MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

British PM Brown has agreed to repay £ 12.000 in expenses

Gordon Brown told to hand back excessive cleaning and gardening claims.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has agreed to repay more than £12,000 in expenses after an inquiry found he made excessive claims for cleaning, gardening and decoration at his second home.

Mr Brown wrote to all Government ministers urging them to follow his lead and repay in full any sums demanded by former Whitehall mandarin Sir Thomas Legg, who is carrying out an audit of all MPs' claims over the past five years.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg paid back £910 in gardening expenses, while Tory leader David Cameron is to supply Sir Thomas with documentation relating to a £218 over-claim for mortgage payments which he has already returned.

It has emerged that Sir Thomas - who wrote to all MPs and ex-MPs with his provisional findings - is treating any claim over £2,000 a year for cleaning and £1,000 for gardening as excessive and demanding any sums above that level should be returned. This is likely to spark anger among MPs, many of whom argue that there was no such limit in place at the time their claims were submitted and approved.

Meanwhile, former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was forced to apologise to the House of Commons after a separate inquiry found that she wrongly claimed second home allowances on her family house in her Redditch constituency.

And a new inquiry was launched by the House of Lords into allegations that Labour peer Lord Paul claimed £38,000 in overnight subsistence allowances after designating a flat he had never slept in as his main home. The probe was requested by Lord Paul after media reports at the weekend and he will step down from his duties as a deputy speaker in the Lords pending the investigation.

In a statement released by his office this afternoon, Mr Brown confirmed he would be repaying the full sum of £12,415.10 demanded by Sir Thomas. This figure comprised £10,716.60 in relation to cleaning and £302.50 for gardening in the period 2004/05 to 2008/09, as well as a £1,396 bill for painting and decorating that was inadvertently submitted twice in 2006.

The double payment of the decoration bill had not been revealed until it was uncovered by Sir Thomas's probe. Mr Brown's adviser on ministerial interests, Sir Philip Mawer, confirmed that the concerns raised by Sir Thomas did not amount to a breach of the ministerial code.

MPs have three weeks to respond to issues raised by Sir Thomas. In a letter to all ministers, Mr Brown urged them ”to respond promptly and in full to any requests for further information and when the process is completed to make appropriate repayments”.