“Ministers are about to conceal MPs’ expenses, even though the public has just paid £1m to get them all ready for publication, and even though the tax man expects citizens to do what MPs don’t have to. They buried the news on the day of the Heathrow runway announcement. This is heading in the diametric wrong direction from government openness.”
UK residents, please see the MySociety blog post to read what you can do to make sure this doesn’t happen.
I sent a message, though I am not sure if it will do any good, as apparently the Kensington and Chelsea MP has been absent from all debates about government transparency and has never voted on any of these issues. Also, I am not technically a UK citizen…
Finally, I refuse to believe UK taxpayers spent 1 million GBP on getting MPs to publish their expenses without some evidence more credible than a Daily Mail article. ;-)
I think the £1million was the cost of assembling and processing the data into a report for all 635 MPs. Given government inefficiency, and the amount of people to contact and work to be done to assemble the information, I can quite believe that figure.