On Saturday Gordon Brown said he had to deal with more important issues than MPs’ expenses.

This morning expenses are a top priority and he announced an expenses overhaul within the week.

Could it be that a certain Dispatches broadcast Sunday evening had anything to do with this? Surely not?

The promised changes include:

• Full receipts for ALL claims- GREAT
• Getting rid of second home claims for those living within commuting distance of London. SENSIBLE
  No allowance for those MPs living in grace-and-favour accommodation. – ABOUT TIME!
• Scrap second home allowance and introduce daily attendance rate – BAD. The whole point must be transparency. A daily attendance rate doesn’t give that. An MP could still buy an IPOD on expenses. The point isn’t that voters balk at paying for legitimately claimed expenses, it’s the illegitimate claims that rankle. The only way to ensure the propriety of claims is to have a transparent system.
• Transparency of MPs’ Second Incomes – GOOD but the reporting limit for items that must be declared in the Register of Members’ Interests must be lowered from £650 to something closer to £50.
• MPs’ staff to become direct employees of the House of Commons. GOOD IN PART. But we still aren’t told the names and salaries of MPs staff which is the only way to know if someone claiming a salary is actually doing the work commensurate with that payment.

If you missed it, or want to see it again, you can now watch this on the Channel 4 website and scroll down to:
Dispatches: The Westminster Gravy

From the Channel 4 Website

The Palace of Westminster is meant to be the mother of all Parliaments. It is lauded as a beacon of democracy. Dispatches set out to examine the state of our primary political institution: how democratic is it and how accountable are MPs and Lords to the citizens they are meant to represent.

I had my own reasons for being concerned with the state of our democracy. When I first made a freedom of information request for a detailed breakdown of MPs’ expenses five years ago I was pretty much laughed at. It was considered inconceivable that the average member of the public could be allowed to trawl through an MPs’ ‘personal’ receipts. I put the case that these receipts had nothing to do with an MPs’ personal life. Expenses and allowances can only be claimed to meet costs incurred on MPs’ parliamentary duties. There should be nothing personal about them.

Five years on and having won a case in the High Court I am still waiting for these receipts. I did not anticipate the truculence with which Parliamentary authorities and some politicians met the public’s demand for greater transparency and accountability. While the public are looking for ‘Google Government’, a place where they can access all information easily in a format that is accessible, Parliament seems to exist on another planet, at least another century. Too many seem to believe that they can pass laws that affect the public and spend public money without putting forward their detailed reasoning or being directly accountable to citizens. This has led to a feeling that politicians are more concerned with representing their own interests rather than the public’s.

The structure of Parliament appears to favour political insiders at the expense of the general public who pays the bills. What other person has a boss who allows an expense system like that outlined by Andrew Walker in The Green Book? Walker, the director of the Department for Finance & Administration, stated in The Green Book: ‘It is your responsibility to satisfy yourself when you submit a claim.’ He also states that his office prides itself on the ‘high quality of our service and on our confidentiality.’ I wondered why they were so proud to offer confidentiality as one of their services. After all, the fees office distributes the public’s money. Expenses can only be claimed by an MP for his official duties. There should be a commitment to transparency, not confidentiality.

I thought the story was over when I won my Information Tribunal case in February 2008 which ordered the receipts be disclosed. Leadership comes from the top, primarily the Speaker of the House Michael Martin who chairs the Members Estimates Committee and who introduces the rules in the Green Book, the rules by which MPs claim allowances. But it was Mr Martin who rejected the advice of his original legal team and hired another one at vast public expense to appeal to the High Court. If he thought the threat of going to the High Court would dissuade me, he was wrong. I went ahead with the help of my own lawyers and we won.

In May 2008, the High Court judges ordered disclosure of all receipts and claims of the 14 MPs in the original requests, along with the addresses of their second homes. The House of Commons acknowledged their sound defeat by stating all receipts for all MPs would be published in October 2008.

That date came and went. I was then told the receipts would be published in December. That date, too, came and went. Still no receipts. The Commons claimed that it was time-consuming work, scanning all the receipts and blacking out sensitive information. But this ‘sensitive’ information was being defined subjectively by the MPs, not – as the High Court ruling stated – by certain defined principles. Why should Margaret Beckett be allowed to redact, or black out, the name of the firm who she tried to purchase a pergola from at taxpayers’ expense?

After the winter recess, MPs came back and had the gall to try for a second time to exempt themselves entirely from the Freedom of Information Act. Eventually, they were shamed into dropping this highly unpopular proposal. They were more successful, however, in exempting their home addresses from public scrutiny. The High Court had also ruled that these addresses were the only way to ensure the second homes allowance was being correctly spent.

At 9pm on 2 March 2009, just as debate on the Political Parties and Elections Bill was about to end, Julian Lewis MP stood up and inserted an amendment that exempted all MPs addresses from the Freedom of Information Act. So we have the situation now where the only class of people excluded from the electoral registers is our elected representatives! The point is that only by knowing these addresses can cases such as that of Jacqui Smith and Tony McNulty be known. As long as these addresses are kept hidden, the public can have no confidence that MPs’ second homes claims are being used properly.
(more…)

There are very few places in London where you can get a slap-up meal for less than £2.50, but Parliament is one of them.

Using freedom of information, I obtained the menus of all the restaurants and cafes in the Palace of Westminster while working on the Channel 4 Dispatches programme: The Westminster Gravy Train. The menus reveal the hugely discounted meals members have access to.

Soup for 60p! This must be the only place in London where you can get such cheap fare apart from a soup kitchen.

MPs are not poor by any means, yet their meals are being subsidised by the taxpayer.

If you go to the British Library, where there are lots of students, the food is about £4 or £5 higher. Why shouldn’t that be subsidised? Poor students, researchers and writers seem more suitable candidates for subsidy than MPs and Lords.

Tune into your TVs this Sunday April 19th to see the culmination of my long investigation into parliamentary transparency. Is this a House fit for purpose? Is it reflective of a modern democracy? How can we ensure our elected politicians are representing our interests and not solely their own?
Channel 4 Dispatches: The Westminster Gravy Train.