Possible administrative error
The official website of UK Labour carries a page devoted to Willie Bain MP, the elected representative for Glasgow North-East. It contains a mission statement including the stirring sentence below:
“Politicians have to keep in touch with the people who elect them, and that’s why I’m working hard in the constituency too. I will never claim lavish expenses and never milk the system.“
(Our emphasis.) This week, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority published its official account of MPs’ expenses for the year 2011-12. Out of 650 MPs, Willie Bain was the 5th-highest claimer, racking up an incredible bill of £180,923.70 to the taxpayer on top of his £65,738 salary.
(If the current Parliament runs to its full length and these figures are typical, then the services of Willie Bain will have cost the UK public £1,233,305 over the term.)
Walk-up return flights from Glasgow to London cost around £99, falling to as low as £61 if you book slightly in advance. The House Of Commons sits on around 150 days a year. By our calculations, that means Mr Bain could actually commute from Glasgow to London for every single day of Parliamentary business, spend £53 on his lunch and still have change from his Travel and Subsistence payments, as well as saving the £19,000 he charged the taxpayer for accommodation.
Ian Davidson MP, friend of this blog and Mr Bain’s near-neighbour in Glasgow South, scraped by on just £110,000 in expenses for the year (despite also having the extra workload of being chair of a Select Committee), charging under £15,000 for his combined Accommodation, Travel and Subsistence – £25,000 less on those two things alone than Mr Bain, whose constituency is a mere handful of miles away from Mr Davidson’s, and £70,000 less in total.
The SNP MP Angus MacNeil, who represents the considerably more remote Na h-Eileanan an Iar constituency, still spent £7,000 less on Travel & Subsistence than Mr Bain, £14,000 less on Accommodation, and £33,000 less in total. The Lib Dems’ John Thurso, representing the most distant mainland constituency (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross), got by on £23,000 less than Mr Bain.
We would be intrigued to know why Mr Bain, having specifically vowed to minimise his expenses, requires so much public money to perform his responsibilities to his constituents. Perhaps he’s made some error in his calculations.
If this is Willie Bain showing he is doing what he claimed. “I will never claim lavish expenses and never milk the system.“” then I’d hate to see his expense returns if he WAS trying to milk the system.
I thought he was actually based in London?
The Glasgow address at the by-election he gave was, his Mamie’s Hoose
Top 5 is led by 3 libdems and 2 labour MP’s
Do you think there is any correlation to why they think we are “better together”
Give willie some due, he does respond when tweeted directly to.
Thing is McHaggis one of the Lib/Dems is Carmichael whose constituency covers Orkney and Shetland so, although I hate to say it, I’d give him a wee bit of slack over his expenses. The rest, well stand them up against a wall and ……… 😀
There may well have been an error. But I reckon it was made, not by Willie Bain, but by his constituents.
And there is the positive case for the union.
Here we have Mr Bain and his (non) excessive expense claims, whilst down the road we have the disabled being treated like criminals
link to mentalhealthtoday.co.uk
link to morningstaronline.co.uk
Interestingly the government REFUSED to carry out an impact assessment on the disabled of how the austerity measures were affecting them, hmm! I wonder why. It couldn’t be because of the answers that any report would find could it?
Mr. Eric Joyce (LABOUR, FALKIRK) is still at the top of his game too, spending more than the other 647 MP’s except his unionist Liberal chum Alistair Carmichael, from Orkney & Shetland on subsistence last year to the tune of £40,106.73. So he takes Silver Medal.
Mr. Jim Murphy, (LABOUR, E. RENFREWSHIRE) did his very best to spend more than anyone else on staffing but had to take the Bronze Medal for nailing the public for only £36,401.30.
Angus Robertson (SNP, MORAY) was not to be outdone by his lavish Unionist rivals so came first at spending money on Constituency Rental costs at a mere £8,536.33. He ought to know better even though his Gold Medal was quite cheap.
But the Supreme Champion at spending other people’s money must go back to Alistair Carmichael (LIBERAL DEMOCRAT, ORKNEY & SHETLAND) whose income, office costs, staffing bills & travel expenses cost the tax payer an incredible £255,127.90 last year. That’s over £4,900 per week or just under £700 a day, including those days he sitting on his arse during parliamentary recess doing nothing, except perhaps checking his expense sheets.
No wonder he looks so happy in that picture!
I too, have always wondered what a bed of ill-gotten funds would feel like to sleep upon. Really bloody comfortable I imagine.
Directly after Oor Wullie’s (well certainly mine since he’s my MP) declaration of his aversion to lavish milking, is a great example of the Unionist paradox.
‘We know the next General Election is a straight choice between Labour and the Tories – the SNP are irrelevant in that debate.
Growing up in Glasgow, we know the devastation caused by the Tory years. We saw the poverty, the mass unemployment, a whole generation and a whole city written off, pensioners living in freezing conditions with no dignity. It made me angry then and it makes me angry now.’
The Tories make Wullie so angry that he’s actively opposing the one political change that would prevent them from wreaking more devastation on the already devastated – not only that he’s joining with the Tories to fight that change!
Iain you have to remember that his decision to do was made by some one in his constituency ABOVE his pay grade!
Arbroath, even before expenses there cannae be many in our constituency above Wullie’s pay grade!
In the photos of the Bettertogether’s big weekend if Unionism, Bain certainly didn’t look as though he objected to following orders.
I always wonder if MPs make any attempt to minimise their travel and food costs.
If I was an MP, I’d be booking flights as far in advance as possible (or if I was a Glasgow MP I’d be getting the train, since it doesn’t take much longer than the time taken to get to Glasgow airport, check in, fly, wait for luggage and then get the tube into central London). It’s actually quite obscene that someone can claim to have spent more on travel than many people make in a year.
