A list claiming to describe the crimes of MPs is being widely shared on Facebook at the moment, after being originally posted in 2019. It isn’t true.
The list, which originated in the US more than 20 years ago, and which we have written about before, describes “a company with approx 635 employees”, before detailing the specific number of them who have been accused or convicted of various crimes.
For instance, it claims that 29 have been accused of “spouse abuse”, seven have been arrested for fraud and nine have been accused of “writing bad cheques”.
The post concludes: “And collectively, this year alone they have cost the tax payer £92,993,748.00 in expenses (nearly 93 million) Welcome my friends to the House of Commons!!”
There are MPs representing 650 constituencies in the House of Commons, which also employs many other people. Although some MPs have recently been accused or convicted of crimes, it appears that many of the numbers in this list were originally supposed to refer to members of the US Congress in 1999—and even then they were not verifiable—so there is no reason to think they would be accurate about British MPs today.
MPs’ expenses were around £93 million back in 2007/08 before the system was changed following the expenses scandal. This was the cost of all MPs’ expenses (including travel) and the salaries of the staff working for them. It didn’t include MPs’ own salaries.
When we last checked this list, in April 2019, shortly before this Facebook post was originally shared, MPs’ most recently published annual expenses for 2017/18 were about £35 million. Including the salaries of MPs and their staff, it came to about £182 million.
In the latest available annual figures at the time of writing, for 2020/21, MPs’ expenses were about £11.6 million. Including office and staffing costs, but not the MPs’ salaries, the figure is about £132.6 million.
Photograph © Andrew Dunn, 29 September 2004.