It has today been announced that the newly appointed Chief Executive of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) is to be paid £120,000 – around £15,000 more than his predecessor.
The body responsible for administering the expenses of MPs and their staff has previously shown disregard for taxpayers’ money by decamping to a luxury hotel to discuss hiking MPs’ pay. That move itself was a case of sticking two fingers up at taxpayers, because the body spent no less than £70,000 on opinion research which established that the public thought MPs’ pay is broadly fair as it is.
Reacting to today’s announcement about the salary of the new IPSA boss, Jonathan Isaby, Chief Executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said:
Yet again IPSA is showing itself to be painfully out of touch with the general public.
When savings are rightly being found across the public sector, this pay hike for the new Ipsa boss shows an utter disregard for taxpayers' cash.
Ipsa has become a bureaucratic monster of a quango whose costly systems for processing MPs' expenses continue to deliver poor value for the considerable amount of taxpayers' money they swallow.