Sir Patrick Cormack article for Wolverhampton Express and Star
3rd June 2009
I have never known a time like this. Soldiers are shot in Afghanistan. The future of one of our greatest car plants is at risk. An airbus has been lost over the Atlantic. All over the country recession is wreaking havoc with peoples' lives. And yet Parliament, which should be spending all of its time debating such great issues, is itself the headline – or rather MP's expenses are.
Don't get me wrong. I am astonished that some colleagues I have known as hard working and conscientious Members of Parliament, appear to have taken leave of their senses when filling in their expense forms. But it would be tragic if these actions, some of them appalling and wrong, and others just plain stupid, undermined public confidence in the institution of Parliament itself, for upon Parliament all our liberties as a free people ultimately depend.
When I entered the House in 1970 the salary was £3,250 a year and there were only two allowances. I could claim for my journeys between my constituency and London (but not for my mileage within the constituency) and I was allowed £500 a year towards the employment of a secretary. In those days it was very difficult for someone like me, a schoolmaster with a young family and without any capital, to make ends meet. The work load was too much for the half secretary I could employ in London and so my wife began to help out, for some years without any pay at all.
Even then my duties were taking up between sixty and eighty hours of the week – as they still do – but I found time to write and to earn, in addition to my salary, so that the family could have a base in London as well as a main home in the constituency. It meant I could see something of my boys as they grew up. We furnished our own first London base because the allowance towards living in London, introduced at £187.50 a year in 1972, did not even begin to cover the expenses of a home.
Successive Prime Ministers refused to accept independent review boards' recommendations on Parliamentary salaries. I clearly remember a Labour Chief Whip saying that something would be done about allowances to help things along. So through the '80s and the '90s allowances grew but the rules about what you could claim were very clear and I believe that most Members observed them. Indeed the large spreadsheets in the Daily Telegraph bear this out, although the headlines do not always reflect that fact.
However, it is clearly essential that the whole system should be looked at thoroughly and independently, by Sir Christopher Kelly's Committee on Standards in Public Life. I hope that they report very soon and that their report can then be implemented. In the meantime all three party leaders are rather grandstanding on the issue and a number of changes have already been implemented, some more practical than others.
I hope that Sir Christopher's Committee will say that every Member of Parliament should be deemed to have the main home in the constituency and that the second home in London, paid for by a system of carefully controlled allowances, should be rented and not purchased. What has particularly offended people is the notion that Members of Parliament have been able to make large sums of money. Even more offensive has been the practice of 'flipping', something of which I had never heard, whereby Members have been able to designate the constituency home one year and the London home the next. That has already been outlawed – and rightly so.
Whatever changes are implemented I hope people will not follow in the footsteps of Senator McCarthy and blame everyone, including those who have scrupulously followed the rules, merely because some of those rules are now being changed. If the speed limit on motorways was lowered to 65 from the first of July no one would take seriously any suggestion that motorists should be prosecuted for doing 70 on the first of June.
