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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And in this special edition of the pod, we are focusing on the work of IPSA, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. IPSA is the organisation which sets MPs pay and monitors their expenses, and we're delighted to be joined by its chair, Richard Lloyd, who's been chair of IPSA now.

Richard, welcome to the pod, by the way, for what is it, six or seven years now.

Richard Lloyd: Thanks for having me. Yes, it's just over six years.

Mark D'Arcy: And Richard, we wanted to start just by giving our listeners an idea, because they won't necessarily be familiar with all this. Just what is the kind of package of salary and expenses available to Members of Parliament?

What is the pay [00:01:00] and what are the special provisions made for the fact that they have to operate both at a constituency and in Westminster, for example?

Richard Lloyd: Like nearly everyone in the public sector, they get a salary and a pension, but there's other things that we fund that allow MPs, enable MPs, to do their jobs in Parliament.

As you say Mark, they have to be in their constituency and they have to be in Westminster. So we'll enable them to do that, to be in two locations. If they have a constituency that's far away from Westminster, say, then we'll fund their travel and their accommodation in London so that they can do their jobs in Parliament and get back to their constituencies and serve locally.

The other thing though, which we are really seeing as probably the most important thing IPSA does these days, is to enable them to do their jobs by funding their staff. We fund the equivalent of about five people for each MP's office. We fund the physical offices that they work in and the equipment that they need, and that [00:02:00] forms the vast majority of the funding we put into enabling MPs to do their jobs.

But the absolutely core principle here, obviously, that money doesn't go into MP's own pockets, the core principle here is that any of the funding we provide has to be solely for parliamentary activity. It can't be party political. Can't be self-promotional. It's to enable them to do their jobs as legislators and constituency MPs

Ruth Fox: Back in the time of the expenses scandal in 2008-9 now I'm not quite lost in the midst of time, one of the big issues was housing, homes that MPs had because they need two homes, one in the constituency, one in Westminster. How have the rules changed on that?

Richard Lloyd: You're right. That was one of the most eye-catching parts of that story in 2009. Very early on, before my time, IPSA put in really tough rules about that.

MPs can no longer claim mortgage payment relief. They can't, as was alleged at the [00:03:00] time for some MPs, flip their costs between one home and the other. So there are strict budgetary limits. They can rent a place near Westminster or use a hotel if that is what they require to be able to do their jobs and they live far enough away.

That has completely changed in some cases how MPs are able to live and manage their own property, for example. but it was the right thing to do to put to bed those arguments, that perception that MPs were somehow lining their own pockets through the expenses system, in particular in relation to their mortgages.

Mark D'Arcy: Because there was at one point at least a situation where essentially an MP who served for two or three terms could have Parliament paying the mortgage on a London property, which they'd have more or less bought, and which would be the property of the MP, not of Parliament at the end of the process.

Richard Lloyd: That was one of the stories, and I think it was right to clean that up in a really clear way. Of course, what that does mean now is that we fund rent and [00:04:00] hotels in and around Westminster. That's not cheap, and I think for MPs that have to spend say, three or four nights a week in and around Westminster, but they might have flat or they might have a friend who has a flat near Westminster, sometimes that those rules can seem overly tough, but I think some of these things had to be put into place to address that perception that MPs were on the take.

Ruth Fox: There's also been quite a lot of media stories recently about how MPs are renting to other MPs and that's financial benefit to them and so on, and you can understand why they might do that, security issues and safety and also fellowship comradeship friendship when they're spending so much time away from their families and away from their main homes.

But how does IPSA approach those kinds of questions?

Richard Lloyd: We've looked very hard at those kinds of media stories, and by the way, we've put an end, no longer will new arrangements of that kind, MPs renting to other MPs be allowed. But in the end, for [00:05:00] us, there is a, first of all, public confidence question here. Does this look bad? Does it smell bad? Is it value for money? And if the answer to those questions are no, then we will put in place restrictions that deal with that. But this is a tiny minority of MPs that, they're still in those sorts of arrangements. And actually when you look at the numbers, they are pretty low cost arrangements.

But again, the public perception here is pretty key. And for me, weighing up what the public might think or misread about those arrangements versus what enables an MP to do their parliamentary job, that is the core duty of IPSA.

Mark D'Arcy: Now IPSA has been in place since, I dunno now, 2010 or so, as a response to the expenses scandal and the really astonishing scams that a small number of MPs were running back in the day.

Have you now cleaned up Dodge, so to speak, has the new sheriff in town succeeded in ending the MP crime [00:06:00] wave?

