MPs' expenses

[mirrorshard]

So they're being officially published online, with some key details blacked out.

Heather Brooke says: "I can see that avoiding embarrassment has been the key motivating factor of what's been deleted."

Clearly, not letting everyone in the world know MPs' addresses, their regular travel patterns, their bank details, their NI numbers, their signatures, and the names of people who deliver to their houses is entirely due to a desire to spare the government any more embarrassment.

Comments

[caramel-betty.livejournal.com]

I haven't looked at them myself (yet), but on the blacking out of addresses...

When they were talking about it over the past couple of months and how the addresses being blacked out would prevent us seeing the flipping and capital gains tax exemptions, it struck me that instead of simply blacking out an address, it should be blacked out and replaced with:

House 1, Placeshire
House 2, Placeshire (so you can tell when I've moved house within the vague area of my constituency)
House 3, Southampton (so you can tell when I've had dry rot fixed in a house nowhere near my constituency or London)
House 4, That London (so you can see my expenses in London)
House 5, That London (so you can see when I've moved in London).

[oneplusme.livejournal.com]

To save on cross-referencing, even the last couple of characters of the postcode would be enough to uniquely identify each property in an MP's portfolio without revealing its actual location. It would lose the advantage of knowing whether the property was in a relevant location, of course.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

CR2, Blankshire / AJ6, London. Would work perfectly.

Also, "if you have more than two houses at once you're obviously rich enough not to need us to pay for them".

[megamole.livejournal.com]

[redacted]

[spencerpine.livejournal.com]

Leaving out those details sounds fair enough to me.

Graham

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, those bastards, not wanting people to know where they live. I know I'm totally up for giving my home address out to all and sundry.

Frankly, these redactions are no more than one would expect in *any* standard bit of disclosure. I'd be quite horrified if they hadn't been censored.

Non-story of the week.

[thalassius.livejournal.com]

It's funny how many outrageous claims disappear (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5572694/MPs-expenses-the-20-worst-cover-ups.html) as a result of these entirely understandable redactions.

As caramel_betty has pointed out, there are halfway houses between full publication and redaction of every possibly incriminating detail. They were not made use of. I wonder why.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Almost certainly a combination of information-science illiteracy and the primitive instinct towards a coverup!