Spink: I have not ‘over-claimed £ 2,425.86’

YOU DID, Bob. Any reasonable person would agree…

In your IEP claim, for 31/12/2004, you claimed £118.44 in respect of the firm Banner.

In your next month’s IEP claim, for 31/01/2005, you claim another amount, of £20.41, for the same firm.

In your following month’s IEP claim, 28/02/2005, you provide the Banner statement, detailing the outstanding invoice amounts of £20.41 and £118.44, for which you had provided claims in the previous two months. You then go on to claim the statement’s total of £138.85.

Your over-claim: £138.85.

In your IEP claim for, 31/07/2005, you claim £93.99 in respect of the firm Neat Ideas, and supply the invoice.

In your IEP claim two months later, 30/09/2005, you provide the Neat Ideas‘ statement, detailing the outstanding £93.99 invoice amount, and go on to claim it again.

Your over-claim: £93.99.

The month following your previous over-claim, you detail further Neat Ideas expenditure, for £123.33, in your IEP claim for 31/10/2005 — and provide the invoice.

The next month, in your IEP claim for 30/11/2005, you furnish the Neat Ideas statement for the previous invoice’s outstanding amount of £123.33, and go on to claim it again.

Your over-claim: £123.33.

In your IEP claim for 31/01/2006, you claim for, and provide, a statement from the firm CellHire, in the amount of £332.87. The amount is made up of two outstanding invoices: £276.13 for services provided in December, and £56.74 arising in January. You claim the full amount of £332.87.

Two months later, in your IEP claim for 31/03/2006, you provide the CellHire invoice for January, in the amount of £56.74, and already claimed for two months earlier. You go on to claim the full £56.74.

Your over-claim: £56.74.

In the same month, in your IEP claim for 31/03/2006, you provide, and claim for, a CellHire statement for outstanding invoices due in February and March. The amounts are for £14.78 (Feb) and £111.47 (Mar). The total of the statement, and the amount for which you claimed, is: £126.25.

Two months later, in your IEP claim for 31/05/2006, you furnish a running statement on your CellHire account, which restates the outstanding balance for £111.47 due on the March invoice, and two further sums, for April and May, in the amount of £82.86 and £41.34 respectively. You cross-through the £111.47 correctly (because it had been claimed for in March of the previous fiscal year) and you go on to claim for the remaining amounts, for April and May, in the amount of £124.20.

In your IEP claim for 31/07/2006, you furnish the previous month’s statement from CellHire, indicating that they still await payment for the services they had provided, and their invoiced amounts, for the period February to June. Those amounts are (Feb to Jun): £14.78, £111.47, £82.86, £41.34 and £29.36. The statement’s total is for £279.81 — and you claimed all of it.

Your over-claim: £250.45.

In your CA claim for 31/12/2007, you claim for £1,762.50 in regards to ‘Newsletter printing’ and provide a statement from London and Essex Newspapers detailing an invoice, for that same amount, raised in that month. You claim the full amount.

Two months later, in your CA claim for 29/02/2008, you label an item ‘Consituency Report,’ and back it up with another statement from London and Essex Newspapers, detailing that their December invoice, in the amount of £1,762.50, is now two months overdue.

You claim the statement’s total: £1,762.50.

Your over-claim: £1,762.50.

That brings your total over-claim, which can be proved beyond all reasonable doubt, to a total of: £2,425.86.

All supporting documents are contained in your published expenses. For the record, I provide my working papers, which also contain an analysis of your IEP and CA expenditure, quoted in my Saturday’s email to you, here: Bob Spink.PDF

I conclude by bringing your attention to the following facts:-

Each Communication Allowance members’ reimbursement form that you sign states:-

Use this form to ask us TO REIMBURSE you for costs you have incurred on your Parliamentary duties.

The BLOCK CAPITALS are my own; but they are only there because you (or someone else) have circled that very phrase on your first CA claim form for 31/05/07.

I also point-out that each Incidental Expenses Provision members’ reimbursement form, which you also sign, clearly states:-

You can only claim for costs you have actually paid.

It saddens me that the tone of your email response was such that I decided to publish the full text of our communication. This has never been about you Bob: it is about the Public’s Right To Know.

I personally regret that you did not take the sixty-hour window, which I purposely provided you with, to launch an internal investigation and put these matters right.

It need not have come to this…

… (24/06/2009) – The Page That Will Not Go Away

… (27/06/2009) – Spink Claimed £1,053.98 For ‘General Media Advice’

… (24/08/2009) – Spink’s letter to Sir Christopher Kelly, whinging about his expenses and revealing, ‘in total confidence,’ that he does not actually live at his Downer Road address; but ‘at another house’ in his constituency.

