Labour MSP Charlie Gordon has been in the news over his high level of expense claims. It’s not the first time he, money and politics have been in the news, for he’s the man who resigned as Labour’s transport spokesman over a dodgy overseas donation for Wendy Alexander’s Scottish Labour leadership campaign.
Charlie Gordon’s payments to his son
This time though it’s the level of expenses he has been claiming as an MSP that are in the news – including the fact that a large part of them have been paid to his son, Gavin Gordon, for costly office services and for a website that hardly anyone visits.
The Herald reported in late January:
Glasgow MSP Charlie Gordon paid £13,000 of public money to his son’s website firm last year, the latest Holyrood expenses figures revealed yesterday.
They showed that the man who had to resign as Labour’s transport spokesman because of his role in the Wendy Alexander donations saga has been directing more than £1000 a month to GMG Solutions, a company run by his son, Gavin.
Mr Gordon’s entry of £12,822 for “website costs” pushed the total he claimed to £36,760, more than double a typical claim by other Glasgow MSPs.
GMG Solutions is an interesting firm because it “does not have a web site, a portfolio, or any basic contact information” (source) and “the domain listed on the invoices hasn’t even been registered” (source).
But what of the money itself? In a classic case of, when in a hole start digging furiously, Charlie Gordon’s defence is that these funds have been wrongly described in the expenses return, and in fact:
Out of the monthly total, only about 20% went on maintaining his personal website, while the rest was charged as “call handling” (source).
What does this call handling entail? In Charlie Gordon’s words:
We decided to move our office practically into a virtual office, and GMG (solutions) runs it basically like a contact centre where you have distressed constituents on the phone for up to an hour. What Gavin does is take all the details so that we are aware of all the issues in real time. With the best will in the world, I can’t be in the office or on the phone all of the time (source).
In other words: he takes phone messages and passes them on. That’s a very expensive answer machine. Especially when you consider that a commercial telephone answering service for businesses running virtual offices comes it at prices such as £25 per month from one supplier I just found.
Just to be clear:
- 80% of £12,822 is £10,257.60
- £25 x 12 +VAT = £345
- Difference: £9,912.60
Doesn’t look like value for money to me, even if you allow for a more up-market service than the one I quoted.
Charlie Gordon’s website expenses
And then there’s the question of the money for the website. A website which also doesn’t look value for money given how little traffic it gets. Duncan Stephen has done a good bit of detective work and reveals that:
Charlie Gordon’s website received 561 visits throughout the month of August 2007. This translates to just 18.1 visits per day. It is worth remembering that all Webalizer stats include robots (i.e. non-human visitors) such as Googlebot. As such, all of these visitor statistics are generous estimates!
Making the calculation, we can see that Charlie Gordon spent £3.44 per visit on his website that month. Even if we accept Charlie Gordon’s assertion that the website costs were in fact 20% of what the Scottish Parliament lists, this is still 69p per visit to the website (including robots). This is quite simply extortionate.
Quite.
5 Comments
Excellent digging.
I’m sure many MPs don’t mind leaving a tip when getting their friends and family to do work for them, but this is really taking the ****.
http://www.lettersfromatory.com
As someone who broadly supports the tories, I would like to disassociate myself from the previous comment:-
Letters From A Tory said:
“I’m sure many MPs don’t mind leaving a tip when getting their friends and family to do work for them”
I don’t actually have any objection to MPs employing family/friends as long as the work is ‘wholly, necessarily and exclusively for their parliamentry duties’, and that person is qualified to do the work and paid at the going rate – no more, no less.
But any ‘tip’ or additional payment is entirely out of order.
“Wholly qualified to do the work” being the important phrase there. For some reason, web design is always the poor relation in businesses and organisations. I have honestly seen situations where business owners let their 14 year old kid do their corporate web site because he had a Bebo page, which therefore qualifies him as a professional. It’s like letting your kid keep your business books because he likes “Countdown” and is therefore a qualified accountant. I get a bit tired of my profession being fair game for shortcuts and excuses by people who, let’s face it, don’t even know how to check their own email because they have a secretary do it for them.
Back to the point, when you are doing a publicly funded government web site, there is simply too much involved for the task to be left to an amateur, no matter how well-meaning they might be. The Scottish Parliament has to bear some of the responsibility for this for failing to provide guidance and standards for consitutency web sites.
A high street virtual office product would be thoroughly unsuitable for most elected representatives’ needs. Surely? Using one might well open an MP to accusations of shoddy practice.
And while we don’t really know the breakdown between and programming, and look and feel design, any other creation, hosting, royalties, disbursements, maintenance, redesigns, etc plenty of say £5,000 websites both don’t get many hits and don’t actually need to. They’re there for those who need them and choose to visit themis all. And £13,000 as a total is quite a modest amount for the services described.
Unless you’ve got something else Mark this seems another thin one. How is this particularly piece of familial (or indeed buddy) employment exceptional in a context of dozens, nay hundreds of such arrangements?
Nadine Dorries for example has employed several of her daughters as paid interns and has now taken on one of them – a year or two out of college – at the top Office Manager etc grade.
She may be brilliant. Or not. But there was no open process of recruitment and the normally garrulous blabber mouth Nad is yet to mention the appointment in her web/blog output. We don’t know what proportion of the total staff bill young Dorries receives.
Clearly there are some Lib Dem MPs and the like who should be in hot water for the way they divvy up their staffing budget, the way they procure and describe the procurement of print, and indeed websites.
And although under discliplinary – says the word on the street – Rowen’s man Hennigan still appears to be working to a 4-letter person specification.
“A high street virtual office product would be thoroughly unsuitable for most elected representatives’ needs. Surely?”
The Labour MSP decided to use a virtual office product provided by his son that he has described as operating in the same way a high street virtual office product. So I’m only judging him on what he said he’s done and what other people would charge for doing the same things he says his son has done.
If you think that running a virtual office isn’t appropriate for an MSP (and I agree it’s hard to see how it is in these circumstances) then far from being a defence of his actions, it’s another criticism.