The Wardman Wire

There has been a lot of trumpetting about how the repayments due from MPs after the Legg Report Audit are now going to top one million pounds.

So far, 166 MPs have come forward to admit that they have been asked to repay a total of just under £300,000 by Sir Thomas Legg, following his audit of allowances dating back five years.

Another 176, including a number who stand accused of some of making the most questionable expenses claims, have either refused to reveal the contents of their “Legg letters,” or failed to respond.

That means the true figure requested by Sir Thomas is likely to be far higher.

Repayments made as a result of the Legg audit come on top of the £637,000 which MPs voluntarily repaid in the weeks and months after The Daily Telegraph began its series of disclosures in May about widespread abuse of the system.

I thought it would be useful to put this in context. It amounts to slightly over 2% of the Additional Cost Allowance expenditure over the period covered by the Legg Report.

Sources:

Daily Telegraph.
House of Commons Annual Resource Accounts.

Notes:

1. This graph only includes the Additional Cost Allowance, which was the main focus of the Legg Report. All the other parts of the Expenses system are excluded.
2. The Legg Report was limited to the period 2005 to 2008.
3. A sum of roughly a further 44 million UKP was claimed under the Additional Cost Allowance between 2001 and 2004.
4. The receipts and records for the period 2001 to 2004 were destroyed by the Commons Authorities under the authorisation of the former Speaker Michael Martin, while a High Court Case was in train involving about the public’s right to access receipts and records from the Commons.
5. Repayments do not appear to include interest charges, so misappropriated (whether deliberately or in error) funds are – in practice – Interest Free Loans.
6. Repayments do not include penalties either, unlike when ordinary people make mistakes in payments to the “Revenue”.
7. Neither the Legg Report, nor the Kelly Report, have yet addressed the most egregious abuses. Consider, for example, that Ann and Nicholas Winterton owned an unencumbered London residence which they sold to a trust benefiting their own family, and then charged the mortgage thus created to the taxpayer; the sums obtained were more than £120,000.

The above notes may help the reader understand why, in my opinion anyway, we have only got onto the first few looseboxes of the Augean Stables which have to be cleared out.

Had you forgotten the earlier period 2001-2004?

I haven’t.