Do we want to be governed by a bunch of Goody Goodies?

[philsmove]

In my experience, expense claims are, so some extent, allways a work of fiction

the company I used to for, eventually got rid of them and replaced them with fixed allowances, it was up to you if you stayed in a cheap B&B or the Ritz. You kept or made up the difference

The country has a debt of ££££ billions, but our leaders seem to be getting there nickers in a twist over a some one claiming the cost of a light bulb

[emmylou25]

All 3 companies i've worked for have had sign off processes to check people aren't claiming for things they're not authorised to buy and my current one is the worst for checking our field merchandising team's mileage claims randomly by using multimap style route planners (a bit extreme but they've had a lot of dodgy claims in the past before they changed the pay structure for the field).

I would have thought MPs claims should also be checked...the problems come when people claim for the luxury things that aren't needed for the job (and expecting the tax payer to pay for these luxury things). I'd be p****d off with a colleague of mine in a private company taking things to the extreme. But ultimately it's down to ethics of either what's supposedly allowed (ie ethics of the sign off committee) or the people claiming.

[StokeBloke]

I don't think there's anything wrong with MPs having their expenses checked for irregularities like the rest of us - I just don't think that the MPs should be checking their own expenses, maybe it's a task for someone who is in a slightly more independent position.

[Trousers]

. . . . some one claiming the cost of a light bulb

I don't think it's quite like you suggest.
People and I include myself here have no issue with valid expenses
Let's say a night in a hotel because we were working away from home or late,
Train fares from constituencies to work.
Meals whilst away from home even.

This style of expense can't really be questioned

However I take umbrage to the repairs to these 2nd homes the buggers have got, to them making the profit on the sales, Fiddling the system to their best ends so that one married couple of MP's had select the marital home as the 2nd home the other the one in london and they claimed two allowances. That is the pi55 taking part.

The odd light bulb is not and has never been the issue as I see it

[philsmove]

The odd light bulb is not and has never been the issue as I see it

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/view...-a-lightbulb-/

[David Franklin]

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/view...-a-lightbulb-/

Reading the article, the issue isn't the lightbulbs, it's claiming for getting a fscking electrician to change them instead of doing it himself like the rest of us.

(Neglecting the fact that this is the Daily Star we're talking about here, so rather more than a pinch of salt should be employed!)

[straycat]

Goody goodies? To a degree, yes. What I really want is to be governed by people who believe in personal integrity.

As for the personal expenses row, it only bothers me if it shows up a lack of said personal integrity. Compared to everything else that's going on, it's a drop in the ocean.

[zimbabwean]

Just a thought about the integrity of these said "Public Servants" if they can find it so easy to be 'creative' with their expense claims, which if you were to submit in the commercial world, you could be had up for fraud, and Fired/prosecuted. Then where do the populace have faith in them when it comes to major Issues such as the "War on Terror" , "Weapons of Mass Destruction" etc etc etc would it not follow that they would do anything no matter how wrong or right to get the result they were looking for, and in turn being "self serving".

Just a Thought??

[whitetiger1518]

What bugs me is the scale of these expenses.. I agree with Trousers - particularly the second paragraph, where you emphasise the scale of these expenses - unless I have misread, some of these expense claims (the cheapest ones!!!) are dealing in hundreds of thousands of pounds

Personally speaking as a Public Servant in an educational organisation going through perpetual pay fights, some of the cheapest expenses = 3 or 4 times my salary easily...

I'm sure if just some those funds were reallocated to the rest of the chronically underfunded public system, the whole system would all be able to function a bit better....


I personally wouldn't care if the money did or didn't come to the education sector - I'm sure the Firefighters, Coastguard, NHS or Police could all do with the money too!


Irritated Whitetiger

[philsmove]

What bugs me is the scale of these expenses.. I agree with Trousers - particularly the second paragraph, where you emphasise the scale of these expenses - unless I have misread, some of these expense claims (the cheapest ones!!!) are dealing in hundreds of thousands of pounds

I may also have misread and or misunderstood, but as far as can make out, the second home allowance is an average of about £61 per day, not, I agree, an insignificant sum of money, but not completely unreasonable

The question is, do we really need 646 MPs?

