Labour MPs' expense claims

The Daily Telegraph has obtained details of MPs' expenses claims over the past four years which it has published.

Here is a summary of the claims made by leading Labour politicians and their reaction to the reports.

GORDON BROWN

Claim: The prime minister paid his brother, Andrew, £6,577 for arranging cleaning services for his Westminster flat for 26 months. Since reporting the arrangement, the Telegraph group has clarified that there "has never been any suggestion of any impropriety on the part of the Prime Minister or his brother".

Response: No 10 said the two shared a cleaner who worked in both their flats. Andrew Brown paid her and was reimbursed for his share of the cost. He did not do the cleaning himself or gain financially.

There was a formal contract for the arrangement, Downing Street sources add, stipulating the cleaner's hours of work and pay. The cleaner wanted to be paid by one person for National Insurance purposes.

Claim: Gordon Brown also claimed twice for the same plumbing work within six months of each other.

Response: The House of Commons Fees Office said the mistake had been inadvertent and apologised for having not spotted it. Gordon Brown is understood to have repaid the sum involved - believed to be £150.

JACK STRAW

Claim: The justice secretary over-claimed £1,500 on council tax on his second home. He made a claim for the full bill despite getting a 50% discount from the local authority for the property.

Response: A spokesman for Mr Straw said he acted within the rules. He spotted the mistaken council tax claim himself and repaid the money himself. Mr Straw later told the BBC: "I have acted in complete good faith and within the rules. It is an error, which obviously I wish hadn't happened, but in circumstances in which I was incredibly busy during that period - that is not an excuse, it is just an explanation."

HAZEL BLEARS

Claim: The communities secretary claimed for three different properties in a single year, spending almost £5,000 of taxpayers' money on furniture in three months, the Telegraph reports. She also claimed for stays at London hotels after selling her flat. In March 2004, she declared her property in her Salford constituency was her second home and spent £850 on a television and video and £651 on a mattress. In April, she switched her second home to a flat in south London, claiming £850 a month for the mortgage.

In August, she sold the flat, making a £45,000 profit, and stayed in hotels over the following two months. In December, she bought another London flat for £300,000, claiming a monthly mortgage of £1,000 and a grocery bill of £400.

Response: A spokesman for Ms Blears said her claims were all within parliamentary rules and approved by the Fees Office. Her outlay on furnishings - such as mattresses and pillows - was "reasonable". Ms Blears has since admitted she did not pay capital gains tax (CGT) on the £45,000 profit from the flat sale. CGT is charged at 40% on the sale of homes the Inland Revenue does not consider to be a main residence. At the time, it was registered as her second home for expenses purposes. But her spokesman said there was "no liability" for CGT. However, she said she has complied with both Commons and Revenue and Customs rules.

GEOFF HOON

Claim: The transport secretary reportedly switched his "second home" designation - refurbishing his family home in Derbyshire at taxpayers' expense before buying a London townhouse.

The Telegraph said that in 2004/05, he claimed £20,902 for his second home - then the Derbyshire home - spending thousands on refurbishments. At the time he was defence secretary and later Commons leader and had a "grace and favour" Whitehall apartment. After losing that apartment in 2006, the newspaper says he bought a Georgian townhouse in Westminster and declared that as his second home. He went on to claim £21,995 in 2006/07 and £23,083 in 2007/8 - the maximum allowed. His monthly mortgage interest payments, picked up by the taxpayer, increased from £270 to almost £900.

Response: In a statement, Mr Hoon said he still had "significant costs" to meet at his grace and favour flat at Admiralty House - although it was rent free. "These were comparable to the costs I would have incurred if I had continued to live in my own property, therefore a claim under the ACA for my constituency home was not unreasonable," he said. He said officials told him it was within the rules and similar claims had been made by previous ministers.

ANDY BURNHAM

Claim: The culture secretary was reportedly battling with the fees office for eight months over a £16,500 expenses claim to buy and renovate a new London flat which was eventually paid, after being rejected three times. He also claimed a £19.99 bath robe bought from Ikea in 2007 that was not allowed.

Response: Mr Burnham insists he did not profit from the property transaction. He made only permissible claims and returned a £1,000 surplus to the Fees Office for allowances he did not spend.

On the Ikea receipt, he made a "genuine oversight" on one item. When it was discovered, he corrected it and he was not reimbursed.

LORD MANDELSON

Claim: The business secretary claimed for improvements on his constituency home after he announced he was leaving Parliament to become an EU Commissioner. He later sold the property for a profit of £136,000.

