They do look after themselves...

Yesterday's written parliamentary questions included this gem (here):

Carolyn Leckie (Central Scotland) (SSP): To ask the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body by how much it has subsidised the members’ dining room to date and what subsidy it will provide in future.
(S2O-8978)
Kenny MacAskill: The members’ restaurant is available to all passholders on a Monday and Friday and is also used to host official functions and events. The bar area is accessible to all passholders.
The estimated total subsidy across all the Parliament’s catering outlets between August 2004 and December 2005 is around £650,000. It is not possible to give a precise figure for the members’ restaurant, since some costs are generic, but we estimate around £100,000. This has been calculated by apportioning to the members’ restaurant a percentage of the total cost of labour and other overheads of all catering services.
The future subsidy will be determined by usage, service level and tariff policy. Whilst usage is beyond our control, a business decision is taken by the SPCB to set the tariff, which determines the income, and service levels, which control one of the costs. Usage aside, the subsidy is driven by and controlled by that business decision. While we will keep these matters under review, we have no current plans to make major changes and subsidy is likely to continue at broadly the same level.

This raises a number of other questions:

1. Why is the catering subsidised at all? And, note, the subsidy is described as a subsidy rather than as some kind of operating loss, implying at least an element of pre-planning. And MSPs from out of town are in any case able to claim meals on their parliamentary expenses. The MSPs are on decent salaries, so why should they be fed and watered from the public trough?

2. A subsidy of £100,000 on the members' restaurant seems excessive: there are only 129 MSPs and they are only in Parliament for a maximum of three days a week, less the 16 weeks annual holiday they award themselves. By my calculations, this works out to a subsidy to the members' restaurant of nearly £1000 per working day or, assuming they all ate there, about £8 per MSP per working day (for catering!).

3. The final paragraph of the answer is just nonsense. Like any catering organisation, the service should be able to estimate their future costs and usage, and then work out a tariff to cover those costs, taking account of the proposed subsidy. OK, the final outcome may involve an unexpected profit or a loss, but unless you estimate future income and expenditure, you have no hope of managing the financial side of the operation.
And, if the SPCB sets the tariff without an estimate of usage - as implied by the answer - then they are in serious soapy bubble.

Does the SPCB know what it is doing? Silly question...

Well done to Ms Leckie for asking the question. I hope she pursues the matter.