Richard Lloyd: The sheriff needs to keep vigilance, obviously, always, and we are, but I was looking earlier at some of the outcomes we've managed to bring about, how compliant are MPs with the rules. And for years now, it's been close to a hundred percent of the spending that MPs do with IPSA funding. It's almost a hundred percent that is fully compliant with the rules. So yes, there are no longer, day-to-day potential risks there.

What there are often is misunderstandings. We spend a lot of time training MPs staff and MPs themselves about how the system works. But I think we have now got to a stage where the very detailed rules that we've had in place since 2010, and the very detailed scrutiny of that spending across the board, has done its job. And we are moving on to a system that's a bit more flexible and a bit more focused on the things that we know are risky. Now, sometimes [00:07:00] things do go wrong and sometimes still MPs do for whatever reason make naive or wrong decisions about how they use public money. And then there's a very strong compliance system, an enforcement system that we have, we have many sticks up our sleeve. So the sheriff is not without teeth, to mangle my metaphors, but there is a real understanding now amongst MPs and their staff that if they get things wrong, having been advised or helped to get things right, the system will come down on them.

Ruth Fox: So what are the sticks?

Richard Lloyd: We've had in place since 2010. a compliance system. We have an independent compliance officer who can fine MPs or require them to pay money back. Over the years, we've occasionally referred cases to the police. There's been some quite high profile cases that have ended up in court.

Thankfully, those are very historic and far and few between.

Ruth Fox: Jared O'Mara springs to mind. [00:08:00]

Richard Lloyd: There was a former labor MP in Sheffield who was sentenced to prison for four years for fraud. But again, that is so vanishingly rare. Now we are super vigilant, but if we do find cases of obvious fraud or we do uncover misuse of public money, or we are misled, we could take pretty tough action pretty quickly.

Mark D'Arcy: When it started, IPSA was incredibly unpopular with MPs. They were used to being able to claim for things and would often just glower at officials who said, no, I'm not sure about that. And pressure would be put on and low the money would be paid. And when IPSA came in, when two or three MPs were gathered in one place, they should have a gripe about IPSA.

How are you working with them, now, is this now a more harmonious relationship?

Richard Lloyd: That hostility Mark was still there when I started in 2018, 2019. You could still see that for some MPs, actually on principle, establishing IPSA and ceding some sovereignty from [00:09:00] Parliament to an independent body was seen as a big mistake.

And the relationship between IPSA staff, in particular my predecessor, and, some of the more senior people at IPSA, and MPs was in a really bad place. There were lots of reasons for that. In part because IPSA's operations weren't particularly customer friendly. It wasn't easy to deal with us as an MP or as an MP's office manager,

Mark D'Arcy: And you'd like to deal directly with the MPs at the start of IPSA rather than with the office staff.

Richard Lloyd: There was a view that the MP was who we should deal with, whereas actually in most MPs offices, it's the office manager, it's the staff who do the day-to-day administration of finance and make the arrangements for travel and so on. So what we've done over time is worked much more closely with MPs staff and with their representatives.

We've worked with MPs to understand how we can make the system simpler for them, and by making the system simpler, make it easier for them to comply pages [00:10:00] and pages of rules have led to people being either confused or tripping over those rules. What we want to do now and what we've been doing over the last five years or six years, is helping people to comply by making the system simpler.

It's a really obvious thing to do, but that's quite a different culture, a different approach to being the traffic cop on the corner waiting to catch people going past at 25 miles an hour.

Ruth Fox: If you are thinking about moving from a rules-based approach to a sort of more principles and guidance based approach, so that you, instead of having a 45 page rule book, you have a much slimmer rule book, but you set out the principles that should guide MPs in thinking about these issues when they're considering expenditure.

What are the principles?

Richard Lloyd: The four key principles are, is the money you are spending, the IPSA funding, for parliamentary purposes? Are you using it with integrity? In other words, are there any conflicts of interest in [00:11:00] how you are using that? And you will be in taking that funding need to be clear that you are accountable for its use.

Now, these are principles that we've worked to for years and years. The principle that the funding we provide has solely to be used for parliamentary purposes that has been written in our rule book for years. But what we've added to that is layer on layer of detail, and some of that detail will remain.

For example, you can't spend IPSA funding on wine and parties. You can't employ members of your own family. So there are obviously clear red lines that remain as rules, but we want MPs to focus on those principles and to judge themselves, not to be told by IPSA, is this in line with those core principles?

Now, alongside that too, we have a lot of strings attached to our funding. So you can't employ staff with IPSA funding without [00:12:00] using our model contracts, without using our model job descriptions, and so on. So there isn't actually a huge amount of money in MPs' budgets that we provide over which they have a huge degree of latitude.

