Charlie Gordon MSP: the curious case of high expense claims and payments to his son

Labour MSP Charlie Gordon has been in the news over his high level of expense claims.

It’s not the first time he, money and politics have been in the news, for he’s the man who resigned as Labour’s transport spokesman over a dodgy overseas donation for Wendy Alexander’s Scottish Labour leadership campaign.

Charlie Gordon’s payments to his son

This time though it’s the level of expenses he has been claiming as an MSP that are in the news – including the fact that a large part of them have been paid to his son, Gavin Gordon, for costly office services and for a website that hardly anyone visits.

The Herald reported in late January:

Glasgow MSP Charlie Gordon paid £13,000 of public money to his son’s website firm last year, the latest Holyrood expenses figures revealed yesterday.

They showed that the man who had to resign as Labour’s transport spokesman because of his role in the Wendy Alexander donations saga has been directing more than £1000 a month to GMG Solutions, a company run by his son, Gavin.

Mr Gordon’s entry of £12,822 for “website costs” pushed the total he claimed to £36,760, more than double a typical claim by other Glasgow MSPs.

GMG Solutions is an interesting firm because it “does not have a web site, a portfolio, or any basic contact information” (source) and “the domain listed on the invoices hasn’t even been registered” (source: mwbex.com).

But what of the money itself? In a classic case of, when in a hole start digging furiously, Charlie Gordon’s defence is that these funds have been wrongly described in the expenses return, and in fact:

Out of the monthly total, only about 20% went on maintaining his personal website, while the rest was charged as “call handling” (source).

What does this call handling entail? In Charlie Gordon’s words:

We decided to move our office practically into a virtual office, and GMG (solutions) runs it basically like a contact centre where you have distressed constituents on the phone for up to an hour. What Gavin does is take all the details so that we are aware of all the issues in real time. With the best will in the world, I can’t be in the office or on the phone all of the time (source: mwbex.com).

In other words: he takes phone messages and passes them on. That’s a very expensive answer machine. Especially when you consider that a commercial telephone answering service for businesses running virtual offices comes it at prices such as £25 per month from one supplier I just found.

Just to be clear:

• 80% of £12,822 is £10,257.60
• £25 x 12 +VAT = £345
• Difference: £9,912.60

Doesn’t look like value for money to me, even if you allow for a more up-market service than the one I quoted.

Charlie Gordon’s website expenses

And then there’s the question of the money for the website. A website which also doesn’t look value for money given how little traffic it gets. Duncan Stephen has done a good bit of detective work and reveals that:

Charlie Gordon’s website received 561 visits throughout the month of August 2007. This translates to just 18.1 visits per day. It is worth remembering that all Webalizer stats include robots (i.e. non-human visitors) such as Googlebot. As such, all of these visitor statistics are generous estimates!

Making the calculation, we can see that Charlie Gordon spent £3.44 per visit on his website that month. Even if we accept Charlie Gordon’s assertion that the website costs were in fact 20% of what the Scottish Parliament lists, this is still 69p per visit to the website (including robots). This is quite simply extortionate.

Quite.