MORE THAN FIVE years before the Telegraph’s expenses investigation began, freelance journalist Heather Brooke sat in her makeshift office in the corner of a friend’s attic painting studio, picked up the phone and dialled the number for the switchboard at the Houses of Parliament.
‘Hello, is it possible to speak to someone who deals with freedom of information requests?’ she asked, in her distinctive mid-Atlantic accent.
‘What’s that?’ came the reply.
‘There was a law passed four years ago,’ the reporter continued. ‘It lets members of the public have access to information and I’d like to speak to the person in charge of that.’
‘Um, I don’t know who that would be,’ said the switchboard operator. ‘I’ll put you through to the public enquiry office.’
Oh joy, thought Brooke. They haven’t got a clue.
Parliament had passed its first Freedom of Information Act as long ago as 2000, and its full provisions were due to come into force at the beginning of 2005. Brooke was interested in finding out how MPs were spending public money, and had decided to see whether Parliament, having had four years to prepare for the new Act to come into use, might already be in a position to help. But her enquiries were quickly leading her to the conclusion that Parliament was nowhere near ready for the introduction of the Act. From the way she was bounced between various departments, it seemed that few people had even heard of it.
Brooke had been born and raised in Seattle, though she had dual British–American nationality through her parents, who had moved to the US from their native Liverpool. It was during a previous life as an intern on The Spokesman–Review, a small-town daily newspaper in Spokane, Washington State, that Brooke had first developed a taste for exposing the expenses claims of politicians. America’s long-established freedom of information laws allowed her to dig through public records in the state capital, Olympia, to find out what local representatives had been spending public money on. Although she found little evidence of malfeasance, Brooke saw the relative honesty of local politicians as proof that transparency was a vital weapon in preventing abuses in public office.
From Spokane, Brooke had moved on to the Spartanburg Herald–Journal in South Carolina, but fell out of love with journalism after covering more than three hundred murders, telling friends she felt ‘burnt out’. A move to England, where she had been shocked at how difficult it was to get access to information held by officialdom, gave her the idea of writing a guide to using the forthcoming Freedom of Information Act, and she had become an expert in navigating this fiendishly complex piece of legislation, which seemed to some as if it had been designed to confound and frustrate those who tried to use it, rather than to encourage greater openness.
It was against this background that Brooke, by now aged in her mid-thirties, made her first approach to Parliament in February 2004 from her temporary office in Putney, south London, where her documents and ring binders competed for space with easels and painting materials belonging to her artist friend.
Brooke was particularly interested in the issue of MPs’ expenses, which had already provided a rich seam of newspaper stories guaranteed to provoke outrage among a British public who had an inherent distrust of politicians and believed they were all on the take. The most controversial element of what the MPs could claim for was something called the additional costs allowance (ACA), which gave them the right to claim up to £23,038 a year (at 2007/8 levels) for maintaining a second home.
Although MPs earn a good living (their basic salary in 2007/8 was £64,766), it was deemed insufficient for them to afford the cost of homes both in their constituencies – where they were expected to spend weekends and Parliament’s long periods of recess – and in London, one of the world’s most expensive cities. Successive governments had shied away from the idea of giving MPs a large pay rise to enable them to shoulder the expense of two homes, and so an alternative system was devised to allow them to claim the costs of their second home – including the interest on their mortgage – on expenses, in the same way that Joe Public might claim a train fare or a lunch.
Brooke was one of the first journalists to make a direct request to Parliament for details of MPs’ expenses. Having got nowhere with her telephone enquiries, she eventually received an email from Judy Wilson, Parliament’s data protection officer, who said she would also be handling FoI requests. Brooke called her and asked if she would be able to repeat the exercise she had carried out in America, digging through MPs’ expenses receipts to see what they had been spending public money on.
‘That’s really interesting,’ said Wilson, who assured Brooke that Parliament would be publishing details of MPs’ expenses in October 2004. Brooke decided there was nothing to do but wait.
When October came, however, Parliament published nothing more than a summary of the total amount which each MP had claimed on their expenses, backdated to 2001 and broken down into travel, office costs and the ACA.
Brooke called again. ‘Is this it?’ she asked. She was told it was.
Undaunted, Brooke decided to submit a written request for details of MPs’ expenses as soon as the Freedom of Information Act came into force in January 2005. She decided to go for broke by putting in a request for the expenses claims of all 646 MPs.
It was no great surprise to Brooke when her request was refused by the House of Commons on the grounds that it would be too expensive to collate and publish such a huge volume of information. But her motto was ‘never take no for an answer’, and where less combative reporters might have given up, she saw this as merely the opening round in a battle with the Commons authorities which she was quite happy to fight for years, if need be. And so it was to prove.
Brooke tried several different angles of attack, including requests for travel expenses; for the names and salaries of MPs’ staff; and for the ACA claims of all MPs. In each case her requests were swatted away by the parliamentary authorities, who seemed to regard her as something of an irritation.
