Do as Ipsa says, not as Ipsa does
IT’S NOT unknown for people to travel some distance in order to attend an interview for a job. Neither is it all that unusual for those candiudates to be reimbursed by his or her potential employer, even if he or she is unsuccessful.
So you can hardly blame my colleague, Chris Bryant, for offering to reimburse travel costs to a candidate who travelled from Liverpool to London and back again in order to make his case for filling the vacancy in the Rhondda MP’s office.
Naturally, Chris sought the advice of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa, as if you didn’t know by now) to make sure this was allowable under the new rules. No, came the depressingly inevitable response. But on the plus side, they told Chris that they would have no objection to him paying the money out of his own pocket, which I personally think is jolly decent of them.
So, naturally enough, Chris asked Ipsa (using an FOI request) what their own policy was; did they ever reimburse travel costs to interview candidates?
After a bit of embarrassing, tongue-tied delay, the answer came back:
During the implementation stage of IPSA travel expenses were paid to some of the candidates that applied for the Chair and Board member positions. This has not continued.
This has not continued because the Chair and all the board have now been appointed. And once they were safely appointed, they pulled up the drawbridge after them.
This same organisation denies MPs the right to reimburse travel costs to candidates hoping to be employed in jobs paying a fraction of what an Ipsa board member gets, let alone what the chairman gets!
Hypocrites. Stupid, sanctimonious, incompetent hypocrites.