Party leaders run gauntlet of seething MPs
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Gordon Brown will face David Cameron over the Commons dispatch box today for the first time since the summer break, amid deepening anger from MPs on all sides over demands to repay their expenses.
Both party leaders have insisted that their MPs must co-operate fully with the audit of their second homes allowances carried out by former Whitehall mandarin Sir Thomas Legg.
But with MPs facing bills, in some cases running into thousands of pounds, today's Prime Minister's Questions will take place against a backdrop of barely-suppressed fury.
Many backbenchers are angry at what they regard as the arbitrary manner in which Sir Thomas has retrospectively imposed limits of £2,000 on claims for cleaning and £1,000 for gardening in any one year.
At Westminster there was talk yesterday of a possible legal challenge to his report as both Labour and Tory MPs complained that he had violated the principles of natural justice.
Many are angry that they will not only be hit financially, but that their reputations are being besmirched even though they believed that they were acting within the rules at the time.
But Mr Brown and Mr Cameron are adamant that only by acceding to Sir Thomas's demands can MPs finally hope to draw a line under the expenses scandal which rocked Parliament earlier this year.
Both have threatened tough action against any dissenters in their ranks who will not to toe the line, with Mr Cameron saying he will bar any Tory refusniks from standing at the next election.
The Tories last night disclosed that 11 members of the shadow cabinet had agreed to pay back more than £17,000, with shadow business secretary Ken Clarke topping the list with a bill for £4,733 - although he was still discussing the exact amount he would have to pay.
Three others, including shadow defence secretary Liam Fox, were said to be in discussions with Sir Thomas's office over their claims, while Mr Cameron heads a list of eight shadow ministers who have asked to provide additional information.
Unlike the Conservatives, Labour was not releasing details of its frontbenchers centrally, leaving it to ministers to declare individually how much they had agreed to pay back.
Last night Treasury Chief Secretary Liam Byrne said he was paying back a total of £1,860.54 - including a phone bill which was submitted on the wrong claim form.
At the other end of the scale, Children's Secretary Ed Balls and Work and Pensions Secretary Yvette Cooper, who are married, are to repay £13.50 each because of a "miscalculation" of interest on their joint mortgage.
So far, however, no frontbencher from either main party has come close to the £12,415.10 for claims for cleaning and gardening which Mr Brown has been ordered to repay.
There has been deep frustration on the Labour side at the way the expenses issue has re-emerged so dramatically after a summer in which the political debate had appeared to move on to other issues - such as public spending.
While most of the MPs who have spoken out so far are planning to stand down at the general election, among those hoping to carry on many appeared resigned to having to pay up, regardless of how badly they believed they were being treated.
Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg called today on Sir Thomas to reopen his files for another look at the "worst offences" - including "flipping" the second home allowance and claiming for non-existent mortgages.
Writing in the Telegraph, he said: "I think most people expected the worst offences to come under the toughest scrutiny - MPs who avoided capital gains tax, claimed cash for mortgages that didn't exist or "flipped" their second home so they could claim for renovations on house after house.
"Every single MP who "flipped", avoided capital gains tax or claimed for non-existent mortgages must be forced to repay the money and held to account.
"That's why I am writing to ask (Sir Thomas) to reopen the files with a renewed emphasis on the worst offences."
Labour MP Elliot Morley notably claimed for mortgage interest payments of £16,000 - 18 months after the mortgage was paid off. He repaid the money and announced he was standing down at the next general election.
And former Communities Secretary Hazel Blears wrote out a cheque for £13,332 and famously brandished it on TV after admitting she did not pay capital gains tax on the £45,000 profit from the sale of a flat she designated as a second home.
Mr Clegg - who has repaid £910 of gardening costs - added: "If we want to rebuild faith in politics, there can be no half measures. Only fundamental reform will be enough."
Labour MP Stephen Pound said: "The interesting thing is (Sir Thomas Legg) has imposed the template of morality over all this rather than legality."
He said he was not aware of anybody refusing to cooperate with the auditor, but added that there were some "ugly stirrings in the undergrowth".
Mr Pound, who as an outer London MP chose not to claim the second home allowance, said his colleagues would be "mad" not to accede to Sir Thomas's demands.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he added: "There was a culture of acquisitiveness and avarice which was unforgivable.
