When will Britain's MPs come clean?

When I began investigating members of parliament's (MPs') expenses in 2004, I telephoned an outer London MP to ask why he was claiming £14,000 (Dh84,852) a year in second-home allowance when his constituency was only 27 kilometres from Westminster.

He told me that he commuted daily on the Tube from his constituency home to the Commons. So why did he need the money?

Because, he told me, his "main home" was a seaside flat he had recently bought on the Isle of Man. The London home was registered with the fees office as his second home, so he could claim for its running costs.

Was it right for taxpayers to fund this lifestyle? He replied: "It has always been a provision of the House of Commons that it should be so".

John Wilkinson, then Tory MP for Ruislip-Northwood, just did not get it. His excuse has been repeated by many MPs since. And today, even after the moats and the duck houses, the 'flipping' and the phantom mortgages, the home-cinema systems and the free lodging for relatives, MPs still do not get it.

They demonstrated that with the publication of their expenses claims on Wednesday, on the parliamentary website. At last, the documents that have ended so many careers in the past few weeks are in the public domain. But the key pieces of evidence are missing.

So many details have been blacked out - 'redacted', in officialese - that what is left appears, in large part, anodyne. It is only thanks to the painstaking Daily Telegraph investigation that we know just what dodges were carried out, and by which MPs.

Looking at the details that have been blacked out, it is clear that they go far beyond what is necessary to preserve privacy and security.

MPs were offered a lengthy period in which to go through their receipts and request the removal of details. Many appear to have taken the opportunity to cover up items that are simply embarrassing.

In some cases, inexplicably, they have covered up items that have already been exposed by the Telegraph.

The deletion of MPs' addresses from the material disclosed on Wednesday is a different matter. It is required by law. But this law in itself is a scandal.

When I requested the details of six MPs' expenses in January 2005, the month the Freedom of Information Act came into force, I specifically asked for the addresses of the second homes where taxpayers' money was being spent.

I did so because I knew that such dodges as paying rent to a family trust on a property an MP already owns, or remortgaging a property owned outright in order to claim back the mortgage interest, could only be detected if the addresses were revealed.

When my case came to the High Court last year - joined to applications by two other journalists, Heather Brooke and Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas - the judges found in my favour. The addresses, they said, must be released.

The three judges - who included Sir Igor Judge, now the Lord Chief Justice - conceded that the disclosure of a private address was to some extent an intrusion, and therefore required justification.

But they found that in the case of MPs "there was a legitimate public interest well capable of providing such justification", due to the laxity of the Commons expenses system.

They upheld the ruling of my earlier tribunal, which found that the scrutiny of claims by the fees office was "so deeply flawed & and the necessity of full disclosure so convincingly established, that only the most pressing privacy needs should in our view be permitted to prevail".

The High Court judgment referred to the case of Michael Trend, the former Tory MP who paid back £90,000 (Dh545,478) in 2002 after claiming a second-home allowance when he had only one home, as an example of the sort of rule-breaking that the Commons authorities had failed to detect.

After the verdict, Michael Martin, the Speaker, who was forced from office last month, threw in the towel and agreed to publish expenses details routinely.

Yet even after this decision, MPs, egged on by Julian Lewis, the Tory defence spokesman, voted to change the law in order to protect their addresses from exposure.

MPs' addresses appear on the electoral roll; they appear on ballot papers at general elections; they are, therefore, in the public domain, and should not be redacted from the published expenses receipts. The High Court agreed. But clearly there are mixed views on this point.

The law must be changed before the next batch of expenses are published on the parliamentary website. Otherwise, the public will once again rely on a newspaper-style investigation to give it the full picture.

The Freedom of Information Act is a far-reaching piece of legislation. It is one of Labour's lasting achievements, and it is ironic that its use in the MPs' expenses investigation has done the government so much harm.

Yet it has so far failed to change the culture of secrecy in British public services, in Whitehall and in parliament.