Wickham's musings from Chalke

 
There's been a lot of fuss about MPs abusing their expenses. They have been claiming allowances for second homes while not using them, or claiming allowances for a relative's home that they hardly ever use, claiming allowances for one second home to improve it then claiming expenses on another second home after selling the previous one, avoiding capital gains tax on second homes when they sell them, claiming for furniture, TV sets, gardening, repairs to tennis courts, maintenance of swimming pools and so on.

The media and general public have criticised all parties and all party leaders have apologised and promised to change the auditing by having it done by an independent body.

However, it does seem that MPs have not broken any rules, they have just milked the system and had expenses approved despite the rules saying that expenses should be appropriate or something to that effect. Everyone thinks that they have broken the spirit of the rules.

In my view the most important issue is to stop MPs profiting from second homes. Sometimes the criticism has gone too far, it's not the expenses themselves that are out of order, but the fact that MPs use the expenses to enrich themselves.

Consider an MP living in one town with a constituency a hundred miles away and both towns being one hundred miles from London. The MP has to stay somewhere in the constituency and in London. A hotel room would not be convenient as the MP would need to store clothes and files, would need a computer and a TV to watch the news and political programmes, etc. A rented or purchased flat is obviously needed and the MP needs to maintain it and also a garden if it has one, have the home cleaned, pay Council Tax and services and so on, but at the end of the MP's tenure the property should be handed on to the next MP or sold for the profit of the State and all equipment handed to a State depot for issue to another MP.

The biggest abuse seems to be where an MP designates a relative's or partner's house or even one of his own properties as a second home and then uses expenses to improve it. The property may not be anywhere near his constituency and he may only use it very occasionally. In this case expenses should be restricted to items purely for House of Commons use.