Jan 2009 21

Victory on MPs' expenses – for now9

The good news came through at Prime Minister's Questions today that the Government is going to drop its last-ditch attempt to keep MPs' expenses secret! This is great news for taxpayers – we will be allowed to see how our elected representatives spend our money. Thank you to everyone who wrote to our phoned their MP to urge them to support transparency and accountability. This quick fire battle is a reminder, though, that we must never take things for granted.

This was a debate that was won overwhelmingly last year, after several months of hard fighting in the aftermath of the Derek Conway affair. With the public, the Information Commissioner, the Commissioner on Standards in Public Life, the High Court and the House of Commons Authorities all backing full disclosure of expenses, no-one could have predicted that the Government would be brass-necked and arrogant enough to try to keep them secret after all.

And yet they did. Any horror movie fan could tell you that if you relax after embedding an axe in the face of the gruesome mutant that was trying to eat you, safe in the belief that they are now dead, that is the moment at which they will make one last lunge for your jugular. In this horror movie, Harriet Harman was that mutant.

She played her part well – picking the perfect time to launch her attack, with the cover of the Heathrow announcement to hide the original announcement, and timing it so that Barack Obama's inauguration would fill the media at exactly the same time the debate over MPs' expenses would be heating up.

But she was still defeated – thanks in part to the vigilance and hard work of the coalition of campaigners who fought these proposals over the last few days, but mostly down to the people power of all of you who wrote to your MPs. It is a victory for democracy, accountability and taxpayers' rights – it is our money, it is our Parliament and we have the right to see what goes on there.

This affair should teach us two things:

1) They respond to pressure. People often say that politicians never listen, but such was the strength of public feeling on this issue that they got really rattled. It is always worth standing up to be counted.

2) Be eternally vigilant. Even now we must not let down our guard. They have tried to wriggle out of transparency on expenses once, and they can try to do so again. Tomorrow's debate and vote is still going ahead, albeit without the Government's motion and a Three Line Whip on Labour MPs, and there will still be a vote on various aspects of the expenses rules, so we should still keep watch.

Whilst we can never simply rest on our laurels, we can take heart from today's victory. People power works.

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  • Steve Robson

    The FOI really is a loonies charter. it allows malicious organisations such as yours and everybody with an axe to grind about some minor issue to waste millions of pounds of taxpayers money requesting details about every daft question they can think of.
    When are you going to campaign against it? It must be costing a fortune in responding to all these requests about tuppence ha’penny. At the same time as you’re focussing on all this minutae, you’ve completely dropped the ball and not spotted your mates in the so called wealth creating private sector banks being paid millions per year and racking up vast expenses while they bankrupt the country.
    You should hang your heads in shame, both for being allied with the real villians and for missing the real costs that will blight taxpayers for years to come.

  • Mark Wallace

    Ah, yes, Steve, those famous loonies: the taxpaying public…
    The FoI Act is one of the best things done by this government because it lays down the principle that everyone has a right to see how their employees running their public services are spending their money. There is no reason why the public sector should spend other peoples’ money behind closed doors, and FoI has played a great part in increasing accountability in this country.

  • Steve Robson

    You choose to ignore I note:
    1) the huge cost of the FOI in responding to the vast number of queries it generates.
    2) the fact that the game has been lost while you have been worrying about this trivia. You took your eye off the ball big time, like we all did, but yours is still off it. We all have to pay high taxes for a generation to bail out your banker friends, who have earned (and kept) millions, yet you never criticise, while you crucify honest public servants for daring to earn over £50K pa.
    Never forget, private sector greed caused this mess (as Mr Obama rightly said), not the public sector.

  • Graeme Pirie

    Steve, tell us why FOI results in a huge cost?
    ANY organisation paying expenses, private or public, with half decent accounting methods will detail expenses anyway. Even owning my own business I detail all my expenses & could produce a detailed list for the last year in five minutes flat.
    Most of the info I’ve seen gathered by the TPA through FOI requests is very simple information that should be able to be gleaned from management accounts in a few minutes.
    The cost argument is one that’s most frequently used by those who want to hide information. Let’s not forget that it was those same politicians who made the law that are now whinging about complying with it. Surely “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” applies to them as well?
    In reality of course, the civil servants are employed anyway & even if detailed information was required it would cost nothing, simply some time from people who are being paid anyway. As Digby Jones said, half of them don’t have a job anyway.
    Now the banks, you’re quite right they’ve made an utter mess of things & should suffer for it. Personally I’d let a few of them go to the wall. However those with more sense than me have decided that they’re critical to the UK. Nonetheless you also miss the point that if we hadn’t been so highly taxed for the last 10 years then we might just have been better placed to weather this situation, without the fear of being up to our eyeballs in even higher taxes to pay for it all.
    Just a shame “no more boom & bust” was just more c**p from the man that thinks he saved the world.
    None of this makes the waste in the public sector right though.

