MPs’ Expenses: The Legacy of a Scandal Ten Years On

The scandal

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, MPs’ expenses was a scandal long in the making. The first regular salary for an MP was introduced in 1911 (£400 per year) as part of a transition from a firmly amateurish endeavour towards a more professional undertaking. The problem was that from this point ‘the politics of MPs’ pay’ became a rather prickly pear as successive governments were generally unwilling to sanction pay increases for fear of a public backlash. As a result, MPs’ salaries fell further and further behind comparable public sector salaries, and far behind anything that many parliamentarians could earn in the private sector. Pressure from disgruntled backbenchers grew throughout the 1960s and was only vented through a typically British example of ‘muddling through’. Instead of dealing with the issue head-on, it was decided in 1971 that an Additional Costs Allowance (ACA) should be introduced in order to compensate MPs for the inevitable travel, subsistence and accommodation costs that their duties demanded. The politically expedient twist, however, was provided by the generosity of the ACA and the fact that receipts would not be required and no questions asked. It was, in essence, designed to be a hidden salary ‘top-up’ that would solve a problem without the public ever needing to know.

This was how a secretive culture of financial entitlement took root in Westminster and it was one that very few MPs had any incentive to challenge. Those who did speak out against ‘the bloated putrefactions of patronage’ were hastily quietened by their less abstemious colleagues. In 1992, for example, Tony Wright – then a backbench Labour MP – wrote about the ‘Palace of Low-Grade Corruptions’ and the need to ‘wind-up the old rackets and clean-up Westminster’ but his warning was not heeded. By 2009, the ACA was worth almost £25,000 a year on top of an MP’s salary. It was somewhat ironic that after passing the Freedom of Information Act, the very same parliamentarians then attempted to exempt their own financial affairs from coming within the scope of the Act. What followed was both a tragedy and a farce, as MPs fuelled public suspicion and media interest by doing everything they could to prevent disclosure. Parliamentary procedures, legal wrangles and ridiculous redactions were in the end rendered meaningless when a disk containing millions of expense claims was leaked to The Telegraph.

The disk proved to be the political equivalent of an incendiary device which served to simply confirm the long-held views of the public that their MPs were corrupt, untrustworthy and had their ‘snouts in the trough’. From duck houses to moat cleaning and from Kit-Kats to bath plugs – not to mention the ‘John Lewis list’ or the ‘flipping of homes’ – it is almost impossible to over-state the scale and intensity of public anger as the extent of the scandal unfolded. The immediate effects were significant and included the forced resignation of the Speaker of the House of Commons, mass resignations, a very large turnover of MPs at the 2010 General Election and ultimately the arrest, prosecution and jailing of several MPs. Parliament really was on its knees which begs (appropriately) the question of what reforms were put in place in order to deal with the politics of MPs’ pay and to rebuild public confidence in British democracy in the wake of the scandal?

Initial assessments

There are three main reasons why the MPs’ expenses scandal created such extreme levels of public outrage. The first is that the affair happened in the wake of the global financial crisis, when the public were both angry with the behaviour of a largely unaccountable global elite and being asked to accept a new age of austerity. Revelations concerning MPs’ financial behaviour smacked of double-standards and here was also an ‘elite’ that could be held directly to account. This flowed into a second factor: unlike previous scandals where just one or two errant MPs had been involved this appeared to be an example of almost systemic corruption. Finally, the manner in which opposition parties had spent the previous two decades accusing Conservative governments of sleaze and corruption nurtured an environment in which the public already believed politicians were ‘on the make’.