[Lee Bartholomew]

The excessive expenses claims of a number of MPs were made public today.

The newsreader stated that one MP claimed nearly 5 grand last year for taxi fares last year alone, another claimed 2 grand for a TV license, etc. I was sitting thinking, "That's my taxes they're robbing!"

Then it was stated that John Prescott claimed about 4 grand for food last year, and I thought, "That's fairly reasonable, if you think about it."

[FirstMove]

In my experience, expense claims are, so some extent, allways a work of fiction the company I used to for, eventually got rid of them and replaced them with fixed allowances, it was up to you if you stayed in a cheap B&B or the Ritz. You kept or made up the difference

My company went the other way. The Inland Revenue argued:
Your staff are making a profit out of expenses and we're not getting any income tax or National Insurance from it." You can't tell us how much they're earning (without introducing an expenses system), so we'll tax the total amount.

The question is, do we really need 646 MPs?

I don't know what the optimum number is. Currently each MP has around 70,000 constituents. Increase that number and they'll just want more parliamentary staff in their offices.

[Barry Shnikov]

The 'second houses' expenses system is intended to relieve MPs of the additional expenses incurred as a consequence of having to do part of their job in Westminster and part of it in their constituency.

I read one quote yesterday in which - I think it was the labour minister who resigned - said he'd called the expenses office and asked what was the limit on the cost of a TV for his second home. There isn't one, he was told. He says now "I thought that was just crazy."

This did not, however, stop him from going out and spending £2,500 on a home entertainment system.

It's this breathtaking lack of moral fibre that bothers me. He thought it was crazy, but he didn't let that interfere with his desire to enrich his life with taxpayer's money. Myself, though I can't speak for anyone else, I would have said "OK, a 40" flatscreen seems reasonable - £500', and even then I would have wondered if maybe I should have been settling for a 32". The reason is that I would consider this as being something I was duty bound to keep within reasonable limits - that I MYSELF should be imposing limits on, regardless of what limits might be imposed elsewhere - because it's not my money.

When I was getting travelling expenses at 40p per mile, which was far more than it was costing me to travel, I had no qualms because I knew a) the figure is based on 'overall cost per mile of running a car for a year', and b) it was costing my employer less than the same journey by taxi and rail. But when I had to stay in a hotel I did not go and stay in a five-star penthouse, not because I thought it was liable to be detected but because there was no reasonable need for it, all that was required was a comfortable room and a decent breakfast.

However, I've known people who felt it was their bounden duty to exploit the system as much as possible and justified their attitude by saying 'Oh, it's what they expect, they system is designed to take account of a bit of jigging'. Seems like almost everyone in Parliament was of this second type.

I'm a bit - 'well, people will generally act as badly as they can get away with' - but even I've been taken aback. Not by the greed, particularly; but by the total failure to appreciate how small-minded and grasping they are being while simultaneously voting for reductions in social services spending, and so on.

[bigdjiver]

I have not heard Gordon Brown or anybody else point out that the Government won't stand for dishonesty or excess, which is why there is a register and guidlines in the first place.

[Lee Bartholomew]

Just seen on the news that Labour MP Shahid Malik said that his claim of £66,827, including £2,600 for a home cinema system was "One Million Per Cent within the rules"

With maths skills like that, no wonder his expenses are screwed.

[Swinging bee]

Truth and polititians are not bed fellows...Neither come to that ,are truth and journalists .... With that in mind the whole thing is very easy to work out...

[djtrev]

Out of 646 MP's only 13 were below £100,000.
Apparently according to last nights news,the MP who was sacked was claiming on a mortgage that was already paid up.
Try making excuses for them to anyone who is having difficulty with any of the Government departments-Tax office for example.
Personally I think they are a bunch of thieving,greedy,conniving,dishonest shiesters.

