Cutting the crap with MPs expenses and allowances

Rather jolly post over at Mark's Any Musings, which neatly cuts through the crap on the MP's expenses scandal. How its not so much about duck houses and claiming for third or fourth homes as its about MPs claiming expenses instead of getting a higher salary.

The first scandal is that they lied about what they are paid. Used "expenses" as a cover to make it look like they are paid less than they actually are.

The second scandal is the Blears & Hoon method of avoiding CGT. If you buy a property with an allowance called ADDITIONAL costs allowance, that seems like a definition of a second home to me. That is fraud, pure and simple whatever rules say (Parliament or HMRC ones) As the Gorgon said "Unnacceptable". This second scandal should be fixed by plod.

The third scandal is the targetting of some as guilty because of the flavour of their claims, while others esacpe scott free because they or their claim is less interesting, or they have friends in the right places.

If they get expenses instead of salary, then its under the radar, it's tax status as income is murky, its uneven.

The one's who played by the spirit of the rules and used the own moral judgement about how much to claim they go home with less than the dishonest who hide behind the letter of the rules and claim as much as they can as their entitlement.

So what to do?
1) Publish all claims, to take power away from the Telegraph.
2) Bin the whole expenses system.
3) Make employees salaried on HoC payroll.
4) Pay a fixed up-front allowance for housing & travel based on distance from constituency to Parliament.
5) Pay a fixed up-front allowance to run an office.
6) Call a general election and throw the bums out, but allow some time for a deselection process to run first.

I'd add the caveat to point 4), pay no allowance for housing and instead allocate MPs a room at the taxpayer-owner Olympic Village. If MP's find that inadequate, they're welcome to make alternative arrangements out of their own pocket.

And also, on point 5) I had this theory that it would cost more money to run an office for a really large constituency than for a really small constituency, having more people to attend to and more work to be done. So I ran it through my spreadsheet, ranking MPs by constituency size, and ranking all the various expense categories. Then doing Mark Reckons's quartile graph thing to see if there was any signs of correlation.


Nope, no sign of correlation at all. Running an office for 30,000 constituents looks like it costs about the same as running an office for 90,000 constituents. Flat rate office running allowances for all MPs then.

Accusations of sexism in the MPs expenses scandal

I've added a new column to my MP's expenses database, this one for the gender sex of MP. So now we can look at whether female MPs or more or less honest than male MPs based on reports in the Telegraph and the blogosphere. I ought to add the caveat for comparative purposes that regardless of gender sex the proportion of fiddling MPs for each political party is LibDem 25%, Labour 26%, Conservative 29%

gender sex	Total MPs	Fiddlers	Saints
Male	522	142	32
Female	126	36	11
%male	81%	27%	16%
%female	19%	29%	9%

And, cos I know you really love graphs which compare the three main political parties:-

So is The Telegraph picking on female Conservative MPs or are they more likely to be indulging than other colours?

Stepping down

MPs stepping down at the next election or announcing that they won't be standing at the next election isn't quite the same as resigning is it?

Like if you find a guest robbing your house, you don't wait for them to finish the job and then never invite them back. You hound them out and beat the crap out of them.

Staying in their position as MPs until the next election isn't quite the same as fucking right off, right now.

Unless of course, the next general election is very soon. IPJ reckons it could be as soon October and there was that flurry on twitter about the next election being only a few weeks after June 21st.

So maybe standing down at the next election has a similar timescale involve to fucking right of right now. But its still not the same thing.

If MPs have been found to be swindling the taxpayer, they should fuck right off right now. Aye?

MP's self-published expenses

The other day I read some blogpost somewhere out on the internet saying that MPs who were publishing their own expenses were doing it in lots of different formats, some in PDF, some as google docs, some as just summaries and totals, and this was going to be a little bit of a pain for the public.

Indulge me for a moment, the only independent body who can regulate MPs expenses are the public. Not the general public, but people like the blogosphere and the people who make up the media and local constituents.

No QUANGO or arms length government body or private sector organisation is going to have the confidence of the public, parliament should be beholden to the public. We get to chose who is hired and fired. So the public needs the information in an easily processable form.

Sometime soon the House of Commons are going to publish all the expenses information, but as with most government things its going to be in a format that isn't the best for the peopel who will be using the information.

I don't know what format's best, Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, some kind of xml rss feed? I dunno. What I can suggest is that we look at all the MPs who've published their own expenses online and see what different formats they're using and which ones we like best.

