An unfashionable view

MPs will soon have to show receipts for all expenses claims over £25.  After the Conway scandal, surely that’s a good thing?  I think so.  Yet the press release sent out by Martyn Jones MP – and highlighted over at Red Box – does make some persuasive points against.  Here’s the key passage:

“Monitoring an influx of allowance claim forms will require the Department of Finance and Administration to employ more staff for more hours. This department already costs £17,000,000 per year to run and has increased by over a third the amount of people it employs in the past twenty years. I am not trying to say that MPs are above scrutiny – that is not the case. However there must be a better way to safeguard the public purse than having a mass bureaucracy to analyse and process every single receipt we touch. Many of my colleagues have shown an interest in a random spot check, whereby a smaller bureaucracy would employ a full audit on only a few MPs expenses per year.