With regard to the item in the Echo of Thursday May 26 about Sir John Butterfill’s expenses – playing the two homes system to avoid capital gains tax – it is astounding.

And now, having read the online item in the MPs’ Expenses section of your website from a Mr Williams, who explains the regulations that MPs should have been following, it is astounding times a hundred. These rules are all laid out in what is called the MPs’ Green Book.

I have checked myself and they say: “You (the MP) must avoid any arrangement which may give rise to an accusation that you are, or someone close to you is, obtaining an immediate benefit or subsidy from public funds”.

I cannot see, therefore, that what the MP has been up to can count as anything but a clear breach of these standards – unless anyone wants to tell me that £600,000 of personal gain is not a matter of “obtaining an immediate benefit from public funds.”


Paul Gibson, Surrey Road, Westbourne