[DavidY]

I liked this thought from Clive James' "Point of View" here:

The apparent scam of MP expenses looks bad, but the fact that it looks bad is the very thing that makes it not so bad. The outrage that we are encouraged to feel means that we live in a country where corruption is not the norm.

[Agente Secreto]

The 'second houses' expenses system is intended to relieve MPs of the additional expenses incurred as a consequence of having to do part of their job in Westminster and part of it in their constituency.

.....................

I'm a bit - 'well, people will generally act as badly as they can get away with' - but even I've been taken aback. Not by the greed, particularly; but by the total failure to appreciate how small-minded and grasping they are being while simultaneously voting for reductions in social services spending, and so on.

I'm reminded of the approach we took to this in the military. If guys were assigned to longer term central London roles for instance they were allowed to claim for renting places only. The military rules were specific about not allowing people to buy assets at Public expense. Also, on the food and drink front the argument when you were living away on a long job in lodgings was that you'd have to buy food at home from your salary so why should the military buy it for you when you were in lodgings!

I can remember though how inventive some people can be - we had one group of guys working for me on a 9 month job near Elgin who all bought caravans and then rented to each other in a caravan park just outside the base. They ended the job having each paid for the caravans and made enough additional expense profit all to fly out to Cancun for a holiday!! Also, remember the cases in the 90s of senior military officers and their extravagances in decorating official residences.

Personally I think they are a bunch of thieving,greedy,conniving,dishonest shiesters.

The expenses thing has certainly done nothing to persuade us that sleaze is not alive and well at Westminster (and of course let's not forget Brussels either). At the moment the lot of them look fundamentally arrogant and they are just not capable of holding our trust. People only act reasonably if they have integrity and a sense of 'shame' and I'm not sure that politicians are overly provided with either of these qualities.

We can of course vote them out if we can find anyone with integrity to replace them!!

[geoff332]

One thing that strikes me very clearly here is that there are at least three things going on. Two is systemic, the other individual. Systemically, there are set rules and precedents for expenses that MPs incur.

The rules are largely black and white and and it can be relatively easily assessed if someone has broken them or not. Should an MP breach these rules, they have no ground left to stand on. This applies regardless of whether it was intentional or not. In reality, few MPs appear to be actually breaking the rules and those that are have been punished.

Similarly, there seems to be fairly universal belief that the rules are too lenient and need to be tightened up. There can be changes, but I suspect that if one looks at it rationally, rather than with the current passion stirred up by the media, substantial changes would create more problems than they would solve. Numbers like, 'mosy MPs claim over £100,000 in expenses' are misleading; they need to be placed in the context of what it costs them to do their job. Personally, I've clocked up around £25k in expenses so far this year for business travel, while some of my colleagues have incurred none. This is because my job requires me to travel, not because I'm on a junket.

The one major change I would make revolves around MPs buying personal assets on the Government. If they buy assets, those assets should be the property of the Government, not the individual; if they want to keep the asset, then they should pay for it themselves. That, rather than the amount they spend, should be the essence of the debate.

The precedents are a slightly different issue. This really refers to the soft boundaries on spending: what is acceptable and what isn't. This refers more to the culture of parliament and spending - attitudes towards claiming expenses and the expectations of what is acceptable and not. Without being inside the culture, it's hard to pin down what it is, but the picture that's being painted is one of "if you can claim it within the rules, then do so". And, now that the public's aware of it, that's deemed unacceptable.

The problem is, how to change that? Reactive posturing due to the media-created furore will not produce substantive change in culture; it'll produce a new, probably expensive, layer of bureaucracy and a culture of blame. But this is that's going to happen at the moment. It does require clear moral leadership, that stems from individual integrity (something more substantial that what comes across as self-righteousness that we're getting from all sides of the house at the moment).

Finally, the individual behaviour. This is the thing that everyone seems most worked up about, but actually the last thing I think needs to be worried about. The individuals who are actually breaking the rules are already being dealt with; the rules need to be tightened up; and the culture needs to be changed. But fix all of that and you will produce a change in individual behaviour.