the abuses, inadvertent or otherwise, that take place. When trade unions are reporting more donors of the political levy than there are members of the union, I do not know whether that is by design or accident, but we should have the courage to look into that and correct it. That is what my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude), who led from the Front Bench yesterday, wants us to do, and I know he would welcome a more positive Government contribution on that subject.

There is also the question of the advantages of incumbency, such as the communications allowance. If we seek to restrict spending by candidates while there are great financial advantages to incumbency, that corrodes confidence in public life.

It is important that the way that appointees, be they ministerial or public ones, conduct themselves is in keeping with the standards that we expect. I know that exchanges have taken place on this earlier today, but it was disappointing that one of the Government’s more recent appointments, Mr. Paul Myners, who has been appointed to a civil service post as head of the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority, made an ill-advised personal and political attack on some of my hon. Friends last week. On “Question Time”, he referred to the

“arrogant, superior young toffs who lead the Conservative party”.

That is not the kind of remark that we expect from a public servant. I know that the reputation of Mr. Myners in business is strong, but if someone is working for the public benefit in a position of trust, they ought not to make partisan political statements such as that on the record.

Some excellent contributions have been made in this debate. I have referred to some of the remarks of the hon. Member for Cannock Chase, who chairs the Committee. He made an excellent speech that forcefully made the case for his recommendations. They speak for themselves, and I hope that the Minister will give them a response.

The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) was a little premature in his hymn of praise to the Prime Minister, although it was tempered later in response to an intervention. We must wait a little to see whether we will have the enthusiasm that the hon. Gentleman expects. He mentioned the contribution of Sir Simon Jenkins to the report. It is a significant one, because when Sir Simon gave evidence to the Committee he made a powerful point about the importance of localism. He made the point that if we were sitting in New York debating confidence in public officials and public representatives, people would think first about the mayor of New York and local council members there, then about the governor of the state of New York, and ultimately about the President.

In this country, when people think about those in public life, they automatically go straight to the Prime Minister, Ministers and MPs. We seem to have lost that confidence in, and indeed the prominence of, people in civic positions between central Government and people’s lives. Having lost that is a fault, because people tend to have confidence in people whom they know, people whom they can see and—as was made clear earlier—people whom they can kick out. People do not feel that they can directly kick out the Prime Minister—they feel that they can do so only very indirectly—but those in their own constituencies and their own council areas should be more accountable to local people. That gap in the middle of our democracy corrodes our standards.

The hon. Member for Pendle made a slightly curious speech. He endorsed several of the points that I am making about the Government’s need to respond more proactively. He also expressed some regret for some of his party’s remarks during the 1990s and the contaminating of politics by dwelling too much on matters of sleaze, but he then launched into an unsubstantiated attack on Lord Ashcroft. I was not sure that such an approach had great consistency. The hon. Gentleman made a useful contribution in talking about the dance of the seven veils that the Government have been doing since July 1998, when they first promised a civil service Act. We await the publication of the legislation, and we hope that it has benefited from the scrutiny that the Public Administration Committee has given its own draft Bill and, subsequently, the various Government consultations on it.

My right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) is perhaps the only Member of this House to have been praised in the evidence that the Committee took. The eminent commentator Peter Riddell said in his evidence that the system of parliamentary regulation was much better than it had ever been,

“partly thanks to two individuals, Sir George Young and Sir Philip Mawer”.

The whole House knows what contribution my right hon. Friend has made to promoting standards in public life. The point that he made about the Standards Board is well founded. There can be no better example of the sort of parent-child relationship, in which the establishment of the board has encouraged bad behaviour in some councils, with tit-for-tat reporting of the most trivial alleged offences, which wastes public money and corrodes the confidence that people have in those institutions. We should take a much more sensible approach.

My right hon. Friend also mentioned the Prime Minister’s document, “The Governance of Britain”. That was a great opportunity to go further in proposing arrangements to enforce the ministerial code and ensure that the arrangements that we have for Ministers are as robust as those for MPs, but that opportunity was not taken. There was also the possibility of pre-empting some of the recommendations that we are making in this debate, but sadly, the rhetoric and hoop-la surrounding the great unveiling of that document have not been matched by its content.

The hon. Member for Luton, North paid an appropriately warm tribute to the Chairman of the Committee, and made a fascinating speech that drew attention to the need to hover above some of the micro-issues and ensure that we have the right systems set up that will serve us well for the future. The contribution that he has made, and continues to make, in the Committee, will do that too.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell) made his usual robust speech. He is a thoughtful and independent-minded Member, and I know that no one is more passionate than he is about restoring the importance of local democracy in our national life. His contribution today was in keeping with that.