‘They pretty much laughed in my face, because it was just so unheard of that a common person would dare to ask for them,’ she later said.
Parliament’s release of summaries of how much each MP had claimed was not without interest for reporters, however. Armed with even this most basic information, journalists had been able to uncover what appeared to most right-minded people to be blatant abuses of the expenses system, many involving MPs whose constituencies were in Greater London, less than half an hour’s commute from Parliament, deciding to treat themselves to a second home in Westminster courtesy of the taxpayer.
One of the most notorious examples involved Alan and Ann Keen, husband and wife Labour MPs who represented next-door constituencies in west London and had a home in Brentford, just 9 miles from Parliament. Despite living closer to work than thousands, if not millions, of Londoners, the Keens had for years been claiming his’n’hers second-home allowances to fund the cost of a swish serviced apartment on the banks of the Thames. The couple were dubbed ‘Mr and Mrs Expenses’ by one newspaper, and the name stuck.
But journalists sensed that they were barely scratching the surface when it came to MPs’ expenses claims, knowing as they did that MPs were allowed to claim for furniture, electrical equipment and food, among other things. To a nation of cynics it seemed impossible that MPs, faced with such temptation, could have done anything other than misbehave.
As Brooke kept on submitting her requests for more information, two other reporters joined the fray. On 4 January 2005 Jon Ungoed-Thomas of the Sunday Times asked for the expenses claims of the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the then environment secretary, Margaret Beckett. The following day Ben Leapman, a reporter at the London Evening Standard (who would later move to the Sunday Telegraph), put in a freedom of information request for the expenses claims of six MPs, including Blair and Alan and Ann Keen.
After hitting a brick wall in their attempts to get even a crumb of information, all three reporters appealed to the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, who acted as ombudsman in disputed FoI requests. It was the start of a four-year legal battle in which the FoI requests were constantly batted back and forth between Parliament and various tribunals and courts.
The Commissioner ruled that the expenses details of the fourteen MPs named by the reporters should be made public – setting a precedent which was greeted with utter horror by many other MPs, who had been merrily putting in highly questionable expenses claims for years on end, certain that the public would never be able to find out what their money was being spent on. In what was seen by many observers as the ultimate act of hypocrisy, David Maclean, the Conservative MP for Penrith, in Cumbria, put forward a Private Member’s Bill (a method by which backbench MPs can propose new laws) to exempt Parliament from the Freedom of Information Act.
The move appalled parliamentarians like David Winnick, the Labour MP for Walsall North, who said the amendment would ‘make a mockery’ of the House of Commons, and be ‘disastrous’ for the reputation of Parliament. Debates on the issue were dominated by opponents of the Bill, including Norman Baker, a Liberal Democrat MP, who warned that it would encourage a ‘culture of secrecy’, and the Conservative MP Richard Shepherd, who said that voting to exempt Parliament from transparency laws which it wanted to apply to everyone else would be a ‘staggering misjudgement’. Maclean was the only MP who spoke in favour of the amendment; nevertheless, in May 2007 the Bill was passed by 96 votes to 25 on a Friday afternoon (a time of the week when most MPs were on their way back to their constituencies), revealing just how worried MPs were about allowing daylight to shine into one of the darkest corners of public spending.
The Daily Mail described the vote as ‘a dark day for democracy’, the Guardian said the result was ‘about as far as it is possible to get from openness and accountability’, and the Daily Telegraph accused Parliament of acting like ‘Communist officials in East Germany’. An incandescent Norman Baker claimed the vote was a ‘stitch-up’ involving the collusion of the parliamentary authorities, pointing out that the two Deputy Speakers who chaired the debates, Sylvia Heal and Sir Michael Lord, allowed two ‘closure votes’ to stop opponents running down the clock with long speeches to prevent the Bill going forward – the first time in twenty years such votes had been held on a Friday. The clear implication was that the Bill had tacit support from the supposedly impartial Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, a man who would cast a long shadow over the whole expenses furore for the following two years until it was finally played out with the Daily Telegraph’s disclosures in May 2009.
In the event, the amendment Bill never became law because the House of Lords saw the proposed measure for what it was and refused to have anything to do with it. No law can be passed in the UK without the approval of Parliament’s upper chamber and, ultimately, the Queen, and while the House of Commons has the power to overrule the Lords, the peers can considerably slow a Bill’s progress by rejecting it, which was what they did now. Although David Maclean refused to admit defeat, Gordon Brown made it clear when he took over from Tony Blair as Prime Minister in June 2007 that he did not see the justification in exempting MPs from FoI laws, leaving Maclean with little choice but to withdraw his Bill.
