Early Thursday morning, four years of Parliamentary expenses -- more than a million receipts and claims -- were put online, ranging from former Prime Minister Tony Blair's gas bills to his successor Gordon Brown's £4,710 ($7,726) refurbishmentDior of his kitchen and living room.
But the heavily censored public release -- the result of a five-year legal battle over the U.K.'s relatively new freedom of information laws -- proved less illuminating than explosive leaks of the information by the London-based Daily Telegraph newspaper Guccibeginning more than a month ago.
The stories, detailing lawmakers' claims ranging from dog food to payments on mortgages that no longer existed, whipped up a scandal that has ended the parliamentary careers of moreIWC watches than a dozen politicians.
Politicians say that addresses, travel plans, personal and financial details needed to be blacked out for security reasons. But it was these details, revealed by theJaeger LeCoultre Telegraph, that helped expose many of the most serious abuses of the expense system.
"The info that has been published is a very poor substitute which will fuel public anger, because it looks like information has been covered up," said Katherine Gundersen, a researcher at the group Campaign for Freedom of Information.
On some receipts, almost all the information except the expensesLongines figure was blacked out, leaving no context. Also missing were claims that had been rejected and the correspondence between Parliament's fees office and politicians that in some cases has proved embarrassing. Ms. Gundersen said worries such as the revelation of specific addresses could be met by printing partial postal codes or just indicating where an address Orishas been changed.
With addresses blacked out, for example, it is impossible to see where members of Parliament have "flipped" the designation of their second home, allowing them to Patek Philippefurnish different houses at the taxpayers' expense, or to spend large sums on refurbishing second homes and sell them soon after. Such revelations were among the most damaging to emerge from the newspaper exposé.