We have had a good debate. We have covered a lot of ground. The report is excellent and challenging, but the Government’s response so far has been lacking. It has been opaque, although we now have an opportunity to hear from the Minister. I hope that she will take the opportunity—

Is the hon. Gentleman committing his party to supporting all the recommendations in the report, especially those on appointments?

As I said, there is much in the report with which we agree, but I cannot at this stage commit to its every jot and tittle. It enjoys our warm endorsement and it has been fed into our policy review. Our proposals will be published shortly, but we are concerned at the moment to hear from the Minister about whether the measures will be put before us in the Bill that we have been promised in this Session, so that we may change the law.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) on securing this debate. It has given the House a welcome opportunity to debate important issues with the benefit of what has been described as the bright light, or sunlight, shone by the Public Administration Committee. The debate was all the better for that.

I welcome the open and mostly constructive spirit in which the debate has taken place. I wish to place on record and emphasise that, as the Government said in our response to the Committee, we are giving serious and continued consideration to all the issues raised by the Committee and in this debate. Our commitment is to a continual improvement, and I think that that commitment is shared by right hon. and hon. Members.

I cannot emphasise enough that the Government are committed to maintaining the highest standards of conduct for those in public life. We welcome the Committee’s review of the regulation of that conduct, with its particular focus on the bodies that have been set up by the Government for this purpose. The Government also welcome the fact that the witnesses to the inquiry were convinced that

“public life in the early twenty-first century was cleaner than it had been before.”

I am pleased that that observation was approved by the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young). He has form in that regard, as he has always supported higher standards in public life.

The Government share the Committee’s views in a number of areas. First, we agree that the primary purpose of the system of ethical regulation is to ensure that standards of public conduct remain high. Many hon. Members have suggested as much today, and we accept that ethical regulation is a component of good government. Secondly, however, we agree that

“a rule based system should never substitute for a culture of high standards, rooted in the traditions of public life and shared by all those who participate in it.”

Thirdly, we believe that regulators have an important role in ensuring that people in public life are properly scrutinised and that they make an important and valuable contribution to upholding the highest standards. On those points, the Government are very much at one with the Committee, and much of what has been said today bears that out.

Before I go on to deal with specific points raised in the debate, I should like to add my tribute to the work done by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase and by the Public Administration Committee, which he has chaired so forensically and enthusiastically for a number of years now. As we have heard, he might have been standing at this Dispatch Box had he not made his views so clear in the speeches that he has made. However, I am grateful that he has given me the opportunity to stand here myself; I am for ever in his debt. The Public Administration Committee has produced a large number of recommendations of great quality over many years which have helped to shape the landscape of ethical regulation in this country. I repeat that I believe that standards in public are all the better as a result.

Before I deal with specific matters raised in the debate, I want to put the improvements that the Government have made and the bodies referred to in the report in some sort of context. Most significant in that regard have been the roles played by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and by Parliament. On 3 July, the Prime Minister made it clear in an announcement to the House that he hoped to agree a new constitutional settlement that entrusts more power to Parliament and the British people. In the Green Paper entitled “The Governance of Britain”, he set out two objectives for that settlement—namely, that the Government should be more accountable for the power that they hold, and that the rights and responsibilities of the citizen would be upheld and enhanced. Indeed, the Prime Minister has gone further and called on the House to work with the Government in a spirit that takes us

“beyond parties and beyond partisanship”.—[Official Report, 3 July 2007; Vol. 462, c. 815.]

Today’s debate forms part of that discussion, in which I hope that all hon. Members will participate in that spirit.

I shall begin with the Committee on Standards in Public Life, about which the report made clear recommendations. As I announced earlier, the Prime Minister has today appointed Sir Christopher Kelly to be the committee’s chairman. He will take up the post on 1 January and will continue the committee’s important work to ensure high standards across public life. I can assure the House that Sir Christopher was recruited through fair and open competition and in accordance with the rules of the committee for public appointments.

I should also like to take this opportunity to thank Rita Donaghy, a long-standing member of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. She has admirably filled the role of interim chair, and I am sure that the whole House would want to pay tribute to her.

Will the Minister explain why, in respect of such a sensitive appointment, it was not felt appropriate to consult the leaders of the main Opposition parties?

There may be some confusion about the Government’s commitment, so perhaps I can gently point out that we never made a commitment to consult Opposition parties about that appointment. However, we have made a commitment to consult the main Opposition party leaders on the appointment of the First Civil Service Commissioner and the Commissioner for Public Appointments. It may reassure the hon. Gentleman and other Members who made the same point to learn that Sir Christopher has indicated that he is more than willing to go before the Public Administration Committee at the earliest opportunity. I am sure that it will welcome that offer.

