The wives, husbands and other family members currently employed at the tax-payers' expense plan to apply for jobs with other MPs as a way of dodging the guidelines expected to be recommended by Sir Christopher Kelly next month.
Sir Christopher, the chairman of the committee on standards in public life, has been tasked with drawing up tough new rules to stop MPs abusing their allowances and expenses after the Daily Telegraph exposed widespread wrong-doing earlier this year.
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Showing posts with label MP's Expenses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MP's Expenses. Show all posts
Monday, October 26, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
MPs Planning to Use Taxpayers' Money to Pay for Childcare
John Bercow, the Speaker, is backing plans for the Commons to offer a "short-term, short-notice" child-minding service for MPs.
The "core funding" of the new childcare service is to come from public money. Members will also pay a fee for using the service.
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The "core funding" of the new childcare service is to come from public money. Members will also pay a fee for using the service.
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Saturday, June 20, 2009
MPs Spent £1.2 million Hiding Expenses
Blacking out many of the most interesting and controversial details of MPs’ expenses was an expensive operation carried out on Parliament’s instructions by the Stationery Office, the privatised publisher of official documents.
The company was contracted by the House of Commons to prepare the claims for release after Parliament lost a three-year legal battle with journalists and freedom of information campaigners to keep the information secret.
Read more...
The company was contracted by the House of Commons to prepare the claims for release after Parliament lost a three-year legal battle with journalists and freedom of information campaigners to keep the information secret.
Read more...
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Police Rule out Broad Inquiry Over MPs' Expenses
Senior police and prosecutors have announced they will not launch criminal investigations into more than 100 MPs over their apparent abuse of parliamentary expenses.
The Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan police said today that after examining "numerous cases" they found there was no prospect of a fraud conviction in any of them because there was no evidence that the individuals involved misled the Commons fees office.
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The Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan police said today that after examining "numerous cases" they found there was no prospect of a fraud conviction in any of them because there was no evidence that the individuals involved misled the Commons fees office.
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Monday, May 25, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
MPs Quit - and Blame the Voters
MPs caught up in the expenses scandal blamed the anger of their constituents and the public backlash for their decision to quit Parliament.
Ben Chapman, Labour, and Anthony Steen, a Conservative, said that they would stand down at the next election while maintaining that they had done nothing wrong.
In an astonishing outburst Mr Steen, who spent £90,000 on his second home, including big sums for lopping trees in its grounds, said that his critics were jealous because he lived in a large house. He blamed the Freedom of Information Act for his plight and asked what right the public had to interfere with his private life.
“I’ve done nothing criminal, that’s the most awful thing, and do you know what it’s about? Jealousy,” he told the BBC. “I’ve got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral. It’s a merchant’s house of the 19th century. It’s not particularly attractive, it just does me nicely.”
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Ben Chapman, Labour, and Anthony Steen, a Conservative, said that they would stand down at the next election while maintaining that they had done nothing wrong.
In an astonishing outburst Mr Steen, who spent £90,000 on his second home, including big sums for lopping trees in its grounds, said that his critics were jealous because he lived in a large house. He blamed the Freedom of Information Act for his plight and asked what right the public had to interfere with his private life.
“I’ve done nothing criminal, that’s the most awful thing, and do you know what it’s about? Jealousy,” he told the BBC. “I’ve got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral. It’s a merchant’s house of the 19th century. It’s not particularly attractive, it just does me nicely.”
Read more...
Monday, May 18, 2009
40% of UK Voters Would Shun the Three Main Political Parties
Disenchantment among the British electorate with the three main parties is at a record high after 10 days of revelations about the expenses claims of the nation's MPs.
Two in five say they will refuse to vote or select one of the minor parties, such as the Greens or Ukip, rather than support the Tories, Labour or the Liberal Democrats, a ComRes poll shows.
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Two in five say they will refuse to vote or select one of the minor parties, such as the Greens or Ukip, rather than support the Tories, Labour or the Liberal Democrats, a ComRes poll shows.
