There are some changes among the key personnel on the All Party Parliamentary Group on Insurance & Financial Services after today's annual meeting.

The chair, Jonathan Evans, was re-elected as were the three deputy chairs, Andy Love, Lord Hunt of Wirral and Lord Newby. The group has two new hon secretaries following the decision of Tracey Crouch to step down, although she remains a member of the group. Succeeding her will be Heather Wheeler, elected as Conservative MP for Derbyshire South last year and a qualified member of the Chartered Insurance Institute, and long-standing Conservative MP for Gainborough, Edward Leigh.

The other change is that Jonathan Swift, now Editor-in-Chief of Post and Insurance Age, will take over the lead role in co-ordinating the group's activities from me. This is a role that I have performed since 1990 when the late Sir Robert McCrindle and myself set about creating an all party group to cover the insurance industry, finally establishing the group at the beginning of 1991. I recently wrote about some of the highlights of working with the group over the last 20 years so I am not going to rehearse them all again here.

This is an ideal time to hand over the reins. 20 years is a long time and it has been hugely rewarding to work with Parliamentarians and a wide range of leading figures in the insurance and financial services sector to ensure that government and Parliament are better informed about innumerable issues, large and small. But the main reasons for making the change now is that we are one year into a new-look Parliament with the group successfully reformed and working well, engaging with the industry, pressing regulators and government on key issues and attracting support from across the political spectrum. At the same time, Jonathan Swift has moved up to be Editor-in-Chief of Incisive Media's prestigious stable of insurance brands, publications and events, the very job that I was doing when we started the group. It made for perfect timing.

I am not disappearing and I was asked by Jonathan Evans at today's meeting whether I would still be around - I certainly hope so as I support both Jonathans in the next phase of the group's development. I also intend to keep going with this blog as the pace of regulatory reform accelerates over the next couple of years.

The long list of rejected expenses claims from MPs that was published today by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) makes fascinating reading. It also provoked me to feel some sympathy for MPs trying to do a decent job and made me wonder at the huge cost of administering this new system.

I think that MPs from all parties were being very mild in their criticism of IPSA , its huge bureaucracy and outrageous costs when they debated the new expenses system this morning. It was when I saw that a claim for a few pounds for buying lunch for an intern was rejected that I began to sit up and wonder whether the pendulum hadn't swung a long way too far after the scandal-ridden farce that went on in previous Parliaments. I wondered how I would feel if such a claim was rejected - pretty cross is the answer. There are plenty of other claims which have been rejected which in most private businesses would have been paid. There are probably many more that would never had been submitted if the rules (which I have tried reading on IPSA's wesbite) were clearer.

It is all too easy to say that MPs have brought this on themselves, a rather flimsy argument that doesn't really acknowledge that 100s of new MPs were elected last May and cannot be blamed for the appalling abuses of the previous system. It also glosses over the very serious point that Sir George Young, Leader of the House, made this morning about the new system driving people of modest means away from Parliament. I am not attempting to justify the threadbare old system, even less some of those who seriously and deliberately abused it but it does look as if we have gone too far the other way.

Not only do the rules need looking at but the cost of the system to administer them does too. As I understand it, IPSA costs over £6m a year to run an expenses system for 650 MPs and about 1500 Peers. I think most boards of directors in the private sector would be beating the table with rage if they found they were saddled with an expenses system that cost that much to run for that many staff. There has to be a better way that is fairer, more efficient and alot cheaper.

• Apologies for the longer than usual gap between posts. This is a combination of additional responsibilities at Incisive Media (for our TV studios) and exasperation at the number of spam comments that suddenly hit this blog like a tidal wave: 245 on one Saturday afternoon alone! 

I took advantage of Incisive Media's close relationship with the All Party Parliamentary Group on Insurance & Financial Services to invite Jonathan Evans, the new chairman, into our offices to meet some of our editors. It led to a fascinating round table discussion on the likely course and impact of regulatory reform.

