It seems only fair to ask. I’ve been struck today by the cross-party consensus – noted here on Left Foot Forward – that the Blogosphere is united in disgust at MPs:
Bloggers of left, right and centre were united today in disgust over reports in today’s papers that some MPs will refuse to pay back expenses that they claimed erroneously.
The argument put forward is logical enough, and best summed up by Lib Dem blogger Mark Thompson’s exasperated question, “Do they honestly think that the public are going to stand for them rejecting the report, whatever the grounds?”
True enough. And yet. I’m rather wedded to the principles of equality before the law and due process – a bit old-fashioned, I know, but still. And two things trouble me about the consensus around MPs paying back their expenses:
1) the retrospective back-dating by Sir Thomas Legg of MPs’ expenses which were signed-off by the authorities. For example, my employer allows me to stay in a hotel when I’m away from home on business to a maximum value of £100 a night. Now you may regard that as excessive. But I wouldn’t take kindly – indeed I would likely take my employer to a tribunal – if they retrospectively lowered the limit to £75 and then demanded I repay the cumulative difference. Quite simply it wouldn’t be fair.
2) the lack of a genuine appeal process. For wholly understandable political reasons, the party leaders are expecting their MPs the abide by Sir Thomas’s findings without quibble – but why should they? If an MP feels a genuine mistake or misunderstanding has occurred, why shouldn’t they contest the conclusion, instead of feeling compelled to ‘take a plea’ deal?
What strikes me most, though, about this whole sorry saga is that some MPs who have perpetrated genuine abuses tanatmount to fraud – for example, ‘phantom’ mortgages and ‘flipping’ homes to avoid capital gains tax – are being mixed in with MPs who maybe over-charged the taxpayer for a cleaner or gardener. A small minority of MPs deserve all the opprobrium which can be heaped upon them; the trouble is, the ordure is being spread rather thinly at the moment.
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13 Comments
The hotel example isn’t quite right though is it?
The better parallel would be if you spent £50 on a hotel, and £50 buying a present for your friend’s birthday, and then billed the company for a £100 hotel. You’ve not exceeded the limits, and your company was prepared to accept your signiature underneath the words “I solemny swear that these expenses were necessarily incurred on company business”.
Their oversight is lax, and that’s problematic, but every MP claimed on the understanding that these were “expenses wholly and necessarily incurred in the pursuit of Parliamentary activities”.
Similarly, MPs were taken on trust to correctly say which was their main and which their second property for expenses purposes. No-one checked. That is lax, but “flipping” either means that they had a significant change in their lives that moved their main home, or they at some point took advantage of no-one really interrogating them to see if what they said was true.
They didn’t just break the spirit of the law, they broke the letter of it. This is not, in the cases I’ve seen, remotely unfair. Just because the authority charged with oversight did a poor job, that does not excuse the behaviour. Having lied in a legal statement every time expenses were submitted, many are being let off lightly by being allowed to repay the money. They aren’t being hard done by at all, compared to what would happen to you and I if we fiddled company expenses. My employer would at least fire me, and might press charges as well as getting their money back.
I don’t understand your point about the lack of appeal. No MP can be compelled to pay back money – there might be a political cost, but that’s not a justicial issue. If they are thrown out of their party because the leader thinks they should abide by the rulings, then that is an internal party discipline issue, and I presume there is an appeals process in place.
Morus – no, your hotel example is wrong. You’re suggesting, falsely, that all MPs who have been asked to repay expenses by Sir Thomas knowingly misled the authorities. That is not correct. A number of MPs – the ones I’m talking about in my posting – have been found to have claimed more than Sir Thomas thinks was reasonable, and are now being asked to pay back the difference. I’m questioning if that’s fair.
I agree with you about ‘flipping’, and said as much in the posting.
As for appeals, in practise no MP who wishes to stay in Parliament will dare contest the findings (though some who are standing down might).
If what they spent doesn’t pass the ‘wholly and necessarily’ test then it is quite fair that they are expected to pay it back.
I think your hotel example might be better phrased as you deciding yourself that £100 was a reasonable amount, and your employer telling you later that it wasn’t.
Stephen, I think you’re absolutely right and have blogged to that effect. The idea of retrospective rules is in general an abominable one and that is what Sir Thomas Legg has done in introducing a wholly arbitrary £3,000 limit on cleaning and gardening expenses.
However, I would also note that the principle involved has not always been followed by MPs when legislating for other people, particularly with some of Labour’s assault on civil liberties such as control orders.
I’m not suggesting that all being asked to pay back money knowingly misled the authorities – included are MPs who may have thought that what they were claiming was within the rules, but was so radically profligate and unreasonable that they are being asked to repay the excess. They were within the limits, but not the limits of reasonableness.
So, you are given a £100 a night for hotel, and told bills for daily sustenance will be covered too. You spend £85 on a hotel room, and make it up to the limit with a meal on room service. But you also go out for a bar crawl with lashings of expensive champagne. You think your boss will accept your claim? I reckon he’ll say “but we paid for your hotel and your meal on room service. Why would anyone think that you could just add another £200 on Krug?”. That’s not what was meant by daily sustenance, and it’s no defence to say you didn’t realise.
I’d be with you if this was a clear ex post facto law, but it isn’t. It’s reprimanding MPs who often signed off statements that involved a lie being told, or who at best stretched the meaning of their statement so thin as to be unreasonable. Nobody buys a duck pond in the pursuit of their Parliamentary duties, whether they can make an absurd case for it being “technically within the rules or not”. The second-home expenses rules were poorly drafted, but not so bad as to be obvious that there were some limits that MPs should apply to their own behaviour. Those that did not do so are now being called to account for breaking the rules of the time, not rules recently invented.