I'm compiling a list of MPs who've self-published so far (with links)

Ainsworth, Peter - PDF (damaged and could not be repaired apparently)
Alexander, Danny - summary of quarterly claims 2008/09 html table, itemised 2009/10 googledocs
Allen, Graham - html summary of latest month's claims
Armstrong, Hilary - Scans of claims
Atkinson, Peter - Link to TheyWorkForYou
Austin, John - copy of TheyWorkForYou
Bacon, Richard - PDF of photocopy of claim
Baker, Normal - html summary and .doc
Banks, Gordon - html table summary
Burt, Lorely - html summary
Cable, Vince - html summary
Cameron, David - Conservative shadow cabinet googledocs
Clarke, Kenneth - Conservative shadow cabinet googledocs
Clegg, Nick - jpeg 2008/09 expenses
Duncan, Alan - Conservative shadow cabinet googledocs
Fox, Liam - Conservative shadow cabinet googledocs
Francois, Mark - Conservative shadow cabinet googledocs
Gibson, Dr Ian - PDF of photocopy of claim
Grieve, Dominic - Conservative shadow cabinet googledocs
Huhne, Chris - PDFs of ACA and IEP
Hunt, Jeremy - Conservative shadow cabinet googledocs
Lamb, Norman - PDF of photocopy of claim
May, Theresa - Conservative shadow cabinet googledocs
McLoughlin, Patrick - Conservative shadow cabinet googledocs
Mitchell, Andrew - Conservative shadow cabinet googledocs
Mundell, David - Conservative shadow cabinet googledocs
Paterson, Owen - Conservative shadow cabinet googledocs
Stunnel, Andrew - html prose summary and jpeg
Swinson, Jo - PDF of quarterly expenses
Villiers, Theresa - Conservative shadow cabinet googledocs
Willetts, David - Conservative shadow cabinet googledocs
Wood, Mike - PDFs of ACA, IEP and comms
Wright, David - Statement on expenses
Yeo, Tim - html summary of claims
Young, Sir George - table summary of claim in html

Its going to take me ages, there are lots of MPs and they all have their websites laid out in different ways.

Hmm, and for my own purposes, this is a list of MP's websites that I have checked that don't have self-published expenses data.

Adams, Gerry
Abbott, Diane
Afriyie, Adam
Ainsworth, Bob
Alexander, Douglas
Amess, David
Ancram, Michael
Anderson, David
Anderson, Janet
Baird, Vera
Baldry, Antony
Balls, Ed
Davis, Dai
Winterton, Ann
Winterton, Rosie
Woodward, Shaun
Wright, Dr Tony
Wright, Iain
Wright, Jeremy
Wyatt, Derek

And MPs with no website

Ainger, Nick
Arbuthnot, James
Atkins, Charlotte
Austin, Ian
Bailey, Adrian
Barron, Kevin
Beresford, Sir Paul
Betts, Clive
Blackman, Elizabeth
Blair, Tony
Blunkett, David
Bone, Peter
Borrow, David
Boswell, Tim
Brown, Gordon
Brown, Nick
Browne, Desmond
Burnham, Andrew
Byers, Stephen
Caborn, Richard
Campbell, Gregory
Campbell, Ronald
Cash, William
Caton, Martin
Chope, Christopher
Clappison, James
Clark, Greg
Clarke, Charles
Clarke, Tom
Clwyd, Ann
Conway, Derek
Cormack, Patrick
Cousins, Jim
Cox, Charles
Cummings, John
Curtis-Thomas, Clare
Dalyell, Tam
Davis, David
Dobbin, Jim
Dodds, Nigel
Doherty, Pat
Doran, Frank
Durkan, Mark
Eagle, Maria
Etherington, William
Farrelly, Paul
Fisher, Mark
Gibb, Nick
Gildernew, Michelle
Gillan, Cheryl
Godsiff, Roger
Goggins, Paul
Goodman, Paul
Greenway, John
Hammond, Phil
Hayes, John
Heal, Sylvia
Heyes, David
Hogg, Douglas
Hollobone, Philip
Howarth, George
Howells, Dr Kim
Humble, Joan
Ingram, Adam
Johnson, Diana
Jowell, Tessa
Joyce, Eric
Kaufman, Gerald
Kemp, Fraser
Kennedy, Jane
Laing, Eleanor
Lancaster, John
Letwin, Oliver
Lord, Michael
MacNeil, Angus
Mahmood, Khalid
Malins, Humphrey
Mallaber, Judy
Marsden, Gordon
Marshall, David
Martin, Michael
McAvoy, Thomas
McCartney, Ian
McCrea, William
McGrady, Edward
McGuiness, Martin
McNulty, Tony
Morley, Elliott
Mudie, George
Murphy, Conor
Murphy, Denis
Murphy, Jim
O'Hara, Eddie
Olner, Bill
Opik, Lembit
Owen, Albert
Paisley, Rev Ian
Palmer, Nick
Prescott, John
Reed, Jamieson
Rennie, Willie
Rifkind, Malcolm
Riordan, Linda
Robathan, Andrew
Robinson, Geoffrey
Robinson, Iris
Ruane, Chris
Russell, Christine
Ryan, Joan
Salmond, Alex
Sarwar, Mohammed
Seabeck, Alison
Sharma, Virendra Kumar
Shepherd, Richard
Simpson, David
Singh, Marsha
Skinner, Dennis
Smith, Geraldine
Smith, John
Smith, Sir Robert
Spicer, Michael
Stewart, Ian
Straw, Jack
Stringer, Graham
Syms, Robert
Tapsell, Sir Peter
Taylor, David
Tredinnick, David
Turner, Neil
Tyrie, Andrew
Vis, Rudolph
Walter, Robert
Wareing, Robert
Watts, Dave
Williams, Alan
Williams, Betty
Williams, Mark
Williams, Stephen
Wilshire, David
Wilson, Philip
Winterton, Nicholas
Wishart, Peter
Woolas, Phil
Wright, Anthony
Younger-Ross, Richard

