Tory claimed £10,000 for website

Angela Browning on the House of Commons Terrace

Angela Browning paid a political research company run by a former Conservative Party campaigner £9,635 in July 2007.

Mrs Browning also charged taxpayers more than £1,000 for the cost of installing two radiator covers in the lounge of her designated second home.

The bill was among claims of nearly £7,300 for the cost of soft furnishings and decorating at the London flat she shares with her husband, David, who she employs as her part-time secretary.

Mrs Browning’s seven-page website, which carries details of her constituency and parliamentary work, was designed by Parliamentary Liaison Services Ltd (PLS), run by Mark Fullbrook, the former head of campaigns at Conservative Central Office.

One London website designer with more than 10 years’ experience in the industry said a similar website should cost no more than £1,250 to set up and run. Philip Sweny, of Halpen Marketing, said: “It seems to be a very basic site.”

PLS claims to work as a “communications adviser” for up to 20 Conservative MPs, even though the Green Book, which lays out the rules for MPs, says there is a bar on “advice for individual Members on self promotion”.

Mrs Browning said she had followed guidance given to her by the fees office.

“The contract for the website is to maintain and run it right up until the next election,” she said. “I didn’t get a second quote because I had dealt with the company before. That was the only claim I have ever made on the communications allowance.” Mr Fullbrook insisted that he had provided a good service. He said the £9,635 fee was for two-and-a-half years’ service, adding: “We are a commercial company and we think the price was reasonable for the quality service we provided.

“MPs’ websites are governed by special rules and we try to run it by those rules. Anybody can set up and run a website, but Angela Browning needed it to be done by people who understood the rules that apply to MPs, and we were able to provide that service.”

Mr Fullbrook said his company also stayed within the Green Book rules on “self-promotion”.

Mrs Browning, the member for Tiverton and Honiton and a junior agriculture minister in John Major’s government, was reimbursed £1,104 for the cost of the two white “Sandringham-style” radiator covers fitted in the lounge of her Pimlico flat in January 2006.

Mrs Browning said she installed the covers because one of them was very close to the door and she kept knocking her leg against it. “It was very hot,” she said. “There were two in the same room so it’s difficult to have one covered and not the other.”

In March, 2006, Mrs Browning was reimbursed for the £715 cost of a new carpet for the master bedroom of her second home.

In November that year, she also hired a company to redecorate her kitchen and fit new worktops and a sink at a cost of £2,714.

Six months later, Mrs Browning claimed £151 for new curtains and £400 for four made-to-measure pelmets.

In July, 2007, she again undertook some decorating, this time hiring the same company to paint her hall at a cost of £1,045.75.

In December, 2007, Mrs Browning – who had stopped claiming for the cost of her second home when the interest-only mortgage payments of £641 came to an end six months earlier – sold the property for £493,000 and moved to rented accommodation half a mile away.

Mrs Browning claimed £1,646 a month for rent at her new second home until July last year, when the files show she planned to stay in hotels until moving to a new flat last September.

“I have tried very hard to work within the spirit of the rules,” she said. “Most of the examples you have given were genuine replacements of things that were well past their sell-by date. For the kitchen, I repainted the units rather than buying new ones and only replaced the worktops because they were rotten.

“My painting bills were high but I had 18ft ceilings in a listed building.”