Maggot Members of Parliament

Members of Parliament continue to try to cover up their expense claims, these quote from Hansard are from yesterday' debate: Mr. David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD): What the right hon. and learned Lady has just said is of great interest. Many of us believe that if the scheme and the audit proposals had been in place three years ago, the matter would not have gone to the tribunal and the High Court, and we would not have the unholy mess that we now have. However, the fact is that the right hon. and learned Lady is proposing a scheme of publication that falls short of that full disclosure that the High Court has determined is correct—[HON. MEMBERS: “It does not.”] I am sorry, but it falls short of the full disclosure that the High Court has determined must be the case under the existing scheme. Is the right hon. and learned Lady suggesting that that should be tested again through the information tribunal and the courts, or does she plan to introduce an alternative scheme of full disclosure to full receipt level? If she intends to leave the matter where it is, and if someone makes an application, whether that goes to the tribunal and what the decision is will be left to fate.....(Link) 2.22 pm Dr. Tony Wright (Cannock Chase) (Lab): I fully expected to be on the losing side today. My understanding was that the dark forces on both sides of the House had conspired—[Interruption.] Well, my colleagues on both sides of the House had come together to persuade the Government to remove the House and Members of Parliament from the scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act in relation to detailed spending. That was the proposal that we were to be presented with today, and because I have learned over the years that the dark forces normally get their way, I imagined that it would be carried. It is only because I thought that it would be carried that I suggested to a colleague we might try to recover the situation. I know that amendments have not been taken, but the point of our proposal was to say to people who had worries about the retrospective nature of the provisions that we could at least decide prospectively that we wanted to sign up to what the court has told us to do...... The problem is that, since then, large numbers of Members of Parliament have sought to extricate themselves from the onerous provisions that they passed. I can understand why they, we, I would want to do that. The implications of the Act can be extremely irritating. Newspapers can foment mischief and misinformation about what we spend money on. Our political opponents can use the Act simply to cause all kinds of trouble and to spread misinformation. All of that is true, and I have enormous sympathy with those who make such points, but the remedy is not to say that we should find a way in which, uniquely, Members of Parliament can be removed from the provisions....

“The ACA system”—

the additional costs allowance system—

“is so deeply flawed, the shortfall in accountability so substantial, and the necessity of full disclosure so convincingly established, that only the most pressing privacy needs should in our view be permitted to prevail.”

When the High Court went over the same set of issues, and was asked to do the same balancing exercise, it said in its judgment:

“We have no doubt that the public interest is at stake. We are not here dealing with idle gossip or public curiosity about what in truth are trivialities. The expenditure of public money through the payment of MPs’ salaries and allowances is a matter of direct and reasonable interest to taxpayers…they bear on public confidence in the operation of our democratic system at its very pinnacle, the House of Commons itself. The nature of the legitimate public interest engaged by these applications is obvious.”

That is a coruscating verdict on a system that we have allowed to continue over the years. That is why I say that the abuses were waiting to happen.

Let us be clear: the effect of the withdrawal of the proposal overnight is that we are now back in the situation that the court judgment brought about. We are going to have an expanded publication scheme, and I welcome that. It is a good thing, but we are now also subject to the decision under FOI law that the details of our expenditure should be published. I am not sure whether this is an example of the dark forces still being dark, but there is clearly still a feeling among some hon. Members that if we can only agree to an expanded category of items to be published, we will somehow be able to extricate ourselves at the eleventh hour from the decisions that have made the publication of our expenditure inevitable. I say to those dark forces that that is not the case.