Misuse of the MPs "Communications Allowance"

The Lib/Dem MP for Cheadle, Mark Hunter, also PPS to the Lib/Dem leader, has been criticised by the impartial parliamentary watchdog for misusing his "Communications Allowance."

Mark Hunter MP, who is PPS to Nick Clegg, was ordered to repay £500 after having allowed a constituency-wide survey on the NHS, paid for by the Communications Allowance, to be contaminated by party political messaging.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards concluded:

"I conclude, therefore, that the way Mr Hunter deployed this survey in his Liberal Democrat newsletter was a breach of the rules since he was using the product of material paid for from the Communications Allowance for party political or campaigning purposes."

He continued:

"I do not believe it was a calculated breach. But this was more than a series of isolated misjudgements or individual mistakes. The evidence suggests that at its heart lay a confusion in Mr Hunter’s approach between communications with constituents as their constituency Member of Parliament and communications with them as a member of his political party. The former is properly a matter for support from Parliamentary allowances; the latter, not.

While minor misdemeanours in themselves, the party reference in the survey’s end note and its description as a Liberal Democrat survey in the party newsletter are in my view symptomatic of a failure to make a sufficiently clear distinction between the Parliamentary and the party political. The line between the two can be difficult to draw but in my view the successful drawing of that line is central to the public acceptability of these allowances.

In this case, Mr Hunter did not distinguish clearly enough between his Parliamentary and party political roles and as a result I conclude that he breached the rules by using the Communications Allowance, albeit largely indirectly, to support his party political or campaigning activities."



Previously Labour MP and former cabinet minister Ruth Kelly had to issue an apology for spending part of her parliamentary communications allowance on a constituency newsletter that, in clear breaches of guidance, boasted of Labour Government achievements. The guidelines state that "no party political or campaigning material is allowable in any part of a publication funded, in whole or in part, from the allowances."

Mrs Kelly told the newspaper that broke the story - The Mail on Sunday - that she apologised unreservedly. Her newsletter included the following sentences:

“This reaffirms Labour’s commitment to investing in the NHS”
“The Labour Government has invested so much in improving early years’ services"
It boasts of “the difference made by Labour’s commitment to investing in and modernising our NHS"
It includes the slogan from her website “Your NHS. Better with Labour”
It also promoted the work of Bolton West Labour Party.


Mr Hunter and Mrs Kelly are not the only offenders. CCHQ has identified other leaflets - paid for by taxpayers - but which appear to be in breach of parliamentary guidelines:

* Bridget Prentice, a Minister for Justice, has the Labour Party logo on every page of her newsletter – and even includes a photo of her local Labour Party HQ.

* Gisela Stuart, majority 2,349, also uses the Labour Party’s colours across the entire leaflet, including photographs with Gordon Brown and claims Gordon Brown is ‘delivering a fair deal for pensioners today’.

* Julie Morgan includes a section in her leaflet celebrating the arrival of ‘a new Prime Minister’ who has seen ‘many testing occasions’ as well as pointing out she supported Harriet Harman for Labour’s Deputy Leadership.


More details are given on the Conservative Home website - see link at right, or go to

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/goldlist/2008/10/liberal-democra.html


Commenting on the Labour abuse cases, Francis Maude said:

“The Communications Allowance was deliberately created to enable sitting Labour MPs to protect themselves against their democratic opponents. This is further evidence of how Labour voted through taxpayers’ cash to bankroll their political campaigning in marginal seats. If Gordon Brown is serious about restoring trust in politics, he should scrap this unfair Allowance now."

Labour MPs frequently bleat about the money which Lord Ashcroft, about whom they are completely paranoid, gives to support Conservative candidates.

It is worth stating that the money given to most Conservative candidates such as myself from the target seats fund which Lord Ashcroft runs in his capacity as a party deputy chairman - not all of which comes from him personally - is considerably less for most of us than the amount of taxpayer's money which our Labour or Lib/Dem incumbent opponents are entitled to claim via the Communications Allowance.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Of course, Conservative MPs also have this fund at their disposal too and they do use it.

I accept that with their greater number of MPs, Labour has a bigger advantage but I think your post implies that it is only Labour and Lib Dems who benefit which isn't true.
Chris Whiteside said…
I don't think I said that only Labour and Lib/Dem MPs had this money at their disposal.

Once this money had been made available to all MPs, for Conservative MPs not to use the money on the same basis as the other parties would put us at an unfair disadvantage. However, most Conservatives did vote against the creation of this allowance.

I am not aware that any Conservative has been found to have abused the allowance, but if they were, I would criticise this in the same way that I criticsed the Labour and Lib/Dem MPs referred to in my post.

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