Commons spent fortune blacking out expenses
Blacking out many of the most interesting and controversial details of MPs’ expenses was an expensive operation carried out on Parliament’s instructions by the Stationery Office, the privatised publisher of official documents.
The company was contracted by the House of Commons to prepare the claims for release after Parliament lost a three-year legal battle with journalists and freedom of information campaigners to keep the information secret.
The second-home allowance was “so deeply flawed, the shortfall in accountability so substantial and the necessity of full disclosure so convincingly established that only the most pressing privacy needs should in our view be permitted to prevail”, the Information Tribunal ruled on a test case of 14 MPs in February last year. It set out strictly limited circumstances in which redaction — blacking out — of information would be justified. MPs’ addresses should not be exempt except in cases where there was a “specific, credible threat” to security, it ruled.
The Commons authorities appealed and lost in the High Court but a series of rulings from the Commons meant that the expenses details published yesterday were starkly different from those envisaged by the Information Tribunal.
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In July last year the Commons passed an order exempting addresses from disclosure. Three months later the Stationery Office finished scanning and editing, for the first time, the vast volumes of expense claims and accompanying receipts and invoices, but it was then ordered by the Members Estimate Committee, chaired by Michael Martin, the Speaker, to censor the documents for a second time. The committee argued that anything that revealed MPs’ patterns of behaviour or gave away the identities of suppliers who had access to their home addresses would compromise their security.
The committee drew up criteria for further redactions: information published would be limited to a member’s name, the type of allowance, date and value of claim, the goods or services purchased and the identity of suppliers to offices. It also listed 14 categories of information to be redacted, to include addresses, correspondence with the Fees Office, all comments made by Commons staff, the names of hotels used and the identity of anyone providing goods or services to MPs’ homes.
The Stationery Office used those criteria to edit the documents a second time. In April MPs were given access to their redacted claims and asked to satisfy themselves that the criteria had been properly applied.
The deadline for those requests was last month, and Parliament had not envisaged publishing the final edited documents until mid-July. They were brought forward to today only after The Daily Telegraph began publishing details of the uncensored versions.
Posts
Mick Agar is 100% on the money.
Each MP should have to pay a share of this amount. None of it should be born by the taxpayer
Peter Botting, Bexhill-on-Sea, United Kingdom
"Commons spent fortune blacking out expenses"
Bet they remembered to get a reciept..........
Simon Howells, Macclesfield, Cheshire
Get over yourselves, MPs. You're not nearly important enough for any terrorist to waste time on. I can't imagine why a terrorist would even bother blowing up Gordon Brown - he serves their cause far better right where he is.
Tom Welsh, Basingstoke,