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Assembly's Final Blow To Public Purse
I saw this a couple of days ago and have been meaning to post on the fact that the Assembly has already cost the tax payer £100m in the time since its been suspended (which I touched on in January), but now it's expected to cost up to a further £3.5 million just to close it!
MLAs will be handed up to £1.7m to cover their expenses, and may also get a "golden handshake" type redundancy payment of £16,000 each, potentially totalling another £1.7m! This resettlement allowance is normally paid when members step down or fail to be re-elected, to allow them to pay off staff.
Why is it only after nearly 4 years that members are paying off their staff? What the hell have they been doing since October 2002 besides wasting public money? Both the MLAs and their staff should have had their payments stopped then, this latest shambles is just more salt in the wound.