Interestingly, the actual impact of the expenses scandal in terms of public attitudes, voting behaviour and subsequent reforms appears incredibly small. Jennifer van Heerde-Hudson and Orlanda Ward’s The 2009 British MPs’ Expenses Scandal: Origins, Evolution and Consequences (2014) found that ‘despite some early predictions, the scandal was limited in its impact: the purported ‘revolution’ never occurred’. The main elements of this ‘limited’ impact can be summarised across three dimensions: (i) social effects: the available survey data suggested that the scandal had not fuelled anti-political sentiment but had in fact simply reinforced pre-existing negative attitudes; (ii) electoral effects: the influence of the scandal on the 2010 General Election was limited as a large number of MPs had decided to ‘jump before they were pushed’ and either resigned or did not stand for re-election; and (iii) institutional effects: the scandal marked the end of parliamentary self-regulation of MPs’ pay and expenses and responsibilities shifted to a new constitutional watchdog in the form of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA). Put very simply, the short- and medium-term analyses published between 2009 and 2014 tended to emphasise electoral and psephological perspectives (to the detriment of the cultural and institutional) and share a common conclusion that the longer-term impact was surprisingly slight, and that the vaunted political ‘revolution’ which some commentators thought the scandal might spark did not occur.

The long view

This article argues that the legacy of the MPs’ expenses scandal was more significant and far-reaching than initial assessments were able to recognise. Three caveats must be given before exploring this argument in more detail: (1) the passage of time clearly makes forging direct causal links increasingly problematic due to the existence of intervening variables; (2) in some areas our argument rests on the perception of key political actors that a link exists; (3) that the expenses scandal had a profound long-term impact on British politics is in reality an initial hypothesis or proto-theory – it does not (and could not) provide an exhaustive account of each and every variable. Table 1 (right) provides an overview of this argument.

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Table 1:

The Impact of the MPs’ Expenses Scandal

EFFECT	MEANING	SHORT-/MEDIUM-TERMASSESSMENT	MEDIUM-/LONGER TERM ASSESSMENT
Social	Impact on public attitudes & framing	Moderate	Significant (redefined dominant cultural reference points, shift in nature of anti-politics)
Electoral	Impact on electoral behaviour & recruitment	Minimal	Moderate (demand-side dynamics facilitated a culture shift and spill-over effects)
Institutional	Impact on governing structure & outreach	Minimal	Significant (the changing role of the Speaker, Wright reforms, ‘Right to Recall’)

That the MPs’ expenses scandal was connected to contemporary concerns regarding rising anti-political sentiment was raised by current or former MPs interviewed by the authors during April and May 2019. These interviewees underlined the manner in which the scandal continues to cast a dark shadow over Parliament. One female MP described the scandal as ‘like a wound that just won’t heal’. Another interviewee, former Labour minister Lord Blunkett, said that the legacy of the scandal ‘still lies on us today…people are deeply suspicious and worried about whether their MP is on the make’.

Survey data suggests that it is not that public cynicism about politicians is particularly new but that it is possible to identify a distinctive shift in the tone and nature of anti-political sentiment following the MPs’ expenses scandal. More specifically, the scandal served to embed a new set of cultural reference points in the sense that in the immediate post-war period politicians were commonly viewed as ‘self-seekers’, ‘place-seekers’and ‘social-climbers’ but the dominant social lens was largely benign, and reflected a healthy scepticism and the dominant civic culture at the time. What appears to have changed in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal is that not only have new stories and sharper characters been added to this traditional repertoire – ‘expense fiddlers’, ‘pigs’, ‘duck houses’, etc – but the tone and nature of public sentiment has become more aggressive, angry and despondent.

This flows into a set of electoral consequences that have also been largely overlooked. The first of these was the manner in which the scandal intensified a sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’ which was then exploited – and to some extent fuelled and funnelled – by populist parties. In 2010, Ukip campaigned with an election poster depicting all three main party leaders and the slogan ‘Sod the Lot’. Whilst Ukip did not succeed, they did go on to enter mainstream politics, increasing its number of elected local councillors from four to 147 in 2013, receiving more votes than any other British party at the May 2014 European elections, winning its first seat in Parliament later that year and securing over 3.8 million votes (12.6 per cent) in the 2015 General Election. The MPs’ expenses scandal arguably played a significant role in fuelling public dissatisfaction and thereby facilitated the fracturing or thawing of the long ‘frozen’ British party system.

