Friday 26 June 2009

Family affairs…

THE Assembly’s Standards and Privileges Committee has said that members will have to declare when they employ family members as their staff, and the SDLP have said that only one family member should be employed.

Which, of course, begs the question as to what constitutes a family member…a spouse, cousin, a brother, a nephew? After all, on this small wee plot of land we’re all related in some way.

The Assembly speaker, Willie Hay, has also announced 10 guiding principles MLAs should abide by when dealing with expenses. The fifth principle reads: “Openness and transparency about expenditure incurred by Members will predominate, subject only to data protection, security considerations and inordinate or disproportionate costs.”

Guess that means it will be time for the redacting pen to come out when MLA expenses are published!

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