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Sunday, May 17, 2009
MPs' expenses: shoot them or jail them – public is after revenge
It was fortunate that Andrew MacKay did not encounter one of his elderly constituents when the Conservative MP defied growing public fury to show his face in Bracknell town centre yesterday.
"I can see ordinary people going round with shotguns and shooting them all," said a pensioner in this industrious Berkshire town. She was so enraged by MPs' expenses, she said, that she was tempted to shoot the Speaker herself.
The days when Dick Turpin reputedly rested up in a pub where this new town now sprawls have long gone. But voters outside Westminster are increasingly convinced that their representatives have got away with daylight robbery.
As Keith Rogers put it in Sleaford, where Conservative MP Douglas Hogg belatedly agreed to pay back £2,200 spent cleaning his moat: "This is not politics. It's theft. MPs' allowances are more than most people's wages in Lincolnshire."
When MPs returned to their weekly surgeries and other duties in their constituencies yesterday, they encountered a landscape transformed by revelations about their expenses. The cynicism of many voters towards Westminster had been replaced by something much more engaged, but also far more enraged.
Read more...
"I can see ordinary people going round with shotguns and shooting them all," said a pensioner in this industrious Berkshire town. She was so enraged by MPs' expenses, she said, that she was tempted to shoot the Speaker herself.
The days when Dick Turpin reputedly rested up in a pub where this new town now sprawls have long gone. But voters outside Westminster are increasingly convinced that their representatives have got away with daylight robbery.
As Keith Rogers put it in Sleaford, where Conservative MP Douglas Hogg belatedly agreed to pay back £2,200 spent cleaning his moat: "This is not politics. It's theft. MPs' allowances are more than most people's wages in Lincolnshire."
When MPs returned to their weekly surgeries and other duties in their constituencies yesterday, they encountered a landscape transformed by revelations about their expenses. The cynicism of many voters towards Westminster had been replaced by something much more engaged, but also far more enraged.
Read more...
Friday, May 15, 2009
The Spectator:Why Won’t My Employer Pay Me to Look After My Castle While I’m in London?
The thing that puzzles me is why did Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, need to buy a whole box of tampons? I can understand that he might wish to look at one, out of curiosity. But it seems profligate, if you’re the taxpayer, to shell out for a whole boxload. Couldn’t he have just borrowed one from his missus, if he was that interested? Apparently you are breaching the House of Commons rules if you claim for tampons for someone else — and so Phil is bang to rights. But it is ok if you are a lady and wish to use them for the purposes intended by the manufacturer. When you think about it, this is a little puzzling, too. Is there something about life in the House of Commons which predisposes women towards unnaturally heavy menstrual cycles? The rest of our womenfolk buy their own sanitary wear, no matter where they live or what hours they might work.
And then there’s this: the tampons (and indeed ‘panty-liners’) Phil bought were part of a grocery order from a supermarket — for which you and I paid the whole amount. Why? Why are we paying them to feed themselves, given that we already pay for their second homes? Is there any other job in which grocery bills can be charged up to the state? I can understand a small weighting allowance for London; I can understand, to a degree, an entertainment allowance for, you know, taking potential donors out to dinner and offering them a knighthood. But regular grocery bills, when the Commons shuts up shop earlier than most offices?
You may think Phil’s experimental tampon allowance is small beer compared to Hugless Dogg’s upkeep of his bloody moat — and you’d be right. You and I have to hire someone from the local village at our own expense to dredge our moats, some ghastly agricultural labourer on his uppers and short of a limb or two who has recently been convicted of prising open the church poor-box. And I have searched hard for an employer who might pay some garrulous and hideous peasant woman to come in and look after my castle while I’m doing fabulously inconsequential work in London, but to no effect. Hugless gets it all paid for — the moat, the washerwoman, the gardener. Living allowances which enable Hugless Dogg — sorry, Viscount Hailsham these days — to pretend he’s the bleedin’ Count of Monte Cristo at our expense. Yep, check. The Tories, for sheer purblind cheek and venality easily outdo their cheapskate Labour counterparts on screwing the taxpayer for all he’s worth.