The flip-side of the scandal, however, is that in addition to boosting the position of ‘insurgent’ parties, it also forced the established ‘mainstream’ parties to use the 2010 General Election to usher in a new generation – or ‘fresh wave’ – of MPs. The need to distance the ‘Class of 2010’ not just from the MPs’ expenses scandal but from the entrenched and very often quite incestuous relationships that tended to dominate party politics in Westminster and Whitehall, created opportunities for a raft of candidates to win selection and election who may have been unlikely to have done so under traditional procedures in less scandalous times. Indeed, a significant number of MPs in this intake made the fact that they had no previous political experience or longstanding relationships with their respective party (i.e. they were ‘untainted’) as the core element of their campaigns. Noteworthy members of this intake who subsequently developed a reputation for independent thinking include Caroline Lucas, Anna Soubry, Nicholas Boles, Robert Halfon, Rachel Reeves, Nicky Morgan, Rory Stewart, Kwazi Kwarteng, Sam Giymah, Chukka Umunna, and Stella Creasy.

Finally, the institutional configuration at Westminster changed as the system attempted to re-correct itself in the wake of an almost catastrophic failure. The creation of IPSA remains possibly the most obvious institutional manifestation of the reform process and, counter to the thoughts of many scholars writing in the immediate aftermath of the scandal, this constitutional watchdog not only continues to exist but is now the focus of international replication. But possibly the most obvious and significant institutional change relates to the election of John Bercow as Speaker of the House of Commons. In 2014 he told The Guardian that he had wanted to apply for the position because he ‘felt that there was a task to be undertaken’ especially in relation to ‘helping Parliament get off its knees’. In this regard the evidence suggests he has been broadly successful and especially when it comes to rebalancing the relationship between the legislature and the executive back towards the former. In one simple line on a graph, Figure 1 demonstrates Speaker Bercow’s revitalisation of the tool of the Urgent Question, while at the same time possibly offering some explanation of why he might be so disliked on the government benches.

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Figure 1:

Number of Urgent Questions asked by Session

Bercow’s tenure as Speaker has been far from perfect but history is likely to judge him as a modernising and generally successful holder of that most venerable of parliamentary offices. But it is crucial to note that the MPs’ expenses scandal both created the job opportunity for Bercow in the first place and it created an institutional context that was ripe for reform. The changing role of the Speaker and other institutional reforms – the ‘Wright Reforms’ to the select committee system, for example, or the ‘right to recall’ – illustrate how the legacy of the MPs’ expenses scandal was more extensive than is commonly acknowledged.

Still on its knees?

Within political science crises, disasters, fiascos and scandals have long been a topic of intensive inquiry. Such moments are often viewed as ‘windows of opportunity’ in which reforms and changes – even transformational shifts in the dominant mode of governance– suddenly become credible policy-options due to the exposure or recognition of specific challenges or events. Whether the opening of a ‘window’ leads to the introduction of a new reform and whether this succeeds, depends on the interplay of a vast range of intervening

variables. Looking back ten years after the MPs’ expenses scandal we have drawn upon original research in order to suggest that its legacy effects may have been more significant than what was originally acknowledged within initial analyses. There were no mega-constitutional reforms or revolutionary effects in the traditional explicit transformational sense but it can be argued that the scandal triggered a very British revolution. There were ‘no barricades, tumbrils or guillotines’ – as one observer put it – but a series of significant institutional reforms were rather quietly implemented in the wake of the scandal.

Moreover, in terms of cultural and electoral effects it is possible to argue that there have been, and continue to be, longer-term consequences. William Lewis, writing in the New Statesman ten years to the day after he, as editor of The Telegraph, broke the MPs’ expenses scandal, was therefore wrong to state that ‘[N]othing has been done to address the disintegration of trust in our public institutions’. It would have been closer to the truth to suggest that several things were ‘done’, but that they appear to have failed in terms of rebuilding trust in our political institutions. A significant number of MPs felt that the MPs’ expenses scandal was a missed opportunity. Indeed, the main legacy of the MP expenses scandal – despite the social, electoral and institutional impacts highlighted in this article – still appears to be the need for an honest conversation about the price of politics, the value of democracy and therefore the cost of politicians.