By Ned Simons - 21st October 2010
A Commons committee has said they would have suspended former Tory MP Andrew MacKay had he not stood down at the election.
In a report published this morning, the Commons committee on standards and privileges concluded that the former Bracknell MP breached the rules governing second home allowances.
He wrongly designated a house he shared with his MP wife in Bromsgrove as his main home.
MacKay is married to Julie Kirkbride, who at the time was MP for Bromsgrove.
The couple spent the majority of his time in London.
For Parliamentary allowance purposes, the Bromsgrove property was MacKay's declared main home and Kirkbride's second home.
The London property was Kirkbride's declared main home and MacKay's second home.
The committee said that it "should have been obvious" to MacKay that the arrangement whereby he and his wife each designated the other's second home as their main home, allowing both to be funded from parliamentary allowances, was "fundamentally wrong".
And the members of the committee said they were "very disappointed" that the former MP maintains he did not break the rules when though it is "quite clear" that he did.
"The very fact that Mr MacKay is no longer a Member of Parliament shows what a heavy political price he has paid," it said.
The committee called on him to apologise for the breach in writing.
It also concluded they would have ordered him to apologise on the floor of the Commons and sought his suspension from Parliament had he still been an MP.
MacKay resigned as Commons aide to David Cameron when news of his expenses claims came to light in May last year.
He and his wife subsequently stood down from Parliament at the general election.
He took a lucrative lobbying job with communications giant Burson-Marsteller.
The standards and privileges committee also today cleared Conservative MP Nadine Dorries of wrong doing after she was accused of abusing the second home allowance.
And the House of Lords has suspended three peers for wrongly designating properties as their main home when they spent little time in them.
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