Stephen Hodgson

Archive for June, 2009

Further to my initial analysis of Andy Reed’s expenses claims last week, this morning I reviewed Mr Reed’s council tax expenses claims.

Something doesn’t feel right about the claims – take a look at the below figures for how much Mr Reed claimed each year to pay council tax at his second home:

2004/2005: £644.00
2005/2006: £600.76 (down 6.8%)
2006/2007: £700.00 (up 16.7%)
2007/2008: £780.00 (up 11.4%)

A number of things strike me about Mr Reed’s council tax claims:

1) The total claim is all over the place – first down 6.8% then up by a dramatic 16.7%. Are there any councils in London with such dramatic year on year changes in council tax? This change could be explained by moving to a new property in a different council area but the mortgage and service charge claims suggest Mr Reed has not moved second home (or ‘flipped’ etc).

2) Except in 2005/2006, Mr Reed claims a whole number every month for council tax. It’s feasible his council only charges council tax in whole numbers but not that likely.

3) Mr Reed has claimed council tax for every month of the year. Most councils allocate the tax over 10 periods, not the 12 periods claimed by Mr Reed.

Until the Telegraph reveals which London borough Mr Reed’s second home is in, it isn’t possible to say for sure that Mr Reed overclaimed for council tax but there are some strong indications that he may have.

Further reading

• * MPs still don’t get it (16 October 2009)
• * Andy Reed MP’s expenses: initial look (11 December 2009)
• * Shameless Andy Reed should repay £20,000 (13 December 2009)

(Links updated 13 December 2009)

At long last, details of MPs’ expenses claims from April 2004 to March 2008 were published today at http://mpsallowances.parliament.uk/.

Naturally I’ve been looking through the expenses of local Labour MP for Loughborough Andy Reed. There’s a lot to look at (hundreds of pages across the four years) but at the same time some invoices or claims can be scanned extremely quickly because of the decision to redact/black out/censor large parts of some of the documents. It is not always clear what policy was being applied because just looking at Mr Reed’s expenses, it is clear the censorship is inconsistent (and often useless because one document will be censored whilst another implies or even directly reveals what the censored document contains).

Here’s a summary of what I think are the most interesting expense claims by Mr Reed (with references to the source documents for those who want to view the original, albeit censored, receipts):

Supporting local business

Over the course of two years, Mr Reed paid over £9,000 to local Labour borough and county councillor and Charnwood Labour group leader Max Hunt for IT management services, strategic communications services and staff recruitment services.[1]

Supporting the local Labour Party

In 2006/2007 and 2007/2008, Mr Reed appears to claimed £900 to cover costs incurred by the Labour Party. These look like they could be equivalent to party political donations rather than expenses of Mr Reed in carrying out his parliamentary duties.[2]

Achieving the decent homes for MPs standard

Across the four year period (2004/2005 to 2007/2008), on top of mortgage interest for his second home, Mr Reed claimed for, amongst other things, the following:-

£3,500 on bathroom refitting and redecorating
£2,880 (approximately) on cleaning costs
£1,700 on kitchen furniture
£1,500 on two televisions and a video recorder
£700 on a sound system
£580 on kitchen redecorating
£240 on wall brackets
£10 on kitchen utensils

That’s £11,110 on second home improvements, furniture and electricals over four years. All at the taxpayers’ expense and all claimed in addition to mortgage interest, council tax bills, utility bills and so on.[3]

Keeping up to date with technology

Mr Reed claimed expenses for a lot of IT equipment for his office. He has a particular thing for Sony Vaio laptops.

Over the course of four years, Mr Reed claimed £4,077.45 for three Sony Vaio laptop computers, £177.99 for Sony power adapters and thousands of pounds on other IT equipment including desktop computers, monitors/LCD screens and networking equipment. Mr Reed’s most expensive Sony Vaio laptop set taxpayers back nearly £1,900. Would a local small business owner be likely to shell out £1,900 on a single laptop computer?

Interestingly, Mr Reed also claimed £116.32 for Microsoft Office XP Student Edition. This is an interesting claim because Office XP Student Edition is only licensed for use by full time students in the course of their activities as a student. It is not clear how this student-only software could be used by Mr Reed or his office and it would therefore appear to be either incorrect use of the software or an incorrect claim.[4]

Website costs

Staying with the technology theme, Mr Reed claimed a whopping £2,400 on website costs over four years, including costs of web design, web hosting and domain name registration.

Mr Reed’s website has always, to my knowledge, expressed party political views, and it is regularly used to both endorse Labour candidates and to attack opponents. In my mind, it is wrong that a party political website should be charged to the taxpayer – it would be far more appropriate for Mr Reed personally, or the Labour Party, to pick up this expense. Indeed, if Mr Reed had claimed his website expenses through the Communications Allowance (and not the Incidental Expenses Allowance, as he did) the expenses would have been disallowed because the Communications Allowance is strictly not to be used for anything party political.[5]

Support for Christian groups

Mr Reed is known for his support of Christian groups both within and without parliament and his support seems to extend to claiming £1,000 for research by Christian/religious organisations.[6]

What’s Mr Reed got to hide?

