Expenses Update
Posted by Andrew Stunell, MP for Hazel Grove, at 17:46, Wed 10 June 2009:
Dear Friend,
You may well have seen today’s edition of the Stockport Express regarding my expenses claims. It missed the central point that I have always only claimed a fraction of my London living allowances, a point which the Editor has acknowledged in a phone call today.
I believe it is important to be as transparent as possible about the money you pay me and how it is spent, which is why I have published information about my allowances on my website for some time, long before the current crisis began. I have been amongst the least expensive MPs in Parliament since I was elected in 1997, and have always been determined to provide my constituents with the best quality of service at the lowest possible cost.
Below is the letter I have sent to the Stockport Express, which they have agreed to publish next week:
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From Andrew Stunell MP
Dear Sir,
The articles in this week's Stockport Express covering my Parliamentary pay and allowances miss the central point entirely: in the five years from April 2004 to March 2009 I claimed far less than the maximum allowances for an MP living in London.
In fact my claims were £46,800 less in that period than the total of allowances available. Every year since my election I have underspent on this allowance, as I have always aimed to keep the cost of working in London as low as possible.
In 2007, the year when the windows referred to had to be installed as part of the landlord's refurbishment of the block, it STILL left £7,700 of my living allowance unclaimed. Last year over £11,000 was unclaimed. I regularly rank near the bottom of the league table of MPs' London allowances.
The article was also seriously misleading in its use of the headline 'Revealed' and several inferences in the text that this information had been held back. On the contrary it has been on my website, together with much other information about my pay and allowances, for a long time, and I had specifically referred the Express reporter to it when the paper first made inquiries.
Compared to these points, it may seem trivial to point out that the service charge on the flat is an annual one, not a monthly one as the Express report suggests.
Anyone who wants more information on these matters can look at my website, which has as much on it as data protection currently allows.
The raw claim forms and receipts etc will be put up on it once the House authorities have supplied a version in which credit card numbers, addresses of third parties and other material where publication would be a breach of the Data Protection Act have been removed.
Yours faithfully,
Andrew Stunell MP
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I hope this goes some way towards clarifying the actual situation, which has been significantly distorted by the reporting in the newspaper.
More detailed information on my allowances, how much I’ve claimed, and how I have spent it, is available on my website at http://andrewstunell.org.uk/pages/mps-allowances.html
Of course, if you have any detailed points you want to raise, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Kind Regards
Andrew Stunell MP
Comments
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Posted by Lindsay Wallace, 18:11, Wed 10 June 2009: (Is this post abusive?) #
I have been commenting during discussions on the topic that I noted on a website (provided some months ago by the Guardian I believe) that Andrew Stunell's expenses were significantly lower than those of some neighbouring MPs. It is unfortunate that all MPs are currently assumed to be motivated by greed in the same way. I used to live in Luton where they MP for Luton South has been identified as having her second home in Southampton. The MP for Luton North, Kelvin Hopkins, in contrast doesn't have a second home and rarely feels the need to stay away from his home in Luton, a reasonable commuting distance from Westminster. I'm sure there are many other examples of Honourable MPs to contrast with those who are less so.