So just to put that in context, most nearly 80% of what's in an MP's office budget is for staff salaries, and we pay those salaries from IPSA's central resource. So there's a kind of degree of proportionality here, but a new degree of accountability and responsibility for MPs, just like in other regulated sectors.

They just need to stop and think for themselves and their staff do, are those principles being applied as I make this decision to spend this public money.

Ruth Fox: You make decisions on MPs pay, you also provide the staffing costs, are you considering or have you got to consider the potential, given the way in which the nature of the job and the level of communications that are coming in, the number of [00:13:00] constituency problems they're dealing with, do you have to consider actually whether the number of staff that an MP's office now needs compared to perhaps 2010 when IPSA was set up, has changed?

And do their salaries need to change so they can get more experienced staff in? Because they have quite a bit of churn, Mark, you and I talked to, I think it was Rebecca McKee, wasn't it, about a year or so ago about some research she'd done on MPs' staff, and we were quite surprised at the level of annual churn.

Richard Lloyd: Yeah. I mean like any organisation and in particular, if you think of 650 MPs offices, small businesses, there will be churn and there's often a degree of stretch when there's a lot going on. And we look at that very closely. We talk to MPs' staff very frequently, and what we've done is we've slightly increased that budget.

So on average they can employ five different people. We've put in place, we check against the market in which they operate. so caseworkers for example, we can check [00:14:00] whether their salaries, we can benchmark those against other similar roles in the marketplace, and we are keeping those broadly aligned with comparable roles elsewhere.

That's easier than the lack of competition in the MP labour market. But there is always this question about how big is right? And, there are some MPs who would say right now they are so busy that they need more people. There are others that say it's about right. There are others who say, actually what I need is really good quality parliamentary assistance to help me with my work as a legislator.

So there's no one approach to doing the job of MP, which gives us a simple, straightforward answer to the model of what's an MP's office like, but we have increased that and we are really, careful about making those decisions in a way that protects the wellbeing of the people that are working in really busy MPs offices.

But there [00:15:00] has to progress with what's going on elsewhere.

Mark D'Arcy: But there has to be a bit of a wall between the political side of an MP's operation and the legislator, parliamentarian side doesn't there, as I understand it, it wouldn't be acceptable for an MP's constituency office to include a desk that was operated by the MP's political agent.

They couldn't sit in the same building and work from it and use the phones and the photocopier or whatever, you couldn't have an MP renting part of the particular party owned building back as the MP's office and the money then going into their political party afterwards.

Richard Lloyd: That's right. There's got to be a parliamentary purpose and party political campaigning or party political activity is absolutely not allowed to be funded by IPSA. And when you look at the work that most MP staff do, it's often a blend of supporting the MP, making speeches or interventions in Parliament or doing case work or doing admin, and the responsibility, and again, this is a principle for us, [00:16:00] is that team of staff being used solely for a parliamentary purpose?

If it's being used in a party political way, then we will say no, and we will stop that. But again, these are complicated setups where you do have people, we found in the recent past when we've been looking into this, people employed by an MP who in their spare time will go and knock on doors. That's their right. But if the MP is complying with our principle that those staff are used for parliamentary purposes only and not enriching the MP in some way, then the question is, how many given the demands on each MP's office that we see?

Mark D'Arcy: Do you find yourself having to deal with MPs who want to put out a constituency report, an annual report, as so many of them do now about their parliamentary activities and somewhere buried in the text is a reference to how it would all have been wonderful, I had this brilliant idea, but those rotters on the other side stopped me from [00:17:00] doing it.

Richard Lloyd: There is always a gray area in particular for MPs wanting to communicate to their constituents. I was looking at what an MP's team had sent in just this morning and they want to explain to the constituency what that MP has done in Parliament to take up a really big burning local issue on behalf of their constituents, and they can do that without getting into party political mud slinging. It's fine. It's where the MP is using that budget to promote themselves in a party political way that we say no. And we spend quite a lot of time giving advice about that, but it's so important that we enable to a sensible degree MPs to communicate properly with their constituents as part of the job.

The question is, is that being pushed too far, too politically? If it is, then the answer's no.

Ruth Fox: Would your job be made easier if MPs [00:18:00] had a job description?

