Steve Ladyman’s expenses appear in the Daily Telegraph

“Stephen Ladyman claimed property in Ramsgate as second home with a £1,000 monthly mortgage interest between 2005 and 2008.Charged for regular £80 cleaning bills, £95 utilities, £50 telephone bill and £340 for food”

Once again as I did with Roger Gale I should stress that Steve is one of the MPs to take us for the least and both he and Roger obviously stayed well within the rules.

However I am not so very happy about £4,000 a year food bill in terms of what he costs us £137,559 he is so close to Roger as to make no difference.

Click here for Steve on they work for you and here for his own online expenses interesting as he is one of the MPs that publish receipts online, however I believe the food expenses are unreceipted.

Although in business I believe I could claim against income tax for staff entertainment and entertaining foreign clients, although I never do I certainly wouldn’t be able to claim a bean without a receipt.

Roger Gale’s expenses appear in the Daily Telegraph

“Roger Gale claimed £624.98 for a television and stand and £250.30 for a TV aerial. Also claimed £1,700 for redecoration, plumbing and electrical works at his second home in London”

Ed. I waited to add my thoughts on this one until my ire cooled a little, as I didn’t want to seem unreasonably critical of Roger and as he ranks 446th out of 645 this puts him in the top 200 in terms of MPs that have fleeced us the least.

£875 just to watch TV, the trouble is that our MPs have lost touch with the real world, it doesn’t seem to matter much that some of them are saying sorry and paying the money back.

Rogers total expenses last year were £137,337 click here for some more detail, the problem for me is once one realises that part of there expenses look unreasonable one starts to wonder about the rest.

Now for me being in business if I got caught having made an unjustifiable expense it would trigger a tax inspection, by that I mean that the taxman would have a very close look at my books and if there was much wrong with them I would be looking at fines, prison and bankruptcy.

It is no excuse saying MPs wages are too low as MPs know what their wages will be when they stand for election.

Kent County Council Elections, their broken website and councillors expenses

Still on the subject of the forthcoming elections the lists of Thanet candidates for the KCC elections are on the TDC website only in pdf format which is fine if your computer has The program installed and is powerful enough to run it properly, click on the link to view them there http://www.thanet.gov.uk/council__democracy/cllrs_democracy__elections/elections_and_voting/elections_4_june_2009.aspx

If not I have published them at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts2/id108.htm this particular pdf document is a bit of a dogs dinner so when I tried to convert it into HTML all its columns vanished, so you will have to put up with images of the documents here.

I can usually overcome this problem by using search engine cached pages of pdf files that are in HTML but as TDCIT hasn’t tagged the pages no search engines have found them. It’s all a bit sad really, a bit like if I put my books for sale on the internet in a funny file format without tagging the pages so no one ever found them and I went bankrupt.

I have been trying to find out what the different candidates have to offer which is a bit of a time consuming business, I haven’t received any election material from any of the candidates or parties so far and internet wise coverage is patchy.

Now I really don’t like to be constantly complaining about our local councils IT but with the limited amount of time I have their websites are an important resource to me, once again I see no alternative, so here I go again.

The KCC website in this instance is even worse than the TDC one, it hasn’t even lists of candidates just a busted crazy map that takes you to pages without the information it says will be there this is what it says here http://www.kent.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/democracy-and-elections/elections/ Find out the candidates that are standing for election in your area click on it an see what you get.

If any of the candidates wish to send me links to their websites or material to publish by email if they haven’t got a website I am happy to publish the links or the material here.

In view of the current expenses disaster and in order to find out who your existing county councillors are click on the link for a list of their allowances and expenses http://www.kent.gov.uk/publications/council-and-democracy/member-allowances2008-09.htm once again funny file formats that may not open on some computers, so I have put them up in HTML something that anyone can view on any old computer. Click on the link to view them. http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/blogpicts2/id109.htm

As you can see at £1,762,906.72 they don’t come cheap so we want to get the right ones, don’t we?

I wonder which councillor is responsible for making sure KCCIT performs properly, one would think that the part of their website about the forthcoming election would work properly.