There are ninety MPs standing down this General Election and we should spare a thought for the staff they employed as well. Because for MPs who are standing down their caseworkers, office managers, secretaries and admin staff will find themselves redundant.
Luckily for the staff that will be thrown on the scrapheap there is a financial cushion in the way of a redundancy package. If these staff are on an IPSA contract (and have worked for 2 years) they will get twice the state redundancy package. Older type contracts (pre-2010) will be different and may be better or worse - I strongly suspect better, otherwise older employees would have been idiots not to move on to the IPSA contracts, an option which was made available to them.
Their world of employment is somewhat curious. They are paid out of the public purse but employed by the MPs themselves. The whole allowances system for MPs appears to allow them to function as small business owners, except they have no fear of going bust. It also allows them to pick their staff themselves, which has come in very handy for so many of them because it enables them to employ close family members. "No-one else is as flexible and reliable" is a rejoinder you'll have heard from them. So in lots of cases these MPs have functioned in the manner of not just small businesses, but small family businesses.
The scale of this nepotism is surprisingly large (or perhaps I should say surprisingly small considering the self interest and downright greed we have witnessed from them in recent years). Of the 90 MPs standing down, 20 are listed in the MPs Register Of Interests as employing a "connected party" in March 2015. This is defined as
"Any family members employed and remunerated through expenses or allowances available to support his or her work as a Member of Parliament. Family members should be regarded as including a spouse, civil partner or cohabiting partner of the Member and the parent, child, grandparent, grandchild, sibling, uncle, aunt, nephew or niece of the Member or of a spouse, civil partner or cohabiting partner of the Member".
This is a percentage figure of 22% employing family members, almost identical to the 23% figure in Parliament as a whole (152 out of 650 as at March 2015). So basically just about 1 in 4 MPs are employing family members.
Anyway this redundancy package will be good news for the likes of Mair Francis in the Aberavon constituency. As most followers of nepotism within the Labour Party will know, Mair has been employed for many years as a Senior Parliamentary Assistant for her husband Dr Hywel Francis. In 2013-2014 her salary was in the band £40K to £45K.
Just across the water in Swansea, the Gower constituency, we have Bethan Caton, wife of Martin Caton MP, again employed as a Senior Parliamentary Assistant, but on the cheap it seems at a salary of only £30K to £35K in 2013-2014.
Even in Neath, my own patch, the nepotism carries on. In 2013-2014 IPSA records showed that Peter Hain was again employing a family member.
http://www.parliamentary-standards.org.uk/ViewAggregateData2014.aspx?mcode=0578&year=2013
This time it is his niece, the daughter of his sister Pat who was previously employed by him too. Oh, and let's not forget the family matriarch either, who worked for her son from 1991 until 2009 retiring at the age of eighty-two.
The curious thing is that although we have Hain's employment of his niece recorded in last year's aggregate figures of how our MPs spent their various allowances (on IPSA's website), this employment does not appear in the more widely viewed (and regularly updated) Register of Members Financial Interests. Part 2 of that register is specifically to record those MPs who employ connected parties and who these parties are. Surely not another administrative slip up by our former MP or his staff? There must be some other reason for it.
The IPSA rules clearly state that MPs may employ local councillors as well. So surprise, surprise, in Neath we had a County Borough Councillor (guess what Party?) employed in Hain's constituency office as his office manager. IPSA rules ensure, quite correctly, that said councillor will be looked after in the sense of a redundancy package. There is nothing in the rules that then prevents these same ex-employees starting with the new encumbent (which in Neath will be Christina Rees of course) the day after they have been given the old heave-ho. That might be a good Freedom of Information request in a couple of months for an inquisitive political journalist (Martin Shipton?) as to how many MPs' employees made redundant then took up new positions post-election. I doubt it will be a significant number because new MPs coming in will of course have their own families to look after first.
I appreciate nothing untoward is going on here - it's all "within the rules", but it does wind me up that public money is used to swell so many MP family coffers where MPs have employed connected parties, and we have (Labour) local councillors being fed twice from the public trough. What would all these people do in a world where they weren't able to make their living off the backs of the taxpayer?
