From the BBC:
The Parliamentary body set up to police expenses will cost about six times the amount MPs have been ordered to repay, the BBC has learned. Figures show the annual cost of running the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority will be £6.5m. Last week, MPs were told to pay back £1.12m of their second home expenses after an audit of their claims dating back to 2004 by Sir Thomas Legg...
While it is quite probably the case that this body, like most other government bodies is overfunded and inefficient (and hasn't clawed back nearly enough), to compare £6.5 million with £1.12 million is to completely miss the point.
By analogy, if a supermarket employs two or three security guards at a cost of £50,000 a year, the owner doesn't care so much about how many shoplifters they catch in flagrante and whether they manage to retrieve a few hundred pounds worth of goods from them. The correct comparison is how much stock would be pilfered in the absence of those guards - for example, the owner would be daft to make them all redundant in order to "save" £50,000 if he knew that without them, £100,000 worth of stock would go missing.
UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: This is not the cost of the now concluded investigations, which appear to have cost about £1.1 million in total to look at claims from 2004 to 2009 - i.e. about £340 per MP per year, which doesn't seem too bad. I guess it would take a normal person a week to check one year's claims, I'm sure it's all very faffy. This is the ongoing annual cost of the new 'body'. Which makes the comparison even more vacuous.
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11 comments:
Yes, I agree. The same thought struck me when I heard this on the radio this morning.
Ideally there should be nothing to pay back (ie no fraudulent claims). In which you would be comparing £6.5 million with £nil! Nonsense.
6.5 million? Jesus Christ, Dour and Daughter could do it for a couple of mill, no prob. Hire us now!!
6.5 mill? WTF? That's £100,000 per each MP. OK, add in peers, so say £50,000 for each person claiming exes. Per year. That is 100%, 24 carat bullshit.
R, thanks.
D, VFTS, I think it's £10,000 per MP not £100,000 actually, which is still an outrageous sum of money (you pay a beancounter £2,000 a month - it can't take five months to trawl through one MP's receipts, surely?), but I stand by my logic. You might as well compare the cost of the police force with the value of stolen goods they return to their rightful owners.
Why does the head of this overfunded and underworked organisation have to be paid £100,000 a year?
Does anyone give any idea where the rest of the £6.5M goes?
It seems to me a bit like the guy who makes a shit cup of tea so that someone else will be asked to do it next time: We'll make this as expensive as possible to show that we should have been left alone in the first place.
Your logic works... in most places.
The problem is about who is running the "policemen". Do they care if they work hard? If the "policemen" report something which seems to meet the rules, yet is obviously a scam, are they going to report it to their boss, and is their boss going to do anything about it?
We had a fees office, and it seems that they authorised almost anything that was sent to them, from duck houses to manure. Why should this be any different?
The answer to the whole problem is to put it in the hands of voters. MPs get paid a total remuneration per annum of their term, by the voters in the constitutency which is declared on their ballot paper. As it would be constituency-based, it would iron out differences such as travel and staff costs.
OOPs, bugger, missed a zero. Sorry.
But I think your analogy is faulty. Plod, supermarket guards etc. are faced with the general public (although I grant you that they know their regulars). In this case, the identity of the 646 criminals is known. Even if their addresses are a bit vague. So they don't have to be sought out.
And we already know that the cost of "unguarded" theft in this case is about 1 mill over several years. (probably a bit more, really, but that's what's been declared as fraudulent). So spending 6 mill every year is [...insert phrase of choice ...].
B, VFTS, see update, this £6.5 million is a staggering overspend, if we pro rata the cost of Legg's enquiries, it ought to be more like £200,000 per annum, and even less than that if they just checked the claims properly in the first.
Or we could have it for free by giving MP's a fixed (higher) salary and telling them to pay their own bloody expenses.
JT, we have discussed by email, that idea needs a bit of honing.
A quick calculation gives a figure of 80 staff, assuming the lowest is paid around £50K, giving an average of £75K,and leaving a bit for other expenses.
Now a civil servant of the rank that commands a salary of £100K, would probably expect a staff of 85, regardless of whether they had anything to do.
It's probably just somewhere to put civil servants freed up by cuts elsewhere as part of "tackling the budget deficit".
B, that looks about right. *sigh* yet another quango for me to axe when I get into power */sigh*
Mark, this is where the 6 mill p.a. is going. Read and weep. Guido
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