Picture credit: Geir Halvorsen
The blazing row about MPs expenses is an unsavoury and dismal situation, for sure – but there are important Systems lessons to be drawn from the debacle.
In the UK a stream of embarrassing revelations about highly questionable expenses claims has meant that Members of Parliament have spent the week universally condemning ‘the [MPs expenses] system’ and calling for “a complete overhaul of the system.”
Firstly, the MPs now rail against the much-maligned ‘system’ in the apparent ignorance that the ‘system’ is nothing more than their own behaviour, which has previously escaped public scrutiny and operated with almost absolute impunity beyond self-defined and self-policed ‘rules.’
So the MP’s expenses ‘system’ meets the first Systems principles of self-organisation and emergence.
absence of effective governance subsystem
Secondly, the system in question operated safely within a clearly defined system boundary: the privileged walls of the Palace of Westminster. This boundary effectively protected the system from external interruption for many years - until the High Court finally ruled that MP’s expenses were not exempt from the Freedom of Information legislation. The shadow of public scrutiny loomed large and the system became unstable – a prerequisite for any substantial change.
The expenses system became completely destabilised when the Daily Telegraph published embarrassing information about how MPs had ‘played the system’ – at the taxpayers’ cost, of course. Apart from the obvious personal integrity issues, these revelations exposed a fundamental Systems weakness: the absence of an effective governance sub-system.
a system within a system
The newspaper exposé and subsequent public indignation also illustrated the unequivocal principle that the MP’s expenses system was not an unassailably independent operation – but merely an operational component within a much broader System of Systems. As such, the expenses system clearly had another inherent Systems weakness: it failed to recognise its context and the broader environment.
a self-hung parliament
Any system that believes itself to be completely closed will always get a rude awakening when environmental influences eventually disturb the system – which is precisely what has happened so spectacularly in the previously revered halls of Westminster. The integrity of the Mother of Parliaments has been well and truly hoist by its own petard – a situation very nicely illustrated by cartoonist Matt Buck’s cartoon of a self-hung parliament.
In this whole affair I am only surprised that the media has yet to coin the obvious term: troughgate!
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