MPs forced to bare all for voters
MPs who have hated the introduction of much tighter rules on the declaration of outside interests – hours worked and pay – will hate one other feature of the much-leaked Kelly report.
Sir Christopher Kelly isn’t satisfied with the transparency plans already laid down and suggests going further.
He wants potential MPs to make a declaration to their constituents before an election saying just how much they intend to work on the side.
It would not be operable for this coming general election but would be for future ones. On another proposal, there’s some confusion in Westminster about how Sir Christopher Kelly came to talk of only “12 constituencies” being affected by his proposed change to the second home allowance zone when he talked to party leaders yesterday.
Sir Christopher estimates that if you apply the one hour rule (he calculates that as a journey time of one hour from the gates of the Commons to a station in your constituency – including time taken to get to main London terminus, not including the journey from your constituency station to your actual constituency home) then only an additional 12 MPs lose their allowance on top of the many who lost out when the “20 mile radius” from Westminster rule was introduced earlier this year.
That doesn’t seem like much of a saving, stripping 12 MPs of the allowance, given that one of the tasks for the committee was meant to be cutting the overall costs of MPs’ expenses.
Quite a few MPs started the day talking about all sorts of wheezes and schemes that might allow them to frustrate or significantly amend the Kelly recommendations, forgetting that in the frenzied aftermath of the Telegraph expenses stories they had stripped themselves of the power to determine their own expenses.
One MP reminded me of one celebrated case where an MP tried to make sure he would get his hands on the sliding scale “golden goodbyes” which Sir Christopher is now consigning to the dustbin.
Back in the 1970’s the veteran Labour MP and anti-monarchist Willie Hamilton worked out that by voluntarily standing down and not contesting his Scottish seat he would miss out on the severance payout. He looked up one of the safest Tory seats in the UK, South Hams in Devon, and stood against the Tory MP there to make sure he had contested an election, gone down fighting, and could still get the extra payout that entitled him to.
No doubt Sir Christopher has made sure there are no such loopholes in his report.
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