A link from a national heroine

It's not often that one gets a blog link from someone currently being hailed as a national heroine. In my case, it's Heather Brooke, the freedom of information campaigner who has, more than anyone, been responsible for getting the details of MPs' expenses out into the open.

Heather picked up on my posting about Michael Martin's use of the s34 exemption to the Freedom of Information Act to quash a request about MPs' paid-for trips abroad. It turns out that this exemption was put in place to deal with pressing matters of national security! This is starting to look like a pattern in government legislation isn't it? "Counter-terrorism laws will only be used against terrorists" and so on.

Mr Speaker has also, it seems, used the exemption to deal with matters even less pressingly important than overseas junkets - for example the setting up of the Parliamentary Beer Group.

MPs' tolerance of Martin in the position of speaker is starting to look almost as culpable as their expense claims.

In the meantime, Heather has been setting up an online petition. Together with the Taxpayers' Alliance, she is demanding full disclosure of MPs' expenses. This seems like a pretty good one to sign up for.

Who should represent you?

Reading between the lines of the reports of Cameron's press conference on Tory MPs' expenses yesterday, he has gone as far as he can with the parliamentary Conservative party. As Adam Boulton explains, paying back the ill-gotten gains is as far as Tory MPs are willing to go.

When someone is punished, either they are contrite and take their punishment or they are not. Clearly the Tory MPs are not. They still feel that they are in a position to negotiate over what their punishment will be. They presumably still feel they have done nothing wrong - the argument that "it was within the rules" argument seems to dominate their thoughts.

Lots of people have pointed out that this kind of thinking suggests an inability to distinguish right from wrong. This is undoubtedly true.

And we can't have people like that as our representatives in Parliament.

It's very sad for Cameron, who I think would go further if he had the ability to do so, but he relies on the parliamentary party for his position. He cannot force the crooks out. So there's no alternative but for the electorate to deal with the issue themselves. The fact remains that decent people cannot vote for the three big parties and I hope they give their verdict accordingly.

My party? Or my country?

What jolly japes this expenses saga is launching.

Lord Tebbit has announced this morning that people should not vote Tory - or words to that effect; it was slightly more nuanced than that. This has got readers at Conservative Home in a bit of a tizzy, with Jonathan Isaby arguing that the whip should be withdrawn from the noble lord.

The thing is though, surely Lord Rottweiler is right - surely nobody with a shred of decency would want to vote for a party awash in corruption and graft? Jonathan Isaby is obviously keen to maintain internal discipline in the party he supports, but this is the problem with party politics. At times, you are put in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between what is best for your party and what is best for your country.

I would have thought that the only possible answer to the dilemma is to choose country over party, if one is to maintain even a shred of self-respect. Decent people will refuse to vote Tory, just as Lord Tebbit suggests.

I wonder how many Conservatives support the Isaby line?

Is Michael Martin covering up still more corrupt practices?

What an odd coincidence.

While passing my eye over recent decisions of the Information Commissioner (as one does),  this ruling caught my attention.  A member of the public had asked for correspondence and documentation relating to whether members of parliament should declare overseas trips paid for by the British Council.

The Parliamentary authorities ruled that the information was exempt under the Freedom of Information Act, because its release would "infringe the privileges of the house".

The request went to internal review, was rejected again, and was then passed to the Information Commissioner for a final decision.

At this point, who should intervene but Speaker Martin, Gorbals Mick himself, who promptly issued a certificate under s43(3). This part of the Freedom of Information Act essentially says that the Speaker is  going to be the arbiter of whether Parliamentary privilege is in danger or not.

He decided that it was. Quelle surprise.

So, reading between the lines, would you say that the British Council has been paying for MPs holidays and that Speaker Martin has intervened to keep everything hushed up?

Rotten timing for Mr Speaker, isn't it?

This is fun!

Michael Martin loses it over expenses....

Douglas Carswell tables a motion calling for Martin to quit, the first such call for a speak to go since 1694....

Conservative Home says tomorrow will be very ugly for the Tories...

And there's hints of more to come...

Fixing MPs' expenses

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.

To be clear about this, the amount of money that is to be registered is intended to cover all of an MP's expenses: salary, pension, subsistence, accommodation, staff and so on, including the "rotten allowances" like resettlement.  But there would be nothing to stop efficient MPs like Philip Hollobone (who mysteriously*, but admirably, runs his office without any staff) using the surplus he could generate to line his pockets with. That would be the reward for efficiency.

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.)

They are crooks

Yes, the politicians have their noses in the trough...again.

