Creativity to the fore on expenses

Apr 23 2009 by Peter Jackson, The Journal

EARLIER this week I had the unnerving experience of watching a video, posted on Downing Street’s website, of Gordon Brown speaking, punctuating his gurning delivery with random smiles and grins.

To save you the same ordeal, I can tell you he proposed that MPs’ second homes expenses should be replaced by a flat-rate daily Commons attendance payment and that MPs should not be allowed directly to employ staff, instead the House of Commons would be responsible for contracts and salaries.

This follows a whole series of scandals and revelations of MPs claiming for: rooms in their parents’ homes; bath plugs; and movies of a questionable nature, entertainment of spouses for the use of, and so on.

While most of this was reprehensible, I could not help a wry smile to see Fleet Street in such outraged pursuit of the expense-claiming MPs. It was, after all, not so long ago that the notoriously creative expense claims of hacks provided light reading for many a newspaper’s accounts department.

It was only in the late 1980s that many standard expenses claimed by reporters – meal allowances for working overtime and so on – were negotiated away to become part of an overall salary.

Because at the time, which was when the MPs’ remuneration system was developed, there was a different attitude to expenses and they were, for some reason, seen as a justifiable supplement to a salary.

I recall in my first job as an accountant going to stay in Cambridge with the rest of my team to audit some light manufacturing company or other. We were, of course, allowed to claim, upon production of receipts, for our hotel bills and up to a certain amount for an evening meal, but that could not include alcohol.

At the end of the audit the partner came up from London to join us for a celebratory dinner in what had become, over the two weeks of the audit, our favourite Italian restaurant.

We did have a few bottles of wine, as was usual.

Sadly, as was also usual, when the waiter brought the bill to present to the partner, he asked whether we wanted the wine hiding in the total as we had requested every other night.

The partner pretended not to notice.

Peter Jackson is a writer and ex-business editor of The Journal – p.jackson77@btinternet.com