MP expense claims – the unanswered question
Unless you have been living in a cave for the last few months, it would have proved next to impossible to escape the media providing us with the minutiae of MP expense claims. Not surprisingly, the facts have been met with a sense of outrage from the public who put these people into office.
One question receiving less attention is ‘Why’? Why have a good number of these politicians clearly and unambiguously made inappropriate claims? Should we conclude that more than a few MPs are no better than common crooks?
To answer this, we need to turn our attention away from the nature of the claims themselves and focus instead upon what’s driving or motivating the behaviours that have been reported. We propose two explanations for this. First of all, MPs are seeing these allowances as their perfect right to claim. They consider it their right as they perceive there to be an imbalance between the effort MPs are putting in to their work, and the reward they receive. MPs are looking around them and are making comparisons as we are all prone to do. In making these comparisons, they recognise that their pay is relatively meagre compared to senior civil servants, for example. Making large expense claims is one way of redressing this imbalance.
What’s further reinforcing this behaviour is the ‘normalising’ that is likely to be taking place. Even if an individual MP has doubts about the integrity of making particular expense claims, these doubts might be soon dispelled when they recognise that fellow MPs have made such claims themselves. As with other social groups, behaviour thus becomes the ‘norm’, with reassurance being sought from seeing other members of the same social group behaving in the same way.
Whilst the above explanations does not excuse the abuse we have seen, it does shed light on how it might be addressed. As we have seen in the past, it is politically difficult for MPs to vote themselves a pay raise. However, if the inequity between effort and reward is perceived to be very real, we will continue to see the same group trying to find covert ways of redressing this imbalance. Surely the answer lies in finding a way to explicitly address the inequity, rather than pretending it’s not there.
Dr Simon Draycott, Director, Mendas Ltd
