Faced with public disgust at the shamless rapacity of MPs Sir Stuart Bell, the Labour member of the House of Commons Commission, came up with swift proposals to prevent another scandal around parliamentary expenses: contract out the processing of expenses to a private firm so they can't be exposed under the Freedom of Information Act.
How shameless and out of touch can you get? Bell's answer is not to clean up the system of expenses and hold those who've abused public funds accountable: his answer is to hide the expenses!
Bell explains: "Receipts would be available under FOI in the unit [when it is part of the Commons] but when they go to an outside unit they would not".
Luckily for taxpayers there's one small problem with this ruse: it's legal nonsense. As Michael Smyth, head of public policy at Clifford Chance, points out, the freedom of information "applies not just to information held by a public authority, but also to information held on behalf of that authority.
"The House of Commons cannot simply get around the Act by outsourcing expenses administration to someone else. Otherwise, every public authority in the country could send their records out to a third party and refuse all requests made under the Act.
"Even if future expenses information is held by a private sector company, it would still be held on behalf of the Commons and a request for it would be able to be made to the Commons in the usual way."
Oh well. Back to the drawing board for Bell. But on the off chance he's reading this, perhaps I can humbly suggest to him that any new system he proposes for parliamentary expenses should aim for more transparency, and not less. Just a thought.
Hat-tip Joshua Rozenberg