… (Ted Pugh, 24/09/2009) – The Fat Lady Still Hasn’t Sung

Information Is Only As Free As Labour Wants It

(Alasdair Palmer) - GOVERNMENTS RARELY DO EXACTLY WHAT THEY PROMISE; but when this one promises to do something, it is becoming a sure sign that they will do precisely the opposite.

Ministers will tell you, for example, that they are committed to ‘transparency and openness,’ and remind you that Labour was responsible for the legislation on freedom of information – which is true. But ever since that legislation was passed, ministers have tried to block and undermine the parts of the Freedom of Information Act which are supposed to ensure that information is actually freely available to the public. It took a protracted court case to establish that MPs’ expenses claims had to be made public – and the version that would have been revealed, if the Telegraph had not intervened, was so heavily redacted as to be almost worthless.

There was another example of the Government’s hypocrisy over transparency last week. The Department of Health used to publish statistics on the number of late abortions, and the reasons for them. In 2003, it stopped. The reason given was that the data would lead to the identification of doctors who perform late abortions, and the women who have them, and that both would then be targeted by anti-abortion activists.

That argument is even less plausible than maintaining that MPs’ expenses should be kept secret because the poor darlings might get depressed if people find out about their fraudulent claims. For a start, the DoH’s claim that the statistics had, in at least one case, led to the identification of a doctor who performed a late abortion was straightforwardly bogus: as the Information Tribunal noted when ordering the release of the data, the department was ‘not able to point to anything in the published statistics that would have enabled the general area, town, hospital or doctor to be identified,’ still less the identity of any woman who had undergone an abortion. The source of the information the DoH complained about was not the statistics at all: it was a police press release.

But even if there was the possibility that someone could be identified from the statistics – which there is not – there would still be a case for publishing the data. Late abortions are legal only when the foetus has a risk of being born with a ’serious’ handicap. There is evidence, however, that they are being performed for relatively trivial reasons, such as that the baby might be born with a cleft palate. Doctors who break the law in this way are not entitled to anonymity. Yet it was the allegation that the law was being broken that prompted the DoH to suppress the statistics on how many late abortions were being performed, and why.

Late abortion is, of course, intensely controversial: some people think it a basic right; others believe it to be murder. In between those two extremes, there are a growing number of people who feel distinctly uneasy about allowing abortions after 24 weeks (the date when an infant can usually survive outside the womb), especially when they are performed for ‘cosmetic’ reasons.

Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of that practice, the critical point is that the limits on why and when abortion is permitted have to be decided democratically, through public debate informed by facts about what is actually happening. The DoH does not subscribe to that view. It thinks the matter should be decided by government fiat. That is why it wants to suppress the statistics: its officials are committed to preserving late abortion, but do not believe that they can win the argument, so have decided to stop the argument from happening by blocking the information critical to it.

Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, is now set to devote tens of thousands of pounds of public money to achieving that goal in the courts, by seeking to have the Information Tribunal’s decision overturned. Which only goes to show: when you hear a minister say, ‘We are committed to doing everything we can to promote democratic debate,’ it means they are doing everything they can to stop it.

One In Three MPs Abused The Expenses System

(Daily Mail) – ONE IN THREE MPS have been found guilty of abusing their expenses, laying bare the true scale of the scandal.

About 200 are being sent final demands by auditor Sir Thomas Legg today to hand back up to £1 million of taxpayers’ cash.

At least one MP couple will be asked to repay more than £100,000, senior Commons sources said.

A further three dozen MPs will get new demands averaging £20,000 after Sir Thomas scrutinised their mortgage papers and found they had made unreasonable claims.

He has decided not to accept excuses or delays and will publish his report naming and shaming the culprits on December 14.

In a double blow for MPs, the Daily Mail also revealed that the enforcer brought in to introduce a new expenses system has decided not to authorise a major pay rise for five years.

Nearly 40 MPs have signed a Commons motion calling for an increase in their £65,000 salaries.

But Sir Ian Kennedy, chairman of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, has made clear privately that he wants reform to ‘bed in’ first.

A source who has spoken to him said: ‘The public has to see the new system working and trust it before we can even talk about that. MPs can scream all they want but it’s not going to happen.’

Sir Thomas had already ordered 166 MPs to repay money totalling £300,000 after overclaiming for items such as gardening and cleaning — an average of £1,800 each.

But at least another 35 will be asked to hand back sums averaging £20,000 in mortgage interest claims, clawing back another £700,000 for the public purse.

A senior Commons source said: ‘The second wave is a small number of larger demands, after the large number of small demands.

‘The second wave are demands that you really wouldn’t want to receive. If you’ve got a dodgy mortgage, it’s going to be a large amount of money.

