As reported yesterday on Coffee House, MPs have been incredibly frustrated by the response of parliamentary spending watchdog Ipsa to their requests for extra security measures following the murder of Jo Cox.
This afternoon Ipsa’s chair Ruth Evans has written to MPs saying the regulator will ‘review and accelerate’ the process of approving applications for security funding, acknowledging that there have been complaints about how it is working at the moment.
If Ipsa is able to speed up its approvals process, this will come as a huge relief to those MPs who are understandably nervous about their own vulnerability to copy cat attacks following Cox’s death. If not, parliamentarians are likely to continue to push for a new body to look after their security, which would be their first attempt to erode the power of a watchdog that many feel doesn’t make a great deal of effort to understand what the working life of an MP is really like.
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