Baws deep in SQL once more

So, I've installed XAMPP and I'm pretty sure it all works. I've got PHP & MySQL for Dummies on my lap and a spreadsheet with all the MPs expenses and majorities data.

I used to dabble with SQL in my last job, using Open Office Base to try to create an MRPII system, but that was six months ago, things are different now.

So I've got me one new table, which looks a little like this:-

ID	Name	Attribute	Value
1	Afriyie, Adam	Constituency	Windsor
2	Burns, Simon	Constituency	Chelmsford
3	Cameron, David	Party	Conservative
4	Streeter, Gary	Constituency	Devon, SW
5	Abbott, Dianne	2005 Majority	7427
6	Wyatt, Derek	Expense fiddle link	http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5330808/Labour-MP-Derek-Wyatt-billed-75p-for-scotch-eggs-MPs-expenses.html

I think keeps it all kind of simple, rather than having to add columns or create new tables everytime something new happens. Its probably some technique they teach you in first year database management, I swear I read some techy article about this sort of way of arranging databases years and years ago.

Anyhoo, whilst its easy to do a wee

SELECT Name, Value FROM mpinfo WHERE 'Attribute' = 'Constituency' ORDER BY Name

or

SELECT Name, Value FROM mpinfo WHERE 'Attribute' = 'Party' ORDER BY Party, Name

to get lists of each homogenous atrribute. I'm wanting to display a table which has columns for 'MPs name', 'Constituency', 'Party' and whatever else.

Lazyweb, can you help?

It should simply be a case of joining the results of the two previous SQL queries

SELECT Name, Value FROM mpinfo WHERE 'Attribute' = 'Constituency'
LEFT JOIN
SELECT Name, Value FROM mpinfo WHERE 'Attribute' = 'Party'
ON Name=Name

But that's clearly not going to work, so can I run an SQL query that creates two new tables, one for each of the previous queries, then joins them, spits forth the desired information, and then drops the tables.

And can I do this within phpMyAdmin?

We're from the internet, we're here to help (part 5)

The problem with yesterday's graphs and calculations is the assumption that if an MP's expenses are expensive, then there is something clearly wrong, which is a little flawed.

With the current expenses scandal, whilst public opinion is generally against MPs, its mostly been The Telegraph who are judging which expenses are fiddles and which aren't. Their editorial policy judges what to report. Here's their latest list of all the MPs they've reported on, the ones without links are generally cases where MPs have not claimed, and the ones with links are generally fiddles.

By my flawed counting, there are 136 current MPs who The Telegraph have reproted on.

Carrying on from Mark Reckon's groundbreaking work correlating MPs election majority with how much they fiddle, here is a table of number of fiddles by majority decile.

	Number of reported fiddles	Percentage of reported fiddles
1st decile (smallest majority)	7	5%
2nd decile	12	9%
3rd decile	7	5%
4th decile	13	10%
5th decile	17	13%
6th decile	14	10%
7th decile	13	10%
8th decile	16	12%
9th decile	21	15%
10th decile (largest majority)	16	12%

Lets look at that graphically:-



And once more but with quartiles just to show off that correlation a little more clearly.


So what Mark Reckons already demonstrated the other day still stands with a few more day's worth of data.

