A government health minister is to hand back £41,709 in taxpayer-funded expenses that he claimed for furniture, fittings and other items for his second home.
Phil Hope, the minister for care services, said that he felt he needed to repay the money to regain the trust of his constituents in Corby and East Northants.
"The anger of my constituents and the damage done to perceptions of my integrity concerning the money I have received to make my London accommodation habitable has been a massive blow to me that I cannot allow to continue," he said in a statement.
The MP has been criticised before for employing his son and daughter at taxpayers' expense in his constituency when they were both students.
At the next election will be defending his meagre, 1,500 majority against one of the Conservative's strongest election candidates, the novelist Louise Bagshawe.
Later he told Sky News: "This is not about votes, it's who I am."
Asked where he would find the cash, he said: "My wife and I are just talking this through at the moment about getting the money together and I will be able to pay the House of Commons within a week or so."
Among the claims made by Mr Hope over a five-year period for his "modest" two-bedroom flat in South London were for a new kitchen, seven doors, wooden flooring, bedroom furniture, chairs and tables, two bookcases, a television, a £120 barbecue and £61 of gardening materials - despite a Commons ban on claiming for garden equipment.
Some of his constituents said today that they were unimpressed by his gesture. "He shouldn’t have taken it in the first place," said Joanne Smith, 39, from Corby, where £40,000 is enough to buy half a three-bedroomed terraced house.
Bruce Jones, 71, was scarcely less scathing. "I have always voted Labour all my life, but when I heard about all these expenses, I was disgusted. They should all give them back. It’s good he is giving them back but they all should."
Mr Hope's voluntary move – by far the largest pledge to date to repay expenses – came as six days of revelations about MPs' expenses in The Daily Telegraph continued to bear fruit, with the last of the three main party leaders coming forward to promise action.
Nick Clegg said today that his Liberal Democrat front bench team would repay any profits from the sale of their taxpayer-subsidised second homes.
As the spotlight on MPs’ expenses turned on his party, Mr Clegg also said that he personally would repay an £80 phone bill which included calls to Vietnam and Colombia.
At a strangely subdued Prime Minister's Questions in the Commons, David Cameron sought to push the cost-saving agenda even further, proposing that all MPs’ expenses should be published online and that MPs’ £10,000 annual communications allowance should be axed.
When Gordon Brown replied that such reforms were a matter for the Commons, Mr Cameron feigned frustration, and demanded to know when the Prime Minister was going to show some leadership. He asked whether Mr Brown needed an independent commission to decide whether to have tea or coffee in the morning.
Yesterday, Mr Cameron was the first party leader publicly to take the initiative on the scandal, when he announced that several members of his Shadow Cabinet would be repaying up to £11,000 each which they had claimed from the taxpayer. He too promised to repay a £680 maintenance bill.
He also imposed tough new rules on his own MPs, including a ban on claims for food, furniture or maintenance, and promised a review of all Tory claims dating back four years that would result in wrongdoers either paying the money back or being sacked from the party.
Not to be outdone, Mr Brown went on television late last night to promise that all expenses claims by MPs of all political parties would be scrutinised, going back four years, and a mechanism set up for them to repay misclaimed cash. The controversial practice of "flipping" which house is designated as a second home, so that money could be spent on more than one property, would also be banned, he said.
But commentators said this morning that Mr Brown's promises were merely a re-statement of what had been provisionally agreed by MPs on Monday at a meeting of the cross-party Commons Committee on Members' Allowances.
The Daily Telegraph, which has obtained the details of all MPs’ expenses, reported today that Mr Clegg claimed the maximum second home allowance and exceeded his budget by more than £100 at the same time as he was calling for reform of the system.
In response, Mr Clegg said: "Where mistakes have been made, money should be paid back. I have said ’Hands up, I made a mistake, £80 worth of telephone calls should not have been billed to the taxpayer’. I have paid the money back."
Explaining a £680 claim for gardening including work on a wall for a rose garden at his Sheffield constituency home, he said that the garden had been derelict when he bought it.
"It is quite right, since I am not there during the week, it seems to me, that I use the allowance available to me, to make sure that it is in good basic maintained order, which it is now.
"But the point is this – that any improvement or any repairs done to that home which increase the value of the home, goes back to the taxpayer ... it goes back penny for penny for what they have given me in the first place, plus any gain."
In the Commons today he went further still, calling for a halt to taxpayers subsidising MPs' mortgages at all.
"Surely the only long-term response is to get us, to get all MPs, out of the property game altogether," said Mr Clegg. "We are here to serve our constituents, not make a fast buck on the property market."
Individual MPs are continuing to respond to allegations as they appear in the Daily Telegraph, which today published its sixth round of details on MPs' expenses, this time about the Liberal Democrats.
The newspaper said that Andrew George, the Lib Dem MP for St Ives in Cornwall, claimed £847 a month for mortgage interest payments for a riverside flat in Rotherhithe, South London, that was also used by his 21-year-old daughter, Morvah. Her name appeared on the house insurance.
Among the other disclosures were that the former party leader Sir Menzies Campbell paid nearly £10,000 of taxpayers’ money to an interior designer to refurbish his flat in central London, and the home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne claimed for a £119 trouser press which was delivered to his main home rather than his second designated address. Mr Huhne has refunded the £119.
Sir Menzies told the Telegraph that the expense was justified because he had not used his full second home allowance in previous years, but this afternoon he changed his mind and said he would pay back the interior designer's £1,490.66 fee, which he said no longer seemed appropriate given "present public perceptions and indeed the mood of the House of Commons".
Mr George said: "This story’s main allegation appears to be that I have a London flat that is sometimes visited by my daughter, who lives elsewhere in London... Is the Telegraph suggesting that my family should not be able to visit me in London?"
Last night Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, appearing on television waving a cheque, which she said was a payment of £13,000 that she was voluntarily making to the taxman because she had not paid capital gains tax on the profit from the sale of her London flat. She had told Inland Revenue that it was her main residence, and thus exempt, even though it was registered with Parliament as her second home.
Other Labour MPs also came forward with promises to repay cash, including Margaret Moran, MP for Luton, who claimed for £22,500 of dry rot treatment at her partner's seaside home in Southampton. Mark Lazarowicz, MP for Edinburgh North and Leith, said today that he would repay £2,675 of his claims for legal and professional fees on buying a London flat because they were "much higher than many of the public would be prepared to accept".
But as the chorus of mea culpas grew, one Tory MP expressed concern at the way the individual party leaders were announcing their own measures for dealing with the issue before the Committee on Standards in Public Life, chaired by Sir Christopher Kelly, had completed its review of the system in the autumn.
"It is becoming a competition that ’my shirt is hairier than yours’," Ann Widdecombe told the Today programme.
"The problem is that we will have about 25 preferred solutions of increasing hairiness before Sir Christopher Kelly has even reported."
She said that MPs outside London needed to run two homes and she warned that it was important to ensure that people of modest means were not driven out of Westminster politics.
"At the moment we are faced on the Tory side with being told that you cannot claim for repairs and maintenance. If you are of modest means and your boiler blows up, somebody please tell me what to do. Perhaps I will go to David Cameron for a personal loan – not that I have a second home at the moment."
Source:The times
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