"We know that, the question is how on earth do we move forward and get away from that now? And the impression I get, and a lot of MPs get, is that no matter what we do we are simply not going to win back anything like respect from the public because of what we've done, it's so shocking to most people.
"It's a terrifying situation, we've all been tarred with the same brush, we all know it, but at least hopefully paying back the money in many cases, even when it's not absolutely legally necessary, will go some way towards it.
"Sadly I doubt it."
Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Theresa May was asked whether it was right to ask MPs who had claimed fees "properly" and had these claims approved by the fees office to pay back money later.
"Sir Thomas Legg has conducted an independent review and I think what MPs need to recognise is that it was an independent review. I think the point is, what we all need to recognise as MPs is the degree of anger out there," she told GMTV.
She added: "I think the question that Sir Thomas Legg has looked at is the system, as indeed we had a scrutiny panel within the Conservative Party and it looked at the system and it didn't just say 'did you meet the rules?'.
"It sort of did the 'smell test' - is what you claimed actually reasonable to the man or woman in the street?"
Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes, Norman Baker, accused Sir Thomas of inconsistencies in his audit and claimed the former Whitehall mandarin was letting the "big fish" off the hook.
He told the BBC: "Speaking to three or four other MPs it's clear there are factual inaccuracies in some of the letters, which is of course adding to this toxic mix at the moment."
Mr Baker called for Sir Thomas to make a statement explaining how he was going to take the audit process forward.
He explained: "He needs to answer the question as to why, if it's going to be retrospective and beyond what MPs thought the rules were going to be reinterpreted as, he's concentrating on gardening and cleaning and relatively small matters and not the bigger abuses ...(such as) the house flipping."
He added: "He's been inconsistent in the way he has approached this, he's letting the big fish off the hook and the small fish have been gathered up."
Mr Baker did recommend that MPs pay the money demanded from them.
He said: "If he has recommended payments to be made then they should be made quite frankly, and people should just grin and bear it and swallow the pain if it's a pain for them and they should pay the money back.
"But I also want to make sure that if the small fish are paying the money back, the big fish, who've made in some cases tens of thousands of pounds out of the system, are having to pay that back as well.
"These people who've set up their country estate as their second home and a box room in London somewhere as their main home and they then charge the tax payer vast sums for doing up their country estate, that's clearly very close to fraud."
Anne Begg, Labour MP for Aberdeen South, who was cleared by Sir Thomas, said there was an "understandable feeling" among MPs that the rules had been changed unfairly and retrospectively.
She told BBC Radio Scotland: "On top of which, quite a number of my colleagues are quite upset because they have got letters that haven't given them a clean bill of health - asking for documents that they know they have already provided to the Fees Office.
"That is causing extra stress and upset for them and it's understandable how they feel."
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Comments
They ought to be very careful - most people in this country are too busy trying to earn a living
- but if the MPs make a fuss about this - the whole issue wil rear it's head again - and even the
most compliant citiizen will vent their anger.
Making unreasonable claims on taxpayer's money is the issue - not some loose, vague ,
very generous set of rules that allow these people to claim for all sorts of stupid, luxury items.
Shut up - pay up - or push off
I decide one day that the speed limit outside your house is stupid at 50mph passing, as it does, a school. I decide that it should have been 20mph all along. I now send you a bill for several thousand pounds for all the times you exceeded 20mph. I ignore any complaint you make about "how were you supposed to know", except by saying "common sense".
The point is that the rules where wrong, but applying new rules retrospectively is the politics of the madhouse.
Can we excpect that the denizens of the fees office, and the Cabinet Secretary to whom they ultimately report, have all been sacked? Thomas himself, as one of the wildly overpaid and much vaunted civil service madarins has his own responsibility for this shambles to explain away.
But.
They were told to claim within the generous rules in order to make up for their rather less than generous salaries. At the time the new rules came into place an MP was earning about £50,000, and with Murdoch running the meeja circus there would be all hell if that were increased.
I hope it is challenged in court - we might have one civil service mandarin whose Olympian verdict is seen for so much meeja grabbing nonsense.
Legg should now look into the many other dodgy expenses and extract payment where claims have been clearly extravagant, as Clegg has suggested. Remember Brown flipped homes and claimed for extensive kitchen improvements over two financial years so as to maximise the grant.
And when is Eliot Morely going to havee his collar felt?