Another pertinent comparison is Ian Clement who has now been convicted and sentenced in relation to his fraudulent and relatively small expense claims from the London Assembly.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/davehillblog/2009/oct/06/boris-johnson-ian-clement-pleads-guilty
Clement was a civil servant / special adviser rather than a Parliamentarian, other than that is there any relevant difference between his sad case and that of some of the MPs?
“Equality before the law” and “due process” surely means the same law applies to the lawmakers as their staff, and in a similar time-frame does it not?
I too am uncomfortable with the retrospective changes in the rules, and the lack of due process in terms of appeals. However, putting on my realpolitik hat I have to say that the sight of MPs appealing against the Legg letters is somewhat unedifying – and moreover it gives the press yard upon yard of rope with which to hang the already maligned political establishment.
It’s a tough one – in an ideal world, the public would understand that whilst all wrongly-claimed items must be repaid, the retrospective adjustments are unfair. I fear that in the real world, however, the seemingly unified response to the debacle in teh blogosferes is more likely to be reflective – total and utter disgust, period.
I don’t think MPs have any option but to pay back the money or they will be deemed to be on the make at the taxpayers expense, and will incur such bad publicity that it isn’t worth arguing. Indeed I think we have reached a point where many people assume everyone in politics is on the make even if they are someone who has never been paid a penny from taxpayer funds.
However, I still do not like this idea of restrospectively changing the rules. We wouldn’t allow it in law, so why should we with expense claims.
“the lack of a genuine appeal process. For wholly understandable political reasons, the party leaders are expecting their MPs the abide by Sir Thomas’s findings without quibble – but why should they? If an MP feels a genuine mistake or misunderstanding has occurred, why shouldn’t they contest the conclusion, instead of feeling compelled to ‘take a plea’ deal?”
They can write back to Tommy Legg and tell him so. They have three weeks to do so.
On point 1, Sir Thomas Legg has not restrospectively invented any rules. He’s simply taking the existing rule:
“wholly and necessarily” and applying it to cleaners and gardeners because there was no limit in place at the time.
There is plenty of natural justice here. MPs actually passed the FOI act themselves, so they’ve had nine years to prepare for this. They have every right not to repay the money requested of them. If they took it to court they would win. So bully for them. They won’t have a hope in hell of getting re-elected but they won’t have to repay the money.
Great. Natural justice is served.
So the question for the MP is: Do I want to pursue natural justice for the sake a £1K gardeners’ bill and lose my seat in the process?
Simples.
You give your example of the hotel. It seems a good example. But you tell me any profession – any profession – in private or public buisness where people get paid money to pay gardeners and cleaners? There’s not many are there?
£1000 a year for gardening and £2000 for cleaning is hardly unreasonable.
Or are MPs expecting to use Capability Brown for their gardening and Kim and Aggie for their cleaning?
The issue seems to me that we would like to have as MPs people who have a natural inclination to do what is right, if they do not, how can we trust them to make good decisions on our behalf, which is their job?
Anyone who has a natural inclination to do what is right would take the attitude regarding expenses paid for by the taxpayer that they would only claim what is strictly necessary in order to do their job. So, I can accept a second home is necessary for those whose constituency is far from London, but expenses claimed for it should be at the minimum a small flat for a single person within, say half-an-hour’s commuting distance would be. No decent person who was an MP would ever contemplate claiming more than this in expenses for a second home.
They ought not to need laws to tell them this. It ought to come naturally. The ONLY person I would want as an MP is someone who was allowed to claim unlimited expenses – as much as he or she liked – but would not even contemplate claiming more than the bare minimum justified by the requirements of the job.
So ANYONE who claimed more than that and justified it by saying “But it was allowed” is, in my opinion, someone I would never ever want as an MP. Such a person has shown by his or her behaviour that he or she is completely unsuited to be an MP. Even to say “But it was allowed at the time” is to say that you cannot see a distinctiion between what is morally right and what is legal, and I do not want such a person holding any sort of postion over me which invovles – as is essential for an MP – making a moral judgment, or making legislation. Either they would wish to over-burden me with legislation because with that mentality they would want to make illegal anything they thought was immoral, or they would willingly make decisions which they know are immoral on the grounds they personally benefit from it.
It is not a matter of punishing these people, I fully accept the idea that retrospective punishment for what wasn’t illegal when it was done is wrong. It is a matter of shaming them. So, yes, name them, and let them explain themselves. If they cannot explain their expenses in terms of absolute necessity for their job as MP, never ever vote for them should they stand again.
“If what they spent doesn’t pass the ‘wholly and necessarily’ test then it is quite fair that they are expected to pay it back.”
Yes. Reality check. The MPs’ expense allowance covers weekday accommodation which is required close to the MP’s place of work. Many employers pay some sort of similar allowance. They expect the employee to find a hotel, bedsit or flat. One can easily imagine a typical employer’s reaction to the sorts of claims MPs have made. “Gardening? Gardening? Why on earth should you need a garden at your weekday lodgings? If you want one, you’ll have to pay for that yourself, chum.”
OK, I concede that an MP whose claim was within the rules and agreed by the Fees Office should be allowed to “leave this court without a stain on your character”. Provided he/she pays up pronto, that is! Sir Thomas’s £1000 p/a gardening limit would sound excessively generous to most employers – and their employees too.
£1000pa is about £20 a week, which on the one hand won’t get you much gardening done, on the other hand, it’s a lot more gardening than you’d expect an MP to need doing on their behalf at their second home.
£2000pa is about £40 a week, which will get you quite a bit of cleaning, particularly for a second home which is not under constant use…