I think there were two things that struck us most about his views on this: firstly, the importance on the international perspective and, secondly, the relative lack of political blame he attached for the failures of the current system. Of course, he was critical of what he described as "the lack of clarity" in the tripartite regime and its failure to get to grips with systemic risk that eventually almost overwhelmed the entire sector but he implicitly acknowledged that most people went along with the general thrust of regulatory structures (if not delivery) over the last 13 years. This lack of all out criticism of the previous regime meant that he welcomed the decision of Hector Sants, chief executive of the Financial Services Authority, to stay to head up the new prudential regulator that will sit within the Bank of England: "Most people in Parliament think that the continuity offered by Hector Sants is beneficial. The idea that we sack everyone would lead to such a lack of legacy knowledge and that would be a retrograde step."

It was his warnings about the change of mood internationally that deserve the greatest attention. Most of his focus was on Europe where he spent ten years as a member of the European Parliament closely involved in the debates on most of the financial regulations that came out of Brussels in that time. His key warning was that we are can expect alot more regulation from Europe: "We will see significantly more European activity in the financial markets post-crisis. We will see a more activist regime". This, he said, would manifest itself on several levels.

There are going to be new European financial bodies set up in the next few months and the challenge will be to keep these operating at the level of setting out clear principles and acting in a supervisory capacity, leaving detailed regulation to national regulators. There will, nevertheless, continue to be detailed new regulations coming out of the European Union with Solvency II heading the list followed by narrower issues such at the Insurance Mediation Directive which is currently being reviewed. The challenge with all of these will be to ensure uniformity of implementation and enforcement, Mr Evans told our editors. Too often he said he saw MEPs and ministers from countries like France demand amendments to legislation that they had very little intention of enforcing. This will be a familiar secnario to brokers and intermediaries who complain bitterly about UK regulators "gold plating" directives like the IMD while France and Germany drag their heels in implementing them and certainly do little to enforce them.

There was some good news in his views on European attitudes, however. He felt that the initial knee-jerk phase of heaping all the blame onto the Anglo-Saxon model of financial services was now passing. Much of the hostility to British and American banks and investment markets in the immediate aftermath of the financial storm breaking was because they were quick to acknowledge the problems they had while other European institutions kept quiet: "Now the pressure is on non-UK and non-US banks who are having to come clean about the extent of their own holdings of poor quality debt and other threats to their solvency".

He was also asked about the levy on banks that the Chancellor of the Exchequer proposed in his recent Budget which he said was "more modest than the banking sector feared but has still left the public feeling that the banks should pay more", suggesting that the way may be open to come back for more depending on how the economy responds to the crisis measures put in place by the coalition.

His attitude to the coalition? This came up - inevitably. He is an enthusiast. As a pro-European, pro-electoral reform Tory he sees much to praise in the way the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have launched their joint programme and set about implementing it.

For those interested in more of Jonathan Evans' views on regulation and how it will affect the retail financial services sector I made a video with him on this after the round table - this is on broking.co.uk

I was a little skeptical when, just a week after the General Election, US digital campaigning expert Joe Trippi (pictured) told a seminar organised by the Personal Democracy Forum that the UK was a major election behind the US when it came to political parties exploiting social media. His response to those inclined to dismiss the impact of social media on the recent election as being marginal was to argue that the UK is now where the US political scene was after the Presidential election of 2004 and that comparisons with the huge impact the Obama campaign made through social media in 2008 were false. My reaction was partially that he probably had a point but also that you would expect an American to say that they were several years ahead of us.

Forgive my cynicisim.

It has been wiped away by reading Digital Political Campaigns 101, published by ClickZ (part of Incisive Media's US-based interactive marketing division). This is simply essential reading for anyone who wants to start developing a thorough understanding of what integrated digital campaigning is really all about. In just 25 information (and link) packed pages it brings home just why Joe Trippi and others think the UK still has a long way to go to catch up with the US in this area - and there is alot of catching up to do if anything like the impact of the Obama campaign is to be achieved here. Just one statistic brings home the scale of what that campaign achieved: $500m was raised through digital campaigns run by the Obama camp. Interestingly, two-thirds of that came through people clicking a 'donate now' link in a targeted email.