And you wonder how much of an MP’s food they claim for – I’ll claim for food if I’m away on business and therefore have had to eat in a restaurant due to the lack of a kitchen, but if I was an MP with a second home, I’d feel daft claiming for food I’d made in my own (second) home.
I would have thought the whole point of MPs’ second homes is to minimise these sort of costs. Looks like wee Willie Bain takes taxis everywhere and dines in expensive restaurants.
Just a thought Doug, but would the likes of Bain actually fly up to Glasgow? If I’m right these flights are all one class, if he travels by rail then he can claim FIRST CLASS can’t he? Best he stays away from the plebs that voted him in, they may actually ask him a question or two like ” what EXACTLY do you do for you money?”
Digging a little deeper we also see that he spent £121,821.29 on “Constituency and Staffing Costs – Payroll” of which (and I’m hoping I’m reading ipsa’s site properly) £65,738.00 was to “connected parties in the MP’s Employment”.
It also strikes me as slightly strange that an “accommodation deposit” of £2,460.00 appears also to have been paid to a connected person yet the “accommodation rent” of £1,450.00 per month does not appear to have been similarly described. Is this perhaps the real administrative error?
IPSA may have put out the figures for M.P.’s expenses but when you look at the figures it just leaves me with the dry boak.
I do not believe that the IPSA crowd are scrutinising the M.P.’s hard enough about their claims. I think IPSA is a half way house between the way things were and the way we, the taxpayer, want them to be, the idea being that we can’t complain any more about expenses because they have done something. What they don’t realise is that what ever it is that they have done does not do enough.
Guys – it is easy to knock, but flights to the and fro Orkney and Shetland are not cheap. Whilst I have no truck with Alistair Carmichael’s politics (or Tavish’s) but he has two island groups to cover, and is a pretty active in being in his constituencies. I’ve found myself sitting beside Mr Carmichael on the Edinburgh to Kirkwall, and Edinburgh to Sumburgh flights on a fair few occasions (and remember he has to fly to and fro London to get even there, and while Easyjet may look cheap, they do not fit in with Loganair’s schedule), so knowing what my T&S costs are, I’d rather not be the one to throw the first stone.
Willie Bain though? Hand me the chuckies…………….
How many and what type of staff do they really have? How many are their own friends and family? Is there any proper checks and audits of these sorts of expenses too or can you just claim the full pot and spend it as you will on staff?
#Appleby
link to the-universality-of-cheese.blogspot.co.uk
Perhaps we should be having ANNUAL audits of each and every M’.P. by an independent group of auditors. At least that way we would begin to get an idea about what the REAL story is about the M’P”s expenses.
I may just be cynical but I have grave doubts about a lot of the expenses that are claimed by M.P.’s. As you say Appleby, how many “staff” are family and friends. I believe that before the last election there were moves being mooted that Westminster was going to bring in rules about M’.P.’s “employing” family and friends. I don’t know if this ever got anywhere though. If it didn’t then the time is well past due for it to be in place!
I was trying to make that point Tearlach about Carmichael. He is the only one who I’d expect to have a large expenses bill due to his travel requirements JUST to get to his constituency. That said I am STILL surprised that he is not No.1 on the list. This in itself tells me that something “fishy” is going on within the expenses culture at Westminster. Surely the further an M.P. lives from Westminster then the HIGHER their travel expenses will be. Yet here we have M.P.’s who are only one TRAIN/PLANE trip away making similar or HIGHER claims!
Without appearing to defend him, the £99 only takes him to an airport some distance from central London. He still needs to get his cotton socks to Westminster. However on The Train Line 5 minutes ago, I could get Glasgow – Euston on Monday this week returning on Friday for £122 for plebs or £440 for first class. These equate to £3600 or £13200 respectively to the big smoke (a city i quite like incidendtally) for a 30 week year.
My job in a private company pays fairly well; I haven’t (and wouldn’t in the current economic circumstances) travelled first class so why is he such a man of the people? Helmet!
I posted a link last night to an article in the Scotsman written by Jim Sillars.
link to scotsman.com
I have found a link over on scottishindependence2014 to an article in the Herald today concerning the same subject.
link to heraldscotland.com
It would appear that the prospect of Blair standing in a Scottish court may be a wee bit closer than even I thought possible., 😀
Arbroath1320,
I thought BA still did first class, but before posting pish I checked their website. You’re absolutely correct; there now appears to be no first class from Scotland to London. But here is the case for the train. I reckon it’s 30-45 minutes slower, but a lot less hassle since when your bum’s down it’s down. And above that you can do a good 4 hours work. No brainer.
And if you’re connecting, there’s Frankfurt (not today with the strike), Charles du Gaulle, Schiphol and Newark. You can get anywhere in the world from these places without going near Heathrow.
When you look at the costs for staff and such claimed by MPs then they must have either very well paid staff (epsecially considering the environment now) or they must have a heck of a lot of them. Can’t say I’ve noticed a big buzz around the local office and I know these places regularly save cash by taking on the young uns on placements, apprenticeships, etc. too and so get a bit of free labour. Must be a big knees up if you have a close relative who gets a foot in the door in politics. A job for life mooching at the fringes. Wives, siblings, parents, children. They’ll all be sorted directly or indirectly.
Maybe we could just get those bus warrants for MPs? They could humbly ask for them and they could be written out for each justified journey ahead of time? That might make them reign it in a bit.
Am I right in thinking that expenses aren’t taxable income? If that’s right, then anything claimed as expenses where there is no proof of the expenditure having taken place is simply tax free income?
Err, no,
If it was an SNP member representing Orkney and Shetland his or her expenses for travel would be legitimate and comparable. That is the nature of the constituency. What is more interesting is the amazing payroll that Willie Bain appears to have accumulated. £121,829?