MPs were accused yesterday of a massive cover-up of their expenses after the Commons authorities released hundreds of thousands of claims documents and receipts with huge sections of detail blacked out.
Amid renewed public anger over the scale of Westminster's spending habits, the documents contained enough fresh information to create new embarrassment for senior politicians.
David Cameron was forced to pay back an extra £947, the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, was reported to the parliamentary commissioner for standards and Gordon Brown was revealed to have charged the taxpayer almost £6,500 to green his second home in Scotland.
Even Tony Blair found himself under the spotlight after the documents revealed that he had claimed almost £7,000 for roof repairs two days before leaving office and standing down as an MP.
With MPs reeling from public anger at the extent of their claims, Bill Cockburn, the chairman of the body responsible for setting their pay, chose yesterday to suggest that MPs deserve a pay rise of up to £10,000 a year, arguing that they were underpaid by 10-15%.
It was also disclosed that 184 MPs – over a third of the Commons – have agreed to pay back nearly £478,000 in inappropriate claims, including Brown and ministers Douglas Alexander, Alistair Darling, Yvette Cooper, David Miliband, Ed Balls, Rosie Winterton, Andy Burnham and the former home secretary Jacqui Smith.
Sir Keith Vaz, chairman of the home affairs select committee, agreed to pay back £18,949, the culture minister Barbara Follett £32,976, Winterton £8,247 and Labour ex-minister Paddy Tipping £14,320. Alexander, the international development secretary, paid back £12,600. The married couple Cooper and Balls together repaid £2,717.50. The shadow business minister, Jonathan Djanogly, agreed to pay back £25,000 and one of the candidates for Speaker, Sir Alan Haselhurst, agreed to repay £15,753. Parliament's website gives no explanation for the repayments.
The documents published yesterday show that MPs claimed an average of £154 each per month for food. Thirty-two members claimed the maximum £400 each month. None needed to show receipts.
Reform-minded MPs and freedom of information campaigners criticised the extent of the censorship of the 700,000 documents published on the parliamentary website. Large sections, sometimes most of a document, were blacked out, either on the advice of MI5 or in the belief that publication would be in breach of the Data Protection Act.
Even Sir Stuart Bell, the senior Labour figure on the members' estimates committee (MEC) responsible for overseeing the expenses fiasco, said the form of publication was "absolutely ridiculous", but insisted that a wealth of information had nevertheless been published.
It emerged that the MEC took two separate decisions to censor the documents after the high court ruled last July that the expenses claims should be published under freedom of information rules. It agreed to remove not just MPs' home addresses, but, in breach of advice of the information commissioner, even the first three digits of their postcodes. In July 2008, MPs also voted to protect their security by removing the names of suppliers of services to homes.
On the basis of yesterday's publications, none of the most celebrated examples of abuse revealed by the Daily Telegraph would have been exposed. The newspaper had access to all unredacted claims, as well as correspondence between MPs and the fees office over the past four years.
The censored documents published obscure whether MPs changed the designation of their second home to maximise claims or avoid capital gains tax. They also do not disclose when a claim was rejected or challenged by the fees office, or whether it was nevertheless paid. Even the page numbers of each MP's claim have been blacked out to disguise whether whole pages have been removed.
Cameron, regretting his oversights in his own expenses, said: "I am disappointed by the amount of information held back. We need a more common sense approach to releasing this information."
The Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, said: "The publication of expenses in this format has only made people even more frustrated. If people had had to rely on this information to find out about their MPs, they would have been faced with swaths of black ink, rather than information about the flipping of homes and the avoidance of capital gains tax."
Brown, who is in Brussels for an EU summit, said he did not know why his claim for a Sky television subscription had been redacted.
Publication came as it emerged that a Labour former minister under investigation for claiming £16,888 of "phantom" mortgage payments on expenses has now had to repay a further £20,000 to the taxpayer. Elliot Morley said further examination of his home loan arrangements by his lawyers had found that part of the capital was paid from public funds - banned under Commons rules. The Scunthorpe MP is quitting at the next general election. But he said last night that he expected to be cleared of any deliberate wrongdoing as he had found evidence that his lender did not give him the type of mortgage he had asked for.
Heather Brooke, the freedom of information campaigner who fought to have the expenses made public, said: "Avoiding embarrassment has been the key motivating factor of what's been deleted."
In a sign that they are desperate to damage their opponents on such a politically explosive issue, both main parties for the first time spent the day highlighting examples of bad practice by their opponents.
What was revealed ...
• Gordon Brown, who repaid £801.86 to the Commons authorities, and David Cameron, who repaid £947, are among 184 MPs to make repayments.
• Brown has treated mice infestations at his flat in London and his Scottish home.
• Tony Blair claimed £6,990 for roof repairs on 25 June 2007 - two days before he stepped down as prime minister and ceased to be an MP. He also claimed for six months of council tax, a month before leaving office.
• Alex Salmond, the SNP Scottish first minister, and Elfyn Llwyd, the Plaid Cymru MP, submitted what appear to be identical bills for £14,100 for legal advice on impeaching Tony Blair.
• Liam Fox, shadow defence secretary, ran up a £5,137.70 mobile phone bill between April 2007 and January 2008.
• Hugo Swire, ex-shadow cabinet minister, charged £5 for a Glynde-bourne festival opera booklet.
... and what wasn't
• Douglas Hogg, Conservative MP for Sleaford and North Hykeham, charged £2,115 to have the moat cleared at his Lincolnshire estate and claimed bills for a "mole man".
• Sir Peter Viggers, Tory MP for Gosport, claimed £1,645 for a floating "duck island" in the garden of his Hampshire home as part of £32,000 of gardening expenses over three years.
• Jacqui Smith, the former home secretary, claimed £10 for two adult films which were accessed by her husband at her constituency home in Redditch.
• Labour MPs Elliot Morley and David Chaytor claimed for mortgages that had already been paid off. All addresses in yesterday's publication were blacked out, which prevented cross-referencing against the Land Registry.
Guardian - 19.06.09
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