MPs may have avoided a reputation-destroying pay rise this year, however Guido can reveal they are still set to receive a big boost to their expense allowances of up to £3,230 this year, including up to £280 more for their second home rent allowance. Despite average London rents falling by over £2,000 last year…
IPSA quietly made the announcement yesterday, with interim chair Richard Lloyd setting out that their accommodation related budgets haver been “Increased based on an estimation forecast of inflation over the next year”. MPs with second homes in London will get a £280 rise, versus £200 if renting a home in their non-London constituency…
London MPs will receive a higher £3,230 boost, while non-London MPs will have to scrape by with a mere £2030 increase to their expenses. It may sound like a unnecessarily large increase, though given the size of their already generous expense allowances it constitutes just a 1% rise…
The House of Commons commissioner for standards has found Claudia Webbe to have breached the MP code of conduct after failing to declare payments she receives for continuing her work as an Islington councillor. In addition to being an MP 100 miles away in Leicester…
Webbe failed to register eight payments of her monthly £876.56 councillor allowances within the 28-day window required. While Webbe has apologised for the breach, her written excuse filled evidence is eyebrow-raising. She chose to deliver an abridged history of the UK’s covid fight by way of an explanation for the delayed registering:
“I would make the following observations on 31st January 2020, the first Covid-19 cases were reported in the UK; On March 5, 2020, the first Covid-19 death was recorded in the UK; On the 12th March 2020, the risk posed by COVID-19 was increased from moderate to high; on 16th March 2020, 20 the Prime Minister advised all persons in the UK against non-essential travel and contact with others; on the 26th March 2020, the UK Government issued a legally enforceable stay at home order to all persons in the UK (otherwise known as a national lockdown; on the 18th June the Secretary of State for Health raised concerns about Leicester, with a focus on my Leicester East constituency; on the 17th July the Government ordered further, restrictive, legally enforceable measures covering the whole of the Leicester City area.
As a new member of parliament, I gave my maiden speech on the 9th March 2020. Further, by the time of the national lockdown I had not yet appointed anything close to a full complement of staff consequently my own workload was huge and I was working seven days a week with less than 4 hours’ sleep a day and still learning all the rules and workings of parliament.”
Quite a comprehensive chronological write-up for someone so busy with her ongoing court case…
While Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh interrupted a select committee yesterday to show off her social media pride, Luke Pollard is going above and beyond to brag about his Facebook successes. Locals in Devonport will spot a gadget in his office window tracking live how many Facebook likes his MP page has.
Last November, local Labour councillor Jeremy Goslin recorded his delight with the tech tracker, with Pollard telling constituents to “Like my Facebook page at facebook.com/lukepollard and watch the counter spin round #plymouth :-)”
What Luke didn’t tell his constituents is they actually forked out for the useless bit of ego-boosting tech. A search of Pollard’s expenses and an FoI enquiry later, Guido can reveal the taxpayer coughed up out £330.66 for the window display.
Even after fleecing the taxpayer for over £330 of unnecessary expenses, Luke’s Facebook page has only 8,309 likes. Equating to about 4p per follower…
At the start of the pandemic, Guido was the first to report that MPs were to receive a huge boost to their expenses allowance, when IPSA raised their monthly credit card limit to £10,000; allowed items to be claimed for without proof of purchase; and increased office budgets by £10,000. Since then, IPSA has also changed rules to allow MPs to claim for taxis. We can’t expect our representatives to catch the plague-ridden public transport like the rest of the proles…
Yesterday, a further boost was announced, in the form of a £312 annual homeworking bonus for MPs’ staff, to cover their home telephone usage, internet, electricity and gas – all tax-free. If every parliamentary staffer – none of whose incomes have been hit by Coronavirus – claimed the allowance, it would cost the taxpayer £1.1 million…
MPs will also be able to request up £18,270 extra for their staffing budget to deal with “a rise in workload for their offices as a result of coronavirus” – up from the £10,000 allowance rise announced at the start of the lockdown.
Responding to the neverending parliamentary pandemic pocket-lining, The Taxpayers’ Alliance Duncan Simpson told Guido:
“MPs and their staff should not be getting budget top-ups for working from home when everyone else is being expected to just get on with it.
“Millions have been stuck in the house, looking after kids and cracking on with their day jobs – where’s their £312 annual homeworking bonus?
“Parliamentary authorities need to get a grip and stop pampering our politicos.”
Guido can’t imagine this is the last excuse for picking the pockets of the public we’ll see from IPSA before the pandemic is out…
IPSA is keen to avoid any further negative press after Guido revealed MPs had been awarded a huge Coronavirus boost to their expenses. On Friday they released a bulletin to MPs advising them to decline local authority small business grants they may have been offered in light of the pandemic. Accepting the taxpayer-funded grant is completely unnecessary given IPSA continues to pay out all costs…
The advice strictly tells MPs that if they have received a partial business rate refund from their local authority, the amount must be returned in full to IPSA. Guido wouldn’t put it past some MPs to have considered trying to claim the government handout…
An email sent to former Members of Parliament from Parliament’s Digital Service Customer Relations team and seen by Guido, has informed former MPs that equipment purchased through IPSA expenses is not retrieved by Parliamentary IT, which only retrieves equipment it issued itself. This means MPs are able to keep any equipment purchased with IPSA credit cards. The same credit cards that three weeks ago Guido revealed were receiving a £10,000 limit boost…
“Equipment purchased personally or with an IPSA-issued credit card is yours to keep. All purchased equipment can be identified by a yellow label starting with ‘CMP’. However, the original software on any purchased computers is owned by Parliament and will no longer be licensed once your account is deleted.
This equipment will need to be reset to its factory settings for it be used again. Due to the security on the computer, the Digital Service will need to do this for you…
…The Digital Service will return privately purchased equipment to the address provided on the return label within 4 weeks, once the device has been factory restored.”
This bonkers system encourages MPs to buy the flashiest laptops they can, safe in the knowledge that Parliament’s Digital Services team will handily wipe the tech and hand it back to MPs for personal use…
One MP who in 2018 purchased a £2,000 laptop by this route was Tom Watson – meaning taxpayers coughed up a flashy personal gift on top of his £80,000 salary.
Not bad, eh?
