Tag Archives: IPSA

Coronavirus and constituents: working for an MP during a pandemic

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IMG_20200430_150419.jpgAfter it was announced that IPSA had made an additional £10,000 available to MPs to support their office costs to help adapt to the ‘new normal’ of working from home with an increasing workload, there was much confusion and some misinformation about what this money was for. Emma Salisbury explains what MPs’ offices do, where that money might go, and what it has been like working for an MP as the UK has experienced a change in the way we live and work of a type that few (if any) people have experienced before.

The headlines were stark – MPs given £10,000 bonus to work from home! The news prompted criticism from political commentators and on social media, resulting in a petition (signed by 250,000 people) to reverse the decision. This wave of headlines prompted Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the House of Commons, to make a statement on the matter. Misinformation such as that put out about this issue has been one of the many democratic challenges of the coronavirus crisis, as the Unit’s Deputy Director, Alan Renwick, and Michela Palese have discussed elsewhere on this blog.

The truth is less exciting, and results in fewer sales and clicks. MPs pay for their offices and staff via the expenses system administered by IPSA, a body set up after the 2009 expenses scandal (for a summary of the 2009 scandal, see this recent blogpost by former Commons clerk Sir David Natzler). Each MP has budgets for their necessities: accommodation, travel, staffing, and office costs. The latter of these is how we pay for the boring things we need to run an office, everything from paperclips to envelopes to printer ink. In order to help support us during the pandemic, IPSA raised the cap on this budget by £10,000 to make sure that every MP’s office had the capacity, if needed, to buy whatever was necessary to make the transition to home working; if the MP or one of their staff does not have access to a computer or printer at home, for example, the budget can cover acquiring this equipment. 

All purchases reimbursed through IPSA need to be claimed for with a receipt and an explanation of why it was necessary, and the conditions of these new funds are no different. If IPSA decides that a claim for an item is not reasonable, then it can refuse to reimburse the MP for that expense, meaning it would have to come out of the MP’s own pocket. The extra amount is a cap, not a target: many MPs will not need to claim for the maximum additional amount. No matter how much of the budget MPs end up spending, this £10,000 is certainly not a lump sum gift to them or their staff.  Continue reading →

An ‘extraordinary scandal’: looking back at the 2009 MPs’ expenses crisis and its consequences

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More than ten years on from the 2009 expenses scandal, Andrew Walker and Emma Crewe have published a book that seeks to offer fresh insight into the origins and legacy of the crisis. David Natzler, a former Clerk of the Commons, offers his own take on the book, and the crisis it seeks to shed light on.

Over a decade has passed since the Westminster expenses scandal of 2009. It is widely regarded as one of the factors, together with the banking crisis and the absence of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, which led to popular contempt for the political class, the growth of UKIP, and thus the outcome of the 2016 referendum. There have been useful books and articles on the scandal’s effect as well as accounts by the journalists involved, and last year there were several TV and radio programmes looking back to what seemed at the time to be a momentous series of events. 

Now there is a book by Emma Crewe and Andrew Walker, An Extraordinary Scandal: the Westminster Expenses Crisis and Why it Still Matters, published late in 2019 by Haus. Andrew Walker was the senior Commons official responsible for the administration of the expenses regime; Emma Crewe is an academic anthropologist who has specialised recently in looking at parliamentary culture. I should declare an interest as it was at my suggestion that Andrew approached Emma with the prospect of working together on this project.

The basic story is familiar. A disc (or discs) containing at least a million documents was bought by the Daily Telegraph, who through May and June 2009 published daily exposés of the claims made by MPs. The information was on the discs in preparation for the major clerical task of responding to a court ruling under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requiring the publication by the House of Commons of much more detailed information than hitherto on payments made to members under the expenses scheme. The Act’s final incarnation included within its statutory ambit both ‘the House of Commons’ and ‘the House of Lords’, although neither appeared in the bill as first drafted. Jack Straw, the minister in charge of the bill, added them to the list of public authorities in Schedule 1 to the Act, and is said to have regretted it ever since. Individual MPs and peers were not then – and are not now – regarded as public authorities. But the House authorities were subject to the Act, and since they administered the expenses system and held the information on MPs’ claims, it became disclosable.