‘One couple has a bill between them that is in excess of £100,000. I have seen nothing to suggest that a final bill of £1 million is wide of the mark.’

Allies of Sir Thomas say he has decided to come down particularly hard on MPs who paid money to members of their own families.

‘He has taken the view that if it looks like a scam, and smells like a scam, that it is a scam,’ a Commons official said.

The demands do not even include the half dozen MPs facing investigation by the police for possible fraud. They include Elliott Morley and David Chaytor, the Labour MPs who both claimed for ‘phantom mortgages’ that had been paid off.

One couple who are widely thought to be in the firing line are Sir Nicholas and Lady Ann Winterton.

The Tory MPs paid off their mortgage, put their taxpayer-funded second home in a trust set up for their children, and then claimed £83,000 to pay rent on the property to the trust.

Tory Bernard Jenkin has been asked to return a large sum after paying £63,000 in rent to his sister-in-law. He has said he will pay back whatever is recommended in Sir Thomas’s final report.

Meanwhile, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards was last night asked to launch an investigation into whether Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle used taxpayers’ money to pay for a report he commissioned from his daughter Lucy’s firm.

Lloyds To Cut Another 5,000 Jobs

(Reuters) – BAILED-OUT LENDER LLOYDS BANKING GROUP is to cut a further 5,000 jobs by the end of 2010 as it continues to overhaul its operations and integrate HBOS.

Lloyds, 43% owned by the government, said today it would take mitigating actions, including redeploying staff and releasing contractors and temporary employees, to limit the net reduction in permanent jobs to 2,600.

That would take net cuts to permanent jobs at Lloyds to around 9,000 since it acquired HBOS in January. Analysts have estimated that over 30,000 jobs could go as the two banks integrate.

News of further bank sector redundancies came a week after more than 5,400 jobs were cut at part-nationalised rival Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC.

The Unite union said the cuts were ‘corporate arrogance.’

‘This country’s financial sector should be looking towards the future, rather then continuing to slash jobs without proper consideration of how to re-build the public’s confidence in our tarnished banking sector,’ Unite national officer Rob MacGregor said in a statement calling for a suspension of job losses.

Lloyds said 2,820 roles. the bulk of the total, would be cut in group operations, with contractors and temporary staff helping to keep the net reduction to 1,350.

It will also cut 1,190 jobs in insurance across Britain, and 950 in its mortgage operations where business will be consolidated to a handful of sites.

Lloyds said compulsory redundancies would be a last resort.

Bob Spink – Master Of Spin

THE DISTRICT NEWS is carrying a piece entitled ‘Confusion over parcel delivery’ in its 13th November issue regarding the incident reported on this blog last week.

In it, ‘they’ say:-

‘MP Bob Spink ordered a replacement phone but was out when the courier company tried to deliver it and so he went with the card left by the courier to collect the phone in Basildon.

‘After handing over the card and receiving the parcel Bob was asked for identification and he showed his credit cards and then his official photo ID Parliamentary pass.

‘The attendant said this was not sufficient ID and asked for Bob’s passport which Bob did not have with him. Bob thought he had sufficiently identified himself and so left with his parcel.

‘The Courier Company subsequently alerted the parcel sender and police, as they thought someone may have tried to impersonate Bob and steal his phone.

‘The supplier of the phone immediately cleared up the confusion by informing the courier company that: “the package has been delivered correctly.” The matter is now ended.

‘Bob is setting out the details since the Echo rang to ask him rather strange questions about police being notified of a stolen phone which was to be supplied to him. Bob has copied this statement to The Echo to ensure any reporting is correct.’

Thanks for clearing that up, Bob…

ECC Chief’s Salary Criticised

(BBC) – ESSEX COUNTY COUNCIL has been criticised for its decision to pay its chief executive a ‘base salary’ of £230,000 a year.

Campaign group the Taxpayers’ Alliance said the council had ‘no justification’ for paying such a high salary to Joanna Killian.

The council said Ms Killian, also chief executive of Brentwood Borough Council, delivered savings of nearly £100m in the past two years.

It said the salary was fair given the complexity of Ms Killian’s role.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance said Ms Killian was one of the highest paid local government bosses in Britain.

‘There’s no justification for such high salaries in local government,’ said a spokesman.

In April, the alliance said its research showed that more than 1,000 council bosses earned more than £100,000 a year and at least 16 earned more than Mr Brown, who earned a £194,000 salary.

A spokesman said: ‘Essex County Council pays a fair price given the responsibilities, complexity and challenges of this role.’

He argued that the council needed ‘quality people’ and added: ‘As chief executive of two local authorities Joanna Killian in the last two years has delivered savings worth a total of £98.5m.’