Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think it's quite important to distinguish between two things. I referred to the compliance officer, and he looks at claims and whether they should have been paid or whether they should have been made in the first place. He doesn't look at the conduct of MPs. That is handled by the parliamentary commissioner for standards, who is part of Parliament.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There are two answers to that question. First, if you really wanted to know, in terms of the people who set the rules and so on, you'd need to ask people from the House of Commons rather than me. But I think the general answer is lack of transparency. It was a closed system for most of the time, and like any closed system, things happen, ways of doing things develop, so when they come out and are revealed to the public, the public recoils against them.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think so, yes. Some things were, but it's easy with hindsight. The vast majority of MPs would say, and I think we'd have to respect this, that it was allowed, that it was in the rules. For example, we could take the furniture claimed for accommodation. We don't allow that, as a response to the scandal.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's correct. We just publish a summarized minute.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, they do.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We do, yes. They can claim that, and the claims are published on the website.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes. Each journey is listed. It's quite detailed.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'm trying to remember. I don't think we do that for every individual journey. We just say where it was to.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We don't publish receipts, but on what we call constituency travel, the MP makes the claim. Basically, they have a mileage rate, and so they just say how many miles they've travelled, where from, and where to.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  IPSA costs every year about £6 million. We're both the regulator and the provider of payroll and expenses. And of course, as an independent organization, you have to have all the normal overheads—HR, IT, and so on. So the total is £6 million. We dispense around £160 million of funding, so this is a relatively small proportion of the overall total.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's around £20,000 to £25,000. It depends whether the office is in London or outside London. It's slightly more for London. London is about £24,000, and others are about £21,000.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's a good question. I'm not sure I can quite remember that. I think it may have been, or with very few in opposition, because I think all MPs recognized at the time, given what had happened, that it was important to create IPSA. Also, it went through extremely quickly. I think it was a couple of months at most for the whole process.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's a very good question. We do survey the public. Support has gotten better; it's just under 40%. The last time we surveyed the public, 40% of them thought things had gotten better. But of course, the stories are over. You may have seen, only yesterday, that an ex-MP pleaded guilty over expenses.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  One things that is asked frequently is, why we don't just have an allowance for something such as accommodation in particular, to make it nice and simple but less transparent. We have considered this in the past but think the time is certainly not right for it at the moment. You'd lose the transparency, and that's the absolute key for us at the moment.