Richard Lloyd: I would love that. Ruth, please, if you could write that and persuade Parliament to adopt it. As there isn't one, there was an attempt 20 odd years ago by a committee in Parliament to set out what an MP does, and this is the part of the unique world we occupy in Parliament. These are office holders who can choose once elected to do their jobs however they like. There's still one MP who was elected in 2024 hasn't yet made their maiden speech. They can choose to not turn up if they like. I'm not saying they haven't turned up, but there is a discretion about office holding as an MP in terms of how you do that job that isn't for IPSA to regulate.

I think it would probably be wise for Parliament to have another go at codifying that a bit more clearly. But, in the end, how an MP does their job and who appraises that, who assesses [00:19:00] that, that's for the constituents.

Mark D'Arcy: And one instrument available to constituents is the recall process. Should there be a grounds for recall that they haven't turned up or something to that effect?

Pretty rare, I would imagine, because most MPs do.

Richard Lloyd: But I think probably the turning up point isn't one that needs setting out in the recall arrangements. I think it's right that was to do with poor behavior and the Standards Committee's power to suspend people from the House. When I get asked about this by constituents, I say, you do have a power. It's called a general election. Use it.

Ruth Fox: Back in 2010 and 2015 after the general elections, this is bringing back memories, because. every meeting I used to have with MPs, I used to have to reserve whatever the discussion was supposed to be about the first 15 minutes to allow them to just vent about IPSA. So it was like providing therapy sessions. That has changed. It barely ever gets [00:20:00] mentioned to me now. So clearly there has been a big change. Obviously there's an awful lot of new MPs, so it's partly a product of the churn. But do you as an organisation track what they think about you?

Richard Lloyd: Thank you for your service. First of all, Ruth, you've done us all a huge favour by doing those therapy sessions. Look, when I, again, when I started, that's what I heard from a lot of MPs. Anger. But from a lot of other MPs, quietly getting on with complying with the rules, not making a fuss about it.

And, again, the compliance rates have been extraordinarily high. What we do is track every year, what MPs think about it. So in the system, customer satisfaction if you like, and, that's gone dramatically better over the last five years. Since 2019, it's gone up from about 25% of MPs and their staff saying we are good or very good, to 66%.

And we don't expect to be loved. We don't expect to have the [00:21:00] really top scores in terms of people's views of us because we do sometimes and quite often have to say no to people. That's part of our job. But what I don't want us to be is an organisation that makes MPs have to spend, or their staff have to spend, hours and hours every week on admin when we can make the system simple, and make it easier for them to do their day job. The parliamentary work they're elected to do.

Ruth Fox: You're saying compliance levels have gone up and improved. You are not seeing now the kind of number of cases, really serious cases that would require police intervention. Your own customer service levels have improved. So what are you seeing in terms of inquiries or complaints or sort of case referrals from, I dunno, is it from the public, from the media, from politicians in other parties complaining about MPs across the floor? What are you seeing?

Richard Lloyd: The complaint levels are pretty steady and have [00:22:00] been for some years now. Quite a lot of them aren't complaints that are for IPSA to deal with, so they might be people saying, I don't like what that party leader said, or someone has misbehaved in a way that is outside our remit.

And those allegations we refer on to other bits of the standard system, the ones that remain that are within our remit, we investigate. We've got a team led by a really experienced former police officer who looks very closely at all these allegations. It's roughly about 30 investigations a year, and a minority of them are upheld.

Quite a lot of them are fairly minor. They're to do with either misreporting or misunderstanding the system. But where we do find in a very small number of cases that there's been some breach of the rules and that's upheld, then, as I said earlier, we've got things that we can do about that. It's a very steady but pretty small number of [00:23:00] complaints that come in.

The vast majority aren't for us, and that is a real challenge to all of us working to uphold standards in Parliament because the system is really complicated. People don't know, the public doesn't know, what IPSA's role is relative to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards or the Standards Committee, or the Procedures Committee.

And who deals with ministerial behavior as well. That's often a complaint that comes to us. People don't like something a minister's done, so they'll complain to IPSA. That's not for us. So there is this trickle of allegations sometimes from staff, from whistleblowers, sometimes. There may be party political motives for doing that, but it's pretty small.

It's usually pretty minor infringements of the rules, and I think that for me, as you said, Ruth, it's a real sign of success. People can be confident. There's an independent expert organisation looking at this stuff really rigorously, and the vast majority of what we [00:24:00] see is in compliance with the rules.

Mark D'Arcy: And the 2009 expenses scandal was devastating for the reputation of all MPs, even the ones who were blameless. I know of one MP who, utterly blameless in the expensive scandal, decided he was gonna leave Parliament because his wife was spat at in the local supermarket about expenses. So has the decade plus of operation by IPSA repaired the reputation of MPs? Do people now operate on the assumption that they're not automatically criminals milking the system?

