Mark Hendrick, a Labour MP, admitted “estimating” the amount of mortgage interest he paid on his second home when claiming on his taxpayer-funded parliamentary allowances.
Mark Hendrick, the MP for Preston, said he had found it difficult to work out how much the interest element of the mortgage on his London flat came to, and so tried to “work on an average for the year”.
Under parliamentary rules, MPs may claim for the interest on a second home but not the capital repayment.
Mr Hendrick regularly submitted claims for between £900 and £1,015 a month on his London flat, before “flipping” his second home designation to a house in his constituency, where his claims rose to £1,469.
When contacted by The Daily Telegraph, Mr Hendrick insisted that he had always acted in line with the rules but refused to disclose his mortgage documents to confirm his statement. He said he regularly provided the Commons fees office with copies of his mortgage documents. None appears on files seen by The Daily Telegraph.
Asked why his mortgage interest varied from month to month, Mr Hendrick said: “My mortgage was a capital plus interest mortgage. Therefore, payments included both, and I did not know until the end of the year from my statement exactly how much of the payment was interest, therefore I tried to work on an average for the year as a whole.
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