Disinfecting Parliament

The

Sunlight Centre

's Juliet Samuel launched "Disinfecting Parliament" - a report about reforming MPs expenses on Monday. She writes in

The Tel

egraph

:

With the coming release of MPs 2008-09 expenses set to re-ignite public rage, Parliament is praying to a former chief bureaucrat for salvation. Sir Christopher Kelly and the committee he chairs, the Committee on Standards in Public Life, have spent the summer trawling through reams of oral and written evidence to try and come up with a new expenses scheme that will keep MPs on the straight and narrow. The Committee has been charged with re-jigging the expenses rules to lift Parliament out of the doldrums and, in Kelly's words , to go about restoring trust in public office holders.

But is Sir Christopher really the knight in shining armour that shame-faced MPs await? Can he possibly deliver on the grandiose aim of restoring trust in public office, in MPsin democracy, no less!

Unfortunately, there are reasons to think he wont.

Disinfecting Parliament is a shadow of the Kelly report that is expected out within the next month. With an introduction by

Douglas Carswell MP

, it sets out some simple yet radical reforms of the Commons that will end abuses of MPs expenses forever.

As TB well knows after many a proofing, it's definitely worth a

read

.