MPs Keeping It In The Family
Seventy Conservative MPs - including David Cameron - and “about 12″ Lib Dem MPs employ members of their family. Gordon Brown and the Labour Party have made no declarations of the number of their MPs who employ family members, though 33 Labour MPs are said to have admitted they do.
I can’t see any issue at all with MPs employing members of their family. Derek Conway wasn’t “employing” his children, but just passing them money under the guise of employment. But actually just employing them to do a job is no problem - so long as they are actually doing the work. Like I wrote before:
Rather than a blanket ban, it would be far better to instead make it necessary that all MPs declare all employees with whom they have a blood or legal relationship with, what the relationship is - and how much they are paying them to do the job.
This is what appears to be happening voluntarily in the Conservative and Lib Dem parties, and piecemeal with Labour.
However, the fact that David Cameron is employing his sister-in-law “as a correspondence secretary in his private office… paid £15,000 a year out of Conservative funds to work three days a week at the party’s headquarters” is a complete non-issue. This money is not coming out of the taxpayer’s pockets, but out of the donations made by Conservative party members and donors, like myself. There is no compulsion to donate in the first place, and I for one have no problem with him employing a member of his family so long as she is doing the job she is being paid to do.
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I agree. What is the problem with an MP employing his wife to look after his correspondence and deal with calls. She is far less likely to leak anything he wants kept confidential, except possibly by accident.
The big proviso is that anyone employed by an MP actually do the work - and do it at a competitive rate. Maybe there needs to be a mechanism to ensure that is the case, but it would be ludicrous to ban MPs from employing family members.