Thursday, May 28, 2009

Now the Fees Office is speaking out.


Oink Oink Oink


Up until now, current and former officials of the Parliamentary Fees Office have not spoken out about the troughgate scandal engulfing Westminster.(Notice how the media refer to them as 'officials' rather than employees or civil servants.)

The former head of the fees office has now spoken out and has made a very valid point.

MP's allowances and expenses should have been cut when the number of hours in Parliament were cut.

In the real world, your terms and conditions of employment centre around how many hours you are contracted for. Any perks or benefits you receive are 'pro-rata'. The same thing should apply to the 646.

They should clock in and out and receive any genuine expense claims after the pro-rata calculation has been applied.

Simples.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well spotted Rab!

Tom Paine said...

That's simply wrong. If their work was cut down, that doesn't necessarily mean their expenses were. You can't pay 60% of your rent in London if you have only 60% of the work to do. Surely you mean a number of them should have been made redundant to reflect decreased workload? The expenses should be just that; expenses. Not "perks" or "benefits."

RantinRab said...

Redundancy sounds like a great idea. Funny that the hours that parliament sits have been reduced, but the number of MPs are to increase to 650 come the general election.

Anonymous said...

Means test them! If they're spending their spare time running directorships or landlording, then they're not so impoverished as to require another allowance.

JSA = you work, you earn, it gets deducted.

ACA = fill in the blanks

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/MEANS-TEST-ACA/