Mr Reed claimed £3,000 in March 2006 for “consultancy services” (0506IEP page 4) but unfortunately every detail apart from Mr Reed’s name, the words “consultancy services” and the value £3,000 is blacked-out. This is a little odd and I hope we’ll be able to see the unredacted version published by the Telegraph to work out if Mr Reed has anything hide. It’s taxpayers’ money, we have a right to know how it’s spent. (There’s no VAT on the invoice so perhaps it was the services of another local Labour councillor?)

A separate document (0506IEP page 8, which may be connected with the page 4 “consultancy services” document) shows another £3,000 claim for “constituents liaison”. Again, almost everything is blacked-out so it would be interesting to see what Mr Reed is hiding.

Conclusion

The guidance given to MPs in the “Green Book” governing expense claims gives a very broad scope for the kinds of expenses that can be claimed, which leads me to conclude that most if not all of Mr Reed’s expenses were within the rules but in my mind questions remain over the following points:

(1) How did Mr Reed come to the decision to buy £9,000 of services from local Labour council leader Max Hunt? Did this arrangement achieve good value for taxpayers? Did Mr Reed consider how payments of this value to a prominent Labour councillor could be perceived by the public?

(2) How does Mr Reed justify charging the expenses of the local Labour Party to taxpayers? In my view, this can never be an acceptable use of public money (it is akin to party political donations).

(3) What will Mr Reed do with his thousands of pounds worth of home electrical equipment when he leaves parliament? Does he think he achieved good value for taxpayers by spending £1,500 on television equipment for his personal use in his taxpayer-funded second home? Could Mr Reed have coped with a less expensive television and sound system?

(4) Will Mr Reed keep any capital gain on the sale of his second home when he leaves parliament? Taxpayers have paid his mortgage interest as well as thousands of pounds of redecoration and refitting costs.

(5) Does Mr Reed think it is right to charge taxpayers thousands of pounds for website costs for what is essentially a party political advertising tool?

In my view, Mr Reed should seriously consider, as a starting point, repaying the following amounts:

£900 – expenses of the Labour Party, not Mr Reed as an MP
£11,110 – electricals and second home improvement costs, which are personal benefits enjoyed by Mr Reed
£2,400 – website design and hosting costs, which amount to party political advertising costs

A total of £14,400.

This is just a small fraction of the £564,635 claimed by Mr Reed for the four years 2004/2005 to 2007/2008 but it would be a meaningful gesture given public anger and some of the obvious questions that the publication of Mr Reed’s expenses raises.

Further reading

• * Has Andy Reed MP overclaimed council tax? (22 June 2009)
• * MPs still don’t get it (16 October 2009)
• * Andy Reed MP’s expenses: initial look (11 December 2009)
• * Shameless Andy Reed should repay £20,000 (13 December 2009)

(Links updated 13 December 2009)

People across the country overwhelmingly backed the Conservatives in the English local elections on 4 June and voters in Leicestershire were no exception. The Conservatives at County Hall in Leicestershire have increased their majority from seven to 17 after gaining seats from both Labour and the Lib Dems. This is an excellent result for the Conservatives and a well-deserved result for the successful Conservative administration. (Leicestershire County Council has just won Council of the Year 2009.)

However, closer to home in the Loughborough constituency, Labour have held on. Whilst the Conservatives gained from Labour in Shepshed, where hard-working Shepshed resident and borough councillor Christine Radford was elected, and gained in Loughborough South, where Charnwood Borough Council Cabinet member David Slater now becomes the county councillor, Labour retained Loughborough North, Loughborough North West and Loughborough East. This means of the four seats that Labour held onto at County Hall, three are in Loughborough.

This raises the question of what these results mean for Conservative prospective MP for Loughborough Nicky Morgan. The current Labour MP for Loughborough enjoys a majority of less than 2,000 votes and Loughborough is a key target seat for the Conservatives at the General Election. I’ve looked at the results across the eight electoral divisions that make up the Loughborough constituency in a pseudo-scientific manner and if 4 June’s results were repeated at a General Election the good news is that Nicky Morgan would be elected MP for Loughborough with a majority of just over 4,500 votes.

The results would be as follows:

Conservatives: 18,975
Labour: 14,380
Lib Dems: 8,746
BNP: 6,276
Others: 1,087

I hasten to add that I carried out only a rudimentary estimate. There are obviously lots of factors that cannot be taken into account in such an estimate, especially with how quickly things are happening right now in the increasingly unstable Brown Government.

The numbers look good for the Conservatives but Labour retained three county council seats in Loughborough and the Conservative majority in newly-won Loughborough South is only 25 votes so there is absolutely no room at all for complacency.

Having said all that, Nicky Morgan is definitely on track to be elected as the next MP for Loughborough. What a shame Gordon Brown doesn’t have the guts to do the honourable thing and call a General Election.