Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Petition the Commons for Transparency

Help petition Parliament so they know what you think.
"We the people call on the House of Commons authorities to immediately publish the full receipts behind MPs’ expense claims – including the crucial second home addresses. The House has had four years to prepare for freedom of information and there is no excuse for the obstruction and continued delays that have prevented the people seeing directly how our MPs spend taxpayers’ money.

We also call on the Commons authorities to commit to publishing these full receipts in future on a quarterly basis, excluding from publication only that material allowed by the High Court ruling of May 16th 2008 (i.e.credit card and bank account numbers).There should be an independent person allowed access to the full record to ensure no MPs are deleting information to avoid criticism or embarrassment."
Your turn.

3 comments:

Chris Cox said...

Amazingly there doesnt seem to be a unified petition on the Number10 website. Methinks someone needs to create one.
On a somewhat related note, interesting to see that the "Resign" petition: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/please-go/
has 57,570 people signed up.

Chris Paul said...

Only about 25% of the MPs have completed the checking and redacting task that is required before the official publication exercise. That's the logjam du jour.

Chris Cox said...

The whole idea of redacting the information seems incredibly counterproductive to me. It's no surprise at all that it was only a day or two after the story went round that the "full disclosure" would be heavily censored that this collosal leak happened.
I realise theres a counter argument which says there is information on those forms which is very much private, and I think witholding that would have been fine. But the idea of witholding vast reams of information so they could hide their misdeeds was ridiculous.