You may be wondering whether the name of your local MP will appear in the list of those “named and shamed” for their extravagant or exotic expenses claims.  You will be relieved to know that I have only one home, which is in Battersea, and I pay for everything out of my wages, including food, meals, mortgages, furniture, council tax, television. 

As an inner London MP I don’t need a second home and can’t claim for one, so I get just as annoyed as anyone else when I hear of colleagues claiming the cost of employing a housekeeper or a gardener or installing a chandelier or a portico or cleaning a swimming pool.

I don’t even see why other MPs should be able to claim for their meals in the Members’ Dining Room or for Sky TV in their London flats.

I take the view that MPs are paid well enough and in any case it’s important that their lives should be not too different from the lives of the people they represent. I take the bus (or bike) to work, I shop at Asda’s, I borrow books (and films) from the library, I drive a 1996 (P-reg) Vauxhall Astra, I don’t have Sky. 

I have always believed that the job of MPs is to get the very best hospitals, the very best nurseries, the very best schools, the very best buses, tubes and trains, the very best of everything for their constituents.

But in the meantime to put up with the same imperfect public services as their constituents so that they never forget that their job is to improve things for everyone, not just for themselves.

Accordingly I have voted:
• against higher pay rises for MPs
• against better pensions for MPs
• and I refused to support a deal giving MPs priority access to a GP

I had to resign my job as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Lord Chancellor two years ago in order to vote against a private member’s bill to exempt Parliament from the Freedom of Information Act (later defeated in the Lords).

I voted last year in favour of abolishing the second homes allowances for furniture, household goods and home improvements and phasing it out for outer London MPs, but it was unfortunately defeated by a vote in the Commons.

I voted last month in favour of scrapping the second homes allowance for outer London MPs and forcing MPs to declare earnings from second jobs.

I think it’s important to establish the principle of transparency for MPs’ pay and MPs’ allowances. They are paid by the taxpayer and the taxpayer should be able to check – within reason – that claims are legitimate.

I say ‘within reason’ because it is possible for bloggers and newspapers to become unnecessarily intrusive.  There have been cases of abuse, which the press has rightly exposed, but there have also been cases of ministers who have been harassed by the media over perfectly reasonable claims. 

Gordon Brown’s brother and sister-in-law, who arranged for a cleaner for him, were hounded and door-stepped by journalists even though there was absolutely nothing wrong or unusual about the arrangement.

Having read through a copy of all my receipts for the last five years, I could not find anything that would be of the slightest interest to a journalist – but I would defend the right of journalists to look through and see for themselves.

I don’t approve of the way in which an anonymous House of Commons official (or hacker) sold a copy of the receipts to the Daily Telegraph for over £100,000 with all the bank details and addresses still in place.

And I don’t approve of the way the Daily Telegraph revealed details of Labour MPs first and kept the Tory MPs to last even though their abuses were far more exotic and extravagant. That was clearly politics, not journalism.

But I do support the disclosure of receipts because that is the best safeguard against fraud and that is why the House of Commons will soon be making all of our receipts available for you to access.

The press has not revealed something that we were going to keep secret.  It has just jumped the gun by publishing our receipts a few weeks ahead of schedule. 

The House of Commons has now come clean and stopped trying to hide what MPs’ claim in the way of allowances.  I wish it had done so years ago.

We will now have a long period when journalists will claim to have found shocks and sensations even when they aren’t there.  That is why it is important that you, the voter, will have access to these receipts directly and not just through the media.  When the papers claim to have found some ‘scandal’ in an MP’s claims, you will be able to go and check for yourself.

Personally I look forward to the day when newspapers and broadcasters will have to publish the expenses claims submitted by their own journalists.

I was a journalist for 30 years before I was an MP and on some of the papers I worked for (not the Guardian, I hasten to add) it was common practice for journalists to submit largely fictitious expenses claims.

They would just write “information from contact including purchase of drinks” and claim £20.  They would ask taxi-drivers and restaurant waiters for blank bills and fill them out with phony meals and taxi-rides they never paid for.

Newspaper managements usually colluded in this.  It was cheaper to increase “guaranteed expenses” than to increase wages.  It was the taxman who lost out.

The expenses regime for MPs is actually much stricter. As a London MP I can’t claim for meals or drinks for myself or indeed anyone else. I can claim for buses and tubes but only between Battersea and Westminster which is a distance of about three miles. I can’t claim for taxis even in the middle of the night, unless I just charge the standard mileage allowance of 40p a mile or charge it to my office costs allowance. 

I am not suggesting we should be able to claim. With the exception of the second home allowances, which will soon be abolished, I think we are finally moving towards a system that is fair to both MPs and taxpayers.

Practically all of the money incorrectly referred to as MPs’ “expenses” is paid directly to stationery suppliers, to staff, to computer companies, to train companies. 

However, the House of Commons has not covered itself in glory in its handling of this issue. It fought a discreditable rearguard action against the implications of its own Freedom of Information Bill. And only a year ago it voted down a sensible package of measures that would have stopped most of the abuses.

The fault does not lie with the Prime Minister or the Leader of the House or indeed the leaderships of any of the parties who have, by and large, been on the right side of the argument. Even the House of Commons Commission – the half-dozen MPs who run the Commons under the chairmanship of the Speaker – have sometimes been on the right side (though only after years of being on the wrong side). 

The problem has come from an unholy alliance of backbenchers, and sometimes frontbenchers, from both sides of the House who have been resistant to reform and apparently unable to see the car crash that was always coming closer. 

I don’t think many of them have been deliberately dishonest or made claims that they did not think they were entitled to.  But it’s clear that many of them made claims that they didn’t think their constituents would like if they knew about them.  And that is not a healthy situation in an age of transparency.