The Act did not come into force until 2005, giving anybody that would be affected five years to prepare. One obligation was to prepare ‘schemes of publication’, which would list what information would be published proactively. The House of Commons made similar preparations to other public authorities: they appointed specialist staff to oversee the effort and discussed what they would proactively publish. The House of Commons eventually decided in late 2004 to publish details of MPs’ expenses broken down into several headings, for each of the previous three years, and to then issue quarterly updates. Crewe and Walker recount the vain attempt to prevent the press from creating ‘league tables’ of MPs by publishing only a locked pdf, which the press had little difficulty in cracking. Various MPs were appalled and angry at being ‘exposed’ as the UK’s or Lancashire’s most expensive MP. One external PR adviser had to resign when it emerged that he had been secretly encouraging one party to make more of a meal of the other party’s record. Continue reading →

Getting a new parliament up and running: what happens after the election?

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sir_david_natzler.smiling.cropped.3840x1920.jpgbeamish.jpg (1)We may not yet know the result of the election, but we do know that we will have a new parliament. David Natzler and David Beamish explain what will happen when the new parliament commences next week. No matter the outcome of today’s vote, certain processes will need to be followed: parliament will need to be officially opened, MPs will need to be sworn in, and committees will need to be re-established — and their members and chairs must be elected.

The dates

The first days of a new parliament follow a well-trodden path, and the surest guide to what will happen is usually to look up what happened last time, in June 2017. However, much depends on the political context. And we will not know that context until the early hours of Friday 13 December at the earliest. All we know for sure is that the new parliament will meet on Tuesday 17 December, and that if the current Prime Minister returns, the State Opening – the start of the new session – will be only two days later, on Thursday 19 December. If there is a hung parliament, the State Opening could be delayed. Continue reading →

Transparency, trust and parliamentary expenses: lessons from the International Parliamentary Regulators Conference

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0.000Earlier this year, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority held the first ever conference for international parliamentary regulators. Here, Vicky Fox discusses how other national regulators operate, and offers an insight into some of the discussions  at the conference by academics, transparency advocates and serving members of the UK parliament.

In March 2019, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) hosted the world’s first conference for international parliamentary regulators. We brought together colleagues from 13 parliaments on five continents: Australia, Chile, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Republic of (South) Korea, Scotland, Wales, Zambia and the UK. We talked about transparency and trust – what it means in the parliamentary regulatory sphere and the role that regulators, the media and elected politicians all play in creating trust in democracy.  

IPSA was created in the United Kingdom nine years ago in the wake of the expenses scandal. But there have been similar difficulties in other countries, including in Australia where an Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA) started operations in 2018. Systems of regulation vary across countries with differing degrees of independence from the national parliament. For example in Hong Kong, pay and allowances are set by the Hong Kong government on advice from an Independent Commission, whose members it appoints. The Legislative Council Secretariat processes pay and reimbursement of claims. In Norway MPs’ salary and other expenses are regulated by law and guidelines. MPs’ salary is set by the Storting, the Parliament, based on a recommendation from the Salary Commission. In Wales there is an Independent Remuneration Board which sets the pay and allowances for Assembly Members. And in Zambia, pay and expenses are set out in legislation and administered by the Speaker.   Continue reading →

IPSA, parliamentary reform and constitutional watchdogs

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In a blog entry in October, I discussed the review by the HC Members Expenses Committee (MEC) of the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009 and the operation of IPSA, concentrating in part on the complex issues of independence and accountability of public bodies such as IPSA, who have some form of a constitutional (especially parliamentary) watchdog role.  This is a subject the Constitution Unit has studied for a number of years, and the creation of IPSA has ignited a fascinating debate between IPSA on the one hand and the Committee on Standards in Public Life (CSPL) and elements of the House of Commons on the other over the legal and constitutional duties  and functions of such a watchdog.  My concern was that the MEC inquiry was too limited and ‘exclusive’ to examine these fundamental issues sufficiently thoroughly.

