MPs’ Expenses
The House of Commons Commission published MPs’ and Lords’ expenses on Thursday (26 October) generating a good deal of press coverage. I was live on Sky News debating with Grant Shapps the reasons why MPs should provide a more detailed breakdown of their expenses.
We’d been told the expenses would be published at the highly inconvenient time (for reporters) of 3.30pm that day. It was some poor hack’s job to keep pressing the ‘refresh’ button on the House of Commons website to see when they were published. In the end, they came out at 3.45pm.
Currently MPs only provide bulk figures in set categories for the entire year. As I’ve said before, such wholesale sums can hide a myriad of sins. For example, there is no way to tell if an MP is say, claiming for taxi journeys when he isn’t even in the county. It was only when Scotland moved to a detailed breakdown of its MSPs’ expenses that such abuse was revealed, leading to the resignation of Tory leader David McLetchie. Another MSP quit and several others had to pay back improper claims.
While Scotland steams ahead into the age of open government, Westminster continues to stubbornly refuse all FOI requests for a detailed breakdown of costs. I have three cases now pending against the House of Commons for a) travel expenses, b) additional costs allowance including mortgage payments, c) names and salaries of MPs’ staff. These are all at various stages of appeal.
The House of Commons Commission is fighting all disclosure. But as the government is fond of telling us every time it invades our privacy, surely if you’ve nothing to fear then you’ve nothing to hide. The sustained stubbornness with which MPs’ are refusing to account for spending public money fuels suspicion that the system is corrupt and poor value for money.
As Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers’ Alliance told BBC News: “It’s not surprising people think politicians have got their snouts in the trough.”
As a further ruse to make it more difficult for the public to quickly get a sense of who spends the most, the Commons’ releases the expenses in a static, non-searchable PDF.
I have created a more user-friendly searchable Excel expenses chart with totals (135kb).
Press on MPs’ expenses
Evening Standard - Fury over Westminster Gravy Train
Information campaigner Heather Brooke, from the website Your Right to Know, says: “These people are paid for with our money and we have a right to know who they are and what they are doing.”
Guardian - MPs’ expenses claims hit record £86.8m
It’s not surprising that politicians think they can get away with these huge expense accounts because there’s no transparency in the system,” said Heather Brooke, a campaigner for open government and the author of Your Right to Know.
MPs’ expenses was also the main topic of conversation on last Thursday’s edition of Your Money on the fledgling internet television station 18 Doughty Street. In case you haven’t heard about it yet, this is one of the first internet TV stations in the UK, though they are fairly well established in the USA.
October 31st, 2006 at 9:47 am
I’ve put up the expenses on http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ on each MP’s page, so you can compare them with previous years; e.g. http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/tony_blair/sedgefield
November 2nd, 2006 at 6:27 pm
What’s “non-searchable” about that PDF? The little binoculars button seems to work fine for me.
And what’s wrong with them publishing at 3.45? This might be inconvenient for journalists - although even then you might concede that Commons staff should tend to spend their mornings preparing information for debates and so on, before turning to FoI requests - but the FoI Act isn’t for journalists, it’s for members of the public. Who probably don’t care what time the information becomes available, unless it’s time sensitive, which this is not.
That kind of complaint is similar in vein to the grumbling about departments publishing their FoI disclosures on their websites, and so preventing journalists from getting scoops, even though the information reaches more members of the public that way.
January 8th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Using “They work for You” I emailed my local MP to enquire about his IT budget, which had been the same amount for three years running. Seemed strange to me, as a builder of PCs, as the cost of technology has fallen considerably in that period.
He didn’t know how the figure was arrived at, although said that he “hadn’t had any new PC in the office for years” and assumed there was a centralised cost for each MP. I tried some random samplings but couldn’t correlate a cost ratio, even when looking at staffing allowance in case the IT budget covered office staff too.
This was at the end of 2005. When the expense figures were released in 2006, his IT expense budget was £0. What a co-incidence.