Why don't tax statements tell us what MPs spend?

Thanks to the introduction of income tax statements, from now on we'll all know exactly what our hard-earned tax money pays for. Or will we?

Chancellor George Osborne is spending £5 million to send us all an annual tax statement that explains how tax money is spent and bring 'transparency' to the allocation of public funds.

It's a shame he won't be more transparent about the cynical way the Treasury have manipulated the allocation and lumped a rather large number of benefits under the heading 'welfare'. Ask the man on the street what 'welfare' means and he'll probably tell you it's what's paid out to 'scroungers' and 'benefits cheat' or those who are too lazy to work. I wonder if he would class pensioners under these headings? Probably not, but the government has.

Just 3% of the welfare budget pays for the unemployed but 46% of it goes towards state pension, pensions credits and tackling pensioner poverty.

If you take pensioners into account, the 'welfare' spending doesn't seem too bad does it but if you want to win votes and justify punitive cuts to the benefits of the most vulnerable in society who are of working age then lumping 'welfare' together is a pretty good, if not disingenuous, way to get people's blood boiling.

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Cost of politicians

The second exception I take to this renewed zeal for tax transparency is that it does not seem to extend to MPs' expenses. In the same week that the annual statements were announced, it was revealed that all records of MPs' expenses prior to 2010 had been shredded.

These documents, that track taxpayers' money just as much as a tax statement does, are being disposed of every three years under the Authorised Records Disposal Practice.

What a joke that our government wants to make tax more transparent and at the same time working hard to dispose of the evidence of the spending of taxpayer money within its own ranks.

It smacks of double standards that we have politicians eager for us to demonise those who are on benefits when we have upstanding – and I use that term loosely – members in Parliament who have diddled the country out of far more money paying for duck houses and moat cleaning, not to mention lining their own pockets paying for second properties, than a person trying to cheat the dole ever has.

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Row over disclosure of MPs' expenses

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