CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Commuting

"MP Rob Wilson defends 9p car journey claim"

(9 posts)

No tags yet.


  1. Stickman
    Member

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33606908

    "An MP has defended claiming 9p on expenses for a 352-yard car journey to a constituency event."

    "The MP claimed 13p for the cost of a 528-yard car journey to attend a business meeting"

    ""I do use my car to cut down the travelling time so I can visit as many constituents and local organisations in the time available. Many of my journeys are over fairly short distances of a few miles, but with a number of visits each week, over a year the mileage does add up."

    Favourite quote:

    " the Conservative MP told Metro.co.uk he was "a very active local MP""

    Just not active enough to walk 500 yards.

    300 yards would take about 3 minutes to walk. Driving plus finding parking space - a minute say? If the time taken to process the claim takes more than 2 minutes then he is wasting time. (And my experience of expense claims systems suggests it would take much longer than this!)

    Posted 9 years ago #

  2. dougal
    Member

    352 yards is an incredibly precise distance. How do they extract such a value? And the 60p for a bike ride between work and home, another fascinating value!

    Posted 9 years ago #

  3. paddyirish
    Member

    60p is 20p per mile for 3 miles - self employed can claim 20p per mile for cycle mileage, as drivers claim 40p.

    Posted 9 years ago #

  4. cb
    Member

    352 yards is 0.2 miles and 528 yards is 0.3 miles.

    I was surprised that they could claim for fractions of miles.

    You'll note that for the longer journey the MP has generously rounded down his claim to 13p, whereas he should really be entitled to 13.5p. Or maybe the system did that automatically for him.

    Posted 9 years ago #

  5. Stickman
    Member

    What sort of system allows 9p claims? If anyone in my work tried that sort of stunt we'd be told to stop wasting time.

    Posted 9 years ago #

  6. Arellcat
    Moderator

    I would suspect that the 9p claim was one journey amongst others in a single claim.

    Posted 9 years ago #

  7. Stickman
    Member

    True, but to be breaking it down to that level of detail is absurd.

    Posted 9 years ago #

  8. kaputnik
    Moderator

    I assume Rob Wilson is paying an administrative assistant (at Taxpayer's expense) to log and claim for all these small claims on his behalf? Hardly seems worth the cost of claiming does it?

    Posted 9 years ago #

  9. cb
    Member

    "I assume Rob Wilson is paying an administrative assistant"

    The article does say he "claimed £174,000 in expenses for the 2013-14 financial year, of which payroll costs were £142,000"

    So that 9p claim probably cost the tax payer several pounds at least which seems like much better value. No wait..

    Posted 9 years ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.


Video embedded using Easy Video Embed plugin