I thought I would just drop you a note to enquire whether you are planning at any stage to give your side of the story when it comes to your expenses for your duties as my local MP?  As an aside, it seems quite quaint to send a real letter in this modern era but you have no email address on your website and even the excellent http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ website doesn’t have one for you. Odd in this modern era of social networking and instant communication that you don’t want people to get in touch by the easiest methods.

As you’re no doubt well aware the Telepgraph has made some mischief by revealing your expenses in relation to your second home (David Clelland: Home buy-out costs taxpayer thousands on MP’s expenses). I would be interested to hear your side of the story as the evidence as presented seems a little a damning. A number of MPs have decided to publish their expenses themselves including the much respected Labour MP Frank Field (see the Guardian – Growing number of MPs putting their expenses online) but your name seems to be missing from the list of those volunteering the information (when I check on Tuesday 19th May).

Of course your voting record on Transparency of Parliament is not great – you were either absent or voted against every positive amendment to the Freedom of Information Act and as recently as April 30^th 2009 you were voting against having to provide receipts for all your reimbersed expenditure as an MP. A little unfair given the lengths small businesses have to go to in this country to meet HMRC regulations. As a retailer I have to keep VAT records on every transaction – no matter how small – for seven years.

Anyway, the matter seems to be that you, at the tax-payers expense, bought out your partner from your London flat. Perhaps you were going your separate ways? It then is turns out that you went on to marry your partner a year later. Unless you have a pre-nuptial agreement of some description this surely means that your partner now effectively owns 50% of the flat again. But we the taxpayers in this country are now footing the whole bill. Now it may be that all of that is mischief from the Telegraph – I’d love to hear your side of the story so do feel free to reply and let me know.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter and I look forward to hearing from you shortly.

Yours sincerely

Andy Redfern

PS In effort to be transparent I have posted a copy of this letter on my blogs.

In streets across Britain many people don’t even know their neighbour’s names, but that certainly isn’t a problem on Cotswold Gardens in Gateshead. This small street is home to 69 members of the same family, ranging in age from four weeks to 76 years. The Hall family have come to dominate the road since 76-year-old matriach Catherine settled there in 1958.

Mrs Hall had eight children, who went on to give her 35 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. Six of her children and their families now dwell in the street, along with three uncles and a mother-in-law. The Hall clan occupy more than 12 houses. But despite their dominance the unrelated neighbours don’t feel left out – as they think the street should be renamed Hall Gardens. When friends used to ask Mrs Hall why her brood was so big she would say telly hadn’t been invented back in her day. She held her dynasty together until she died last month, bringing the grand total from 70 to 69.

Good to see Lobley Hill and big families portrayed in a positive light from a newspaper that would usually be so negative about “big families” and “the North”. Read the rest of the article