The political sense of a bucket of lightly-drowned weasels

[fivemack]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7420848.stm

"MPs could seek to avoid future expenses criticism by awarding themselves an automatic lump sum of £23,000 a year for second homes, a newspaper says"

"If a lump sum payment were made to each MP, the need for these documents to be produced would disappear and there could be a considerable cash boost for those MPs who spend less than the £23,000 permitted."

Handing out lump sums in cash to MPs is the kind of behaviour for which we tut and deduct at least three points when rating the governmental virtue of random countries in South America; what's next, black Mercedes? Is there any merit at all to the idea that important people do not need to provide receipts when spending public money?

If the issue is that MPs need second homes in London, would it make more sense to get Parliament to buy a random seven-hundred-room hotel, a class of building which London hardly lacks, and have them live there?

Comments

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

23K seems rather a lot for a home, even for one in London. It's pretty much exactly the national median gross income, from which the average person pays a hell of a lot of other expenses besides home upkeep.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Our home is 15K, and it's a 2-bed flat in a not very nice area *and* we're getting a pretty good deal.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I like the hotel idea: a Parliamentary campus!

[del-c.livejournal.com]

When you're eighteen years old and unemployed, they seem happy to spend £23,000 a year paying someone to obsess over whether you're *really* looking for a job, or are just enjoying the good life on that sweet corrupt £23 a week. But when you're an MP, it seems your little feelings would be hurt if anyone queried whether you really needed that £23,000, on top of your large salary, to do your job.

Is this like that thing where if you pay poor people less they work harder, and if you pay them more, they slack off, but if you tax rich people more, they slack off, and if you tax them less, they work harder? The theory seems to be that rich people and poor people are two different species of human, with bizarrely opposite behaviour patterns.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

If the issue is that MPs need second homes in London, would it make more sense to get Parliament to buy a random seven-hundred-room hotel, a class of building which London hardly lacks, and have them live there

That sounds disturbingly sensible. Also because it officially says it's ok to have this, so any more scrupulous MPs do not have less opportunity to be resident in london if necessary. But that it's not just a random perk of "Hey, become an MP, get to swan around in london". An MP campus would be better for politicking, because lots of colleagues would be handy, and worse for entertaining mistresses...

[naath.livejournal.com]

Ah, but some of them live in London anyway and have to maintain the "second home" in their constituency. But even then I can't see them needing more than a 1bed flat if they've got all the amenities of a nice home someplace else.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I dunno, people who are used to living in a nice home might be kinda unhappy living in a dorm room a large part of the year.

How do MP salaries compare to what people of their education, test scores, or whatever other way you want to measure their probable results in the real world, make in corporate jobs? They certainly have a lot more travel and necessary entertainment expenses than most "good jobs". I haven't studied your people at all, but it looks to me like our people probably take a significant pay cut to serve in Congress.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Hey, Obama says in his book that he had a teeny flat in DC... clearly some people put up with it.

Hmmm, salaries are hard to find data on... MPs get 60K (ish) and then expenses. That's a pretty damn decent salary from where I'm sitting (on pretty much the UK average of around 20K), and more than many professionals. Not however as much as top city bankers.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'm sure Paul Wellstone's salary as a senator exceeded what he made as a college professor, too. On the other hand, people at the executive levels in business tend to make a lot more than that. Doctors and lawyers are all over the place (surgeons making a bundle, pediatrician's mostly making less, like 1/4 as much very vaguely since both have considerable range).

I'm not sure I want being a representative to be a hobby for rich people who like the power. One way to avoid that is to make it a viable career in terms of reward, compared to the alternatives, for the high-powered people you want in the job. But that may not be the *best* way to get the right people in the job, either. Also, if they feel underpaid relative to the people they see as their peers, it's likely to make them more subject to corruption.

The whole issue of what the "right" salary for a specific job (in any sense other than "market price") is one that there's wide disagreement on, and this case is I think harder than most.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

MPs are on average about fifty, and generally fairly high achievers; 60k doesn't seem an unreasonable salary. The large PDF I linked to has details of how MP salaries were set back to about 1911 (before then it was assumed that you had private means; there was a deal whereby a union levy to pay MP salaries was replaced by some degree of public funding for MPs); in 1990 the idea was 'at a yearly rate equal to 89% of the national maximum point (excluding range points as later agreed) of the Grade 6 (old Senior Principal) pay scale in the non‐industrial Civil Service' which sounds very reasonable. Another comparison would be regional managers of a large company, but I've no intuition about what the person responsible for every Tesco in Bristol is paid.

