UK MPs face ban on second home claims 

Source: ReutersBritain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown with cabinet members

MPs will not be allowed to claim mortgage interest costs on second homes and are to be barred from employing family members, according to leaks of a report into parliamentary expenses due next week.

Christopher Kelly, chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, is to call for the new measures as part of a radical overhaul of the discredited expenses system.

Kelly, appointed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown to clean up parliament, will recommend MPs only be allowed to rent second homes in the future, not buy them, newspapers said.

The tough rules are designed to prevent politicians making windfall profits from buying and renovating second homes at taxpayers' expense.

It is thought the changes will be phased in over five years to give MPs time to sell the properties without suffering financial loss.

The BBC reported MPs living within commuting distance of Westminster and whose journeys take no more than an hour from their constituencies - around 100 MPs - will be unable to claim money towards running a second home.

MPs representing inner London constituencies are likely to see their allowances slashed too, it said.

The committee is due to publish its review on Nov 4, but many of its recommendations have been widely leaked and are likely to be fiercely resisted by MPs.

However, Kelly's proposals do not need a parliamentary vote to come into force, Brown's spokesman said.

MPs had already agreed the Parliamentary Standards Act which took the setting of the new expenses regime out of their hands, the spokesman added.

MPs will be able to discuss the report after its recommendations are laid out in a statement to the House of Commons on its publication next week.

"I think all members of Parliament want to bring the old, discredited system of expenses to an end and they want to bring in as quickly as possible a new system for expenses," Brown told MPs.

Labour MP John Mann said parliament had to accept the recommendations "lock, stock and barrel" if it was to regain its moral authority.

"We can't pick and choose which parts of the report we like," he told BBC television.

"We have to move decisively not to quibble about the detail but to ... endorse the Kelly report and with urgency."

Conservative MP Roger Gale criticised the reports circulating in the media, which he characterised as rumours, and urged Kelly to publish his review following the leaks.

"I've heard one comment, which I think is absolutely ludicrous, to the effect that apparently somebody living an hour's train ride from London will not be allowed to have a base in London.

"Now, that doesn't affect me, but it will affect quite a lot of people, and I just don't believe that Kelly lives in the real world," he told BBC Breakfast TV.

"I don't think he knows what kind of hours we work or what kind of job we do. We've tried to tell him, but he doesn't appear to have listened."