Just how far are their snouts in the trough?

A thought occurred to me the other day. If MPs are using their expenses to pad out their paltry sixty grand salaries, then it might be possible to see this by analysing the expenses figures and looking at how they correlate with other data. My first idea was that there should be some correlation between the travel expenses and the distance from the MPs' constituencies to Westminster.

The House of Commons Expenses data for 2006-7 is here. As is normal with sensitive data like this, it is provided in a format carefully chosen to make analysis as difficult as possible. However, with a trial copy of Adobe Acrobat, and a bit of jiggery pokery in Excel I've managed to get what I think is a clean set of data. I've removed from it those people who are no longer MPs - including Tony Blair.

Having eyeballed the data, the travel expenses didn't actually look as if they were going to throw up anything nefarious. Because of this, and because the staff costs were so much higher, I decided to analyse these instead.

My hypothesis was this: if MPs are employing lots of staff, their office costs should be inflated too, to reflect all the work done by the staff. I therefore prepared a scatter plot of office costs (columns 3, 7, 7a and 8 on the PDF file) against staffing costs (column 4). Here it is:

 

I've asked Excel to calculate a linear trendline, which you can see on the graph. And if you were in any doubt as to how good a correlation there is between staff costs and office expenses, the answer is that there is none. Literally. (For those who aren't statisticians, the R² value of 1E-5 which is to say, near as dammit zero, is the figure which tells you whether there's a correlation or not. A value of near to 1 is a strong correlation. Zero means there is none.)

Which strongly suggests that quite a lot of our elected representatives are on the fiddle.

(If anyone wants the data, you can download it by clicking here). 

Comments

[John East]

You've nailed them. This data is damning proof that they are all crooks.

Isn't it a shame though that they don't care, and still won't care after your revelations.

I was tempted to suggest that you tip off the MSM to your findings, but can you imagine The Sun or BBC news running with an Exel graph and discussing "r" values? No, neither can I.

[manc_ill_kid]

Whilst Excel can't find any trend, you can kind of see one. If you have your line of correlation from zero to the honourable member at the top right, the further your MP deviates from the line, the more on the fiddle they are. Also none of them are above this line, apart from the chap at the bottom left who seems to have filled in his form wrong.

The chap on the far right is either on the fiddle or forces his staff to work from home and provide their own post-it notes, either way he ought to be investigated.

[Bishop Hill]

Actually, the chap on the bottom left (who is Philip Hollobone) has done his form correctly. Apparently Mr Hollobone has no staff, and types all his own letters.

It makes the the rest of them look either stupid or dishonest. And probably both.

[Peter]

You might want to check the data in your spreadsheet - the name in the 'first' column often doesnt match the 'full' column, for instance, have a look at the four Labour Browns, or Glenda and Stewart Jackson.

Of course this doesn't invalidate your point about correlation of expenses and staff costs, just causes confusion about who's got the bigger snout.

[Peter]

Breaking the figures down by party shows that Labour has a much bigger scatter than Con or LD - particular on office expenses (eg Siobhan McDonagh, Liam Bruce, Margaret Hodge - Minister of State for Culture, Media & Sport). In fact the top 20 spenders on office expenses are all Labour MPs...

I wish I could remember more of the statistics I learnt in the past.