Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you very much.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you very much.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thanks a lot. It was a pleasure. I enjoyed it, actually. If you have any further questions in the future, I'll be very happy to help.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, that's exactly right. Under employment law, people can transfer, and on their same terms and conditions. I forget the exact number, but initially probably around 20 to 30 operational staff from the House of Commons did transfer over. Obviously, some of those have moved on now, but quite a lot of them are still with us.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, they are comparable, if not better.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, we are still regularly in the news. It's often attached to a particular announcement we're making—pay and pensions, for example. When we proposed a pay increase, as you can well imagine there was a strong public reaction and media reaction to that. When we published the annual data on MPs' expenditures in September, that created a lot of interest this year.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The question for you is always going to be what the problem is that you're trying to solve. In the U.K., parliamentarians felt the scandal was so big that we needed a wholly external independent operation. The question then is whether you can be truly independent if you're in-house.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, that's exactly right. As I say, it's quite a turbulent process. Getting the legislation through, setting up a new body, establishing it, the transitional processes. So you do have to ask yourself if your problem is big enough to make that kind of change. I can't answer that for you, obviously.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It confirmed the information commissioner, and we are appealing to a higher tribunal, essentially on points of law.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Hello. Thank you. Fingers crossed....

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Okay, I think I finished my answer.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I can't remember the exact percentage of the number of claims I turned down. It's a tiny, tiny amount. Again, you can see them on our website individually. We call them “not paids” and they are very few and far between. So yes, I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of MPs are complying very happily with the rules and are claiming things they need for their parliamentary business.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think there are two principal reasons. One is that we believe very strongly that all the relevant information has already been published, and the way we do it helps to deal with that risk, as I said earlier, of accidentally giving away personal information. The information commissioner disagreed with us and it was almost for things like, what's the colour of the heading, or did the MP scribble something on it?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's reports, advice, and things like that; we don't publish verbatim transcripts.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, that's right. For example, if we're advising the board on changing the rules on something or other, if there's a paper on that and somebody asks to see it—because they've seen it referred to in the minutes—then we'll consider what we can and can't show them. Our assumption is to try to, if we can, actually provide the information.