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Update 20.1 July 2009 The Parliamentary Expenses Scandal

Since the beginning of May the House of Commons has been convulsed by articles in the Daily Telegraph which draw on a CD detailing the allowances claimed by MPs. The most damaging revelations have centred on housing allowances originally designed to enable MPs representing constituencies beyond London to cover the cost of a second residence in the capital. The cases have aroused huge public discontent, and were prompted by issues as various as triviality of claims (for toilet brushes), extravagance (contribution to cleaning out the moat of a stately home) and dubious legality (payment for non-existent mortgages). The publicity helped end a number of ministerial careers, and will probably terminate the Parliamentary careers of up to a hundred MPs. It also contributed to the outcome of the 2009 European Parliament elections - see update 20.2 here. But there is longer term significance to all this, and it is twofold:

1. It has highlighted the ambiguous conception of what it is to be an MP: is it a job, or a public vocation? Until the 17th century Members were paid. From the 18th century they were not, but only because membership of the Commons allowed numerous opportunities for corruption. The cleaning up of British politics in the 19th century, which eliminated corruption as a source of income, led to periodic pressure for the introduction of payments. In 1911 for the first time an annual payment was established, but in introducing it the Chancellor of the Exchequer (David Lloyd George) explicitly denied that it was a salary. He said: 'it is not a salary. It is just an allowance, and I think the minimum allowance, to enable men (sic) to come here.' In the last forty years the role of the MP has been professionalized and payment has come to reflect that professionalization: pay was first linked to other 'top salaries' from 1970; a pension scheme, a normal expectation in most middle occupations, was first introduced in 1964; an office cost allowance was introduced in 1969; the additional accommodation allowance, which caused so much trouble in 2009, originated in the 1970s; a staffing allowance was introduced in 2001. The fundamental problem lies not in corruption in any straightforward way, but in the incomplete professionalization of the of the MPs' role: the language of 'allowances' continued to convey Lloyd George's sense that payment was neither a conventional salary, nor a conventional expense. (Hence the widespread practice also of using the office cost allowance to employ family members.) Since most citizens have, at best, a salary and tightly monitored expenses, the revelation created public bemusement and fury.
2. It will shortly lead to the end of Parliamentary self-regulation of the allowances system. We await the recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life on allowances in the autumn; in the meantime, the Prime Minister has announced the creation of a new Parliamentary Standards Authority to police MPs conduct. It replaces the Fees Office which had been compliant in agreeing to many of the discredited expenses claims. But if the Authority is created the change will be more significant still: it will end, not just self-regulation in respect of expenses, but self-regulation of the conduct of Parliamentary life in general.

An excellent brief account (from which the quotation from Lloyd George is taken) of the history of Parliamentary pay and expenses is: House of Commons Information Service (2009). Members' pay, pensions and allowances. Uploadable from: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/M05.pdf

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