Conservative Member of Parliament Bob Blackman could be forced to pay back over a thousand pounds of expenses after it was revealed he had been overstating his mileage.
The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) found Mr Blackman had made over seven hundred inaccurate claims. It has also come out that he had been warned about this exaggeration as early as 2011. An audit conducted in 2013-14 found that the Harrow East MP had claimed double the mileage as the next ten parliamentarians on the list. A formal probe was launched into the matter but it began after Blackman's meeting with the IPSA to discuss the issue. Since that meeting his mileage has decreased.
The MP commented on his official website that he felt the investigating officer had wrongly interpreted the numbers, saying that “It states in the IPSA guidelines that the most cost effective route should be taken. The compliance officer believes that the most direct route was not taken. I supplied detailed maps for the routes I routinely took which the compliance officer ignored. I am concerned that the compliance officer is not interpreting the rules that exist but rules that he believes should exist.”
Mr Blackman had previously been accused of speaking in a divisive way by some of his constituents. During a debate in 2012 during which the topic of the Kashmir issue was being discussed he appeared to speak in a negative way about Pakistani Kashmir, stating “in Jammu and Kashmir, there is free access for the press, Amnesty International and every other international body that wants access to see what is going on. In Pakistani-occupied Kashmir, what is almost a lawlessness still prevails.”
