Leading Article: Turn spotlight on moonlighting

IN Washington, members of Congress may soon need to take calculators with them to lunch. A new ethics law is expected to restrict gifts, including meals, from lobbyists to dollars 20; restaurants are already advertising dollars 19.99 menus.

Cash payments for speeches have been banned. Members are prohibited from practising professions such as the law, medicine and accountancy. Senators and Representatives cannot earn more than an additional 15 per cent of their official salaries outside Congress. Every 15 May they make detailed submissions about their wealth and income. These are the lengths to which the Americans go to ensure that legislators represent voters, not special interests. Salaries of about pounds 80,000 a year are meant to suffice.

Compared with these strictures, the British political system is wide open to corruption and utterly complacent. The most shocking revelation about the 'cash for parliamentary questions' scandal is that such arrangements are legal. Many MPs still spend mornings in professional practice or commercial enterprise. David Mellor's money-spinning activities are only the most famous. The ambition of every Tory MP seems to be to acquire a string of directorships.

There are no limits on the sums MPs can receive for helping political consultancies. Only sketchy information about what they are paid for is published, and then only in the Register of Members' Interests, to which most people have no access. Privately-held wealth and income remain largely undisclosed. Restrictions on ministers are tighter, yet, more than 160 years after the Great Reform Act abolished rotten boroughs, an MP could be in the pocket of a financial interest and no one might ever find out.

The issue of paying MPs for asking questions is easily resolved: it should be made illegal. A self-financing parliamentary information department could be created to meet the needs of those wishing to pay for such services.

Modest lunches aside, payments in cash or kind by lobbyists should also be abolished, The line between fees from political consultancies and bribery is hard to draw, so such a ban is the sensible course.

It would be tempting to follow the US example and prevent legislators from pursuing careers outside Parliament. But there is a strong argument that such activities keep MPs rooted in the real, outside world. Without other sources of income, they would also have to be better paid.

But, if restrictions in this area are not to be tightened, the public should know in exhaustive detail what MPs are up to. Full tax returns should be published annually, along with highly specific details of the tasks each member has performed for payment. This information should not simply gather dust on Westminster shelves. Far better to require all parliamentary candidates to disclose their interests in electoral communications when they face voters. That might encourage moonlighting MPs to behave with propriety and give better value for the taxpayers' money.