Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority

Michael Connarty Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Paul Murphy]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I hope that her comments and those of all hon. Members who take part in the debate are noted seriously by IPSA. I am sure that it is watching proceedings and will read Hansard.

It is important for IPSA to understand what this debate is about. First, it is about ensuring that IPSA’s operation is cost-effective, because we have a duty as the House of Commons to the taxpayers of this country to ensure that it is cost-effective. Secondly, it is about ensuring that the body is working properly. Undoubtedly, there are areas in which it is not doing so. Thirdly, and most significantly to Members of Parliament, it is about ensuring that our constituents are receiving the best possible service from us.

The area of office costs illustrates my point well. My predecessor entered the House of Commons in 1958. I took over in 1987, until which point no Member of Parliament representing the old Pontypool seat had had a constituency office. That was not unusual. Constituency after constituency did not have an office occupied by the Member of Parliament. I have no doubt that if, almost 24 years on, I decided to close down the office, my constituents would disagree violently. People in every constituency expect their Member of Parliament to have a constituency base with a caseworker, where they can go to talk about their problems.

I agree with the hon. Member for North Thanet (Mr Gale) that there is a considerable difference between an MP who uses the parliamentary estate as his or her main office and one whose main office is in the constituency. The biggest change that we should make is to disentangle office expenses from personal expenses, because an office expense is not a personal one. That matter is causing considerable difficulties for Members and I believe that IPSA is beginning to understand that. It is beginning to change its policy on that. For instance, as Members will know, office rent can now be paid directly by IPSA and we can use the travel or credit card that IPSA supplies to pay certain bills. I do not see for one second why that should not be taken even further. Personally, I do not want to handle any money at all to do with my constituency office, and I believe that my constituents would agree with that policy.

[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

I have to disabuse my right hon. Friend of the idea that IPSA can handle treating personal expenses and office expenses differently. When I asked IPSA to reimburse my expenses for living in London to my personal account and to put my claims for my office into an office cost account, which I have run for the past 18 years, it said that it could not handle two bank accounts at the same time. It could pay all the money into my personal account or all of it into my office account, but it could not separate the payments. The system is terrible and not geared up to deal with the reality of an MP’s life.

[Paul Murphy]

The result, of course, is that the service that we provide our constituents becomes less and less effective. There is no reason in this wide world why the old system of ensuring that personal expenses are separate from office expenses should be taken over by IPSA. Its starting that process seems to me to underline the fact that it has accepted the principle that they are different.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

I welcome the sea change from a system that was clearly not transparent as far as the public were concerned. It was clear that the public thought that the system we had before contained hidden powers for Members of Parliament and a lack of transparency. The electorate were right to demand a redefinition of what we were allowed to spend their taxes on. I have no regrets about all the things for which expenses were available before but have now been withdrawn. It would be wrong of us to think that the public did not demand changes—and they got changes. I regard it as important that we have an independent, transparent system, controlled and reconciled by a body outwith the control of MPs. That is why I cannot vote for the motion.

However, I disliked the witch hunting that went on during the process of change. It distorted the public’s view, and IPSA is a system based partly on what is acceptable to the tabloid journalists and The Daily Telegraph, as well as to the few hotheads—only a few dozen in my constituency—who demanded that we should pay everything out of our salaries and sleep on a park bench. As I have said again and again, it is a punishment system, although IPSA did not mean it to be.

I have to be quite honest that I disliked the windbaggery at the time, of which we have heard some more today, with people playing to the redtops and going for populism rather than common sense in their speeches. That is not useful to any of us. I am sad to say that I could not have supported the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) if it had been selected, because he is doing it again. It mentions apologising unreservedly to the British people—should the 300 new Members vote for that? It suggests that the House trusts IPSA, but I do not trust it. I think IPSA is an incompetent system, put together by people on a board in which I have no confidence, under a chairman who I do not believe understands, or has even tried to understand, what is required. I told the gentleman that to his face, and I have not been persuaded to change my opinion.

