MP expenses crackdown becomes a farce
Dear Sir Thomas Legg,
While motivated by a combination of good intentions and public anger, it is clear that your crackdown on MP expenses is now descending into farce. Although your demands have been far from unreasonable in the eyes of the public, it has been done in such a way as to undermine the entire process and leave many MPs with unfairly tarnished names.
This all started when a panel was set up, headed by you, when the expenses scandal first hit. Every claim relating to the controversial second homes allowance has now been looked at by your panel, and you decided that MPs should not have been able to claim more than £1,000 a year for gardening at their second home and more than £2,000 for cleaning. However, the debate started immediately once it emerged that you set retrospective limits on gardening, cleaning and other things rather than just checking MPs’ claims were within the rules at the time. In your letter to MPs, you said that you could not find any rules covering how much could be claimed for gardening and cleaning so had to judge what you thought were ‘fair limits’. Cameron, Clegg and Brown then jumped on the ‘who can sound the toughest?’ bandwagon and demanded that their MPs agree to pay back whatever is asked of them and many MPs have now done so. Leadership sources in all three parties insisted their tough line was necessary to reassure voters that the system was being reformed. The sad truth is that, even with the need to reassure voters and improve the credibility of Parliament, this situation has been handled in such a cackhanded way that it is now at risk of making Parliament look even more ridiculous than it did before.
Firstly, the legality of what you are doing is extremely dubious. Alan Simpson, a Labour MP, suggested that your decision to impose retrospective limits would be challenged in the courts and another Labour MP, ordered by you to pay back £16,000, is consulting lawyers and says he cannot afford to repay. Several MPs even believe the retrospective demands breach the European Convention on Human Rights. Imagine, just imagine, HM Revenue and Customs sending a letter to everyone in this country saying ‘Sorry, we’re changing the rules retrospectively, you now owe us £5,000 in underpaid tax to make up for the last ten years’. There would be mutiny on the streets. It would have been far more sensible to find out who crossed your newly imposed limit from previous years and then restrict their expenses claims in future rather than demanding cheques on the spot. Secondly, you have focussed on how much people have paid their gardener and cleaner instead of going after those who screwed the taxpayer out of tens of thousands of pounds. What about all those married couples who ‘double-claimed’ on their expenses? What about those who clearly misled Parliament about their second home situation? What about those who dodged capital gains tax and haven’t paid anything back, or those who claimed for ‘phantom’ mortgages?
I’m as furious as everyone else about what MPs have got away with, but the furore that you have created by blundering into the expenses row without enough thought and planning has, in my humble opinion, ended up making Parliament look even less credible. If Parliament can’t even organise a straightforward, open, simple and effective investigation into expenses then what can it do? What the public wanted was swift, decisive action that took Parliament forward rather than backward. Unfortunately, you have achieved nothing of the sort.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
The natural justice angle is interesting, from a jurisprudential point of view.
Naturally, indisputably, retroactive rules/legislation violate natural justice and the MPs are right to highlight this. However, appeals to natural justice do require that the ‘victim’ has ‘clean hands’.
This is where it gets murkier. While retroactive rules offend natural justice, so does being a judge in your own case which is the position MPs with their self-regulated expenses system are in. So while they bemoan one instance of violating natural justice, they were quite happy to remain silent on the older violation that has cost us and enriched them.
In those circumstances, it is clearly arguable that since the system they operated was so utterly, indisputably corruptable (violating natural justice along the way) that the only valid way of extricating everyone from this situation is to judge their actions by what the rules SHOULD have been had their been an impartial judge sitting above their actions rather than one of them who benefited from excessive permissiveness. Tho Legg, as Guido points out, appears too shy to come out and make that argument for himself and will probably get Filkined.
Yes, the natural justice angle is interesting, but there should be no mistake as to why this enquiry was set up and who it was aimed at.
Brown set this up to kick the ‘landed gentry’ country home owning (Tory) MPs, and to counter Cameron’s quick reaction to the original crisis. (Legg has partly refused to play ball, but that’s not really the point now).
When enquiries are set up in this way, half arsed and skewed, that is exaxtly the kind of result that tends to come out in the end. We are still awaiting the result of the other enquiry, and nobody knows how much damage that will inflict. We only know that the damage will come closer to the election, and Brown must now be hoping the balance will swing his way when that report comes out.
That said, Labour MPs have no right to recourse on ‘retrospective law’ when Brown as chancellor made changes to the tax system which rendered perfectly legitimate arrangements invalid and reached back 15 years. Nor when he changed the car tax system on cars that had already been purchased 7 years ago. The double jeopardy laws should also be of interest here, giving prosecutors endless bites at the cherry in a country where guilty is guilty but innocent is not guilty ‘yet’, but we’ll get you later! All this (and more) on the nod from the compliant labour herd.
As ye sow, so shall ye reap….
Shaun, the management of the situation by Legg and others has indeed been dire. He just walked into this mess spraying financial bullets everywhere, and not unsurprisingly he is causing chaos.
Tony, good examples of Brown screwing people over retrospectively but that doesn’t mean other people should get in on the act too!
It’s NOT retrospective, it’s merely applying the ‘wholely and exclusively’ rule, as HMRC does for the expenses of the rest of us.
“Tony, good examples of Brown screwing people over retrospectively but that doesn’t mean other people should get in on the act too! “
No. But neither does it mean we should offer a sympathetic shoulder to cry on when they are hoist by their own petard!
Ifabloke, the abitrary expenses caps are retrospective as they were never included in the Green Book, which detailed what MPs are allowed to claim.
Julia, I’m not feeling that much sympathy for MPs. This letter is more a case of criticising Sir Thomas Legg for botching this investigation so badly.
