MPs expenses

I make no apology for bringing up this subject yet again as it highlights an issue that some people working in or, more importantly, on behalf of a public authority may have not been aware or may have failed to remember.

The article “Freedom of Information update” by Ibrahim Hasan in Bulletin: Records Management Society (Number 150 (July 2009)) looks at the decisions reached by the Information Commissioner and the Information Tribunal during March and April this year.

Obviously top of the list is the fallout from the disclosure of MPs’ expenses by the Daily Telegraph. It’s worth remembering that we have Freedom of Information to thank for the knowledge that, while the rest of us were getting to grips with the credit crunch, MPs were using our money to buy such essentials as hanging baskets, bath plugs, designer rugs and mock-Tudor beams.
On 11 May The Times wrote that “a Labour plot to suppress the future release of MPs’ expenses has been uncovered ....” Senior Labour figures were reported as saying that the future privatisation of the House of Commons Fees Office, which processes expense claims, would mean that the information would no longer be held by the Commons and so not subject to the FoI régime.

Readers of this blog and of ADSET’s Members’ Update publication are, of course, aware that this is a load of twaddle (to put it politely). The Act covers public bodies and those working on their behalf e.g. delivering a careers service.

Take care my friends, please.

The rest of the article is of a more technical nature and aimed at managers of information who will, hopefully, be members of the Records Management Society and will get their own copy of Bulletin and won’t have to wait for to get catalogued and into the British Library lending scheme.

Don’t get me wrong – I am grateful, very grateful, that the British Library collects all these journals and makes them available to readers like me. I’m even more grateful that not only can I sit in the Reading Room with laptop plugged in so I don’t have to hand write and then transpose when I get home but that I can type straight into a blog post and send it “up the wire” and all for free.

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