The Government have not yet committed themselves to the Select Committee’s recommendation about appointments. Will my hon. Friend give serious consideration to that recommendation and confirm that future appointments will not be made in the same way as the most recent one?

At the beginning of my remarks I said that we were considering all the points made by the Committee. We are keen to work with it to improve things where we can. Given the responses I have heard in the House today, I hope people will feel that the appointment was made in the right manner, in a spirit of openness. Furthermore, I have indicated the appointee’s willingness to make himself available to the Committee, which I am sure will be extremely welcome.

May I ask the Minister about the manner in which the appointment was announced? We discovered it at Prime Minister’s questions in response to a question. Was not it felt appropriate to make a written statement today that this very important appointment was to be made?

I refer the hon. Gentleman to the ministerial code, which indicates that Ministers should come to Parliament, as we have done, at the first opportunity. Indeed, a written ministerial statement has been made and the Prime Minister indicated that an announcement would be made later today, so the Government have been true to the proper spirit and the requirements placed upon us.

Will the hon. Lady give way?

I was about to refer to the points that the hon. Gentleman made, so perhaps I could do that first. He asked why the term of the previous chair was not renewed. Sir Alistair himself acknowledged that none of his predecessors had been appointed for a second term and, given that precedent, he had no expectation of reappointment.

My hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) referred to the fact that the previous occupant of the position had never met the Prime Minister. I am happy to tell the House, in the spirit in which I believe we should act, that the Prime Minister has scheduled a meeting tomorrow with the new chair and the outgoing interim chair, Rita Donaghy. I am sure that Members will welcome that commitment.

My hon. Friend and my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (David Heyes) referred to funding for the Committee on Standards in Public Life. I should like to make it clear that the committee’s budget has not been cut by 40 per cent., as was suggested. In fact, in evidence to the PAC in April 2006, Sir Alistair Graham said that the Committee had not faced any cuts, but had received the budget it sought. I have the figures if any Members want reassurance about the situation.

As I am the Minister with responsibility for civil service legislation, I was glad to hear the comments made in the debate today. The Public Administration Committee made a large number of recommendations in its report and they are directly relevant to the constitutional reform agenda that is being taken forward as part of “The Governance of Britain” Green Paper proposals. The Committee has welcomed the Government’s commitment to bring forward legislation on the civil service. This will be the first legislation of its kind from any Government.

I hope that right hon. and hon. Members will join me in paying tribute to the dedication and skills of those who work in the civil service. During my working day, I meet many civil servants, both in Whitehall and across the country, and I am constantly impressed by their hard work and commitment to public service. I thank them for the work that they do for the people whom we serve.

May I push the Minister a little further? Since 1998, it has been announced that a civil service Bill is on its way. We have had a draft Bill, but the Bill was not included in the Government’s draft legislative programme or the Queen’s Speech. What is the timetable for the Bill appearing before Parliament and what is the Government’s expectation of when it will be on the statute book and in force?

All good things are worth waiting for. It is important to note that we are the first Government to give this commitment. It will be within this parliamentary Session. The draft provisions to which the hon. Gentleman referred will enshrine in legislation the core principles and values that govern the civil service: impartiality, objectivity, integrity and honesty. I am sure that the House will understand that, at this stage, I cannot comment on specific issues—nor would it be appropriate to do so—but we are taking full account of the recommendations made by the Public Administration Committee in its report, and I am grateful to the Committee.

It is worth noting the action that we have already taken, independently of legislation. In June last year, we issued a new civil service code. It included the right for the civil service commissioners to take a complaint or concern directly from a civil servant about an issue under the code. Furthermore, the selection panels for the most senior civil service appointments are now chaired by the commissioner. The Government make an annual report to Parliament on special adviser numbers, costs and responsibilities. A new ministerial code was published in July and a revised code of conduct for special advisers was published in November.

As I said earlier, we are consulting the main Opposition party leaders on the appointment of the First Civil Service Commissioner and the Commissioner for Public Appointments. I am sure that the whole House welcomes the Government’s improvements in that regard. In addition, following a recommendation from the Public Administration Committee, and in line with arrangements for the new chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the appointments of the First Civil Service Commissioner and the Commissioner for Public Appointments have been converted, with the Queen’s agreement, to single fixed terms of five years.

Turning to public bodies and public appointments, the post of Commissioner for Public Appointments was created in 1995 to regulate, monitor and report on ministerial appointments to public bodies. The commissioner publishes a code of practice to ensure that the appointments process is open and transparent, and that appointments are made on merit. We have extended the code beyond the point at which it started. It previously applied only to NHS bodies and executive non-departmental public bodies. The Government have included advisory non-departmental public bodies and public corporations within the commissioner’s jurisdiction. That means—this is important in the context of our earlier debate—that about 10,000 appointments to more than 1,000 public bodies are now regulated by the commissioner.

