Bishop Hill Fixing MPs' expenses
May 11, 2009 Politicians Sleaze Here's a plan for how MPs' expenses should be dealt with in future. It goes without saying that immediate steps, such as displaying the heads of the current batch of malefactors at Traitors Gate, will have to precede any of this.
MPs represent their constitutents. They do not represent the state, or parliament or themselves. Their remuneration should therefore be strictly a matter between them and their respective constituents. 
My plan is therefore that during each general election campaign, candidates should announce how much they will cost their constituents if elected to serve at Westminster. This prospective cost will be registered with, say, the Electoral Commission. After the election, the winning candidate will go on to be paid the amount of money they originally proposed, each year for the duration of their time in Parliament.
In an ideal world, the cost would not only be agreed with the constituents but also be borne by them (or perhaps even by the electors who voted for him - that might concentrate minds!) but a practical way of putting this into practice eludes me for the moment. However, even the simple link between the cost of an MP and the electorate who choose him would have a salutory effect on Westminster.
For example, it would undoubtedly bring down the cost of an MP. If I recall correctly, the typical MP costs the taxpayer about £250,000 a year. I don't believe for a minute that this is a reasonable figure - much or it is surely "padding" - family members' sinecures a la Conway and so on - but there is absolutely nothing to stop candidates pitching for this kind of money if that's what they feel it takes. The big parties will have to look carefully at this issue in order to decide how much they need to pay to attract the kind of people they want. If the answer is £250 big ones then so be it. Smaller parties may feel they can win votes by pitching their candidates at a lower level. That's fine too. Who knows, maybe Dave Cameron will find that expensive old Etonians are suddenly not quite so important to Project Tory as he had previously thought.
There's no doubt that as soon the more a candidate's bid is seen as excessive, the more it will become a stick with which rival candidates can beat him. This can only be a good thing.
It would also deal with the different costs of representing different constituencies. The MP for the Western Isles (or whatever it's called these days) will probably have a different cost-base to the MP for Chelsea and Fulham (or wherever). Whether the cost of maintaining a constituency home in Benbecula rather than Chelsea offsets the cost of flying to the Isles each week as opposed to catching the number 24 bus from Westminster to your front door is a moot point. Let candidates and their constituents decide it among themselves.
Fixing MPs' expenses doesn't just mean "mending the system". I also mean "fixing" the cost of MPs: the remuneration figure would be static until the next election. No index-linking, "no adjustments". If politicians vote for inflationary policies, they have to live with the consequences. If they want to go on fact-finding missions to New Zealand, then that is their prerogative, but not a penny more should find its way to their coffers.
Of course, some will be concerned that rich Tory candidates will be able to undercut working class Labour candidates. There are a number of responses to this. Firstly, most candidates for elected office are now career politicians and they are therefore all in the same boat - they have essentially the same pecuniary needs. Secondly, it's not immediately obvious that Labour candidates are any less wealthy than Tories. Shaun Woodward is hardly worried about where his next meal is coming from. Thirdly, today's release of the Tory expenses scandals suggest that extreme wealth does little to attenutate politicians desire to extract money from the public purse: the risk of wealthy candidates offering to work for nothing seems limited. regrettable as that is. If this issue proved to be a sticking point, it would of course be quite easy to institute a statutory minimum: say twice median earnings, and perhaps with a minimal allowance for travel.
The way I see it going, providing MPs were not greedy about it, the cost of their remuneration would simply not be an issue at election time. If one candidate went in at £80k and another at £100k, nobody is going to treat it as an issue at the doorstep. People have bigger fish to fry than a difference of this size. But as soon as someone starts to look like they're on the make, they are electoral toast.
Which is as it should be.
(*The mystery is why he can manage this, but not one of the other MPs can. Anyone would think MPs were installing family members on sinecures rather than paying for staff.)
Reader Comments (4)
Great minds, and all that...
Controversially, I think MPs are too cheap (in their basic pay and office costs), not too expensive. I know how much I am paid (it's more than an MP), and I don't want people who are poorer-quality than me representing us. I'd have fewer of them, better-resourced offices (more like the American system), and pay for quality. (And I'd have fewer government departments and Cabinet Ministers as well. With that many opinionated people sitting around a table, is it any wonder that our policies are almost always committee camels?)
But I agree, if we left it to the electorate to decide, we'd find out what people think is worth paying.