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MP allowances and
greater openness (May 2009) Two years ago this very week, I postponed important constituency business to be one of just 25 out of all 646 MPs - and the only MP in the West Country - to make sure I stood up to be publicly counted in the key Third Reading vote in favour of greater transparency. In short to make MPs subject to Freedom of Information (FoI) laws and open to full public and media scrutiny. Along with the other 24 long-standing champions of greater openness and FoI, I was defeated that day. But it was a hiccup, not a show-stopper. And the publication of MP receipts that has caused such a furore this past fortnight is in some ways a natural progression of efforts to make more information about MPs available to the electorate. Not a single constituent has told me I was wrong to support greater transparency. Rather than waiting for MP allowances to be published, some time ago I proactively published detailed breakdowns on my website so constituents would be able to scrutinise my claims. I gave further detail, for example, stressing I have never sought to 'flip' homes - the practice of changing the designation of 'first' and 'second' homes to maximise claims that has provoked much anger. I believe there is only one reasonable exception to full openness - when it places a person at risk of physical harm. Sadly this is something I know about, having been physically attacked on more than one occasion by violent pro-hunt mobs. I'm told that when I published the information about my allowances, I was the first West Country MP to do so. I'm pleased other MPs have since followed suit. My website information remains available, and updated here. Not surprisingly the number of visits to those pages has increased significantly just lately. Most reasonable people understand that to be effective, MPs need to have a London base as well as a constituency one. But the claims for things which don't seem to merit public money cause understandable anger - MPs benefiting from taxpayer-aided property sales, for example. And claims of thousands for helipads, moats and huge plasma TVs. Taxpayers feel wronged … as well as baffled. MPs should not have allowed the allowance system to develop in this way. All the main Party leaders have rightly apologised. The system needs re-building from scratch. But we also need to start looking beyond the headline-grabbing top-line statistics, and focus on the value taxpayers get from politicians. Any MP doing an effective job for their constituents will incur significant expenses. It's daft to think otherwise. For example, if you serve your constituents with surgeries, home visits and meetings - and if you do your job and travel to London to vote on legislation - travel costs are inevitable. If people write or phone you with problems, you post letters and make phone calls to try to sort them. And you need staff to help you deal with the volume of correspondence. The country could
say to MPs: don't do the travelling, the constituent-championing, the
communicating, the 'getting out and about'. But would that lead to better
MPs? Or just cheaper ones? Written May 2009 |