I don't have a very good idea of the background of the average MP, and theyworkforyou doesn't have biographies; picking a random debate and the first four participants listed, and looking up their Wikipedia entries, we have a miner, a manager of a small shop, a law lecturer and the leader of Leeds City Council. Though three of those four served for a fair number of years as full-time politicians before getting to Parliament.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Ah, but see - MPs get to set what the minimum wage is. I reckon that if they actually had to try *living on it* they might put it up a bit (well, OK, minimum wage plus a free studio flat in London because MPs really do need to live in 2 places and most people don't).

I do think that MPs need to be paid 'enough' to live on, because of course making only rich people MPs is bad and if being-an-MP was unpaid then only rich people could be MPs. However a great many people in this country have to live on a very great deal less than 60K a year and seem to get by.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

While I'm certainly not convinced that a laxly accounted allowance for a second house is the best possible answer, I think the hotel for MPs idea would risk isolating them from the population at large even more than they are already.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

In fairness to the poor sods, The Politics Show got some random punters off the street and asked them to investigate this and they came up with pretty much the same proposal - increase the basic wage and cut all the expenses and allowances.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's that unreasonable that all expenses and allowances have to be public enough to require them to pass muster with the Daily Mail and the Guardian alike, though I suppose that's optimistic given how cross the Daily Mail can manage to get itself to be with the fact that some prisoners are paid a pound an hour, and that the Guardian would argue that Saint Jerome spent unforgiveably much on lion food.

But to suggest an increase in the basic wage by what is at present the absolute maximum permitted cost allowance seems hopelessly imprudent, and an insult to any MP who in the past took care to be parsimonious with public money.

The expenses and allowances (http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/M05.pdf) (OK, the biggest allowance is £93854 for staffing, for which the most recent embarrassments have indicated that some MPs have been very loose with ensuring that the work done corresponds to the job description in All MPs’ staff should be employed on agreed pay scales, linked to job descriptions and standard contracts prepared by the Department of Finance and Administration) amount to about 250% of the MP's standard wage (£61820 base wage; £93854 staffing, £22193 Incidental Expenses, £24006 Additional Costs, £10400 Communications)

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

But that class of building is for the commoners!

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

Well... filling in expenses forms is hugely tedious and timewasting. And, if the expenses are just going to be paid however extravagant they are, maybe it would be best to give the MPs what amounts to a cap and an incentive to economise.

So it depends if £23k is reasonable, or not reasonable. I'm not sure; I've tried living on £17k in London, and I've tried living on £40k [both gross]. I can't remember how I managed the former, and I feel entirely happy and comfortable with the latter but I do still live in someone's spare room. If you wanted to bring some members of your family with you - not totally unreasonable if you're going to spend 2/3 of your life in a place - £23k might be necessary...

I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here. The 700-room hotel sounds a better idea, and I would even have thought more comfortable, what with people around to change the sheets and fix the washing machine and stuff.

[naath.livejournal.com]

You probably *don't* want to be dragging kids around with you though - they'll need to go to school wherever it is they actually live; and your spouse/partner/other adult family members might well want to work, and thus need to live in one place pretty much full time; I don't know how much time MPs usually spend in their constituency verses in London, but I'd expect it would be possible for most of them to make it a weekly commute (and that's something that other people who work in London but want to raise their kids in a 'nice' place do, MPs however at least have a real reason to do so).

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

would it make more sense to get Parliament to buy a random seven-hundred-room hotel, a class of building which London hardly lacks

The downside is that it would become as big a target as the Houses of Parliament themselves. Buying, say, 350 unloved houses, all within reasonably easy walking distance of Westminster, would seem to me to be a better plan; it would probably be of benefit if they weren't too nice, plus MPs had to share. Alternatively, there's always the prospect of trying to further increasing the quantity of technology in use (teleconferencing, etc.) in an attempt to increase the time that MPs spend in their constituency with their families and constituents and decrease the amount of time they spend away in London.

I know the backgrounds of two MPs. One of them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashok_Kumar_%28UK_politician%29) worked at British Steel Technical as a researcher. (I worked alongside him briefly between his former stint as an MP and his current one. Smashing bloke.) The other (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Palmer) was pretty senior in IT management for a global chemistry firm and has said (IIRC - I like him too, so if I do not remember correctly then this is not intended as a smear) that he made the equivalent of ~£95k before becoming a MP, roughly halving his wage when he did so. I rather like our MPs frequently being high flyers in their chosen profession before they go into public service; while British Steel aren't super-generous, both these MPs earned doctorates the hard way and are clearly made of good stuff.

I think MPs are going to be inreasingly incentivised to prove themselves cleaner than clean to a sceptical audience, with the benefits to the public of Freedom of Information and increased connectivity, and I also believe that most of them do a pretty clean job already, and getting more so. Good.