MPs PAY-OFFS 

MPs forced to stand down over the expenses scandal will pocket £65,000 pay-offs, despite pledges to scrap the handouts. Senior MPs secretly agreed plans to keep the huge golden goodbyes which are funded by the taxpayer. Commons leader Harriet Harman said there was nothing in the law that prevented the payouts being scrapped. She admitted, "There has been controversy about it. There is not a contract of employment between the House and MPs in respect of any of these allowances."

The move was agreed at a meeting before MPs broke up for summer. A source close to the committee said, "There have been lots of calls for the grants to be stopped but the MPs decided it would not be fair to change it now. It would be like changing someone's contract when they had already announced they were going to resign." Committee member Lloyd Clarke said the Senior Salaries Review Board, which sets MPs' wages, had already called for the grants to be stopped for MPs who resign or retire.

He said, "If an MP has committed abuse of the expenses system and has said they are going to stand down then they are still eligible to receive the resettlement grant. It is redundancy in truth. There is a clamour that urgent action should be taken to prevent that happening at the next election." It was also revealed that Tory Lord Taylor of Warwick claimed £70,000 in expenses for a home that didn't exist. He claimed he lived with his mum until 2007, but her home was sold in 2001, the year she died. (Source: News of the World, Aug/09)

Disgraced MPs are to pocket their own lucrative share of £153million in golden goodbyes. In one final pre-election hammer blow to taxpayers, every MP quitting parliament is to collect an average of more than £1million. That includes all those “named and shamed” in the expenses scandal. The staggering pay-offs are made up of gold-plated pensions and generous “resettlement” grants that honest workers in the private sector could only dream about. Matthew Elliott, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, last night branded the payouts a “disgrace”.

He said, “If an employee was caught stealing from their employer, it’s unlikely they would walk away with all their entitlements intact. It’s pretty unfair, therefore, that disgraced MPs are leaving with golden goodbyes and million pound-plus pension pots. It may be too late to legally reprimand the current crop of exiting MPs, but it should be written into the new expenses arrangements that any future MP who brings disgrace on the House of Commons should face severe financial penalties, including reduction to their pension.”

Some 148 MPs have already announced they are quitting at the Election with many of them leaving in the wake of the expenses furore which shamed Westminster. A further 20 Labour MPs are expected to announce their retirement in the next few days. It has also emerged that nearly 30 MPs are entitled to a full year’s salary as compensation for leaving office, although many have volunteered to step down. And 58 have racked up final salary pensions that would cost an ordinary person £1million to buy.

Many of the largest pay-offs and pension pots have been accumulated by MPs who are leaving parliament following embarrassment over their expenses claims. A recent poll found that nearly half of voters believe this parliament is the most corrupt of all time and there is likely to be public anger at the cost of the mass clear-out of the Commons. The figure will rise as more MPs are voted out. Andrew MacKay, Conservative MP for Bracknell who became notorious in the expenses scandal, will collect the largest package, worth a total of more than £1.8million.

Mr MacKay, formerly a senior aide to Tory leader David Cameron, exploited the second homes allowance with Julie Kirkbride, his wife and fellow Conservative MP, subsidising two different houses with public money. The MPs’ scheme is one of the most generous in the public sector. Members contribute between 6 per cent and 10% of their salary to the pension fund, which accrues up to 1/40th of a member’s final salary for each year they serve in parliament. (Source: Daily Express, Apr/10)

A former Labour MP who lost his seat at the general election has signed on for unemployment benefit. Nick Palmer, who lost his west Nottingham seat to the Tory Anna Soubry by fewer than 400 votes, told supporters in an email that he had attended an interview at his local Jobcentre. He said that wanted to keep his National Insurance contributions continuous as well as seeing for himself how the system works.

The ex-MP who speaks six languages and has a PhD in maths, admitted that he was curious to see whether he would be “browbeaten into applying for jobs on a building site”. Although he plans to fight the seat at the next election, he is currently enrolled with several recruitment agencies in search of work. He told supporters that he had been impressed by staff at the city’s Station Street Jobcentre.

Far from browbeating him into accepting inappropriate work, his interviewer arranged a specialist CV review with a recruitment expert and several agencies focused on professional candidates. He left the interview impressed at how he had been dealt with but he was less optimistic for the future of the Jobcentre itself. He said, “I gather from other sources that the office is under new orders: to freeze recruitment, lay off all fixed-term staff and outsource much of their work to private companies. The shape of things to come may be more worrying.” (Source: Daily Telegraph, Jun/10)