  • Steve Robson

    No disrespect, but I suspect Councils turning over over a billion a year are a bit bigger than your business. It depends on the requests I guess, yes those for the TPA so called rich list are pretty straightforward, but others are more complex and more detailed than will be recorded on a single ledger code. They all take time and I think Councils would be able to employ less people without them (I know nothing of the Civil Service). That has to be contrasted with the fact that not a penny has been saved by the requests. No Council has paid less as a result of the rich list, because they know that to do so would end up costing them more as they would lack the people needed to deliver the savings to balance the books. You people choose not to believe it, but those involved know that substantial efficiency savings are delivered every year. Unfortunately costs rise too because of issues like an ageing population etc that organisations like the TPA either don’t get or choose not to.
    I honestly wish that the TPA was a better organisation who could work with the public sector to deliver real savings, but they choose instead to focus on sensational headlines rather than real savings. It is the people working in the sector that therefore have to deliver those, which is fine because its their job, but support rather than abuse would help.
    As I say this focus on trivia and headline grabbing is why the TPA have missed the ball and the fact that these bank bailouts will cost us all as taxpayers for a generation. I doubt savers would be happy if the government had let a few go to the wall. As a borrower with a few shares (via demutialisations), I could live with it. My shares are worthless now anyway and the mortgage doesn’t unfortunately go away with the bank’s collapse.
    Of course you are right that waste is not right, but as a taxpayer myself, the two biggest areas of waste for me are the Iraq escapade and the banking collapse, not whether my MP claims £20,000 or £21,000 in expenses.

  • Graeme Pirie

    Steve, I’d definitly agree with you that there’s a barrier between the likes of the TPA & the public sector.
    Where we differ I think is in where we see the issue to be. I like many other people including the TPA see criminal waste going on (and I don’t disagree regarding IRAQ & Banks) and I guess to those of us not in the public sector it seems like a slap in the face from councils etc who have gone way beyond their remit.
    Personally (although of course I didn’t like it) I know that 10 years ago I didn’t grumble too much about taxes, seeing them as a necessary evil. Now however, I am fuming about the level of my income that’s taken from me. At the same time, I see an ever growing “client state” where an expanding proportion of the population find it more beneficial to live off benefits than to work, where councils expand their empires week on week & think nothing of increasing council tax (mine has the attitude that a increase in line with inflation can be called “no increase”!) and at the same time don’t think their job is to collect my bin every week, where MPs become rich through second homes paid for by me, where police are paid to sit and fill in paperwork & a fortune is spent on NHS/education managers.
    I too wish government would work with the TPA (note I have put it the other way round!), but those in government seem not interested in reducing their empires and believe they know better than me how to spend my money. This is why the TPA needs to generate headlines. As they become more and more well known, government may listen.
    It’s an unfortunate reality of course that the many good people in the public sector rarely get a mention..

  • Hope

    Why are the MP’s not telling the public about the massive amount of money that is being spent on social workers/cafcass/fostercare/court/legal system in children ‘in care cases’ that are being prevented from being cared for by relatives, whilst the MP’s do nothing about forced adoption which is costing the taxpayer millions if not billions a year .
    Mp’s expenses are a mere drop in the ocean compared to these?

  • Steve Robson

    Graeme
    You seem reasonable enough. I just think you are wrong to say that Councils don’t care about the level of council tax. There are just huge pressures and they have to make huge savings just to meet ever increasing demands, which are underfunded by central government. Some of that is new requirements, some is caused by an ageing population and by pressures like people failing to look after their children so the state has to step in. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is.
    Where there is common ground is probably that the way to stop this is to actually stop doing things, stop benefits after a certain time, don’t have strategies for everything, don’t try to develop community capacity etc. I say again that its what government tried to do that costs money, not issues like expenses. I think it would be difficult to work with the TPA though because their research is too sloppy to be of any use; they’re a pressure group rather than a thinktank and I guess we need a thinktank with rather better developed, higher quality ideas.
    And finally to return to MP’s rather than obsessing about their expenses, why not just have less MP’s. If the US can manage with 435 Congressmen for five times the population, surely we could at least half our 650 MP’s. Then lose 80% of Councillors and we’re on the way. If we then cut back to one war a decade as well, we could be quids in!

  • Roy

    All of the rogue MPs are now owning up and saying sorry to the public, just because they have been found out.
    Not one of them would have uttered a word unless so.
    We need these MPs to repay all they have taken so greedily over the past five years, with interest, then sacked.
    Who are we to vote for? Who can we trust?
    What a load of pathetic people, the ones that is supposed to set an example, and make laws for all of us to abide by.
    Is it one for us and another for themselves?