But that was by no means the end of Parliament’s fight against transparency. In June 2007 the House of Commons authorities, guided by Michael Martin, appealed against the Information Commissioner’s decision that details of fourteen named MPs’ expenses should be published. As it happens, the journalists also appealed against the Commissioner’s ruling; for although he had decided that the public should be given a breakdown of what the MPs had claimed under several specific categories, he did not recommend the publication of individual receipts, which was what the reporters wanted. The matter would be decided by an information tribunal, an independent panel which settled disputes over FoI requests, but the hearing would not take place until the following year – a convenient delay from the MPs’ point of view.
Meanwhile the clamour for the release of information on MPs’ expenses claims was amplified by a constant drip of newspaper stories on the subject, which eroded the public’s already fragile trust. The most damaging revelation had come in May 2007 in the Sunday Times, which reported that Derek Conway, a Conservative backbencher, had used public money to employ his son as a parliamentary assistant even though he was a full-time student at Newcastle University at the time. The disclosure had led to a parliamentary investigation, which in January 2008 ordered Conway to hand back £13,000 of the money which had been paid to his son, and suspended him from the Commons for ten days. Conway was also expelled from the Conservative Party by its leader, David Cameron, leaving him with no choice but to announce his retirement at the next general election. The Sunday Times reporters responsible for Conway’s downfall happened to be Robert Winnett and Holly Watt, both of whom would go on to play instrumental roles in the 2009 expenses scandal after defecting to the Daily Telegraph.
When the information tribunal was convened in February 2008, public anger was notched up to a new level by a series of astonishing admissions from Andrew Walker, the balding, bespectacled and slightly bumptious Commons director of resources. Giving evidence to the packed tribunal in Bedford Square, next to the British Museum in central London, Walker was questioned on the somewhat opaque workings of the parliamentary fees office, the branch of the civil service responsible for scrutinizing MPs’ expenses claims.
The barrister representing Heather Brooke asked Walker what his staff did to verify MPs’ claims.
‘There is checking where there are receipts,’ he said. ‘Where there are no receipts there is no checking. If it’s below £250 then the assumption is that it’s going to be reasonable.’
MPs were also entitled to claim up to £400 per month for food, he said, without the need to submit receipts.
Reporters in the room, many of whom were experts in ‘creative accounting’ when it came to their own expenses claims, collectively raised their eyebrows at the concept of being given such free rein.
Walker was then asked how officials decided how much an MP could claim for individual items of furniture for their second home, such as a sofa or a television.
Backed into a corner, Walker was forced to confirm the existence of the so-called ‘John Lewis list’, a document which had taken on almost mythical status among journalists, who had been trying to get their hands on it for years. Officially entitled the ‘Additional Costs Claims Guide’, the list was a jealously guarded pamphlet produced by the parliamentary fees office containing the maximum amounts of money the office could pay out for various household items. All the price limits were set according to the typical prices of such goods at John Lewis, middle England’s favourite department store, which the fees office had deemed to be a suitable benchmark for what could be considered a reasonable place for MPs to shop: good quality, but not extravagant.
‘May we see this list?’ Brooke’s barrister asked. No, said Walker. Asked why not, he replied that he feared that if the list were published, and MPs found out the maximum they were allowed to claim for individual items, that would ‘become the going rate’. In other words, MPs would claim the absolute maximum amount for everything they could get away with. Walker’s concerns were hardly an endorsement of his earlier statement that MPs could be expected to put in ‘reasonable’ claims.
Almost before Walker had finished giving his evidence, the Press Association filed an FoI request for the release of the John Lewis list, and on 13 March the parliamentary authorities quickly agreed to publish it.
Even the most cynical journalists and campaigners gasped when they read the details of what MPs were allowed to claim for. Among the thirty-eight items specified (though the list was by no means an exhaustive record of everything an MP could buy on expenses) were beds for £1,000, TVs at £750 and bookcases at £500, as well as fridges, washing machines, cookers, coffee machines and, appropriately, shredders (at up to £50). What seemed to enrage the public most of all was the fact that MPs were also allowed to bill the taxpayer for the cost of a new kitchen (up to £10,000) and bathroom (£6,335), making it clear they could renovate and furnish their entire second home using public money.
News websites were bombarded with comments from readers aghast at finding out that MPs were able to claim more on their expenses than many people earned in a year. One message, from a man in Northumberland to the BBC website, summed up the public mood.
‘This is utterly disgraceful,’ he wrote. ‘These people can claim an amount that most people in this country can’t even earn. If they need somewhere to live when in London, then the nation should build something along the lines of a Travel Inn and each MP could be allocated a room for the duration of his tenure.’
Others contrasted the MPs’ cushy lifestyles with the plight of members of the armed forces, whose dilapidated accommodation had become a major embarrassment for the government that month after soldiers sent photographs of their slum-like barracks to various media organizations.
