MPs in 'honest and good value' shock
The headlines today are full of outrage at the £1.1 million that MPs have been asked to repay to Parliament after overclaiming on their expenses. While this might sound like a lot of money, it relates to 750 MPs over a five year period. That's a wallet-stuffing total of £293 per MP per year. The average (legitimate) expenses bill is over £118,000 - money which is spent (mostly on the salaries of not-very-well-paid staff) to ensure that Members of Parliament can properly represent you, their constituents. In other words, the average MP has overclaimed on their expenses by less than 0.25% (if you omit the MPs who don't need to repay anything, the average for the 389 remaning members is under 0.5%). Given the strictness with which these retrospective rules are being applied, a quarter of a percent is an impressively low figure. I suspect that the record of MPs on expenses claims must be one of the cleanest of any profession in Britain, and probably about as good as any prof...