You cannot fail to have heard about the big news stories that have been hitting the headlines recently about government expenses and what MPs charge us for. The taxpayer has been revealed to have been unwittingly paying for all kinds of things on behalf of our MPs. And while many of those claims have related to travel and things inside their homes, they have also gone into the garden to claim what they can there too.
We won’t mention any names here because the purpose of this news article is really to illustrate how the MPs expenses have gone into areas that we may not have expected. The idea seems to be that the expenses system helps the MPs to manage the effects of having to live in more than one place because of their job.
What it should not be doing however – at least in theory – is to be paying for things that are not deemed to be essential. Gardening would ideally fall into that category. After all, whether you have a nice garden or not should not really have any effect on the way you do your job as an MP, should it? That would make sense for most of us anyway.
But it does not seem to apply. One MP, for example, tried to claim just over three thousand pounds for gardening work and landscaping that had been done. That particular claim was not actually paid out, but there were a lot more that were. That begs the question of how consistent the claims system actually is. After all, if gardening is not deemed to be necessary to performing an MP’s work, why are some gardening claims paid and others aren’t? It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense does it? Although given the news about these revelations that continues to be published, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising at all.
Other expenses relating to gardening in its various forms have been successfully claimed by MPs over the past few years. They may not have time to tend to their gardens themselves, but does that mean we should pay for someone else to do them?
The answer would clearly be no. But the way the system is run is very much weighted in favour of the MPs and not in favour of the taxpayer. It is rather amusing that now all this news has come out, we have seen more and more MPs suddenly ‘discovering’ they have made an error and paying the money back. We can expect this to happen a lot more in the future, we would expect.
So perhaps MPs gardens won’t look quite so rosy in the coming months. But at the same time the public purse may look a little better. We all have to pay for our own gardens’ upkeep, and from now on it should be made possible that MPs have to do the same. And as we know, gardening can be very therapeutic – it might even do them some good.