Your right To Know
Saturday, 18th April, 2009
The story behind Dispatches: The Westminster Gravy Train
From the Channel 4 Website
The Palace of Westminster is meant to be the mother of all Parliaments. It is lauded as a beacon of democracy. Dispatches set out to examine the state of our primary political institution: how democratic is it and how accountable are MPs and Lords to the citizens they are meant to represent.
I had my own reasons for being concerned with the state of our democracy. When I first made a freedom of information request for a detailed breakdown of MPs’ expenses five years ago I was pretty much laughed at. It was considered inconceivable that the average member of the public could be allowed to trawl through an MPs’ ‘personal’ receipts. I put the case that these receipts had nothing to do with an MPs’ personal life. Expenses and allowances can only be claimed to meet costs incurred on MPs’ parliamentary duties. There should be nothing personal about them.
Five years on and having won a case in the High Court I am still waiting for these receipts. I did not anticipate the truculence with which Parliamentary authorities and some politicians met the public’s demand for greater transparency and accountability. While the public are looking for ‘Google Government’, a place where they can access all information easily in a format that is accessible, Parliament seems to exist on another planet, at least another century. Too many seem to believe that they can pass laws that affect the public and spend public money without putting forward their detailed reasoning or being directly accountable to citizens. This has led to a feeling that politicians are more concerned with representing their own interests rather than the public’s.
The structure of Parliament appears to favour political insiders at the expense of the general public who pays the bills. What other person has a boss who allows an expense system like that outlined by Andrew Walker in The Green Book? Walker, the director of the Department for Finance & Administration, stated in The Green Book: ‘It is your responsibility to satisfy yourself when you submit a claim.’ He also states that his office prides itself on the ‘high quality of our service and on our confidentiality.’ I wondered why they were so proud to offer confidentiality as one of their services. After all, the fees office distributes the public’s money. Expenses can only be claimed by an MP for his official duties. There should be a commitment to transparency, not confidentiality.
I thought the story was over when I won my Information Tribunal case in February 2008 which ordered the receipts be disclosed. Leadership comes from the top, primarily the Speaker of the House Michael Martin who chairs the Members Estimates Committee and who introduces the rules in the Green Book, the rules by which MPs claim allowances. But it was Mr Martin who rejected the advice of his original legal team and hired another one at vast public expense to appeal to the High Court. If he thought the threat of going to the High Court would dissuade me, he was wrong. I went ahead with the help of my own lawyers and we won.
In May 2008, the High Court judges ordered disclosure of all receipts and claims of the 14 MPs in the original requests, along with the addresses of their second homes. The House of Commons acknowledged their sound defeat by stating all receipts for all MPs would be published in October 2008.
That date came and went. I was then told the receipts would be published in December. That date, too, came and went. Still no receipts. The Commons claimed that it was time-consuming work, scanning all the receipts and blacking out sensitive information. But this ’sensitive’ information was being defined subjectively by the MPs, not - as the High Court ruling stated - by certain defined principles. Why should Margaret Beckett be allowed to redact, or black out, the name of the firm who she tried to purchase a pergola from at taxpayers’ expense?
After the winter recess, MPs came back and had the gall to try for a second time to exempt themselves entirely from the Freedom of Information Act. Eventually, they were shamed into dropping this highly unpopular proposal. They were more successful, however, in exempting their home addresses from public scrutiny. The High Court had also ruled that these addresses were the only way to ensure the second homes allowance was being correctly spent.
At 9pm on 2 March 2009, just as debate on the Political Parties and Elections Bill was about to end, Julian Lewis MP stood up and inserted an amendment that exempted all MPs addresses from the Freedom of Information Act. So we have the situation now where the only class of people excluded from the electoral registers is our elected representatives! The point is that only by knowing these addresses can cases such as that of Jacqui Smith and Tony McNulty be known. As long as these addresses are kept hidden, the public can have no confidence that MPs’ second homes claims are being used properly.
Many of the MPs Dispatches talked to wanted to see full-scale reform. Ben Wallace MP told us: ‘I don’t want the innuendo. I don’t want to go shopping in my constituency and see people sort of wink at me and say ‘yeah, you’re all on the take’. He made the decision to publish all of his expenses online. He was the first MP to do so. Surprisingly few, however, have followed his lead. That seemed indicative of a culture which placed more value on the opinion of political insiders than on constituents.
The failure to publish has led to a drip, drip, drip of scandal after scandal. Too many in Parliament don’t seem to understand that openness is in their best interests. It is the only way to re-build public trust. What people want from Parliament is what they expect from the internet: easy access to information which they can utilise in ways which best suit them. That is they way to empower people and get them re-engaged in the political process.
That there can be so much public anger over a system and it remain unchanged speaks poorly of the state of this democracy. It is wrong that an MP is more afraid of his colleagues than he is of his constituents. We pay for public servants. We pay for the information they collect. It is in our name that such public information is collected. Why should it be that we aren’t allowed access to it? The time is ripe for Britain to enter the 21st century and become a democracy in practice not just in principal.
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