Make Them Do Community Service

Imagine if you will that you’re running a volunteer brokerage scheme. You’re funded by a statutory authority to place individuals into volunteering opportunities. You’re paid on a per head basis, so you submit monthly invoices for those volunteers placed. You’re also able to claim for your volunteer’s travel and subsistence, up to a set amount, and this also goes on your monthly invoice. Payment is fairly simple, the local authority takes it on trust that your claims are legit, occasionally they might query something but you’re always able to justify your costs. Now imagine that after a few years of operating on this basis, the statutory authority decides to audit you. They send in a team of pencil pushers that go through your claims for the last three years and, lo and behold, their investigation throws up a number of anomalies. You’ve been double claiming for a number of volunteers, you’ve claimed for travel and subsistence where there are no corresponding receipts, and some of the volunteers claimed for have died or since moved on; the amount after three years runs into thousands. Your excuses are lame, it was an oversight, it was the volunteer’s fault, the finance officer had a breakdown, but the fact is you’ve made claims on public money for costs that were either inflated or in some cases did not even exist. Naughty, naughty.

So what would happen if this were true? Well I imagine the authority in question would come down on you like a ton of bricks. Chances are your trustee board would fire you, as the responsible officer, for gross misconduct and your organisation (and possibly you depending on what you did with the money) would probably be sued and steps taken to recover the funds. The charity may even have to be closed down, and at the very least it would be prevented from running similar projects in the future. All a big mess, but at least those involved would have been punished and steps taken to prevent this from happening again. And rightly so. This is public money and theft of this kind is theft against us all and needs to be dealt with.

So as I was watching Sir John Butterfield, the Conservative MP for Bournmouth West, try and justify to Kirsty Young the other night why it was fine for him to use his MP’s expenses to fund a number of building extensions to his ‘second home’ in Woking, including one to accommodate his servants quarters, I couldn’t help but think why is he, along with the many other MPs who have made similar outlandish claims, not being prosecuted let alone still allowed to keep his job? And why do this in the first place? £65k is a more than decent salary for a public servant that gets almost half the year off and only manages a small team of people.

I’m incensed by the whole MP expenses debacle. In a climate where everyone is having to tighten their belts, where businesses and third sector groups are having to cut back or close down, it sickens me to see public servants abuse their position in such a blatant way. The fact that they were not technically breaking the rules in some cases simply does not wash with me. Even if the expenses office passed their claims the fact was they were claiming for things that were clearly not justifiable in their line of work and they must have known this. As the fictional example above demonstrates, if this were in any other area of publicly funded life, those concerned would be removed from their jobs pretty quickly and no amount of ‘I made a mistake’ or ‘it was an accounting error’ would make any difference. Such statements just smack of incompetence and reiterate the justification for their swift removal.

Given that many voluntary projects cannot even afford to pay basic expenses for volunteers and those that do will often come under close scrutiny by their funders to ensure they are spending only what is absolutely necessary, not to mention the DWP constantly on the lookout for a reason to cut benefits for unemployed volunteers, this whole debacle smacks of double standards from the powers that be who impose such heavy sanctions on the rest of us. For me the biggest crime of all is the aftermath it will bring of increased voter apathy and the real risk that extremist parties will make significant gains as the populace seeks to place their vote elsewhere.

Perhaps those MPs that have been caught with their trousers down should forgo their summer recess and be made to do some community service? Given how the government is looking to introduce enforced service for teenagers this seems the least they could do and would set a positive example. I reckon a day’s service for every misclaimed pound should do the trick, who knows we could end up with a whole new national ‘force for good’, all we need is a good catchy name, ideas anyone?

Posted by Jamie Thomas