West Midlands MP Spelman agrees to pay back £1,600 in expenses row
Oct 15 2009 by Jonathan Walker, Birmingham Post
A senior West Midlands MP is repaying £1,600 in House of Commons allowances – after she used the wrong form to submit a claim.
Caroline Spelman (Con Meriden), the shadow local government secretary, is repaying expenses she received for mobile phone bills.
MPs are allowed to claim for phone bills used in their work.
However, Ms Spelman submitted some phone bills as part of her second home allowance, rather than as office costs.
The claims were approved by Commons authorities at the time, but have now been rejected by Sir Thomas Legg, the former civil servant who investigated expenses received by every MP over the past five years.
A spokesman for Ms Spelman said that the claims had been legitimate, but the MP had decided she did not want to contest them.
Ms Spelman is also repaying £400 for cleaning expenses and £400 for an electricity bill which she accepted she had claimed twice by mistake.
Black Country MP Lynda Waltho (Lab Stourbridge) is also to repay more than £100 after the audit ruled she had claimed too much for cleaning.
Some MPs have objected to the enforcement of a £2,000 limit for cleaning, on the grounds that it is a retrospective rule which did not exist when they made the claims. However, Ms Waltho said she would repay the money.
She said: “Sir Thomas Legg has queried a cleaning bill that relates to a period when I shared a flat with two other MPs. It was a condition of the tenancy that we employ a cleaner and we paid the going rate.
“He has applied a single person’s allowance to three of us as co-habiting residents. I have been asked to pay back £134.01, my share of what he considers in his retrospective ruling to be an over payment. Naturally I will pay back the amount but I emphasise that should this ruling have existed at the time I would have ensured my claim was within the limit.”
A number of West Midlands MPs have expressed anger at the process, insisting that they have been asked to repay legitimate expenses claims because of errors by Sir Thomas, or because paperwork they submitted has been lost.
The auditor of MPs’ expenses was openly challenged by a Labour backbencher Alan Simpson, who indicated he had no intention of returning £500 that he has been accused of over-claiming in cleaning bills.
Defying Gordon Brown’s calls for MPs to settle their repayment demands to draw a line under the scandal, the Nottingham South MP said Sir Thomas had got it “profoundly wrong”.
“If he thinks that the principle of him coming in and retrospectively re-writing the rules would stand up before the courts, then I think he should test it before the courts,” Mr Simpson said.
