There is another expenses scandal eating away at the heart of Parliament. This time it’s not venal MPs taking liberties with the rules. On the contrary, the last farrago has left many MP s cowed and reluctant to put their heads above the parapet to rail against a regime they believe is preventing them from carrying out their duties properly, is driving them into debt and will plunge them inexorably into further controversy and public opprobrium next year.
It is the new system of payment of expenses to MPs. Universally regarded as punitive, the consensus across the party divide is that the process has gone from one extreme to another. During Prime Minister’s Questions questions recently, David Cameron warned the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, the body which administers the payments, to “get a grip and get a grip fast” after complaints from members. He went on to describe it as “overly-bureaucratic and costly”. The Prime Minister was replying to Monmouth Conservative MP David Davies who complained that, like MPs on all sides of the House of Commons, he was finding that IPSA was harming his ability to do his job.
Another MP, who published an open letter through the Gallery News parliamentary press agency, was more dramatic. The independent parliamentary scrutineer, he said, is a threat to “the basic democratic principles on which our parliamentary system rests”. It was an open letter with one exception. The MP in question did not feel it wise to be open about his identity out of fear that he would be “picked on” by IPSA staff and that his attempt to do his job would be further hampered. It is a feeling shared by many MPs heading into the recess with credit card bills and overdrafts of thousands of pounds, run up in order to meet basic costs such as staff pay, stationery or telephone bills.
The most common complaints are of bureaucracy, intransigence, refusal to supply information – or funds – and the imposition of practices that will cost the taxpayer more for many services than the old system.
The most basic change is that MPs have to pay for all their expenses up front and claim for reimbursement. This means that all payments go through the MP’s personal account. When the first year’s audit is done next year, what the public will be presented with is the headline figure of what each MP will have been seen to have “pocketed”. Reconciliation with expenditure will not be transparent, except in the MPs’ individual records. It is a media ambush waiting to happen.
Critics claim that IPSA costs, at £6 million a year, three times more than the Fees Office which also administered the thousands of other staff on the Westminster estate and that IPSA staff are on a bonus scheme – a privilege now denied MPs’ staff.
Frustration among MPs and their staff has been boiling up to the point where the Speaker has agreed to look at specific points through the committee set up to liaise between IPSA and his own office. John Bercow’s commitment was given from the chair in response to Labour MP Ann Clywd’s complaint that IPSA had sent a P45 – effectively a dismissal notice – to a member of staff who was appointed, employed and paid by her.
Other complaints have involved a new MP who was forced to produce her birth certificate before she could receive any salary because she “looked too young to be an MP”; the refusal to pay a staff member because he “could not possibly” fulfil all the duties specified in his contract; the posting of MPs’ names on the IPSA website when their claims are rejected; the posting of staff salaries in defiance of data protection laws; refusal to pay for constituency surgeries to be advertised; inconsistency leading to office rents of the same amount being approved one month and not the next; the unilateral changes of terms and conditions with no TUPE rights of transfer; forced redundancies due to late or refused staff payments.
Maternity leave appears also to have been deleted from employees’ rights, an oversight but still an illegal move, which IPSA is attempting to get around by making ad hoc payments from a “contingency budget”. One trade union official said scathingly: “It shows how clueless they are about employment law”.
IPSA has also abolished the “check-off” system under which trade union subscriptions are deducted at source – a move which is seen as a threat to recruitment and retention of union members. Unite’s Parliamentary Staff Branch protested just before the general election that the proposed changes would reduce the level of service MPs would be able to give to the public, not least because the pension contributions which used to be paid centrally at the rate of 10 per cent were to be transferred to the MPs’ own expenditure, further squeezing their budgets.
Those who have confronted IPSA staff have been told that the rules cannot be changed, even when reasonable points are conceded, because of “public perception”. The anonymous Gallery News letter writer puts it another way, claiming that the public fury over MPs’ expenses is protecting “this dysfunctional organisation from scrutiny”.
He wrote: “What kind of people run IPSA? They seem to have no knowledge of the role of an MP or the kind of demands made of a constituency office. They confuse every legitimate claim with an attempt at fraud and complicate a system which could be simplified with no money passing through MPs’ hands. Why can’t they fund regular, verified and recurring office costs? This organisation has set out either deliberately or through total incompetence to destroy the constituency component of an MP’s work and in so doing represents a threat to the basic democratic principles on which our parliamentary system rests.”
