Given the state of the country, you’d have thought MPs might have better things to do than abuse and belittle those running the parliamentary expenses scheme. But that’s exactly what some of our elected masters appear to have been doing in recent months, according to a Freedom of Information request sent by Mr S.
Staff at the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) recorded six anonymised incidents of ‘bullying and abusive behaviour by MPs’ in one 14-month period between July 2020 and September 2021. Among them include one male MP ‘threatening to make bullying and harassment complaints against [IPSA’s] validation team if they do not approve his wrongly categorised claims for taxis.’
Another incident involved a phone call about an ‘annoyed’ MP involved in a case of accommodation overspend who ‘pushed back on anything’ the IPSA staff member tried to say: ‘they kept interrupting me, cut me off and would not give me the chance to reply… throughout the call I was belittled and made to feel incompetent in my job.’ A third adds that an IPSA employee who tried to help an MP who was nothing but ‘rude and uncooperative… his behaviour on the phone was not acceptable.’
Further cases include ‘sarcastic comments made about why [an expenses] claim had been returned for more evidence’, an IPSA staff member offended by an MPs’ tone and one instance in October 2020 where an expenses caseworker said an elected representative was simply outright ‘rude.’
Given the insistence of some MPs for social media companies to crack down on online harassment, might we see the same enthusiasm for offline training for some of their parliamentary colleagues?
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