Richard Lloyd: This has cast such a long shadow over Parliament and the reputation of MPs and I think has deterred people from standing for Parliament. certainly returning to or seeking to return to Parliament.

I've talked to lots of MPs who are extremely bruised by the experience, even when they've done absolutely nothing wrong. It's very easy for people to remember that period. It was a real symbol and a real moment of accelerating mistrust in Parliament and MPs, but it's very [00:25:00] difficult to disentangle what drives that.

It could be that it's distrust or dislike of what governments are doing. It could be any one of a number of other controversies around politics and Parliament, so it's quite hard to disaggregate what we've done to address MPs funding and their use of public money. It's hard to disaggregate that, to disentangle that from the wider view about politicians and Parliament.

And the reputation of MPs is still extremely, trust in MPs, is still extremely low, and I think that's a challenge for people like me and organisations like IPSA to better explain what we see to give people confidence that, like in any organisation, if there is someone doing something wrong, then there is a system there that's really effective at tackling that.

And that we fund MPs to serve their constituents, not to line their own pockets. And that's the message we're gonna have to keep on [00:26:00] making, because it will take years and years for what happened in 2008, 2009, to disappear from the public in the mix of public sentiments about Parliament, in my view.

Ruth Fox: A key player in that communications challenge are people like Mark in his former life as a journalist, and obviously the media loves sensationalisation of scandal stories and so on, and it doesn't take much to get complaints about an MP onto the front pages.

Mark D'Arcy: Guilty as charged.

Richard Lloyd: Thanks, mark.

Ruth Fox: Have you noticed an improvement in how the media engages with these issues, or is it still as difficult as ever?

Richard Lloyd: There were still journalists who are constantly looking for a new angle, a new story in this space. And of course we are very transparent. We publish a lot of data about what we are spending IPSA funding on, and it's very easy, for example, to do a simple calculation of which MP's the most [00:27:00] expensive.

Of course, if you are an MP in Scotland, then your travel budget will be spent at a greater rate than if you live in Surrey. So there are these very simplistic comparisons between MPs that are still quite often done quite often by local papers. But I think what I see and what IPSA has been trying to work much harder with journalists to do is to explain, look, if an MP has spent money on an office and security measures or a printer, that's entirely legitimate use of public money.

If you believe that an MP should be equipped to do their job as a parliamentarian, and actually should be able to do that without having their own private wealth to fund their office as used to be the case, so we spend a lot of time explaining why we fund what we do and how, and the accountability that comes with that.

And quite often these days, that turns what journalists [00:28:00] might get quite excited about in terms of a story into a bit of a nothing. Because I will say, we will say publicly, that is entirely legitimate. If it wasn't, we wouldn't have allowed it. So the stories have tended to move more online. They've tended to be more one dimensional.

There's very rarely stories about groups of MPs or large numbers of MPs apparently doing the wrong thing. And there's a really simple answer for that. It's because they're not, but also because IPSA is there explaining and making sure that people who do write stories still are equipped with the objective authoritative view from the authority and by doing that, I want us to reassure the public again, that there's a watchdog that's taking care of this for them.

Ruth Fox: One of the things that arises from your quarterly reporting of MPs expenditure is that, some of them say, these [00:29:00] kinds of stories, including in the local press, give rise to high levels of abuse from the public.

And we know that security of MPs is an increasing concern, increasing problem. How far does that factor into your work? Are you responsible or are you part of the jigsaw of organisations responsible for funding effectively whatever security operation a particular MP might need? And obviously some of them will need more than others.

Richard Lloyd: This is a huge issue, and I'm glad you've raised it, Ruth, because the lack of security or the perceived lack of security for MPs, obviously we've had horrific murders, but that feeling of being under threat, under attack for MPs and their staff is really real. And when I go to constituency offices that we fund, I can see and speak to staff who are living in quite a fearful working, in quite a fearful environment, and that's gotta be wrong. And the Speakers' Conference on how social media, for example, is [00:30:00] exacerbating that sense of insecurity and that threat is a really important piece of work this Parliament.

What IPSA used to do was to fund physical security measures for MPs' homes and offices. It was a bit of a complicated setup with the other security bodies involved. So that's now being consolidated into one activity led by the parliamentary security team. But we do fund other measures where we see a need, for example. We will fund online or cybersecurity measures, we'll fund measures to help MPs who are at risk of being attacked physically in public.