In the UK, the excitement was over newer forms of digital communication such as Facebook (preferred by the Liberal Democrats), Twitter (the main channel for Labour) and video, especially through YouTube (very successfully exploited by the Tories). The successful use of email by the Obama campaign highlights two things that the UK political parties must learn.

The first is that list building (of activists, supporters, influencers) is absolutely crucial and takes a long time. Too much of what all three parties did here was about pushing things out via social media and almost just hoping it would be looked at. The US email campaigns are backed by proper customer relationship management software that enables them to monitor exactly what action people receiving the emails have taken.

The second is that there must always be clear calls to action, both in emails as well as on the main campaign websites. I have spent several hours trawling through various UK political websites and reviewing emails from the main political parties that people have sent on to me and they do not match up to the very clear and unambiguous guidelines set out in Digital Campaigns 101.

One of the most enlightening chapters in the booklet deals with the successful campaign run to get Scott Brown elected as a Republican Senator for Massachusetts following the death of Ted Kennedy. Here, Rob Willington, the new media director for the campaign, sets out step-by-step how they used social media, including the little known Ning social network, to build up a network of activists from almost nothing. A key message that the UK parties need to take from this is that much more emphasis has to be put on getting people to feel they are 'joining' a campaign rather than merely 'following' it, one of the key reasons why the Brown campaign preferred Ning to Facebook.

All the way through this booklet one is struck by the consistent emphasis on taking people on a journey from the initial contact in the virtual world to a commitment to activism in the physical world, whether that be by donating money, attending events or on the street campaigning.

I have no doubt that the next General Election in 2015 will see many of the lessons from the United States absorbed by all the main parties here. They won't go far wrong if they read Digital Campaigns 101.
 

It has been said many times already that this is the first election of the Twitter age, a shorthand reference to the significant role that social media is expected to play in the political battles of the next four weeks.
There has been alot of sepculation about its possible impact. One of our own recent Incisive Media events, the Search Engine Strategies London conference, devoted a whole session to hearing what the three main parties are doing. There are many differing views about its likely impact but impact it will have so we have decided to join the social media election frenzy. Incisive Media has set up a special Twitter account - @incisivelection - which pulls all of our election coverage into one place. This will provide some of the very best reporting of the key election issues affecting the entire financial services sector and also the IT sector. Every item in the Twitter feed will have a direct link to the relevant story - there will be none of the clutter that some people associate with Twitter.
One of the great advantages of pulling all of our coverage together in this way is that our own editors will be able to get an instant view of what is being published across Incisive Media's many websites and be able to pull in or link to stories relevant to their specific markets quickly and easily.
As to the likely broader impact of social media on the election, today has already seen proof that it is going to be a significant factor.
Firstly, the Electoral Commission announced this morning that every Facebook user in the UK will be sent a message tomorrow reminding them that they must register in order to vote and will be providing a direct link so that they can sign up.
Secondly, we have seen the first Twitter casualty of the election with the Labour candidate for Moray in Scotland, Stuart MacLennan, being sacked for some wildly inapproprate remarks on Twitter. If you didn't already know he was a Labour candidate you might have wondered whether he was representing the BNP so offensive is the tone of them. He naively believed he had crept under the social media radar, something no-one can do for long.
I doubt very much that he will be the only politician whose career is cut short over the next few weeks because of the existence of social media. It adds another fascinating dimension to an already unpredictable election.

I have long been shocked by how much people will pay for what they are told is privileged access to the machinery of Government. This isn't a new issue but has crossed my path many times in the 19 years I have been helping to run the All Party Parliamentary Group on Insurance & Financial Services.