MPs to be forced to repay Legg expenses money
It’s pay-up time and we can do this the easy way or the difficult way. That is the message from the Speaker, John Bercow, to MPs in a letter just gone out in which he says how the Commons will deal with the refuseniks who won’t pay up Sir Thomas Legg’s expenses demands.
There have been estimates that 50 MPs are refusing to cough up demands from Sir Thomas Legg, the former civil servant who has been going through MPs’ past expenses and claiming back from some thousands of pounds worth of what he considers over-claiming.
In fact, no one knows how many MPs will actually refuse to pay up as the final demands are only going out now and won’t all be delivered until 7 December.
But under new rules devised to frighten off the refuseniks and agreed by the Members’ Estimates Committee, MPs will be told that if they don’t cough up they will have the money sequestered from their pension, pay, severance money or some other pot.
There will be a brief, mini-appeal procedure to be overseen by the former judge Sir Paul Kennedy, but appeals will only be considered on the grounds of whether Sir Thomas Legg added up correctly NOT on the grounds that the whole thing, retrospectively setting limits on expenses that were cleared at the time, is rotten.
At the end of the whole process, which could now slip to January and not as planned be finished off before Christmas, MPs will vote on the whole plan.
They will by then know if any fellow MPs are dying in the last ditch on this and refusing to pay up.
They will effectively be voting against those colleagues and subjecting them to the humiliation of clawback.
Difficult but then it would be difficult to resist the heavy whipping which party leaders, desperate to put the whole thing to bed, will be applying to the vote.
Parliamentary Counsel, lawyers to Parliament and the government, have been racking the archives to find precedents for Parliament raiding an MPs’ salary or pension pot, preferably something more recent than the nineteenth century.
I’m told there might have been something along these lines applied to John Stonehouse’s assets when it turned out he’d faked a suicide in Miami and was hiding in Australia.
Update: The law would have to change to raid MPs’ pension pots – details here
Related: Legg letters: Speaker couldn’t stop the ‘Hutton effect’
– Get new posts from Gary Gibbon’s blog emailed to you. Sign up here for free (link takes you to Google’s Feedburner service).