Legg’s expenses inquiry could mean more pain for MPs

When’s Legg over? A traditional summer holiday question… now being asked in the corridors of Westminster.

Sir Thomas Legg is the man heading the inquiry into all MPs’ expenses claimed over the last four years.

This is the piece of work that Gordon Brown called for and it could mean still more pain for MPs before the year is out.

There was an assumption in some quarters that this piece of auditing, which is meant to see whether MPs broke the rules “as they stood at the time”, back between 2004-8, was going to be a bit of a sop.

The rules were, after all, designed to be flexible and were difficult to breach.

But Sir Thomas Legg will be looking at all MPs and only the Conservative MPs have so far been subjected to systematic scrutiny by anyone other than the Daily Telegraph (the Tories hired their own team of auditors and applied a harsher if arbitrary “smell” test to claims).

Legg and his team are going through all MPs alphabetically (the first MPs, with surnames A-D, can expect initial verdicts in the post by the end of July – they get a right of reply/challenge and can even go to the Standards and Privileges Committee if they don’t like the verdict).

Legg now looks like he won’t be able to finish his work this side of the recess (Parliament starts its break a week today) but in September.

Importantly, for those who thought he would find nothing, he will be, in a sense, judging the work of the Fees Office as well as the conduct of the MPs.

So if an MP says he claimed this or that in consultation with the Fees Office who cleared the claim, that doesn’t, so to speak, get him or her “out of jail.”

Legg could still recommend that the Fees Office acted wrongly and that some money should be repaid. At some point, a list with money paid back etc will be published.

There’s been an assumption that no real bogeys still lurk but some MPs think more pain is on the way.