Henry Bellingham claimed £1,500 mortgage interest

Henry Bellingham claimed £1,500 mortgage interest per month for a flat in London. Mr Bellingham claimed a total of £85,845 in four years under the addional costs allowance.

Henry Bellingham, Conservative MP for North West Norfolk, said he fully understood public anger over some MPs' abuse of expenses claims and said the system needed to be rebuilt “brick by brick” in the wake of the scandal.

Mr Bellingham became the latest Norfolk MP to release details of his expenses claims from April 2004 to March 2008.

They show that over the four years, he was claiming an average of nearly £1,400 a month in mortgage interest payments on his London house, but that he made no claims for furniture or luxury items.

He said: “I would like to say straight away that I can fully understand the sense of anger, dismay and disbelief over the way in which some MPs have abused the system.

“Obviously this has done a huge amount of damage to public confidence in parliament and our democratic system. Having said that, I do believe that the overwhelming majority of us are hard-working MPs who have not only abided by the letter of our allowances, but also the spirit of them as well.”

Mr Bellingham, who has been MP for North West Norfolk since 2001 and previously represented the constituency from 1983 to 1997, said he had never “flipped” his allowance between homes in order to claim extra payments.

He said: “As far as Emma [his wife] and I are concerned our main home is in west Norfolk, because this is where we spend most of our time, and I also pride myself on being a local man.”

A second home was essential since it was “almost impossible” to commute to London daily from Norfolk, and hotel costs or renting would be no cheaper than his monthly mortgage interest, he added.

And he said he had claimed “slightly less” than he had actually spent on utility bills, council tax, food and cleaning over the four-year period.

Documents show Mr Bellingham, who has a majority of 9,180, claimed up to £1,750 a month to cover mortgage interest payments.

These amounts varied but were always a round figure, as were all his other claims.

Mr Bellingham said they related to his family's house in Stockwell, south London, on which he had a “pretty big” mortgage of £320,000.

“There's a limit to what you can claim on the allowance, which this year is £24,000 and the previous year was about £22,000. If I claimed the whole lot I would be over the limit, so it was a way of keeping below,” he said.

“I worked out a monthly figure that would actually be slightly lower than the actual amount. By averaging it out it helps with one's cash-flow. The fees office was quite happy about that.”

The figures show Mr Bellingham claimed an average of £288.75 a month for food at his second home, below the maximum allowance of £400 a month. He said his average claim had been for about £7.50 per day the Commons sat.

Mr Bellingham said his total expenses claim, including staff and office costs, of £140,539 for 2007-08 were one of the smallest for any large rural constituency and put him 412th out of 645 MPs.