Labour politicians always set their sights too low, usually at around crotch level. And this may, in the end, determine how you vote at those June Euro elections, vis-à-vis the competing demands upon our money, Labour vs Tory: tampons and panty-liners vs a moat and a chandelier. Unless, of course, you decide to vote BNP instead, having read of the Conservative MP James Gray’s request to the Fees Office to stump up for a remembrance day wreath and decided that enough is enough. There is a word for the likes of Mr Gray, a rude word connected directly to the object of Mr Woolas’s strange obsession; a word you do not read too often in The Spectator but which is utilised often enough where I am right now, in Mr Gray’s constituency, and about him.
Much though the illiterate, thick-as-mince-and-tatties, stumbling disgrace of a speaker, Michael Martin, may rage against the shedding of the light, it seems probable that the Daily Telegraph has done those whom Martin most wants to protect — the MPs who, to the rest of us, appear serial fraudsters — a considerable service. The sheer profusion of greed among our elected representatives will serve to mask the behaviour of those who deserve not merely to be fined, or sacked, but prosecuted. This is not the Telegraph’s fault, of course, but it is how things are, how things happen. And it is why we have suddenly been subsumed beneath a tidal wave of generic, non-specific contrition. They are all terribly sorry, not because of their venality, but because of the rules, which are (always were: if you remember, I have long argued, Mr Humphrys, that the manner in which we claimed our expenses needed reform and transparency) corrupt. All of a sudden, after those generic apologies, comes the dash for cover beneath pitiful pleading about ‘the system’. Listening to them speak, you would think that they were the victims. That their behaviour was the consequence of their environment. It is as though they were smackheads or alcoholics or Palestinian suicide bombers, their course of action (i.e., in this case, defrauding the taxpayer) determined by a set of circumstances beyond their control and which they were powerless to resist. Tampons and moats: hell, we couldn’t help ourselves, give us a 12-step programme.
And, frankly, the lobby correspondents encourage them in this epic delusion, shaking their heads sadly on camera and in print, saying that nobody becomes an MP to make money (yes they do: what other way would Phil Woolas or Douglas Hogg have of earning a crust?) and most are decent people who only wish to dedicate themselves to helping others. What magnificent rot. Lobby correspondents rarely see the wood for the trees when a big story breaks. They are too close, like those financial correspondents — all of them, as it happens — who could not see the meltdown coming and continued to argue as the banks exploded that everything was tickety-boo.
So, sack Woolas and Hogg and all the others who stung the taxpayer for every possible item of their pitiful existences, the chandeliers and the lightbulbs and the bath plugs, and make them pay the money back. But then call in the police to deal with those who knowingly and serially defrauded us all out of huge sums of money by ‘flipping’ their houses. Especially the MPs who, like the Conservative party’s Chris Grayling, own almost half a bloody town but still felt able to claim for subsidies from the taxpayer. And of course Labour’s Margaret Moran: you are paying for her home in Southampton, remember. She is the MP for Luton, where she has one home, and she works in London, where she has another. You’re paying for the third one, in Southampton.
And prosecute those who plainly lied to the Fees Office about where their main home actually was, such as Jacqui Smith. And then change the rules, giving an overnight or small rental allowance for all those MPs who live more than 80 miles from Westminster. No more porticos, moats, tampons, lightbulbs, chandeliers, supermarket grocery bills. You want a larger salary because you think you’re worth it? Fine — get another job or go on The Apprentice. Or prove yourselves.
And then there’s this: the tampons (and indeed ‘panty-liners’) Phil bought were part of a grocery order from a supermarket — for which you and I paid the whole amount. Why? Why are we paying them to feed themselves, given that we already pay for their second homes? Is there any other job in which grocery bills can be charged up to the state? I can understand a small weighting allowance for London; I can understand, to a degree, an entertainment allowance for, you know, taking potential donors out to dinner and offering them a knighthood. But regular grocery bills, when the Commons shuts up shop earlier than most offices?