Response: Lord Mandelson rejected claims he used taxpayers' cash to "renovate" his home for profit, insisting the money was spent on essential maintenance. He said the Telegraph's report - which details a £1,500 gardening bill and £1,350 in house repairs - was presented to provoke public anger. "The fact is that these allowances would not have been paid if they weren't within the rules," he told BBC Radio Scotland.

PAUL MURPHY

Claim: The Welsh Secretary claimed for a new boiler after saying his existing hot water system was "too hot".

Response: His old boiler was replaced after it was deemed unsafe and could not be repaired. All his claims were within the rules and "assiduously" checked by the authorities.

JOHN PRESCOTT

Claim: The former deputy prime minister claimed £312 for the fitting of mock Tudor beams to the front of his constituency home in Hull and in December 2004 a plumber charged him £210.79 for pipework, taps and to "refix WC seat," according to the newspaper. In September 2006, he put a £112.52 repair bill on expenses, which included "refit WC seat".

Response: Mr Prescott said: "Every expense was within the rules of the House of Commons on claiming expenses at the time."

ALISTAIR DARLING

Claim: The chancellor claimed £10,000 towards the cost of furnishing the London flat he bought in 2005, according to The Telegraph. Mr Darling bought the £226,000 property near the Oval cricket ground, claiming £2,074 for furniture and £2,339 for carpets. There was also a £765 claim from Ikea and £768 from Marks and Spencer's for a bed. The £146 cost of staying in a hotel while his flat was being renovated in September 2005 was rejected by the fees office on the grounds that the property was counted as his second home.

But Mr Darling successfully argued that he was "between second homes" and the bill was later paid. He also used his expenses to cover the stamp duty of £2,260 and legal fees totalling £1,238.

It was also reported that Mr Darling "switched" the location of his second home four times in four years, allowing him to claim thousands of pounds towards the cost of both his Edinburgh home and for the London flat.

Response: Mr Darling said: "The claims were made within House of Commons rules which were designed to reflect the fact that MPs have to meet the cost of living in two places."

SHAUN WOODWARD

Claim: Taxpayers contributed almost £100,000 to help pay the mortgage on a £1.35m flat owned by the Northern Ireland secretary, it is reported. The money went on mortgage interest payments and council tax between 2004 and 2008 for the flat. Married to a member of the Sainsbury family and worth an estimated £15m - Mr Woodward is the richest member of the cabinet, though he does not draw a full ministerial salary.

Response: The Northern Ireland secretary's spokesman has said the claims are within the rules and guidelines but Mr Woodward admitted politicians collectively looked "shameful". He said: "If I try to make almost any defence of our collective position - or my position - it looks terrible." However, he added that politicians of all parties "are good people who try by and large to do a good job" within a "rotten" system.

CAROLINE FLINT

Claim: The Telegraph claims the Europe minister put solicitors' fees and stamp duty totalling £14,553 on her Parliamentary expenses after buying a central London flat. Before moving in to her second home in Victoria, she also claimed the £177 a month cost of putting her furniture in storage. Over a period of about eight months in 2005 to 2006, Ms Flint claimed for staying in hotels for an average of three nights a week.

Response: Ms Flint told the Telegraph she had sought advice from Commons officials at each stage and "never sought to make personal gains from public funds". She said only about half the cost of her London flat - including stamp duty - was met through public funds as she had contributed a "substantial amount" towards the cost of buying it from the proceeds of a previous flat sale.

DOUGLAS ALEXANDER

Claim: The International Development Secretary's constituency home was damaged in a house fire in 2007 after he spent more than £30,000 on repairing it, according to the Telegraph. He told the fees office he was "under-insured" and claimed almost £2,000 on items lost in the fire, which he later repaid when his insurers reimbursed him. He has yet to comment.

Response: Mr Alexander said that he had sought the advice of the Fees Office after the fire that damaged his property, "to obtain their guidance as to what it was appropriate to claim in these circumstances, given my continuing need for accommodation to allow me to undertake my work as an MP."

MARGARET BECKETT

Claim: Mrs Beckett found herself in trouble with the Fees Office after attempting to claim £600 for hanging baskets and pot plants. An official informed her in a letter that expenses had to be "wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred to enable you to stay overnight away from your main home". She claimed second home allowances of £72,537 from 2004 to 2008, despite having no mortgage or rent to pay on her constituency home in Derby. As environment secretary and foreign secretary, Mrs Beckett was living at the grace and favour Admiralty House in Whitehall, which enabled her to rent out her London flat.

