There is an inevitability about the expenses crisis consuming Members of Parliament. Their behaviour is unacceptable and scandalous, but I am not yet convinced they are looking seriously for solutions.

MPs who have to spend half their week in London and the other half, sometimes hundreds of miles away, in their constituencies, obviously need somewhere to stay when they are in the capital.

In many European countries MPs stay in housing blocks built near their parliament, one-bedroom flats paid for by the state. No second home allowance needed. No second home means no need to spend money furnishing it, buying sink plugs, potted plants, plasma TVs, mock Tudor beams, piano tuning services, etc. No second home means no opportunity to make money on the sly from buy and selling “second homes” or by calling your sister’s back bedroom your second home.

Plainly, MPs who live further from the capital or whose constituencies are very large, will spend more money travelling, but that is as far as the expenses system needs to differentiate.

We are in this mess, in part, because successive Governments have frozen MPs’ salaries in order to impress the electorate, then quietly promoted expenses as a way of topping up the salary a different way. Peer pressure ensures that MPs are encouraged to join the trough, because that’s just the way things are.

A little more honesty, both from politicians and from the public, and a ruling elite who were willing to learn from best practice and actually do something to put things right, and all this might have been sorted out years ago.

Christian Vassie, Parliamentary spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats for York Central.

Blake court, Wheldrake, York.