Those public bodies provide vital services, from health to education to the protection of the environment, and including everything in between. They are created when that is the most efficient and effective way of delivering a service. The majority of those who serve are unpaid. There has been discussion about the number of public bodies. However, the number has fallen. In 1997, there were 861 public bodies sponsored by the Government, excluding those sponsored by the then Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Offices. By 2006, that number had fallen to 835.

There has been reference to the ministerial code. The Government agreed to a strengthening of the rules relating to former Ministers and the business appointments process. I assure the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire that the new ministerial code makes it clear that on leaving office Ministers must seek advice from the independent Advisory Committee on Business Appointments about any appointments or employment that they wish to take up within two years of leaving office. The code makes it clear that Ministers will be expected to abide by the advice of the committee. Previously, the arrangements were on a voluntary basis. On the new ministerial code, a new independent adviser on Ministers’ interests has been appointed, who can be invited to investigate allegations of wrongdoing. That represents a strengthening.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase made a comment about regulators and the need to put them on a statutory footing. It is important to say that the Government are committed to preserving the existence and independence of the various ethical regulators. The Public Administration Committee said that there needs to be further debate on the precise way in which ethical oversight is best arranged. We look forward to working with the Committee and the regulators to find out what further improvements are needed. Each of the ethical regulators is already accountable to Parliament. Their annual reports are published and they regularly give evidence to the Public Administration Committee. Again, if further measures are necessary, we will gladly continue to work with the Committee and the regulators on that.

The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) referred to caps on donations. Just yesterday the Secretary of State for Justice announced in the House that a White Paper would be published as soon as possible, and the Government will introduce legislation after that. That is an issue for all parties, as was brought out in the debate. I hope that we can work together to restore greater confidence in politics and politicians, which is what we all want. The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey also suggested that special adviser numbers be cut. Perhaps it would help the House if I made it clear that in the ministerial code, there are clear rules on the number of special advisers. Ours was the first Government to publish an annual report on the number and cost of special advisers. Perhaps we could give a bit of calm context to the numbers: the Prime Minister’s statement, published on 22 November, showed that a total of 68 special advisers were in post. That is out of a total of more than 500,000 permanent civil servants.

Will the Minister say how many special advisers were in post in 1997?

I believe that the number of special advisers is already a matter of record; the figure is in the Library.

The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey also suggested that the Government cut the number of press officers. Again, to give some context, there are 563 registered press officers in central Whitehall Departments. I believe, as many of us do, that it is essential that the Government inform the public effectively. I make no apology for campaigns on issues such as not drinking and driving, quitting smoking and handling national challenges such as foot and mouth—that is, on how to keep people safe in their daily lives.

My hon. Friend the Member for Pendle expressed concern that regulators could perhaps be abolished at the drop of a hat. I simply do not accept that suggestion. I hope that the manner in which I have responded to the debate and our wish to see regulators play a strong role will give him some reassurance.

The political honours scrutiny committee was abolished at the drop of a hat.

We are committed to the existence, independence and effectiveness of the regulators, because they help us to carry out our job. We should see them in that light.

The right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire suggested that the Ministers code was less robust than the MPs’ code. I referred earlier to the improvements that we have made. I wish to add a reassurance that Sir Philip Mawer will publish an annual report covering his work and role. Parliament will want to look at that closely.

The hon. Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell) spoke of holding the quango state to account. Perhaps I can offer him a reassurance that public bodies and central Government public bodies are ultimately accountable to Ministers. Chief executives are appointed as accounting officers. They can be and often are summoned to give evidence before the Public Accounts Committee. Those public bodies are required to have published complaints procedures in place. I have already indicated the downward trend in the number of those bodies. On lobbying, I look forward to the Public Administration Committee’s inquiry into the lobbying industry. We believe that the right approach is for the Government to ensure propriety in their actions and for the lobbying industry to regulate its own conduct.

The hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) spoke about party funding. It is worth the House recalling that it was this Government who introduced the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, which took important steps forward by setting up the Electoral Commission and the appointments committee and setting out requirements in respect of donations. The Government must complete that work and we will not hesitate to make any necessary changes.

In conclusion, the Government have never shied away from taking the action necessary to maintain and enhance the standards that the British people have a right to expect from us and which we are proud to deliver. The Public Administration Committee has made a huge contribution over the years to reinforcing and enhancing the principles and practice that guide the way in which holders of public office discharge their duties. The Government look forward to continuing to work with the Committee and the various regulators and to maintaining our commitment in this area.

Question deferred, pursuant to Standing Order No. 54(4) and (5) (Consideration of estimates).

Department for Work and Pensions