Conservative action on MPs' expenses

Last week, David Cameron announced reforms to start to rebuild trust in politics and to take action on the issue of expenses.

MPs, from all political parties, have done things that are unethical and wrong. The country can not wait any longer for Labour's dithering leadership to find a solution. So the Conservative Shadow Cabinet and the Parliamentary Party met and agreed a series of measures to start this process. With immediate effect, Shadow Cabinet members agreed to pay back expenses claims that have caused concern.

To put an end to the problem we propose four measures:

1.      From now on the Shadow Cabinet and all Conservative MPs will publish online - for everyone to see - every expense claim they make as they make it.

2.      We have outlawed so-called 'flipping' - the process where some MPs change what they describe as their first and their second home to make the most of what they can claim on expenses.

3.      Conservative MPs selling a home for which the mortgage interest payments are currently paid by the taxpayer must confirm that if they sell it they will pay Capital Gains Tax on it.

4.      All Conservative MPs are banned from making claims for any furniture, household goods or food shopping.  Only rent, service charges, mortgage interest, overnight bills, utility bills and council tax can be claimed.

These actions alone of course will not fix our broken politics. It's just a start. It is going to take time and effort to repair a system that has been allowed to deteriorate over many years. We are going to have to build that system brick by brick and the public confidence in it. But we all want to be proud of our Parliament and the people in it.

We've got big, big problems in this country. We need big change.  If we win the next election, we'll be asking the whole country to come together to show social responsibility, personal responsibility and thrift. So the least we can do is to ask Parliament to live by those values as well.