So this is an awful thing to have to do, but it's right that we make anyone who is considering, even considering standing for Parliament know that there is a system that is actually hugely better since Jo Cox's murder, that is there to protect them and their [00:31:00] staff. It's evolving. It's not perfect. But this is one of the things that keeps me awake at night.

Obviously I don't want any MP or any MPs' member of staff to feel that they are at risk of being attacked at work or worse.

Mark D'Arcy: The job of an MP of course has changed a lot over the years. Once upon a time, Enoch Powell used to sit in the members' library and reply in long hands to all his constituents' correspondence.

Physically impossible for an MP to do that now, and they're getting tens of thousands of emails every day. But there are other ways in which the job is changing as well. Increasingly, MPs feel the need to have a presence on social media, to put out videos on TikTok, to have plenty of audio visual material out there and different ways reaching their constituents.

Is that something that IPSA is gonna be in the business of funding? Will they be able to buy the kit necessary for that? Cameras, microphones, lights, whatever?

Richard Lloyd: We do fund a communications allowance for MPs for their offices. [00:32:00] And it's right that they do. In the past, probably quill pens would've been bought by.

Mark D'Arcy: Silver quill pens on the list.

Richard Lloyd: Would've been bought by MPs before they had a salary in the sort of 19th century themselves.

I think it's the job of IPSA to look at how MPs do their jobs, how they communicate, how they can better represent their constituents and better legislate, and if that requires a degree of spending on more modern technology, and it's for parliamentary purposes, then, within limits, that's fine with me.

The key for me is the test. And what we say to MPs and their staff, and they will say this back to us, is this value for money? Is it parliamentary? Are you doing this with integrity? In other words, are you buying the kit from your best mate or are you going out to the market and getting the most, affordable equipment possible?

And fourth. [00:33:00] Can you justify this? When your constituents know that you are doing this, are you up for defending that activity to your constituents? If you can answer all four of those questions, yes, then it's probably okay. But I think when you look at the other dimension of this in particular, what I'm seeing now, the impact of AI, everyone is talking about AI endlessly, I know, so apologies, but MPs are getting vast amounts of correspondence. Emails usually often with the content generated by AI tools, and if they reply, they'll get an almost instant reply back. And that's a real thing for people that are running busy offices. I talk to MPs' staff and the volume of correspondence often, in part because the environment everyone's working in as well, but because of the availability of these tools to constituents or just anyone who's a campaigner, that is a [00:34:00] dramatic difference.

And what we will do, what we have been doing, again, with the parliamentary digital team, is helping MPs equip themselves to deal with that flood of quite often AI generated correspondence. It's a very different world to when I first started hanging around in Parliament.

Ruth Fox: Different world to when I workedk for an MP as well. I'm glad I'm no longer doing it. Should we turn to MPs pay, a vexed question for which you are also responsible. You have to review and consider whether MPs pay should be increased every year. You'll have to consider that for the next financial year. You are already undertaking a piece of work on that, I know. Can we start out with just though, what are MPs paid? What is their salary and how does that compare with benchmarking them against parliamentarians around the world?

Richard Lloyd: So this is one of the more controversial things that IPSA is charged with doing. It's a statutory duty. And by the way, MPs can't say no. We set their pay, they don't, and they [00:35:00] can't decline it, and they're paid just over 93,000 pounds a year. At the moment where that compares over the last few years, and we've published this data, it's quite hard to do precise comparisons because of the different parliamentary systems, but that's been about median about in the average zone for MPs pay in G7 economies. So they've been about middling. That's now starting to slip behind. So if you look for example, at the levels of pay in countries like Australia, Republic of Ireland, Canada, MPs in the UK are paid quite significantly less. And the question for us, obviously, we look at as well at what senior public sector roles are paying, again, often quite a lot more than MPs, but if you set aside the emotion and the at times anger about MPs [00:36:00] and you look as you would in a normal job at as best you can, because obviously these are unusual jobs, if you look at comparators, then I think there is an argument to say MPs pay in Westminster has started to fall behind their counterparts in G7 economies and certainly behind senior public sector roles.

Mark D'Arcy: But they're not going to suddenly leave and become an MP in Canada instead, are they?

It's not like there's international competition for their skills or anything like that. And there's no shortage of people running for Parliament. Certainly dozens of candidates in a lot of constituencies. So it's pretty hard sell, isn't it, to go to the public and justify, a 15% pay bump for Members of Parliament when everybody else in the public sector, pretty much, junior doctors excepted, is being told they're facing another five, 10 years of wage austerity.

Richard Lloyd: You're right, this isn't a normal part of the labour market, although sometimes you do see public figures leaving London and going to Canada and becoming Prime Minister, [00:37:00] but I think that the issue for me is what's the value we place on the role.