The MEC has now reported (to a deafening silence, the political classes and media being almost exclusively focused on the PM’s Commons statement on the Eurozone summit/’veto’), and it does address these issues among the more substantive (and probably more newsworthy) issues of the nuts and bolts of MPs expenses.  Not surprisingly, it comes down in favour of the view that, in effect, that IPSA’s statutory duty merely to have regard to ‘supporting MPs efficiently, cost-effectively and transparently in carrying out their parliamentary functions’ should be upgraded from one to which it merely has to “have regard” into becoming its ”prime directive’.  IPSA’s claim that, as a self-proclaimed regulator, its primary duty is to “the public interest” has, rightly, been given short shrift.  This emphasises the importance of efficient delivery of functions – even where its purposes are, as the Committee criticises here, not made explicit in the founding statute because of legislation in haste – over a more lofty claim by a watchdog of being custodians of the public interest to which all else must be subservient.  What will Parliament (and the courts?) make of all this, both in any amendment of the IPSA legislation and in the establishment or reform of constitutional watchdogs generally?

On the specific problem of institutional design of a Members resourcing system that is both effective and maintains public confidence, the Committee has tried to steer a careful, apparently logical if (intentionally?) opaque line, proposing reforms designed to appear sensible and practical, without provoking a media and public backlash that politicians are grabbing back the control they were forced to cede in the 2009 crisis.  Its proposed structure supports retention of independent determination and regulation of the payments system for MPs’ costs, but suggests that “IPSA’s current administrative role should be carried out by a separate body, so that IPSA is not regulating itself, and the Act should be amended to permit this,” and that this separate administrative body “be within the House of Commons Service.”

Though presumably intended to be much narrower in function and responsibility – but what is IPSA’s purely ‘administrative’ role that can be severed safely? – will this new body not risk being regarded publicly as the return of the Fees Office, and, by implication, of the ‘bad old days’ pre-2009?  The Committee appears to have recognised the warnings given to it and CSPL about inappropriate mixing of regulatory and other other related functions, and their impact on independence and accountability, and it believes that its new ‘semi in-House’ system will be better than the pre-IPSA one because “independent regulation by IPSA and transparency would ensure that it did not replicate the deficiencies of the old expenses system.”  Really?

The Committee has recognised what some of us said to CSPL in 2009 about the loss of necessary expertise and understanding of the unique, ‘politicised’ world of parliamentary resourcing implicit in the creation of an ‘independent’ extra-parliamentary body like IPSA, and its proposal is presumably designed to remedy this, and thereby remove the running sore between Members and IPSA.  But structure isn’t everything – in such an environment, culture and ethos are as, if not more, important for the proper operation of parliamentary resourcing that does not become more in the interests of MPs as individuals rather than as the public’s elected representatives.

The fatal flaw of the ‘bad old days’ was not self-regulation per se, but the corrosive, exclusive and self-interested culture nurtured by decades, even centuries, of an irresponsible absence of effective accountability.  The Committee were clearly not keen on my submission that what was required was “”a system of modern parliamentary self-regulation, buttressed by an independent element to ensure that it was being operated transparently and responsibly and was not being abused”, describing it as going further than the views of its other witnesses (para 74).  However, the Committee does not seem to regard self-regulation in the area of parliamentary resourcing as inherently wrong, merely, presumably, undeliverable in the post-2009 climate.  In the same paragraph, it cites with implicit approval CSPL’s view that enhanced self-regulation could be retained at Holyrood and Cardiff Bay because “neither … has suffered a crisis of trust remotely comparable to that which has affected Westminster.”

This is a rather sad, defeatist attitude on whether and how Parliament can fundamentally reform itself, and in ways beyond questions of resourcing.  Without a fundamental culture change, the Committee’s proposed semi self-regulation ‘solution’ will be hard to make work both effectively and in a way that gains and retains public trust.  In fact it risks making things worse by reigniting public fury without ‘solving’ MPs’ discontent with IPSA, or, more fundamentally, without achieving its stated aim of providing an effective Members’ resourcing system (quoting with apparent approval my submission that ““the proper resourcing of the people’s elected representatives is a necessary precondition for a modern representative parliamentary democracy” (para 8)).

So, two cheers to the Committee for seeing the problems and sensing what the direction of reform should be.  But the third cheer must be withheld because of its failure to propose more fundamental cultural reform that would enable its proposals to succeed.  But this is typical of how parliamentary reform is done (or not) in Westminster – and Whitehall.