What is everyone so disgusted about?

Another good citizen is asked by the television news about their reaction to their MP claiming expenses on a house in a town nowhere near their constituency. “I think it’s absolutely disgusting” comes the reaction.

“I think it’s absolutely disgusting”. Always the same. Camera crews appear to be prowling housing estates and high streets up and down the country looking for an “I think it’s disgusting”. You could get the same stock reaction to practically anything else just as relatively trivial, going back years. The TV news should just dip into a “I think it’s disgusting” archive every time this kind of news story comes out.

“Absolutely disgusting”, strangely, doesn’t seem to be used for the things you’d think it would be – you know, hacking women and children to pieces in the jungle, mass rape. Disgust, revulsion, fury – I thought these were supposed to be strong words, but they’ve been hijacked by the news media to describe things that aren’t that important – and members of the public adopt them with glee at the sign of the first TV camera. Either that, or people really are as disgusted, revolted and furious as they say they are. That just makes me sad. If the public had half an idea just how much of their money is wasted, they’d rightly be disgusted.

Oliver Letwin spent £2000 on his tennis court. David Willetts paid £200 for someone to change his light bulbs. MPs are being accused of using public money to feather their nests, as if the couple of hundred quid Willetts claimed for changing his light bulbs could just as easily be put in a brown paper bag and given to a Southampton mother to buy a new mattress. But that’s not how it works. The Telegraph has had a lot of attention for making MPs squirm about fiddling expenses. The news media are selling the expenses story as being one of legitimate public concern, MPs being interviewed on the news say that the public is rightly angry, and you know what, MPs expenses do need to be sorted, and some of them have clearly taken the piss. But it’s amusing just how feeble Mr Letwin’s tennis court repair is in the grand scheme of things, little more than another example of just how accomplished our politicians are at shooting themselves in the foot. As Lord Foulkes points out in this interview, MPs do work, have to travel between London and their constituencies, and their salaries to do so pale into insignificance compared to some others paid from the public purse:

Lest we forget the deals given to some BBC TV presenters, effectively from public money:

Jonathan Ross – £18 million for a deal from 2006-2010
Graham Norton – £5 million for a deal from 2006-2009
Jeremy Paxman – £1 million per year
Carrie Gracie, by her own admission in the interview above – £92,000 per year

The UK government is set to spend £654bn in 2009-10. That’s £654,000,000,000. This after the Gershon Efficiency Program delivered £26.5bn in savings between 2004 and 2007, or about 4% of total public expenditure for 2009-10. There’s a throw rug here and some horse manure there, yes, it all adds up, but it still adds up to bugger all compared to what the government spends and wastes, and that’s not just on Jonathan Ross’s salary.

See below where government money was spent in 2007-08, click on the image to download the full summary from the Guardian website:

Two examples. Government departments have budgets. Budgets are set at the start of the financial year and, probably having been applied for in advance, are given to a variety of strategic projects, or to all-purpose funds for tactical work like marketing campaigns, quick wins, visible improvements, initiatives to sell in the news. Each year in the run-up to the end of the financial year (around April), any money left over is often spent on whatever happens to look like a good idea at the time. The reason? If you don’t spend it this year, you might not get as much next year, and next year you might really need it. So sums of money like £20,000, £70,000, £150,000 are spent on projects that never even see the light of day or are done so sloppily in the run-up to year end that they don’t work.

Government departments are also frequently held over a barrel by suppliers, a captive audience for a sound rogering on a regular basis. Companies with preferred supplier status or support contracts with government departments have a blank cheque, a cash cow. In the case of IT, a combination of poorly-specified projects, endless scope creep, inept project management and sloppy software development means that even basic software fixes or the addition of simple functions cost tens of thousands of pounds, a simple software development project may cost £250000, and the set-up of a new online service can cost millions of pounds. This kind of expenditure is justified by the government as providing value for money, and yet the quality of many software implementations is so poor that support costs ramp up for years to come and the service still never quite does what it was supposed to, while service providers are laughing all the way to the bank.

The NHS IT debacle is only one example of this, a project costing over £12bn. That’s £12,000,000,000. The National Identity scheme is set to cost over £4.7bn. That’s £4,700,000,000. And the treasury is now forced to bail out recession-hit PFI projects with public money while the cost of PFI is set to rise to £10bn per year.

But people are pissed off about MPs because the amounts of money, £250 here, £2000 there, these are amounts people can comprehend, almost visualise wads of notes in a briefcase. And it’s apparently irritating beyond belief for people to visualise these sums of money being spent on helipads and tennis courts. It’s as if, even in the 21st century, we’re living in some feudal society where the peasants are glaring through the fence at some laughing toff dredging his moat. The odd million here and there on software that doesn’t work, ten billion per year on PFI? Meh. £380 on horse manure when there’s a recession on? That’s disgusting.

The MPs expenses for 2007/08 are available in spreadsheet form from Guardian Data Store: