FactCheck: Bradshaw on expenses
Updated on 26 May 2009
Has minister Ben Bradshaw voted for parliamentary reform as much as he claimed to the public?
The claim
"I've always voted for reform, I've always voted for transparency."
Ben Bradshaw, Question Time, BBC One, 21 May 2009
The background
With anger raging over MPs' expenses, health minister Ben Bradshaw faced the public in a special edition of Question Time last week.
During the discussion, he made a number of claims about his own support of transparency and accountability among elected members.
Blogger Matt Wardman, who edits The Wardman Wire, drew our attention to one: Bradshaw's claim to have always voted for reform. Wardman later discussed Bradshaw's claim on his blog here.
During the panel show, Bradshaw said that he had "always argued for and always voted for reform" of the system when he had the opportunity, saying that at last people like him had won the argument, and accepted that the Commons could not regulate itself.
"Check my voting record," he later said, "check the speeches and articles I've written on freedom of information, on transparency for MPs' expenses."
So is the minister's claim borne out by the parliamentary records?
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The analysis
The independent website Public Whip collates details of MPs' voting records on certain issues of interest, and gives the MP a score based on the importance of the vote.
According to this, Ben Bradshaw voted "moderately" for the policy "transparency of parliament".
This is based on his record in 10 recent votes (since April 2007), three of which he attended, and seven of which he missed. Which doesn't sounds anything like as comprehensive as he claims.
But let's look first at the seven missed votes, which relate to a private member's bill and took place on two separate Fridays (a day when comparatively few MPs tend attend parliament).
The Freedom of Information (amendment) bill, introduced by Tory MP David Maclean, proposed the exemption of the Houses of parliament - which hold information on MPs' expense claims - and MPs' correspondence from FoI legislation. Maclean argued that the bill was needed to prevent correspondence between MPs and their constituents being published.
On 20 April 2007, a small number of rebel MPs tabled amendments to Maclean's bill. The time allotted to debate the bill was eventually talked out, most notably by expenses campaigner Norman Baker MP.
The bill came back to parliament, however, for a third reading (much higher than the life expectancy of the average private members' bill) a month later.
A leaked Labour parliamentary committee memo from 9 May 2007 urged MPs to support Maclean's bill, saying it would reinstate the government's original intention to exempt MPs' correspondence from FoI requests, but would not lead to any change in the then-current agreement on the disclosure of MPs' allowances, which the Speaker had agreed to release on a voluntary basis. Critics said the bill was unnecessary, however, pointing out it would exempt expenses from compulsory legal disclosure and future challenges under FoI legislation.
Bradshaw was absent on 18 May, meaning Public Whip records him as having missed a further five votes on the bill or amendments to it.
Ninety-six MPs took part in the final vote that day. Seventy-nine Labour MPs (and 19 Conservatives) voted in favour of the bill, including a number of Bradshaw's front-bench colleagues; nine Labour MPs (and five Conservatives) voted against.
So Bradshaw didn't turn up in the House to argue in favour of a more transparent expenses system. But the bill seemed to offer MPs the chance to make parliament less, rather than more, transparent; it is not quite true that, by missing the votes, Bradshaw missed the chance to vote for a reform he claimed to support on Question Time.
As it happened, no member of the House of Lords took the Bill on through its parliamentary process, so the votes of the MPs eventually had little bearing on whether it made it into law.
The more recent evidence in the Public Whip record does show Bradshaw to have voted in favour of transparency.
He voted (against the majority of MPs) for more rigorous scrutiny of expense claims in July 2008, and on 30 April 2009, in the wake of Gordon Brown's attempt to reform MPs' expenses in the now infamous YouTube message, he voted for a tightening of the rules on the Register of Members' Interests, and that MPs should submit receipts for all expense claims.
The verdict
Bradshaw hasn't been a thorn in the Commons' side on the issue in the way that, say, campaigning Lib Dem MP Norman Baker has. But he has supported parliamentary reform.
Although he missed some (sparsely attended) votes on a private members' bill to exempt parliament from Freedom of Information legislation, Bradshaw has voted on other occasions to tighten up the system of MPs' expenses.
FactCheck rating: 1.5
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Every time a FactCheck article is published we'll give it a rating from zero to five.
The lower end of the scale indicates that the claim in question largerly checks out, while the upper end of the scale suggests misrepresentation, exaggeration, a massaging of statistics and/or language.
In the unlikely event that we award a 5 out of 5, our factcheckers have concluded that the claim under examination has absolutely no basis in fact.
The sources
Ben Bradshaw voting record on Transparency of Parliament (Public Whip)
Freedom of Information (amendment) bill 2006-07
Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) parliamentary committee memo
Archive searches of local and national newspapers (electronic)
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