LONDON LETTER:Ordinary citizens would not live with the level of scrutiny now faced by representatives – but it comes with the territory, writes MARK HENNESSY
THOUGH ONE-THIRD of the membership of the new House of Commons is new, the expenses scandal that wreaked havoc in Westminster last year is still casting a long and baleful shadow.
Barnsley’s Labour MP Eric Illsley, who yesterday became the latest public representative to face the attention of Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer, now stands accused of three counts of false accounting.
Unlike many others implicated in the scandal, Illsley was allowed to run for Labour in the May 6th general election, and though the voters of Barnsley elected him, they did so with a much reduced majority.
He is accused of falsely claiming more than £20,000 (€23,300) over three years for council tax, maintenance, insurance and utilities bills on his second home in Kennington in South London. He has now been suspended by Labour.
Three former Labour MPs – all of whom were barred from running for the party in the election – and one Conservative member of the House of Lords have already made the journey to Westminster Magistrates’ Court that Illsley will make next month.
Newly elected and experienced MPs alike have spent much time in the last week in Portcullis House in the Houses of Parliament, poring over computer screens as they try to come to terms with the new expenses rules.
No longer controlled by the Fees Office, expenses are now to be paid out by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) – the body set up after the scandal broke in the pages of the Daily Telegraph last year.
The MPs are not happy.
Under the new rules, they can claim rent or hotel bills in London, but not mortgage interest. Only one family member can be employed by each MP, and the politicians can no longer claim for first-class rail travel.
One Tory MP who owns a home in London but represents a constituency elsewhere has been told that he can claim for nothing on the London property, but he could get his full allowances if he rented another.
Meanwhile, politicians have also discovered that the £110,000 annual allowance they get has to pay for staff and must now cover pension and national insurance contributions; consequently, they will either have to lay off staff or cut salaries.
The final insult from Ipsa – or “I Pay Sod All” as some MPs have nicknamed it – is that only 85 per cent of their constituency office telephone bill is now deemed to be reimbursable. The rest, says the body, are personal calls.
The computer programme governing expenses has been designed by systems@work, a company headed by Irishman Michael Sheehan, who left Tullamore, Co Offaly, for London in 1988.
In Sheehan’s words, the system is a development of ones already in place in hundreds of workplaces around Ireland, the UK and the Continent, but it has been specially adapted to meet the needs of Westminster.
Each MP has their own personal profile: where they live; how far they have to travel and by what means; and what arrangements they have in place when they are overnighting in the capital.
It has, he said, been designed in such a way to ensure that false or simply mistaken claims cannot be lodged, given that an MP will be pilloried by the press and the public for what could easily be a simple error.
Ordinary members of the public would not live with the level of scrutiny now faced by MPs, said Sheehan, but he noted that “they stood for public office so it comes with the territory these days”.
The MPs, however, have found the system difficult to navigate, though some of the problems can be put down to the usual learning steps that anyone encounters when faced with a new system.
More significantly, however, they have been irritated by some of the governing rules put in place by Ipsa, particularly one that leaves them out-of-pocket for two months before an expenses cheque arrives.
“This even covers stationery bills, for God’s sake. How are we supposed to keep an office running with that? Before, stationery came from the stores,” complained one MP in the corridors of Westminster this week.
Even more importantly, they complain that they cannot get straight answers about what constitutes an allowable claim, and what is not. An MP from a rural constituency, for example, can claim travel if they go back to their constituency for a farmers’ meeting.
But MPs are asking what other functions are acceptable. When they do try to find out they have been told to submit the question in writing, and it will be answered.
However, if they do that, the question will be released later under the Freedom of Information Act.
“No matter what question is put, we’ll end up being made to look awful. No matter what we do. All people want are straight answers. What’s in, what’s out. End of story,” another grumbled this week.
Change had to come, and change is never easy, head of Ipsa Sir Ian Kennedy insisted.
He said that MPs were now getting the expenses necessary to do the job, rather than “the loose notions of ‘allowances’ or ‘entitlements’ under the old system”.