The tribunal upheld the decision of the Information Commissioner, saying in its judgment that ‘The ACA system is so deeply flawed, the shortfall in accountability is so substantial, and the necessity of full disclosure so convincingly established, that only the most pressing privacy needs should in our view be permitted to prevail.’
Faced with this latest defeat, and a growing public backlash, it seemed unlikely to most observers that Parliament would put up any further resistance to the publication of MPs’ expenses. Even the Speaker’s own legal team advised him against any further appeals, telling him the game was up. But Michael Martin wasn’t about to let a trio of journalistic upstarts poke their noses into what he regarded as the sacred world of MPs’ finances; so he found a new legal team who were happy to take on the case – and pocket large fees which would, of course, be footed by the taxpayer.
Martin, a former shop steward from Scotland, had already become something of a pantomime villain for the press long before the expenses row. The son of an alcoholic merchant seaman and a cleaner, Martin had been brought up in a Glasgow tenement with four siblings, and worked as a sheet-metal worker before his long climb up the political ladder via the union movement and the local council. His election as Speaker in 2000 (the first Roman Catholic to hold the post since the Reformation in the sixteenth century) caused controversy by breaking with the loose tradition of alternating between Conservative and Labour incumbents (his predecessor, Betty Boothroyd, had also been a Labour MP), and after a series of rows which saw him parting company with three members of his civil service staff, one of whom he had deemed ‘too pompous’, his detractors began to suggest he wasn’t up to the job.
Quentin Letts, the Daily Mail’s irreverent parliamentary sketch writer, nicknamed him ‘Gorbals Mick’ after Glasgow’s working-class heartland – a jibe which so infuriated Martin that he tried to have Letts banned from setting foot in the Commons. More damaging was the fact that in 2007 he spent £20,000 of public money employing the media law firm Carter-Ruck to fire off warning letters to newspapers that dared to write negative stories about him, fostering accusations that he had such a high opinion of himself – and, by implication, of the institution of Parliament – that he believed he, and it, should be beyond scrutiny.
That view was only reinforced by Speaker Martin’s announcement on 25 March, the day the expenses details were due to be made public, that he would, on behalf of the House of Commons, be lodging an eleventh-hour appeal against the decision of the information tribunal.
On 7 May 2008 Parliament’s expensively assembled legal team gathered at London’s High Court, a Victorian Gothic cathedral of justice whose users, should they be in any doubt about the solemnity of its business, must pass underneath carvings of Christ, Moses and Solomon as they enter.
Nigel Giffin QC, appearing for the Commons, argued that the publication of receipts would be ‘a substantial intrusion’ into the lives of MPs. The three judges presiding over the case seemed less than convinced, and it was no surprise when they handed down their written judgment on 16 May that they had found in favour of the three journalists.
In giving their reasons for rejecting Parliament’s appeal, Sir Igor Judge, Lord Justice Latham and Mr Justice Blake stated:
We have no doubt that the public interest is at stake. We are not here dealing with idle gossip, or public curiosity about what in truth are trivialities. The expenditure of public money through the payment of MPs’ salaries and allowances is a matter of direct and reasonable interest to taxpayers. They are obliged to pay their taxes at whatever level and on whatever basis the legislature may decide, in part at least to fund the legislative process. Their interest is reinforced by the absence of a coherent system for the exercise of control over and the lack of a clear understanding of the arrangements which govern the payment of ACA. Although the relevant rules are made by the House itself, questions whether the payments have in fact been made within the rules, and even when made within them, whether the rules are appropriate in contemporary society, have a wide resonance throughout the body politic. In the end they bear on public confidence in the operation of our democratic system at its very pinnacle, the House of Commons itself. The nature of the legitimate public interest engaged by these applications is obvious.
Speaker Martin had lost hands down. His attempts to block the publication of MPs’ expenses had cost the taxpayer an estimated £100,000 in legal fees.
Aware that the ruling meant it would be unable to resist any further FoI requests for MPs’ expenses, the Commons grudgingly announced it would publish all of the expenses claims and receipts submitted by every MP between April 2004 and March 2008. The publication date was set for October, then put back to December, only for the renewed deadline to come and go without so much as a single slip of paper from Tesco being published.
Were MPs up to something? The answer came when Parliament returned from the Christmas recess, at which point Harriet Harman, the Leader of the House of Commons, suddenly and unexpectedly tabled a motion to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act. Labour MPs would be subject to a three-line whip on the issue – meaning they were obliged to support the vote or face disciplinary action from the party. There was more than a whiff of panic about the move, heightening the already fevered speculation that MPs, including senior members of the government, had something terrible to hide.
Then, on 21 January 2009, after opposition parties had made it clear they would vote against the government, Gordon Brown backed down, paving the way for the expenses to be published, albeit in a censored form.
A new date was set for the publication of the expenses: 1 July 2009. But long before that date arrived, events were to take a rather different course.