I wonder if all three parties exhibit the same behaviour to the same degree...

Party	Conservative	Labour	LibDems
1st quartile (smallest majority)	6	13	2
2nd quartile	10	20	1
3rd quartile	9	22	3
4th quartile (largest majority)	16	17	7
Total Fiddles per party	41	72	13
1st quartile (smallest majority)	15%	18%	15%
2nd quartile	24%	28%	8%
3rd quartile	22%	31%	23%
4th quartile (largest majority)	39%	24%	54%

And graphically...

Crikey!

It looks like Labour buck the trend amongst the three largest parties, their safest MPs haven't been outed by the Telegraph as much as safe Tories and LibDems.

It could just be that The Telegraph are being selective as to whilst MPs the cover, or maybe safe LibDem MPs really are twice as likely to fiddle their expenses as safe Labour MPs.

We're from the internet, we're here to help (part 4)

Are they all the same? Are they as bad as each other? Is bad even the right word or is there something in their nature?

Politicians that is.

I'm still playing around with the expenses versus majority spreadsheet, my mind boggles. In lieu of having a job and any other productive thing to do with my time, I'm in the Brioche cafe in West Hampstead, I've had one cappucino, one hot chocolate, a glass of water and some apple and toffee pie and I've got some cool new graphs.

We've previously shown that in the great scheme of things MPs with very safe seats, with huge majorities tend to claim a little more in expenses than average and MPs with unsafe seats and very slim majorities tend to claim less than average.

But there are different types of MPs, some of them are Red and some are Blue, Labour and Tory. Now historically Tory folk have been rich land owning upper class and Labour folk are from the working class, so you'd kind of expect Tory folk to not claim much cos they don't need to and Labour folk to claim everything they can because they don't need to.

I'm not sure what to expect of the LibDems but hey, lets look at the graphs.

The old scatter graph still doesn't show anything clearly, its just a big noisy Jackson Pollock style thing. We've ranked all the MPs expense claims and ranked all the majorities, and plotted it with colours representing the parties.

If you squint, you can see that the orange blobs, representing LibDems, they seem a bit sparse the further you look to the top right. But other than that, I see nothing significant.

So let's do those quartile bar chart things for each of the parties.



Crikey!

I know what you're thinking, and you're right.

The graph for Labour shows some kind correlation. But right now, my head is mush, and I can't work out what it means.

We're from the internet, we're here to help (part 3)

Was there a point in me doing the table in the previous post? I don't recall, it took me ages and I lost track of my intentions.

Right, Mark Reckons, he's got all the MP's expense totals ranked and all the majorities ranked and he's done some quartile graphs that show a correlation, the more secure the MP, the higher their majority, then the more likely they are to claim huge expenses.

I've run pretty much the same data and here's a scatter graph with majority rank along the bottom and expense rank is along the side.

It ain't a straight line as MarkWadsworth predicted in a comment the other day. But MarkReckons found a correlation, and I'm going to find it too. You just can't see it from a noisy scatter graph thing.

So, my next graph shows the correlation in deciles, I guess they're like the quartiles of Mark Reckon's chart, but there's ten intervals instead of his four.

You can see there's a bit of a correlation, one end's lower than the other, but in the middle its all a bit wibbly.

So I guess, validating Mark Reckon's conclusions, the MPs with the biggest majorities are most likely to claim the most expenses, and the MPs with the smallest majorities are likely to claim the lowest expenses. And all the MPs in the middle, they're all wibbly.

We're from the internet, we're here to help (part 2)

Hi, my name's Chris, I am unemployed, I studied manufacturing engineering at university. We did one module in statistics, but now most of what I do it based on looking at what other people have done, scratching my head and thinking "I could do that".

A few days ago I swear I saw online a blogpost where someone had done a wee table with how many MPs had had expense scandaly things written about them in The Telegraph, and what proportion were Labour, Conservative and so on, I can't find that post now, so I made up the table myself, using data from The Parliament expenses pdf, stuff on Mark Reckons and The Telegraph's full list.

Party	No. Expense MPs	Total MPs	Percentage
Labour	60	258	23.26%
Conservative	37	188	19.68%
LibDem	12	153	7.84%
DUP	2	9	22.22%
SNP	3	6	50%
SF	5	5	100%
SDLP	0	3	0%
UUP	0	1	0%
PC	0	1	0%
Ind	0	1	0%
KHHC	0	1	0%
Ex-Conservative	1	1	100%
Respect	0	1	0%

Crikey, it took me ages to make that table, damn this crappy 'puter, and bah for not remembering where I saw the original table.