If any Member says that IPSA is not interfering with their task of working for their constituents and constituency, either they are not getting reimbursed, they are getting a member of their staff to do the work for them or they are working longer hours. I have an ongoing case in my constituency of a man of 53 who buried his 30-year-old son, who developed pneumonia and left behind four children. That man is an unemployed bricklayer in the middle of a recession that is particularly affecting the building industry. He is my priority, so I chose to deal with his case rather than to start claiming back some of the road travel expenses that I have never claimed since the day that IPSA came into being. I do the same every time—I give priority to my constituency work load and what my constituents need, and I keep putting off claims.

Of course, IPSA’s 90-day rule means that many claims for such legitimate expenses will be denied me, as the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley), who travels two hours to the House every day, told us earlier. It has made an arbitrary rule that after 90 days, it does not matter what we have spent money on, we cannot get it back. Another arbitrary rule is that if we forget to send the paperwork within seven days of an online claim, it can deny us the payments. That has nothing to do with the legitimate claims and expenditure of Members of Parliament.

Now is the correct time to have this debate, which is not about having a whinge at IPSA. It has said from the beginning that there will be a six-month review, and that it will improve the system. My contention, as I said to Sir Ian Kennedy when he came to speak to the Scottish Labour group, is that just as a camel is a horse designed by a committee, IPSA’s system was supposed to be a horse but is in fact a donkey. It was designed by people who were not competent to design it or they met a man, or maybe even a woman, of shifty personal background, who sold them a system that is inadequate and yet much more tortuous.

My son is a senior systems solutions architect for Hitachi. He was awarded the Hitachi systems engineer of the year award for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations countries last year. He laughs like a drain every time I tell him about our online claim system, which we have to back up like some sort of petty cost clerk, by putting together all the paperwork and sending it all in for somebody to check.

I tell my son that two companies are involved—one in Manchester, which is getting a good old pay-off for the online system, and a wedge of people up on Victoria road in rather palatial circumstances who are supposedly checking every single invoice that comes through, and who boast about having turned down so many claims from Members that are in fact legitimate. We have heard that they have even refused claims for people’s offices or not paid national insurance. That is not a system that is working efficiently, but it is costing the Government, and the people through their taxes, a lot of money.

I have had a number of useful conversations with the acting chief executive. I always worry about acting chief executives—are they afraid that if they recommend radical change they could be sacked? He is still acting chief executive, yet he seemed to respond well to everything I said to him.

I have experience of running a claims system as a leader of a council for 10 years. We used a paper system, rather than an online and a paper system. I also have experience of using the system in the Scottish Parliament. At the moment, I get all the bills for my office, which I share with my MSP, paid directly out of the allowances of the MSP and they then send me a bill from the Scottish Parliament and I pay it back to them. That arrangement is much quicker, much more efficient and much more transparent. There has been a suggestion that we move to a system of direct payment. Sadly, I think that a Member who spoke earlier was wrong, because IPSA has moved only slightly in the direction of saying that it will directly pay contracted regular payments, for example, our office rent and our office council tax. IPSA has also offered to do this for our second homes allowance, but—

[Jo Swinson]

rose—

[Michael Connarty]

I am sorry, but I do not have time to give way. IPSA cannot handle the idea that we might want to claim less back than we pay or that we also have regular non-contracted payments that vary, such as service charges for flats. IPSA can handle only very limited things. What it cannot do is handle a system where we send it the invoice, it verifies that it is legitimate, it pays it and then deducts it from our allowances, because IPSA is against an allowance system in principle. IPSA wants a system that is so stupid that we have to make the claims.

IPSA has done something bizarre in terms of transparency by saying that it will pay on invoices: we send it an invoice before we pay it, it will send us the money and then we have to remember to pay the invoice. I predict that there will be tragedies in that way; people will lose invoices and will fail to pay them. If we pay them by credit card, where do we get the receipt to prove that we have paid?

The final thing that I want to talk about is the travel card. We get a paper version where we could clearly fill in what it is for and sign it at the bottom, as we used to do. We could then attach to it any receipts that are not coming from the travel office—the travel office will send IPSA every receipt directly—and so all of my flights, my train journeys and all my use of the Heathrow express would be covered. But IPSA does not want to know about that; we still have to go through a system of having this all put online, then following up on the cost part, assembling all the bits of paper and sending everything in. IPSA is not fit for purpose and it is costing us a lot of money. It is not time to take all the power back to MPs, but it is time to reform it properly.