Senior Tory MP suspended over false expenses claim

A senior Tory MP was suspended from the House of Commons yesterday after he was found by a powerful committee of MPs to have acted "negligently" in claiming £90,000 in parliamentary housing allowances.

Michael Trend, a former Tory party deputy chairman, was accused of being "muddled and naive" by the House of Commons Committee on Standards and Privileges. He was punished with a two-week suspension from Parliament.

The penalty, one of the harshest meted out to errant MPs, was accepted by Mr Trend yesterday who apologised unreservedly to the House of Commons and voters in Windsor.

An investigation by Philip Mawer, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, found that Mr Trend had falsely claimed £90,277 in accommodation allowance between April 1996 and November 2002. Sir Philip found he had claimed the taxpayers' cash "in breach of the rules relating to that allowance" when he went home to Windsor almost every night while claiming that a home of a friend in London was his main residence.

During the inquiry the MP admitted that he had "stayed there only occasionally" but had still claimed the allowance, which is available to politicians who have to pay for accommodation while working in the House of Commons.

Yesterday, Sir Philip recommended that scrutiny of how MPs spend their expenses should be more rigorous and claims should subject to closer inspection by the House of Commons authorities to prevent abuse. He recommended that MPs provide evidence to the House of Commons to support expenses claims and that they were "audited" to make sure they were not fraudulently claiming taxpayers' money.

"Whatever the precise solutions adopted, at the end of the day, the House must be able to show that the requirements for auditing which it imposes on itself are no less effective than those it would expect of others responsible for the expenditure of public money," the commissioner's report said.

The House of Commons finance department has agreed to give better advice to members on the rules governing allowances.

Sir Philip also implied in his report that MPs such as Mr Trend should not be subject to special protection from police prosecution because they were members of Parliament. "The decision whether Mr Trend or any other member who may be shown to have wrongly claimed parliamentary allowances should face a criminal prosecution is one for the police and the prosecuting authorities, not for me," he said. "Claiming an allowance is not a proceeding in Parliament and the provisions of parliamentary privilege do not apply. Members of Parliament are no less subject to the criminal law in this respect than anyone else."

Mr Trend, who has paid back the money to the House of Commons and has said he will stand down as an MP at the next election, apologised "unreservedly" in the House of Commons chamber. "I accept unreservedly the committee's report, which finds me muddled and naive in my negligent understanding of the additional costs allowance," he said.

The suspension, expected to begin in the next few weeks, is less severe than that received by Keith Vaz, a former minister who was suspended from the House of Commons for a month after a highly critical report about his conduct.