Midlands MPs pay £85,000 to keep it in the family

Four MPs' wives and one MP's husband in the Black Country, Staffordshire and Wyre Forest earned between £5,000 and £34,999 each for their work as secretaries, assistants and office managers.

Three of them are the spouses of MPs who were elected in 2010, after the expenses scandal. MPs are allowed to employ one relative each as long as they declare it publicly.

An independent body, the Committee on Standards in Public Life, had advised the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) to ban the practice as it was 'not consistent with modern employment practice designed to ensure fairness in recruitment, management of staff and remuneration'.

But Ipsa decided to restrict MPs to employing just one family member instead.

There were 143 MPs who still employed relatives as of October last year.

Wyre Forest MP Mark Garnier, who was elected in 2010, pays between £30,000 and £34,999 to his wife Caroline to be an office manager. Mr Garnier said: "My wife is highly qualified, having worked at Buckingham Palace and as a trained book-keeper. She is cheaper to employ than someone else and 10 times as effective.

"Ipsa did look at the issue of MPs employing family members but decided to allow it to continue because if you can employ someone who gets good value for the taxpayer and is well qualified for the job, why wouldn't you employ them?"

Stone Tory MP Bill Cash employs his wife Bridget as his Parliamentary assistant on between £25,000 and £29,999 a year. Mr Cash said his arrangement was authorised by Ipsa. Valerie Vaz, Labour MP for Walsall South, pays her husband Paul Townsend £20,000 to £24,999 a year.

She said: "It's there for everyone to see in the register of interests."

Gavin Williamson, Tory MP for South Staffordshire, has been employing his wife Joanne as a part-time junior secretary on between £5,000 and £9,999 a year. He was elected in 2010. Mr Williamson said: "I employ my wife on a part-time basis to cover an increasing workload. She continues to work for me until the end of August when she will finish because I will be employing a full-time member of staff to support me in my constituency work."

Adrian Bailey, Labour MP for West Bromwich West, pays a similar sum to his wife Jill who works as a part-time 'junior/diary secretary' according to the register of members' interests. He was unavailable for comment. The use of parliamentary allowances to employ family members came to the fore in 2009 when it was revealed the former MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, Derek Conway, was ordered to return £3,757 of taxpayers' money paid to his elder son, Henry.

Mr Conway, who was expelled from the Tory party, was found to have made 'a serious lapse of judgement' in overpaying his son for work he did in 2004. A year earlier he had been made to pay back £13,161 paid to his younger son, Freddie, to work as a researcher while a student in Newcastle.

Under the new rules, MPs are allowed to hire no more than one 'connected party', including a spouse, child, parent or financial partner. They were also banned from claiming money to cover the mortgages on their second homes on their expenses and instead have to rent properties.

It has posed a headache for long-serving MPs such as Wolverhampton's Pat McFadden. He was forced to move out of a house he owns in East Park and rent it out to cover the cost of the mortgage, while renting a property next door to live in himself.