Response: The former foreign secretary said: "Grace and favour homes are not rent free, we are taxed on them as a benefit in kind."

DAVID MILIBAND

Claim: The foreign secretary claimed almost £30,000 for doing up his £120,000 constituency home over five years, it was reported. He spent up to £180 every three months on the garden at the property in South Shields.

Response: According to Mr Miliband's spokesman "at every stage, David Miliband followed procedures and rules as laid out by the parliamentary authorities."

BARBARA FOLLETT

Claim: The tourism minister claimed £25,411.64 for security patrols at her London home after she was mugged. She also requested £528.75 to have a Chinese needlepoint rug repaired and cleaned but that was deemed excessive by the Fees Office and she was handed back just £300.

Response: Mrs Follett told the BBC: "I claimed it, it's within the rules and I have no comment to make." She had earlier told the Telegraph that only two of the claims she had submitted during the last 12 years had been disputed and that the one item not accepted had been claimed in error.

PHIL WOOLAS

Claim: The Telegraph suggested the immigration minister had claimed for nappies and women's clothing when submitting requests for expenses. It said it was unclear how these items had been justified because parliamentary rules only allowed payouts for items which were "exclusively" for MPs' own use.

Response: Mr Woolas has threatened legal action over the "disgusting" allegations. He said the items had been on supermarket receipts submitted as part of a claim for food expenses but that he had never asked for money for them. Mr Woolas described the expenses records as "stolen property".

Claim: In response to Mr Woolas' complaints, the Sunday Telegraph claimed that in August 2004 he had submitted receipts totalling £210.31 for food and was reimbursed in full. However, the paper points out that the receipts included non-permissible items such as disposable bibs, nail polish, comics and a ladies jumper.

Response: Mr Woolas said told the newspaper he understood the extrapolation but insisted he had done nothing wrong. He pointed out that - under rules at the time - he was not obliged to submit receipts for food totalling up to £400. "I am being hung out to dry for being honest," he said.

PHIL HOPE

Claim: Care Services Minister Phil Hope was said to have spent more than £37,000 over about four years on refurbishing and furnishing a two-bedroom south London flat.

Response: Mr Hope said his claims for running and furnishing the flat were "in full accordance with the rules" and that the purchases were "no more than was necessary to live in a habitable residence". He said he had only replaced furniture and fittings when they were worn out, had not bought anything inappropriate for the property and had not personally benefited.

KEITH VAZ

Claim: The chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee claimed more than £75,000 to fund a second home in Westminster, even though his family home is just 12 miles away in Stanmore. The Telegraph also suggested he changed his designated second home for a single year to property in his Leicester constituency, before claiming more than £4,000 on furnishings.

Response: Mr Vaz told the BBC he lived in Leicester and that his second home was in Westminster. He has had a Westminster flat since becoming an MP in 1987. He made no claim for the Stanmore home, which he acquired on getting married and was - he pointed out - not in central London. "It's on junction 4 of the M1 and I keep the Westminster flat for early morning meetings as do many MPs who live in that block," he said.

BEN BRADSHAW

Claim: A health minister, the Telegraph claimed he had switched his second home designation to a more expensive jointly-owned London property and claimed full mortgage interest payments, in order for his partner to "benefit from the system". The couple had previously split the mortgage costs, the paper said. However, it claimed that Mr Bradshaw was now submitting the entire cost of interest on the property to be paid out of expenses.

Response: Exeter MP Mr Bradshaw told the BBC he had always claimed for their London home and only briefly switched to claiming for his constituency property between 2003 and 2006, because of a temporary rule telling ministers to claim constituency rather than London costs. The minister said before he and his partner entered into a civil partnership in 2006 he had claimed only a proportion of the mortgage interest - even though he would have been entitled to claim it all. Since then, he had claimed for and paid the full mortgage interest on their London property, as the rules allowed, he said. He added that he always submitted comparatively low claims and had long called for reform of the expenses system.

MARGARET MORAN

Claim: According to the Telegraph, the Labour MP for Luton South spent £22,500 treating dry rot at the coastal property in Southampton she had designated as her second home - even though it was a two-hour drive from Parliament and 100 miles from her constituency.

