The expenses MPs wanted us to see ; Established 1827

Summary

---

MPS' EXPENSES for the past four years are -- officially -- available to the public from today. Yet this belated, grudging and partial concession only goes to demonstrate what a public service was done when the entire database was sold to the Daily Telegraph. The claims now available are certainly informative -- but there are two crucial omissions, for "privacy" and "security" reasons. Expenses claims that were actually turned down by the Fees Office -- which, Heaven knows, swallowed some extraordinarily tendentious applications -- are not published, so those small-scale claims for Remembrance Day wreaths and duck houses that were so very illuminating about the character of the claimants would have been kept from public view.

More crucially, MPs' addresses are omitted from the database. Arguably, there may have been a case for not making this information universally available but allowing only newspapers and other media to have access to it. But this is precisely the information that makes it possible to see the grossest abuses of the system, whereby MPs played fast and loose with the designation of their main homes so as to maximise their claims and tax allowances -- an abuse that occasioned a new verb, to flip.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

The expenses MPs wanted us to see ; Established 1827

In the case of Kitty Ussher, who has now resigned as a Trea...

See the full content of this document

---