Westminster blog

Legg is out in full: Here are some interesting points.

He ordered £1.3m to be paid back by a total of about 390 MPs – of which £800,000 has already been repaid.

The cost of the Legg process was £1.16m.

How many MPs successfully appealed against Legg?

Kennedy says that 44 “appellants” (out of an estimated 70 or 80) have been successful “in whole or in part”. There has been a reduction of about £180,000 in the amount recommended to be re-paid. This has cut the total payback to £1.12m.

Any evidence of tensions between Legg, who ordered MPs to pay back money, and Sir Paul Kennedy, who was in charge of the appeals process?

Kennedy says the approach to cleaning and gardening was a “rational response to a difficult problem”. But he does concede that it was “irritating and potentially very damaging to reputation” when the claims were made in “good faith” at the time.

Kennedy also questions the sudden change in the rules in 2006. “It seems to me that to describe any apparently genuine transaction as tainted, or breaching the requirement of propriety, when there is no evidence of impropriety, is damaging, unfair and wrong.”

How much are individual MPs paying back?

We’ll know later today. But I can give you the broad guidelines. Three were asked to repay over £40,000 each – with the highest at just under £65,000. Another 56 MPs are paying between £5,000 and £40,000.

182 are repaying £1,000 to £5,000. 140 are repaying under a grand each.

However, the figures are complicated by the fact that some will have been reduced by the Kennedy appeals process. So the highest repayment is in fact not £65,000 but £42,458.

Apparently the highest six – after appeals are:

Barbara Follett (Lab, Stevenage) £42,458

Bernard Jenkin (Con, North Essex) £36,909

Andrew Mackay (Con, Bracknell) £31,193

John Gummer (Con, Suffolk Coastal) £29,398

Julie Kirkbride (Con, Bromsgrove) £29,243

Liam Fox (Con, Woodspring) £24,878

How do the repayments break down?

Mortgage/rent makes up more than half the repayments at £711,000. The next biggest are cleaning, at £105,000 and “other” (does that include gardening) at £252,000.

Meanwhile 13 more MPs are going to get a new appeal because they missed the deadline of the New Year.