On MP Expenses

The issue of MP expenses has stormed back into the spotlight in the UK today after the Telegraph revealed explicit details from MP receipts. MPs who have been called out on their expenses (in particular Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, former defense minister Geoff Hoon, and now Gordon Brown and Jack Straw) say they are working within the rules, but the media has portrayed them as taking unfair advantage and using taxpayer funds for their personal use. MPs need to improve the public’s understanding of what they do, and this can only be accomplished through greater transparency.

Regarding understanding, the problem is that the general public knows neither what MPs’ actual, day-to-day responsibilities are nor how their expenses affect their ability to meet those responsibilities. It isn’t clear exactly what it means to have a first house versus a second house. An MP could have completely legitimate uses for the property and the media could be taking things out of proportion. When Harold Wilson was prime minister, there was a furor over his ‘six’ homes. But this turned out to be ungrounded: he did have four ‘homes’, but aside from his London apartment, they (the constituency home in Wirral, No. 10 Downing Street, and a government-provided weekend house) were all used for official meetings. In many cases their use was necessary for him to be an effective prime minister.

It can be expensive to be an effective MP – particularly if her constituency is far from London. MPs have a reasonable claim to business or first-class travel so they can use the time to think and work. But many MPs could stand to be more transparent about where their expenses are going, and the few who take egregiously take advantage of the system should be stopped.

Increasingly, government is acting more like a manager rather than a provider. They often seek private companies to deliver public goods under contracts. As government becomes more business-like, I believe that MPs should be treated more like business people—held accountable for their outcomes (without getting caught up in procedure) and incentivised to perform. But how do you hold someone accountable for an outcome when they have so many (often disparate) things to do, from handling constituency complaints to speaking in Parliament? On top of all the things they have to do, the constraints in which they have to do them can also be large. The myriad of different protocols, procedures, and administrative tasks makes effective governance difficult if not impossible.

If there were greater transparency about what MPs do, people might understand the difficulty MPs sometimes have in getting things done. But MPs are averse to change and have little incentive to make their governance system more dynamic if it would mean the demise of their old boy’s club (which could be a source of the perks they don’t want the public to know about). That MPs and Lords are so dependant on Oliver Cromwell-era procedures shows that it’s necessary to think more clearly about how political systems are operating. Gordon Brown will have to address the Telegraph’s leak, and has already called for a review of MP expenses, but considering the failures of previous enquiries in the 1970s and 1980s, I doubt much will change.

As MPs become more business-like, they also become professionalized. In their desire to be politically correct and please ‘the public’, they don’t say anything controversial; gradually their constituency loses faith in the MP’s ability to represent them, and voters become disenfranchised.

What could the UK (and the US and Australia, who are facing similar issues) do to ensure that MPs are really speaking for their constituencies? One option is to deprofessionalize the role of MP by creating a separate proportionate-representative system in which citizens are put forward for election to work part-time on community issues. These ‘non-public’ officials should be allowed to serve more than one term (if they’re accomplishing things for their community), but there should be certain term limits to ensure diversity. Canada has been experimenting with just such a system for some time.

Some new blood representing constituents could be really good for citizens, if these ‘non-professional’ MPs could cut through the bureaucracy that currently slows down the increasingly professional MPs in Parliament.