Champagne For Breakfast !

The MP’s expenses scandal has resurfaced after the latest release of expense claim forms. I don’t so much detest the guy who claimed for the London Congestion Charge (I used to claim that when I travelled into London) but for somebody paid over £80,000 a year in salary and expenses (excluding the £40,000 they can also claim for employing the wife/son/daughter)to claim £2.99 for a corkscrew for their home is just unbelievable.

Of course, the previous Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, (paid over £160,000 a year plus £40k for her husband) claimed the grand total of 99p for a bath plug! What planet are these people on? And I see that now Jacqui Smith is likely to be dumped at the next election, she’s been on another spending spree, claiming a couple of grand to upgrade her home entertainment system.

Over at the BBC, who volunteered after a bit of external pressure to release their expenses, we find that staff paid over £300,000 a year have been spending taxpayers money like you would throw confetti, with claims of 18 taxi journeys costing over £200 each.

After the disclosures, the BBC was forced to defend their staff, claiming that taxis were more convenient and cost-effective than buses, trains or the Tube. By way of explanation, the BBC has an HQ which is at least a couple of blocks from a Tube station but if they’re afraid of a bit of rain why not get cab to the Tube station – too logical I suppose.

My working life was expense driven for over 30 years but my philosophy was that if I incurred an expense whilst doing my job, which I would not have incurred if I’d stayed at home, I felt justified in claiming that expense and, there was a huge organization of admin people checking what I spent and what I spent it on. MPs and BBC employees though, appear to have few checks and very loose rules.

I have the solution to all this though -my mate Bill whose second name is not printed to protect his reputation.

Years ago when Bill and I worked in an off-shoot of BT, expenses needed a sort of independent signature and for some obscure reason, Bill who was associated with the financial side of the business, was chosen as that signatory.

Whilst it was great that my mate signed off my expenses (the primary requirement was to get them signed off and paid quickly), being a signatory also caused Bill a bit of a problem from time to time and one situation comes to mind.

One day Bill came up to me and showed me an expense claim. It was obviously a bill for a meal at a rather fancy new London hotel and was for quite a few thousand pounds. ‘What’s the problem’, I asked. ‘Look’, Bill said, ‘they had champagne – half a bottle each’. ‘Who submitted the claim’, I asked. ‘The Chief Executive’, he said. ‘I’m not authorizing it’.

‘Bill – think about this. You cannot seriously think about not authorizing the Chief Exec’s expenses’, I advised. ‘I bloody well will – they shouldn’t have been having champagne for breakfast’. And off he stormed indignant that not even the Chief Exec should be having champagne for breakfast – on expenses!

Now if Bill can do this with his own Chief Exec I reckon he should be the ‘Expenses Czar’ for all MP’s and BBC employee’s expenses. It would save the public purse a fortune.