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| Wintertons broke expenses rules | |
| (20 minutes later) | |
| Sir Nicholas and Ann Winterton unwittingly broke MPs' expenses rules when claiming for a second home, the Parliamentary standards watchdog said. | Sir Nicholas and Ann Winterton unwittingly broke MPs' expenses rules when claiming for a second home, the Parliamentary standards watchdog said. |
| Commissioner John Lyon criticised the husband and wife Tory MPs for not keeping up with rule changes in 2006. | |
| The Wintertons say they did nothing wrong by using expenses for a flat, even though they had paid the mortgage. | The Wintertons say they did nothing wrong by using expenses for a flat, even though they had paid the mortgage. |
| But the Standards and Privileges Committee says the arrangement should not have continued as long as it did. | But the Standards and Privileges Committee says the arrangement should not have continued as long as it did. |
| The Wintertons transferred their second home - a flat in London - to a trust, to which they paid rent of £21,600 per year. | |
| They said they had agreed the arrangement with the Commons Fees Office at the time it was set up and would not have gone ahead unless this had been the case. | |
| 'Personal interest' | |
| The Wintertons, who both represent constituencies in Cheshire, say they had followed advice from their solicitor and accountants about their likely inheritance tax liability. | |
| They said they no longer owned the flat but were obliged by the trust to pay the full market rent recommended by an independent valuer. | |
| But the standards committee report said the family trust, which had become the Wintertons' landlord in February 2002 when the property was transferred, "was an organisation in which they had an interest (as trustees) and their children had an interest (as the beneficiaries)". | |
| And it adds: "Given their substantial personal interest in the arrangements, it would therefore have been prudent for the Wintertons, once having gone ahead with the arrangements, to have checked to ensure that charging the rent to the ACA remained consistent with the rules, particularly when these were changed." | |
| The committee said that in its view the Wintertons' arrangements "have been in breach of the rules applying to the Additional Cost Allowance (governing second homes) since July 2006, a fact of which they were officially made aware in February 2007". | |
| And it said it was also concerned "about the length of time their arrangements had been allowed to continue" after the rules changed. | |
| "This should have been addressed at an earlier stage," the standards committee says in its report. | |
| An MPs' committee headed up by Speaker Michael Martin is reviewing the whole expenses system - in the wake of the case of Derek Conway, a Conservative MP who was reprimanded for the amount he had paid his son to work as a Parliamentary researcher. |