Don't blame them all says Norfolk MP

AS MPs faced public anger this week over apparent abuses of Parliamentary expenses North Norfolk MP Norman Lamb stressed that not everybody abused the system.

'I have argued all the way along that there should be complete openness and transparency about all this.

'The longer it has dragged on with Parliament trying to avoid publication has just increased the damaged to the reputation of Parliament and I think some of the abuses are pretty awful,2 he said.

'The frustrating thing is that everybody is tarred with the same brush and the whole of politics is damaged by it and not everybody abuses the system.'

Mr Lamb said that when he was elected as an MP in 2001 he left his law firm as an equal owning partner and put the buy-out money he received towards buying a flat in London.

He said he was on a variable tracker mortgage and so his claims had plummeted as his interested payments are very low at the moment, lower than if he had to rent.

The Liberal Democrat, who used up �23,038 of his second home allowance in 2007/08, said he now hoped to start to publish his expenses online on a rolling basis, providing the workload can be absorbed by his staff.

He said: 'I can only speak for myself, but in my case my wife Mary, through most of my time in Parliament between 2001 and 2005, was working a day a week in the office without any pay, without even claiming travel expenses, doing constituency case work.

'About a month ago I moved office and we spent five hours painting the office ourselves and in at least one year I ran out of allowance for office costs and simply had to meet it myself out of my own money - and that's to run my office in North Walsham.

'But that a side of it doesn't get seen by the public.'