Top Corbyn ally demands axing of watchdog for MPs’ expenses
ONE of Jeremy Corbyn’s senior colleagues sparked fury last night after calling for scrutiny of MPs’ expenses to be scrapped.
Paul Flynn, Shadow Leader of the Commons, said the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa)– the watchdog which checks MPs’ receipts – should be abolished.
Instead, all MPs would automatically receive a specific amount of money which they could spend, removing the need for expenses claims.
In the MPs’ expenses scandal, Mr Flynn was found to have claimed £7,052 for a new kitchen, £1,153 for carpets and £1,200 for decoration of his property in London in 2005. He then sold it and moved to a new £275,000 flat. He was later required to repay more than £2,000 for mortgage interest following the scandal.
Under his new proposals, MPs’ spending would not be checked, and parliamentarians would no longer have to submit receipts. He said the new scheme would amount to ‘a more fundamental reform than polishing dung’. Last night, an exas- perated Labour MP said: ‘This is further evidence of the extent to which Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet is completely divorced from reality. Labour’s official position is now that to stop MPs breaking the rules, we have to abolish the rules. It’s madness.’
Mr Flynn, an 81-year-old long-time rebel, was elevated to the Shadow Cabinet after most of Mr Corbyn’s top team resigned. He revealed his policy suggestion in an email circulated to Labour MPs yesterday, writing that Ipsa was an ‘expensive flop’ and a ‘bureaucratic ornament’ that had been ‘misconceived in panic and fear’.
‘All parties sought a lifeline to escape from the nightmare of the expenses scandal,’ he said. ‘Ipsa was the wrong solution.’
Mr Flynn said that although the previous lax rules were rightly abolished, ‘ the pendulum swung from permissiveness to minute control of claims large and small. The most efficient best value alternative would have been to replace expenses at reduced total cost with an automatic allowance.’
He said Ipsa had failed, with the result that MPs’ reputation had ‘sunk from rock bottom to subterranean’. ‘Financial scandals have continued in both Houses with toe-curling regularity,’ he added. ‘The public are still convinced that MPs use the system for our own ends. There is a better solution. The previous simple five-part expenses system was atomized into a hundred headings and sub-headings. A monthly 30-minute chore was complicated by Ipsa into hours of tedious frustrating trawling through a bureaucratic morass of rules … Ipsa robs MPs and our staff of much of their most precious possession – time.’
He said the new system could be based on an allowance calculated on average expenses based on distance from Westminster. ‘ It would be acceptable even if it meant reduction in the amounts that MPs receive because of the liberation from the tentacles of tedious bureaucracy,’ he said.