By IANS,
London : British Premier Gordon Brown has paid back £500 he claimed on parliamentary expenses to have an outdoor garden-house painted at his constituency home in Scotland.
A receipt for the work, submitted in April 2008, was included in the latest batch of MPs’ expenses published on British parliament’s website Thursday.
Although the claim was within the rules and was not questioned by a review of MPs’ expenses, Brown said he had decided the money should go back.
“I volunteered to do that. I looked through my expenses. I said, I don’t want to claim for anything that is in any way questionable. Nobody asked me to do that,” he said.
Documentation relating to claims made during the last financial year, including the summer house decoration, was uploaded on to the parliamentary website.
A spokesman for Brown said the structure was more “a building in his garden” which he used as a home office than a traditional summer house.
The British prime minister’s claim for the summer house was reported in July this year during an investigation into MPs’ expenses by The Daily Telegraph newspaper.