Let’s be honest, MPs should be allowed to expense Christmas parties for staff
It has been a gruelling year for politicians. From partygate to the cost of living crisis, toxicity about Members of Parliament is on its way up. A YouGov poll earlier this month found that over two-thirds of Brits believe that politicians are “merely out for themselves”. This is an increase of 9 percentage points in just 18 months and the highest since the question was first asked by Gallup in 1944.
This deep unpopularity helps explain the visceral negative response to the prospect of MPs putting office Christmas parties on expenses. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) announced last week that MPs would be able to claim food, decorations and non-alcoholic drinks (how puritanical!) on expenses. Cue outrage. It has been called “tone deaf” and MPs across parties have been told by their leaders to not take up the opportunity.
But should we really begrudge politicians throwing a Christmas party for their staff on the public dime?
There is nothing intrinsically wrong or unusual for an employer to organise and fund a Christmas gathering. They are important opportunities to thank people for their hard work and build up team cohesion. Pretty much every organisation, public, private and charity, has one. Nor do they entail a large financial burden – it may be a “bad look” but a few hundred quid per MP is hardly breaking the bank.
This all speaks to the broader tendency of blowing MP’s expenses out of proportion. These expenses cost taxpayers £139.5 million in 2021-22 – four-fifths of which is related to staffing costs for their offices. This makes up just 0.01 per cent of total government expenditure. If you are a small government radical looking for big savings in public spending they will have to come from elsewhere. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the expenses scandal the system was dramatically improved through extensive independent oversight and transparency. The days of duck houses on the taxpayer are in the past.
If anything, the UK probably underspends on politicians. Their pay is above average, with an annual average salary of £84,000, but the expectations and responsibilities are extraordinary. MPs work gruelling hours in a bizarre workplace under constant public scrutiny.
They are expected to somehow solve wicked national policy problems, many of them outside of their control, while also being a social worker in their local community. They must work pretty much every day of the week, shuffling between Parliament and their constituency, with little time left for families. This is before their formal job of holding ministers to account, scrutinising legislation and watching over government departments.
There may be plenty of other good altruistic reasons for becoming an MP, like representing your community and achieving policy change. But with such high responsibility and low pay relative to other senior positions in law, finance and medicine, it is perhaps no surprise that many of Britain’s best and brightest are eschewing entering politics. There is no way a top corporate executive, whose decisions have far less impact, would do so much for so little money. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.
Perhaps, rather than playing the Grinch at Christmas time, we should pay MPs and their staff more to attract the best and brightest.