It's not an easy job when you explain to members of the public what an MP has to do. When you remind them that this is the pool of talent from which we draw our government, the people that are making the decisions that affect you every day, representing you globally, when you remind people that if you have a problem and you go to your constituency MP again, that's who is doing that job, you get quite a different view and we've consulted members of the public directly on this recently and we started off, we said, what do you think about MP's pay? It's about 93K. And about two thirds of that group said, oh, they're paid way too much. When we took them through what the job entails and the security risks, the amount of travel they have to do, often the different dimensions of the job, by the end of that discussion, [00:38:00] the view of that group had flipped completely and two thirds said, actually you're paying them about right probably at the moment. So I think we have to, as best we can, as IPSA setting that pay level, we have to explain the rationale, the context in which we see that.

We repeatedly say to people who still don't believe this, but we repeatedly say it, I'm gonna say it again, IPSA does this. We set MPs pay, not MPs themselves. We do that independently, and we'll do that taking into account both what happens in the public and private sectors to ordinary people, non MPs, what's going on in the labour market and what are average earnings looking like in the public sector, for example, but also what are the other decisions alongside ours that are being made about senior civil servants, about GPs and head teachers. And then we will come to review and what we do is we explain that we are very transparent [00:39:00] about that. And there's usually a bit of noise on social media about this. And the noise is split two ways in my experience.

One is people who say, oh, they should be paid nothing as if this was the sort of 19th century, because they're all awful. Don't pay them anything. And then there is another opinion, which is they should be paid much more because my God, what an important job. So I think, again, we are somewhere in the middle between those two extremes.

Mark D'Arcy: And fair disclosure, I was one of the people who talked to your citizens panel about what MPs actually do, but there is still, isn't there, a problem with the world outside thinking that this is a very large amount of money and there's also a lot of resentment about Members of Parliament who supplement their earnings as MPs by working outside.

Whether it's the traditional thing of barristers coming to the courts in the afternoon and coming to Parliament in the evening, which had be going on for centuries, or whether it's people, senior politicians, indeed presenting news shows on certain news, [00:40:00] alleged news, channels.

Richard Lloyd: This is part of the wider debate, and again, for IPSA, it's not all for us, but I think there is a legitimate question about whether MPs are solely focused on the job for which they're paid to do, or is it a good thing for Parliament that say, an A&E doctor is also an MP and there are many shades of gray there. And Parliament's looking at this itself at the moment, the Modernization Committee and the Standards Committee are thinking about this very hard. There were some very clear red lines, which is that MP shouldn't be profiting in terms of lobbying or other forms of advocacy from being an MP.

So that's one extreme. But is Parliament a better place? Is it more effective? Is it better to have people who have another career and who may go back to that after they've been an MP, does that make Parliament a better, more effective institution? What we are gonna do at [00:41:00] IPSA is look and see it where the Standards Committee, the Modernization Committee, land on that.

But in the meantime, our principle is this. MPs are all paid the same. It shouldn't be the case that you have to be independently wealthy to be able to afford to be an MP. That means helping them with travel as well as a salary. And there is this, for me, really core issue about Parliament, if you love our democracy and you believe in it, which is, what is the value, put aside the individuals that you see on the TV now, but what is the value you place on that role? People that are making our laws, people that are taking care of really difficult constituency issues. Do you value that? And if you do value that, what's the salary that you think might come along with that? And I think, as I say, the citizens we talked to, thanks for your help, Mark, they landed in, you're doing about the right thing here.

Ruth Fox: Apart from that, did you learn anything else about [00:42:00] their views of MPs, particularly the nature of the work that they do because from their own personal experience, I know what a doctor does. I know broadly what a judge's responsibility is. An MP, they make laws, but they're never in the House of Commons chamber is something that I hear, so what are they actually doing? And we know, because we're marinated in the world of Westminster, we know that actually a lot of what the work of an MP is about is actually not in the House of Commons chamber, it's in committees, it's in the back rooms, it's obviously, it's in offices dealing with the constituency, it's public meetings, it's community meetings, huge range of duties, responsibilities, and types of work that they engage with. Did you get the sense that the people on your citizens panel got that at the beginning or only at the end?

Richard Lloyd: You are absolutely right, Ruth. They didn't get that. And one of the things I heard earlier on was, isn't there some form of quorum in the house?

Because every time you stick the tele on, [00:43:00] there's only 10 of them there. What? The rest are all in the bar. And of course we know that being in the chamber is a quite a small part, important but small part of what an MP does. So we took that panel through with the help of a former MP as well, what the job entails, and people took a very different view of it at the end of that and valued particularly the constituency work.

