Cameron forced to pay back £947
By politics.co.uk staff
Tory leader David Cameron has agreed to pay back £947 in “wrongly claimed” expenses.
Mr Cameron had already agreed to pay back £600 on repairs to his constituency home in Whitney, and that figure is included in today’s announcement.
Today, Mr Cameron sent the cheque in a letter to Terry Bird, the Commons’ director of operations.
“Over the last few weeks, I have carefully gone through the claims I have made against the Additional Costs Allowance (ACA) since 2004,” he wrote.
“This has brought to light a number of points. I would like to make clear that these were discovered as a result of a thorough review by my office, not as a result of media inquiries.”
£218.91 of the repayed money went towards mortgage over-claims resulting from “an inadvertent administrative error”. Of the rest, £9 was over-compensated on an electricity and gas bill, £10 for an overpaid phone bill by a researcher and £29.38 he claimed towards a banner on his website.
The decision follows the publication today of MPs’ expenses by parliament, although substantial portions of the files are redacted, ostensibly to protect their privacy.
George Osborne raised eyebrows this morning by claiming just over £40 for two DVDs of his own speeches.
Meanwhile, shadow media secretary Jeremy Hunt spent £4,882 on stamps in the space of a year.
