It is the public who elect us and pay for us. And it is the public who should be directly involved in deciding the future system of MPs’ expenses. 

I am not talking about opinion polls, telephone votes or blogs. There is now a great deal of experience in the United Kingdom and elsewhere of innovative forms of public engagement  As Health Secretary, for instance, I commissioned a major public consultation, culminating in a 1000-strong Citizens’ Summit in Birmingham (recruited from the electoral register to be broadly representative of the public as a whole). We asked people about their experience of GPs, what they wanted from local health and care services, and whether they would still want more local services even if that meant fewer services in hospital. It all formed the basis for the White Paper, Our Health, Our Care, Our Say.

The government used a similar approach on pensions and retirement. Local councils and the NHS make regular use of citizens’ panels. All of us have found this kind of public involvement far richer and more significant than the usual formal consultation process.

Large-scale public engagement of this kind could break through the present media firestorm, allowing the public to give a serious response to the serious issue of how to pay and resource MPs. I am sure that the public’s common sense would produce good solutions - but even more important, the very fact of public engagement would strengthen public confidence in the outcome.

We all have ideas about how to improve the present system.  For instance, it seems to me quite wrong – and open to constant misinterpretation by the press – to treat MPs’ office expenses as a ‘personal allowance’.

Constituents are entitled to expect a proper service from their MP, including a reasonable constituency office. I believe the Australian Parliament provides an office in each constituency for the Member’s use. That is what we should do here.

I hope it would also be generally accepted that MPs who live in out-of-London constituencies should have somewhere to stay in London while the House of Commons is in session. Equally, I would hate to go back to the days when MPs whose family home was in London had to stay in a hotel or their agent’s spare room when in their constituency. But the system of paying an allowance for this purpose is comprehensively discredited. I would therefore take the same approach as for constituency offices, with Parliament buying or renting appropriate furnished accommodation for MPs’ use. 

Others will have their own proposals. For me, what matters most is not what system we end up with, but how we decide it.  All of us who are MPs share the responsibility for this mess. When so much damage has been done to public confidence in Parliament, we should ask the public to help us to put things right.

If you would like to take part in my online MPs' Salary and Expenses Survey, please follow this link: http://iwc2.labouronline.org/167226/surveys