“Ifabloke, the abitrary expenses caps are retrospective as they were never included in the Green Book, which detailed what MPs are allowed to claim.”
LFAT, as I showed above, the fact that rules applied are retrospective can be justified by the reality that MPs set their own rules and then judged their own behaviour against those rules and handed out wrist slap (see J Smith) punishments for grotesque violations. That situation was so abhorrent to natural justice and the rules of equity that it becomes reasonable to judge those claims for that period by what a *reasonable* impartial person would’ve put in place.
Think about Judicial Review – that is a proceedure where the courts look at the decisions taken by public officials and judge them both against the law, reasonableness and equity with the power to reverse, set aside or throw out decisions apparently validly taken. This is absolutely no different and I have no sympathy for those who have abused the public trust and the rules of natural justice and equity and then try to hide behind the very things they abused when it suits them. Equity expressly forbids this in English law.
That maybe, but Judicial Reviews have a structure and a clear remit. The same can hardly be said of Legg’s activities.
Ish – JR really only cropped up in 1986 over, I think, a case involving GCHQ. At that point, there was no structure and the courts were making it up as they went along. Legg’s remit may not have been clear but the way he has chosen to interpret it was, therefore, up to him and as with the first JR cases, he has had to make a fist of it.
Getting worked up about Legg is to play the MP’s game of ‘we may have taken your money, we may have claimed to phantom mortgages, we may have spent more of your money on cleaning and fripperies than if we had being paying out of our money but please, you must be fair to us’… and frankly, I don’t see these people as victims. I see them reflected in convicted defendants in docks up and down the land, railing at what they feel is an ‘unfair’ process. After all, if they are as great as they believe they are, how could any of them possibly have done anything wrong?
I won’t play that game. I personally think that Legg is mild. These thieves, liars and fraudsters should be swinging from lampposts, not sitting in our legislature ruling over us.
@Shaun Pilkington – “Getting worked up about Legg is to play the MP’s game of ‘we may have taken your money, we may have claimed to phantom mortgages, we may have spent more of your money on cleaning and fripperies than if we had being paying out of our money but please, you must be fair to us’… and frankly, I don’t see these people as victims. “
Well said. Let’s concentrate our fire on the real targets.
Shaun, I agree that Legg has probably been mild in terms of gardening and cleaning costs, but that does not excuse him behaving in such an uncoordinated and blundering manner. With politics in such dire need of having integrity and confidence restored, I am extremely concerned that he has ended up muddying the water more than anything else.
Julia, Legg has done anything but concentrate his fire on the real targets – Jacqui Smith, the Wintertons, Elliot Morley etc
No he hasn’t. But what about Kelly. Where does his remit fall? This enquiry was meat to find nothing, it’s just that Legg has made a name for himself by wilfully stretching the context. Could Kelly deal much more strongly with the flipping and CGT dodges?
LFAT, you are correct that this is becoming a farce, but wrong to shoot the messenger. And demonstrates the folly of the broken system. We will never see the justice that is applied to all applied to MP’s so the best we can expect is an election now – and the only valid judge is the electorate. Its a test of Brown’s leadership – and another one he has flunked.
He was only mandated to look at ‘expenses’ other than mortgage payments.
What ‘uncoordinated and blundering manner’ do you mean?
My sole criticism is that he hasn’t given his decision the robust public defence it deserves, instead allowing the MP’s ‘we’re the victims here’ meme to propagate in the media.
Tony, I thought Kelly was supposed to be designing the expenses system, not getting people to pay anything back.
Alastair, an election would certainly sweep away a lot of the problems / MPs.
Shaun, his decision to just wade in without due consideration for the legal and political ramifications of his actions was astonishingly naive, particularly for a civil servant.
Naive? I think that depends on what he wanted. If he wanted to give MPs enough rope to appear as greedy, self-interested hypocrites with no understanding of natural justice or equity beyond if *they* were well treated by it then I’d contend that he’s done *exactly* what was needed.
Oh poor me! I have to pay back money I shouldn’t have taken from the public in the first place! Its sooooo unfair!
Yeah, I think this reflects *much* worse on them than on Legg!
@LFAT – If that is the case then I have misunderstood the remit of Kelly. I had mistakenly thought that he would look at both what had gone and make recommendations, and as you point out, this is not the case.
So what now happens about the worst offenders? What Legg has done has rather hit the small time minor offences and left the bigger fish alone. It gives the appearance that if an MP agrees without question that he should repay something that was ‘unreasonable’, he has admitted some formal guilt while those who have trousered thousands and possibly defrauded the revenue will never have to face that guilt formally. (Unless the DPP gets involved, which in most cases is unlikely because there has been no breach of the ‘Law’).
And the AG will clearly be standing off… I couldn’t possibly comment on self-interest there, or how people shouldn’t be involved in judging their own case…
And actually, “no breach of the ‘Law’” you say, and yet, that would be for the courts to decide. I would contend, as would the sunlight mob, that people claiming for redeemed mortgages or, frankly, anything else not ‘wholely and legitimately for the business of parliament’ (or whatever the exact phrase is) definitely have a prima facie case to answer. Or do you think Jaquie doesnt? Or the other two who claimed for paid-off mortgages? And how does a duck house further the business of parliament in a way that you and I should pay for?
If this were you or I putting in business expenses to HMRC, we’d be called to account PDQ. There is, I’m afraid, no reason to excuse or ‘masters’ from that when they claim that doing up their land is necessary to their role as a legislator on constituency representative. I believe that’s a prima facie case of fraud but would be happy to leave the courts to decide on guilt or innocence. You appear to have prejudged their innocence and that is, sadly, where we diverge…