Response: Ms Moran said her partner had worked in Southampton for 20 years and that she could not "make him come to Luton all the time". She said: "I have to have a proper family life and I can't do that unless I share the costs of the Southampton home with him." She said all her claims were within Fees Office policy and that she had done nothing wrong. Ms Moran said there had been some "inaccuracies" which were "probably actionable" in the Telegraph reports, which had given "the incredibly misleading impression that somehow we have been dodgy, that we have been fraudulent or corrupt". She said it was "clear that at least one other MP's claims have been included in mine". She said she was taking legal action about the claims.

KITTY USSHER

Claim: Within a year of being elected in 2005, Ms Ussher is said to have set out to the Commons authorities over two pages a list of "essential repairs" to her Victorian house in south London. It detailed how the house "was relatively cheap to purchase but requires quite a lot of work". Among the work listed was replacing "rotten" sash windows and a "grimy" stair carpet. She received the full £22,110 allowance, although her requests to replace "strange" plumbing and "bad taste" Artex were refused. The Sunday Telegraph claimed she had already lived in the house for five years.

Response: The work and pensions minister's spokesman said Ms Ussher "fully supports" the review into MPs' expenses claims and believed it was right that MPs expenses' claims should be published. "All her claims were in line with the relevant House of Commons rules and guidance and have been approved by the Fees Office," he said.

KEVIN BRENNAN

Claim: It is claimed the junior minister had a £450 widescreen television delivered to his family home in Wales and then claimed it on his allowance for his second home in London.

Response: Mr Brennan, Parliamentary Under Secretary in the Cabinet Office, said the Telegraph story was "a thinly-disguised smear which has absolutely no basis in fact". He said all items claimed for which were purchased in or delivered to his Cardiff home were for exclusive use in the London property, and after the larger items were stored in his garage they were taken east by a local business. Mr Brennan insisted that he had always stuck to the rules, but said the system needed to be "urgently reformed".

IAIN WRIGHT AND TOM WATSON

Claim: The two Labour ministers have claimed more than £100,000 for a shared London flat since May 2005, according to the Telegraph. The ministers each claimed for their share of the legal costs involved in purchasing the property and then later for the fees to buy the freehold. Neither minister has yet responded.

BARRY GARDINER

Claim: The MP for Brent North made a profit of almost £200,000 from a flat mortgaged and renovated with the help of taxpayers' cash, the Telegraph has alleged. He is yet to respond.

VERA BAIRD QC

Claim: The Solicitor General - one of the government's top legal advisers - was refused a £268 claim for Christmas decorations.

Response: Ms Baird insists she has broken no rules.

STEPHEN BYERS

Claim: The former Trade Secretary used the expenses system to claim more than £125,000 for the London flat owned by his partner, it is claimed. Over the past five years, Mr Byers is said to have spent more than £27,000 on redecoration, maintenance and appliances at flat in Camden, north London, and extensively renovated the outside of the entire building, which consists of four flats.

Response: Mr Byers told the Sunday Telegraph all his claims were within the rules and had been approved by Commons authorities.

JOHN REID

Claim: The Telegraph has suggested the former Home Secretary claimed for a £199 pouffe, a £370 armchair and an £899 sofa. He is also said to have submitted receipts for £486.50 spent at Marks and Spencer last August on items including slotted spoons, three rattan bins, oven mitts, wineglasses and ice cube trays. His expenses claim for 2007-08 also included a letter from the TV Licensing authority warning the occupier of the property "there is no valid television licence". Mr Reid is yet to respond.

TONY BLAIR

Claim: The former Prime Minister used his parliamentary expenses to remortgage his constituency home for £296,000 - nearly 10 times what he paid for it - just months before buying a west London house for £3.65m. According to the Sunday Telegraph, the loan would have been enough to cover the cost of the deposit on the new home. It said he was able to claim for interest repayments on almost a third of the new mortgage on his constituency home.

Response: His spokesman told the newspaper Mr Blair only claimed back the interest repayments on the portion of the mortgage which covered the purchase price and improvements to the house. There was no cost to the taxpayer in the rest of the money raised against the property, he added.

'MODEST' CLAIMANTS

Three cabinet members in particular are singled out for their "modest" claims under the second homes allowance by the Telegraph. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband had only put in claims for £6,300 a year in rent for his constituency home and for utility and council tax bills. Health Secretary Alan Johnson rented a "modest" property but claimed for food and some furniture. Environment Secretary Hilary Benn claimed only £147.78 for food from the allowance which allows MPs to claim up to about £24,000 a year.