MPs' expenses - time to end this scandal NOW

The recent revelations about MPs’ expenses have focused on government ministers and senior Conservative politicians. But it now emerges that Gosport’s own MP, Peter Viggers, is claiming £24,000 a year on a “second home” and, according to local press reports, was involved in claiming £18,000 from the taxpayer in order to redecorate local Conservative Party offices in Gosport. Viggers’ Conservative colleagues go so far as to boast of “taking advantage” of this rotten system.

Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes, has succinctly summarised the rights and wrongs of the current debacle – rights and wrongs it seems so many MPs, including our own Mr Viggers, seem to find it so hard to understand. Writing in The Independent, he says:

“The basic problem is this: claims for expenses should reflect expenditure legitimately and necessarily incurred by a Member of Parliament as part of his or her duties – no more, no less. Instead, they have been used by too many MPs as an alternative income stream, as a way of bumping up salary without having to vote through an embarrassing increase.

“It is quite wrong that MPs should be taking out mortgages with money provided by the taxpayer, then pocketing the capital gain when the property is sold. It is even worse when they regularly change the designation of their second home in order to maximise the income they can generate through the allowance system.

“Does the Home Secretary not realise how wrong it looks to the average person when she calls her sister's spare room her main home, while running up bills at taxpayers' expense for her real home, where her family lives?

“And how can it be right to charge the taxpayer for oil paintings, goldfish bowls, pot plants, and mock Tudor beams?

“The standard defence trotted out is that everything done has been within the rules. But that does not make it ethically correct, not least because those rules have been written by MPs themselves.

“And so we have the unedifying spectacle of Peter Mandelson, who after all knows a thing about houses, claiming £3,000 to improve his house less than a week after he announced his intention to stand down as an MP. Within the rules? Yes. Defensible? No.”

Quite.