You may think Phil’s experimental tampon allowance is small beer compared to Hugless Dogg’s upkeep of his bloody moat — and you’d be right. You and I have to hire someone from the local village at our own expense to dredge our moats, some ghastly agricultural labourer on his uppers and short of a limb or two who has recently been convicted of prising open the church poor-box. And I have searched hard for an employer who might pay some garrulous and hideous peasant woman to come in and look after my castle while I’m doing fabulously inconsequential work in London, but to no effect. Hugless gets it all paid for — the moat, the washerwoman, the gardener. Living allowances which enable Hugless Dogg — sorry, Viscount Hailsham these days — to pretend he’s the bleedin’ Count of Monte Cristo at our expense. Yep, check. The Tories, for sheer purblind cheek and venality easily outdo their cheapskate Labour counterparts on screwing the taxpayer for all he’s worth.
Labour politicians always set their sights too low, usually at around crotch level. And this may, in the end, determine how you vote at those June Euro elections, vis-à-vis the competing demands upon our money, Labour vs Tory: tampons and panty-liners vs a moat and a chandelier. Unless, of course, you decide to vote BNP instead, having read of the Conservative MP James Gray’s request to the Fees Office to stump up for a remembrance day wreath and decided that enough is enough. There is a word for the likes of Mr Gray, a rude word connected directly to the object of Mr Woolas’s strange obsession; a word you do not read too often in The Spectator but which is utilised often enough where I am right now, in Mr Gray’s constituency, and about him.
Much though the illiterate, thick-as-mince-and-tatties, stumbling disgrace of a speaker, Michael Martin, may rage against the shedding of the light, it seems probable that the Daily Telegraph has done those whom Martin most wants to protect — the MPs who, to the rest of us, appear serial fraudsters — a considerable service. The sheer profusion of greed among our elected representatives will serve to mask the behaviour of those who deserve not merely to be fined, or sacked, but prosecuted. This is not the Telegraph’s fault, of course, but it is how things are, how things happen. And it is why we have suddenly been subsumed beneath a tidal wave of generic, non-specific contrition. They are all terribly sorry, not because of their venality, but because of the rules, which are (always were: if you remember, I have long argued, Mr Humphrys, that the manner in which we claimed our expenses needed reform and transparency) corrupt. All of a sudden, after those generic apologies, comes the dash for cover beneath pitiful pleading about ‘the system’. Listening to them speak, you would think that they were the victims. That their behaviour was the consequence of their environment. It is as though they were smackheads or alcoholics or Palestinian suicide bombers, their course of action (i.e., in this case, defrauding the taxpayer) determined by a set of circumstances beyond their control and which they were powerless to resist. Tampons and moats: hell, we couldn’t help ourselves, give us a 12-step programme.
And, frankly, the lobby correspondents encourage them in this epic delusion, shaking their heads sadly on camera and in print, saying that nobody becomes an MP to make money (yes they do: what other way would Phil Woolas or Douglas Hogg have of earning a crust?) and most are decent people who only wish to dedicate themselves to helping others. What magnificent rot. Lobby correspondents rarely see the wood for the trees when a big story breaks. They are too close, like those financial correspondents — all of them, as it happens — who could not see the meltdown coming and continued to argue as the banks exploded that everything was tickety-boo.
So, sack Woolas and Hogg and all the others who stung the taxpayer for every possible item of their pitiful existences, the chandeliers and the lightbulbs and the bath plugs, and make them pay the money back. But then call in the police to deal with those who knowingly and serially defrauded us all out of huge sums of money by ‘flipping’ their houses. Especially the MPs who, like the Conservative party’s Chris Grayling, own almost half a bloody town but still felt able to claim for subsidies from the taxpayer. And of course Labour’s Margaret Moran: you are paying for her home in Southampton, remember. She is the MP for Luton, where she has one home, and she works in London, where she has another. You’re paying for the third one, in Southampton.
And prosecute those who plainly lied to the Fees Office about where their main home actually was, such as Jacqui Smith. And then change the rules, giving an overnight or small rental allowance for all those MPs who live more than 80 miles from Westminster. No more porticos, moats, tampons, lightbulbs, chandeliers, supermarket grocery bills. You want a larger salary because you think you’re worth it? Fine — get another job or go on The Apprentice. Or prove yourselves.
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