There is a lot of grumbling around parliament about the new expenses regime and the IPSA bureaucracy established to implement the new system.  Some of it is unjustified, some of it is justified.

In Disinfecting Parliament, a report published last year, the Sunlight Centre recommended a number of measures based on best practice in the private sector. Foremost among the recommendations made was that MPs should be issued with a House of Commons debit card to be used for their legitimate expenses. Simples.

The transactions would as normal be electronically recorded automatically and could thus be published online automatically, the spending limits would be automatic and bureaucracy would be minimal. Instead for every transaction we now have invoices being received, authorised, paid by MPs, sent to IPSA where invoices are then re-checked, approved and reimbursed by IPSA with lots of manpower required. Crazy and expensive.

Peston is at it again, the cocky hack claims he has “confirmed” matters thus:

“It has been confirmed that the Chancellor Alistair Darling will impose a one-off super-tax on city bonuses when he unveils his Pre-Budget Report today”.

Shouldn’t the Speaker demand of the Chancellor why Peston and not parliament was the first to know of his plans? The PBR is important and may contain market sensitive information.  Peston has previous on this, causing mayhem with share prices and arguably creating a false market.  Bercow made a big thing of insisting on the primacy of parliament when he was running for office. Prove it today.

Is this what they mean by cleaning up parliament?  This poster has gone up in all the loos on the parliamentary estate.  For MPs too stupid to understand the correct procedure…

The government’s Bill introduced by Harriet Harman yesterday proposes establishing a body to be known as the “Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority” and an officer known as the “Commissioner for Parliamentary Investigations”.

The five members of the IPSA will be

“appointed by the Queen upon an Address of the House of Commons. A motion may only be made only with the agreement of the Speaker for a candidate selected on merit on the basis of fair and open competition and approved by a Speaker’s Committee. Members will be removable only in response to an Address of both Houses. There will be requirements that one member of the IPSA should have accountancy experience, that one member should have Parliamentary experience, and that one member be a holder of or have held high judicial office.”

The Commissioner will be appointed the same way.  There will, according to the Bill

“be a Speaker’s Committee for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority charged with exercising the functions given to it under the Bill – in particular, approving the selection of persons to be members of the IPSA and the Commissioner.”

Do you see the flaw in this “independent” Comissioner and Authority?  Members will be drawn from the establishment and their selection approved by the Speaker’s appointees.  Would we permit criminals to choose their own judge and jury?

This is a stitch up, we don’t need more rules and self-selected regulators, we need reform of the expenses system,  together with clarity, transparency and enforcement of the rules.  The voters will kick out MPs if they can identify crooks, in this sense in a democracy voters are the ultimate regulator of politicians.  This whole idea is ill-founded, we don’t need to intermediate democracy with another quango or committee, this approach has already failed.

We need only to empower voters with enough information so that they can determine the truth about those who seek to represent them.  The truth is all we need, not redactions, not more quangocrats.