Indeed" the rules as they were". And, what rules there were had been devised by this whinging hysterical, hard faced, hard done by bunch of greedy people, their own "club Rules", with no reference at all to the taxpayers. Now they have been caught out - like so many Draculas in the mid-day sun- they are squealing, writhing, and spitting in rage at the only decent figure to emerge from the cesspit of Westminster Mr Legg, the lone shining Knight, who by now is probably in need of police protection.
Anybody who has got so far up the noses of the likes of Lord Mandelson of Foy, as he clearly has, can't be all bad, and what Sir Thomas has done has come as a complete and nasty surprise to the guilty parties, who would have expected the usual mealy mouthed whitewash, bit of a shocker that. But for the rest of us who have to cut their own lawns, and buy their own bathplugs and food, it is like a blast of fresh, clean air blowing over the midden. Blow away Sir Thomas!
One last thing, if there are any members of the House considering a legal challenge to Sir Thom's findings, can they use their own money this time, they must have SOME...
The annecdotal arguement previously listed about retrospective speed limits is bogus, I would say they had a firm understanding of what they were doing when they handed in expense claims, at the same time they cautioned the British public about public spending.
They have sat in scrutiny over the details of our laws, for years and yet we are expected to believe them when they say. "Oh look I found a bundle of cash in the street, how was I to know it was not mine." regardless of how many times they have critised the dole scrounder for similar deeds in the past.
And when expenses were initially called into question, why was there the mad scramble to prevent public knowledge if not from the suspicion that they were about to be caught in their wrong doings.
I will be happy only when the investigation covers not only personal expenses, but committee expenses too!
Gordon Kennedy
Dagenham & Rainham
"i'm going to slow down as 50mph is way too fast to be going past this school despite what the sign says"
or "i'm going to do 50mph here for no other reason than i can"
would be the options.....
How can you have a legal challenge about something that is not even written down anywhere, never mind being on the statute books.
P.S. if I am wrong and the 'principles of natural justice' have been written down somewhere and have been incorporated into our legal system, please tell me where I can read them.
Further to ptstroud's comment: Rules should be written down and available for everyone to read, not made up by mandarins, committee chairmen, or anyone else on the spur of the moment or in response to any kind of 'concern'.
If there are ANY questions about clarity of rules or applicability to any situation, the rules should be modified to make them clear and that modification be publicly incorporated into the rules. The cult of secrecy and the nod and wink methods must be stamped out.
Sections 2-4 of The Fraud Act 2006
Sections 2-4 could have been specially written to deal with those in this Fraudsters' Parliament!
Read the advice on deploying the act which contains this text;
'Section 2: Fraud by false representation
10. Section 2 makes it an offence to commit fraud by false representation. Subsection (1)(a) makes clear that the representation must be made dishonestly. This test applies also to sections 3 and 4. The current definition of dishonesty was established in R v Ghosh [1982] Q.B.1053. That judgment sets a two-stage test. The first question is whether a defendant's behaviour would be regarded as dishonest by the ordinary standards of reasonable and honest people. If answered positively, the second question is whether the defendant was aware that his conduct was dishonest and would be regarded as dishonest by reasonable and honest people.'
The many and various attempts by MPs to change, obscure, conceal and ignore attempts to 'flush out ' these practices must be held as evidence that those concerned were aware that there actions were dishonest and that their behaviour would be regarded by dishonest by reasonable and honest people.
I note that this case fulfills at least two of the common public interest factors contained in Section 5.9 of the current Prosecution Manual namely:-
5.9
a a conviction is likely to result in a significant sentence;
e the defendant was in a position of trust;
o there are grounds for believing that the offence is likely to be continued or repeated, for example, by a history of recurring conduct;
I have made a formal complaint in wrirting to the Metropolitan Police! Whos else has?
As a taxpaying citizen I have had enough of their fraud and expect to hear the slamming of cell doors behind those found guilty!
As a taxpaying citizen voter, I give no credence to the bleatings 'It was agreed by the Fees Office!'- this same office which was beaten into submission by the fraudsters themselves after getting rid of Elizabeth Filkin- one of the tiny minority of officials who refused to play the role of parliamentary poodle!
Yes and pretty soon those same MPs are going to run the gauntlet of the nation's fists when they come calling on our door steps.