Another day, another story of sleaze

It's remarkable how the story of an elected representative getting their comeuppance can cheer one up. And with this morning's news that Conservative chairman Caroline Spelman has been on the fiddle too, I have a positive spring in my step. That's now four Tories caught out.

The deafening silence from the other parties continues too, and I have no doubt they are as bad, if not worse. If you look at the results of the Open Europe survey of MEPs that started this run of sleaze stories off, it can be seen that Labour and LibDem MEPs were even more evasive about answering questions about their expenses than the Conservatives.

I don't think we've heard the last of this.

Zipedeedoodah, zipedeeay..... 

Sleaze in Chichester and Dover

Guido has been doing great things in pushing the Giles Chichester sleaze story to the top of the news agenda, and it looks as though one of GC's colleagues will be following shortly.

There's an almost deafening silence from the other parties, which a cynic like me takes to mean that they're all at it. Gordon Brown did have this to say about his own MEPs though:

He said Labour MEPs had "insisted since 2000 on their being separate validated audits of their own expenses and they have a separate register about family employment".

What we should note about this is that none of these arrangements would have picked up the scam that Giles Chichester seems to have been operating. An audit would have noted valid invoices from a service provider company. Tick. The register of family employment would have correctly shown that he didn't employ any family members (they were employed by the service provider company, right?).

This is a classic case of saying something that looks like a denial, but which on closer inspection, isn't anything of the sort. 

More statistical analysis of MPs' expenses

Following my recent post on the lack of correlation between MPs' staff costs and the amount they spent on office costs, I thought of another interesting test I could do.

TheyWorkForYou publishes figures detailing what proportion of letters sent via their website are actually responded to within a reasonable time. We would expect that MPs with large staff costs should be able to get prompt replies more often than their understaffed colleagues, wouldn't we? (Actually, given we think they're paying their wives and families to do nothing, we wouldn't expect this at all, but let's play along with the hypothesis, shall we?)

Here's the graph:

Again, I've plotted a best fit line so we can understand what's going on a little better.

This time, there is a microscopic correlation, but even so, it's still not good news for our friends in Westminster. The slight downslope to the graph actually seems to show that an MP with low staff costs is more likely to answer his correspondence on time than his high claiming counterpart.

What possible explanation can there be for this anomoly?

I just can't imagine.... 

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). 

More on sleaze

It looks very much like Cash for Conways was not an isolated incident.

The Telegraph is reporting that more than fifty MPs have laid off staff since our Derek was sent down. Meanwhile, Guido has noted that most of Labour MP Tom Watson's family seem to be suckling on the public teat. Watson pays his wife as an assistant, but it's even better than that:

Like her husband, [Mrs Watson] also works for [Euro MP Michael] Cashman and for Wolverhampton Labour MP Pat McFadden, yet still finds time to be a Labour councillor in Sandwell.

And the political classes are rushing to destroy the evidence. According to the Telegraph article, it was alleged yesterday that Speaker Michael Martin has permitted the shredding of MPs expense claims prior to 2005. 

As these expense claims form part of the MPs' remuneration, isn't this illegal? 

Unaccountable

Matthew Parris says that holding Gorbals Mick (I thought he was a Jock?) accountable is not the job of the public or the media but of MPs.

I don't think the question of whether Mr Speaker Martin should resign is any business of mine, or yours, or the British media's, or the British public's. I think it's for sitting MPs, and for Mr Martin himself, to consider and decide. And in making that decision I doubt that he or they should take much notice of any of us.

Now this is all very well, but we have also been told in recent days that no sitting MP will risk criticising the speaker for fear of never being called to speak again. All we've had is a chorus of Labour MPs cheering him to the rafters and making vague claims of snobbery.

This one-sidedness is so pronounced, it completely undermines the idea that MPs can hold the speaker to account. So it's pretty much inevitable that the press and the blogs are going to have to do the work for them.

Mind you, if the idea of recall referendums ever takes off, then we might have real public accountability.  

More on MPs' expenses

The inimitable Guido Fawkes has pointed out that of the three MPs appointed by Gordon Broon to investigate MPs' expenses

• David MacLean (Con) was the architect of the recent attempt to exempt aforementioned MPs' expenses from the Freedom of Information Act
• Stuart Bell (Lab) employed his son as a researcher (and the little brat used his access to the palace of Westminster to do some thieving to supplement his income)
• Nick Harvey (LibDem) is a part-time lobbyist

For the record it's also worth noting that Stuart Bell was one of those who voted in favour of David MacLean's bill making MPs' expenses secret. Nick Harvey didn't vote.

So, of the three people appointed, two are against any sort of transparency, and all three are compromised.

Eminently predicatable.