MPs’ Expenses: A Moat, Tampons & A Bath Plug?

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“No one ever sets out to become an expenses fiddler,”

… confessed an anonymous MP.

“It just sort of creeps up on you.”

It seemed odd when he first entered the House of Commons, he said, to be able to make so many lucrative claims for food, travel and the costs of running an office and a second home. But he soon got used to the money – and started relying on it. Another backbencher described how new boys are nudged by older hands to make the most of their allowances to avoid letting the side down. A series of disclosures in The Daily Telegraph over the past week have shown quite how slack things have become. Many ministers and MPs are not just relying on the allowance system, but are milking it for all they can.

Politicians of all parties have been complicit in what amounts to a fraud against the taxpayer. Nothing is apparently too trivial to stick on expenses. To Jacqui Smith’s 88p bath plug can now be added the 26p wooden spoon, the £2.50 KitKat, and even (claimed for by a Scottish MP) a 5p plastic bag.

John Prescott got the public to pay for the addition of mock Tudor beams to his home in Hull and for the replacement of two broken lavatory seats.

Keith Vaz spent £2,600 of our money on a pair of leather armchairs and a further £480 on silk cushions. Other items claimed as “essential” under MPs’ £24,000 second-home allowance include patio heaters, wide-screen televisions and luxurious wet-rooms.

The claims of some Tory grandees were even more outlandish: John Gummer claimed for removing moles and jackdaw nests from his Suffolk estate;Sir Michael Spicer for installing a chandelier and maintaining a “helipad”;Douglas Hogg for employing a housekeeper, for repairing his stable lights and for the cost (about £2,000) of clearing his moat.

Several claimed taxpayers’ money to clean and heat swimming pools.

The Commons rules on allowances are quite clear. They state that claims can only be made for:

… expenditure necessary for a Member to incur to ensure that he or she could properly perform his or her parliamentary duties.

Quite how this enabled a male MP to be reimbursed for buying tampons for his wife, or Oliver Letwin to successfully claim for mending pipes under his tennis court, is unclear. Yet even this generous interpretation of the rules wasn’t enough for some. One Labour MP wrote an angry letter to the Fees Office after it refused to reimburse him for the cost of a baby’s cot, saying:

“Perhaps you might write to me explaining where my son should sleep next time he visits me in London.”

The thought of spending his own money clearly never occurred to him.

Bad as these chiselling claims are the real scandal is the practice known as “flipping”. This involves MPs swapping the property they designate as their second home, allowing them to tart up multiple properties at public expense. The Communities Secretary Hazel Blears, for example, changed her second home three times in a year. She avoided paying capital gains tax on the sale of one of those “second” homes by telling the taxman that it was her primary residence. Needless to say, MPs insist that such behaviour is within the rules. Apparently, something called ‘the system’ – which, it seems, has nothing to do with them – is to blame.

The basic problem is that successive governments have been too cowardly to raise MPs’ basic pay, for fear of upsetting voters. Instead, they have sought to slip money to politicians under the radar via the largely invisible expenses regime. Fixing this mess is fairly straightforward: simply continue to publish all expense claims so that MPs are shamed into only claiming for expenses they can justify to the public.

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Related articles

• The Speaker exits with revolution in the air. I say, bring it on (guardian.co.uk)
• Westminster greedy pig fever is tearing up the media rulebook (guardian.co.uk)
• UK MPs ‘claimed for swimming pools’ (news.bbc.co.uk)
• MPs’ expenses: Paying bills for Tory grandees (telegraph.co.uk)
• A House of shame? (guardian.co.uk)
• Many MPs face suspension over expenses, says Brown (guardian.co.uk)
• A climate of loathing towards all MPs is bad for democracy (guardian.co.uk)

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Originally posted 2009-05-24 08:54:53.

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