New Expenses Reform Will Identify MPs Who Flip Homes

It has been reported by the Daily Telegraph today that expenses claims for the forthcoming financial year will go into far greater detail than previous years.

The newly elected speaker John Bercow said the electorate would be able to find out if their MP had changed the property on which they claimed second home expenses on order to maximise expense payments.  This practice was know as ‘flipping’ and was one of the worst abuses of the parliamentary expenses system uncovered by The Daily Telegraph in the expenses investigation this year.

Although the full addresses of second homes were unlikely to be made public for privacy reasons, the Speaker said that the expenses claims for the 2008-09 financial year — which are expected to be published by the Commons authorities within the next few weeks — would indicate whether the designated second home was in London or the MP’s constituency.

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