St Albans MP Anne Main to apologise and repay overclaimed expenses (From This Is Local London)

St Albans MP Anne Main to apologise and repay overclaimed expenses

12:47pm Thursday 4th February 2010 in

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St Albans MP Anne Main has agreed to apologise for overclaims on her parliamentary expenses and repay £7,100 in allowances.

Sir Thomas Legg, who carried out the review on expenses in relation to MPs' second homes, said she must repay £7,100 in respect of the period when her daughter supported her by staying in her second home in St Albans.

In a statement Anne Main said: “I welcome this report from the Committee on Standards and Privileges, whose conclusions I shall, of course, abide by. I am pleased that there has been no question over my integrity in this matter and that both the commissioner and the committee accept the evidence that I ‘acted in accordance with advice received from the Fees Office’.

"I am pleased that the committee and the Commissioner accepted that I ‘consulted the House authorities before letting [my] daughter use [my] St Albans flat’ and that my ‘exercise of discretion in establishing [my] St Albans property in order to serve [my] constituents was reasonable in all the circumstances'. I have only ever wished to serve St Albans to the best of my capacity and I am pleased the commissioner recognised that.

"As a new Member of Parliament, I was obliged to seek the guidance and interpretation of the Fees Office and I did so diligently. It is the ‘quality of the advice’ that I followed that has obviously now been deemed to be incorrect. I am pleased that the committee and the commissioner agreed that this was a ‘mitigating factor’ in their conclusions. They conclude that the advice I was given was not ‘correctly interpreted at the time’ by the Fees Office, as it should have been, but based on that advice, given to me at the time, I made the arrangements that I did in good faith.

"I am pleased that the commissioner and the committee agree that my daughter ‘neither sought nor received any personal benefit from her use of [my] second 1 home’. Both the commissioner and the committee have agreed that, as a mother, I received an ‘emotional benefit’ from seeing my daughter and that despite having received advice from the Fees Office that she was entitled to be there, as my daughter, they did conclude that I need to make a payment to reflect this personal benefit to me as a parent. The committee’s decision is that I ought to pay £5,000 to reflect that ‘emotional benefit’ that I received over the period in question. This sum has been ‘reduced by £1,500 to reflect the evidence that [I] acted in accordance with the advice received from the Fees Office’.

"The commissioner, in his report to the committee, described the breach of the food rules as not serious, and a misinterpretation ‘which, given the way this section was drafted, was in [his] judgement understandable’. The committee accepted this unintended breach was as a result of poor drafting of the rules and, of course, I shall repay the £2,100, which reflects the ‘£20 for meals taken in Westminster in each week when the House was sitting during this period’, from May 2005 to May 2008. However, I am pleased that my other meal claims relating to my duties in St Albans have been upheld as being acceptable within the rules.

I shall, of course, apologise for these unintentional breaches of the rules.”

Mrs Main must pay back a total of £7,100: £2,100 in respect of sums wrongly claimed for food in the period 2005 to 2008. A further £5,000, which is one seventh of the sums claimed by her against additional costs allowance (minus food costs) in respect of the period when her daughter supported her by staying in her second home, reduced by £1,500 to reflect the evidence that Mrs Main acted in accordance with advice she received from the Fees Office.

Shamed MPs must pay back more than £1 million in public money they claimed in expenses.