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Two cheers for IPSA

by Richard Roberts / 23 Sep 2011 09:36

The PAC report out today shows that IPSA is inefficient and most MPs think it hinders them from getting on with their jobs, but on at least two counts it is succeeding where its predecessor failed

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There are some very interesting statistics in the Public Accounts Committee report, out today, on IPSA’s performance over the past year:

38% of claims submitted in 2010-11 were for less than the average cost IPSA incurs to process them.
The combined amount of time spent by MPs and their staff dealing with expenses could cost in the region of £2.4 million a year.
Although there has been a 15% reduction in the amount paid under the new scheme compared with its predecessor, 90% of MPs report that they are using their own money to subsidise their work because processing claims through IPSA is too time-consuming and frustrating. This seems to corroborate the findings of a ComRes survey of MPs that Total Politics commissioned back in August, which found that only 9% of MPs thought IPSA was doing a good job, while 77% thought it was doing a bad job, and 48% said it was even worse than the previous system.
Also, the level of public interest in MPs’ claims has tailed off dramatically in the last few months, as the country has been gripped by other scandals. In December 2010 over 10,000 people looked at expenses data published on the IPSA website. In July 2011, fewer than 100 people did.

So, in summary, IPSA is inefficient and expensive, MPs hate it, and the public have stopped caring. Not a great record really.

Yet fundamentally, the report concludes, IPSA is doing its job. It has brought accountability to the expenses system – according to IPSA, 99.7% of all claims made by MPs are within the rules it has set, and the overwhelming majority of those 0.3% of claims that are rejected, are rejected due to administrative error.

And it is gradually restoring public confidence in the expenses system – according to a National Audit Office survey, 55% of people believe the situation regarding MPs’ expenses has improved in the last year, although that’s hardly surprising given how low public confidence in the expenses system was a year or two ago. In fact, it seems rather more surprising that 45% of people don’t think things have got any better.

What’s more, IPSA, despite all the apparent bureaucratic wastefulness, is actually saving the taxpayer money, compared with the previous system that was run by the fees office. According to data published by IPSA in response to Freedom of Information requests (all available here), IPSA’s operational budget for 2010/11 contained £148.64 million for MPs’ expenses and £6.15 million for administration and set-up costs. When you add on one-off set-up costs, the actual cost of IPSA’s administration is slightly higher than that, but the overall cost is still considerably lower than the £183.2 million budget for MP’s allowances in 2009/10 under the previous system. The saving is in fact even bigger than this because IPSA didn’t spend its entire £148.64 million budget for MPs’ expenses in 2010/11. In fact it only paid out £118.1 million, of which only £19.5 million was for expenses, whilst the remaining £98.6 million went on salaries for MPs and their staff.

So there may be a lot of disgruntled MPs who feel they are out of pocket for things they shouldn’t be having to pay for and who resent the burden the new system places on their and their staff’s time, but at a time of swingeing cuts across the public sector, it is good to see belts being tightened within Parliament as well as outside.

On at least two counts – saving the taxpayer money and restoring public confidence – IPSA is already proving a success. Now it just needs to concentrate on making the expenses system more efficient to win over MPs.

Tags: IPSA, Mps expenses, Public Accounts Committee