Now, obviously there were some MPs, and this was a view some decades ago, that the key role of an MP is to legislate, and actually they're trying to do too much social work in their constituency, but that is really valued and it's complicated and it's difficult. So that group of citizens, by the end of that exercise towards the end of last year, were really, I think, struck by the range of things we expect our MPs to do.

They no longer believed that social media meme where, you know, the House of Commons Chamber is empty on the day of [00:44:00] a Finance Bill debate, but it's ramp packed on the day they vote in their own pay, which obviously was completely fake anyway because they don't, and it's that sort of core, quite basic public perception that all of us, the Hansard Society, the media people like me, there is a real basic education and information issue here, and that's why when we do make decisions about pay or about MPs budgets, we now publish really straightforward, accessible material explaining that, contextualizing what this is for. But that's an uphill battle and it's an uphill battle in that context of people mistrusting Parliament.

Ruth Fox: As a regulator, Richard, you're one of a number of bodies that, comes in for a lot of criticism in general terms, as regulators have been in the news, they've been highlighted by politicians as taking away power from Parliament. These unaccountable regulators got too much power. What's your [00:45:00] thinking now? You've been involved in IPSA for a number of years, you've had a long career in and around politics. What's your view on how the role and importance of regulators, but also who are you accountable to?

Richard Lloyd: Obviously I'm a quangocrat, says one of the smaller Sunday papers. It's a fair charge. Who are we and why are we making the decisions we make? Parliamentary standards isn't my only regulatory role, and there is this continual tension between independent expert regulation usually set up in response to a problem or a crisis and the strategic direction and the wishes of ministers of the day.

And I understand why the Prime Minister is frustrated that the whole entire machinery of regulation and arms length bodies makes government, at times, slower. My answer to that is if you look at the debate [00:46:00] and the circumstances in which IPSA was established, the crisis in confidence was so extreme that there would've been, I think, really no additional confidence created, if the answer was Parliament in this area needed to continue to self-regulate. It would've worsened. It would've fueled that, and we'd have still been living with it. If that legislation and IPSA hadn't been brought into being so quickly would've still been living with it even worse than we are now. So there are times when it's absolutely the right thing to do.

I think for all regulators, including, what I do day to day, you've gotta look at the way you regulate. Are you just creating additional red tape as it's called, bureaucracy? Are you just fueling this sort of sense of a drag on, action, or are you genuinely in line with what Parliament, and that's who gives us our powers, in line with what Parliament intended? Are we doing the most [00:47:00] efficient, leanest job possible to enable something to happen and our core duty to is to enable MPs to do their jobs. So for me, the debate is right, it's gotta be had in Parliament. If Parliament decided IPSA was no longer necessary, absolutely.

I suspect you won't be able to find many MPs who will say to you, at least on the record, that they'd like to go back to regulating their own pay, nevermind their own business costs, because they can see the value in being able to say an independent expert body is doing that and keeping on it. But, this is a live debate.

I think it's a shame sometimes when that is boiled down into this sort of red tape, blob sort of argument when actually I see a lot of regulators doing really brilliant work to help the economy, to help keep consumers safe, and to help hopefully restore trust in our democracy. But these are quite difficult judgments to make, and it's right that Parliament does.[00:48:00]

Mark D'Arcy: One of the things I didn't know until I started preparing for this interview was that you get together for a regular conflab with some other ethics regulators, the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards, the Ethics and Integrity Commission. What do you talk about?

Richard Lloyd: So many things, Mark. There's quite a few of us. So again, the fair challenge is are there too many bodies? As successive things have gone wrong, have there been more and more attempts to fix it?. Not usually with an independent statutory body like IPSA, but often with a committee or with a code or the like. What we do as chairs of the various bodies in and around standards in public life, the people that are responsible for public appointments and the prime minister's advisor and so on, what we do is we take stock together regularly. We look at what we see and we now actually have a new duty under the Ethics and Integrity Commission, which is [00:49:00] to advise the Prime Minister on where we see gaps in the standards landscape and we can ask him to do something about it. And that will be done publicly.

So it's a bit of extra, I would say, influenced by those of us that are charged with doing different bits of that job. But we're never short of things to talk about, Mark.

Mark D'Arcy: Richard Lloyd, chair of IPSA, thanks very much indeed for joining us on the pod today.

Richard Lloyd: Thanks very much for having me. Great to see you both.

Ruth Fox: Thanks, Richard.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media at Hansard Society.

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