Official details of MPs' expenses have finally been released by the House of Commons.

But the disclosures have turned into a sour joke because so many of the details have been blocked out.

Instead of openness and transparency, we have been left with more questions than answers.

The blanked-out areas on the documents mean that in many cases the information which can be seen is virtually meaningless.

MPs were allowed to go through their claims and request which information was withheld, including home addresses, bank details and security arrangements.

But House of Commons officials had the final say on which information was finally released on the internet list.

One small example among the myriad of paperwork is an Orange phone bill submitted on behalf of Dan Norris, Labour MP for Wansdyke, which shows no details of a time frame, so it is not possible to tell whether the charges are for a day, week, month or a year.

Mr Norris, who said the mobile bill was for a phone used by a member of his staff, said the black boxes blocking out information were put on by the House of Commons' data protection officer.

Mark Wallace, campaign director for the Tax Payers Alliance, called the released documents the 'Black Marker Pen Edition'.

He said: "It beggars belief that after all the outrage of recent weeks, Parliament is still not willing to come clean with the public.

"This is half-hearted transparency that has allowed MPs to hide all sorts of crucial pieces of information.

"Quite frankly, this over-use of black marker pen is an insult to the public, who still are not being taken seriously by MPs."

The Evening Post has printed out the documents relating to the nine MPs serving the Bristol area – Dawn Primarolo (Lab, Bristol South); Kerry McCarthy (Lab, Bristol East); Stephen Williams (Lib Dem, Bristol West); Doug Naysmith (Lab, Bristol North West); Roger Berry (Lab, Kingswood); Liam Fox (Con, Woodspring); John Penrose (Con, Weston-super-Mare); Steve Webb (Lib Dem, Northavon); and Dan Norris (Lab, Wansdyke).

The stack of receipts is nearly two feet high. There are literally thousands of documents and receipts, which we will plough through to report on each MP.

The published information for all 646 MPs runs to more than one million pages.

The censored or "redacted" expenses were published online yesterday, more than a year after Parliament was forced to do so by the High Court and weeks after a full record of uncensored claims was leaked to the Daily Telegraph.

The newspaper obtained its information from computer discs carrying full details of all MPs' claims, understood to have been created during the process of compiling and censoring the documents and sold by an insider.

Although the published information includes receipts relating to MPs' claims between 2004/05 and 2007/08, many of the most controversial revelations made by the Telegraph would have been unlikely to emerge.

As addresses are not published evidence of MPs' "flipping" their allowances from one home to another to maximise claims and avoid capital gains tax on house sales could not be detected from the redacted receipts.

It would also have meant details of Luton Labour MP Margaret Moran, who received £22,000 to treat dry rot on a second home 100 miles from her constituency in Southampton, and Tory former minister Douglas Hogg, who asked for money to clean his moat, would have been unlikely to emerge.

And the official receipts show no sign that Tory grandee Sir Peter Viggers tried to claim £1,645 for a "duck island" on his garden pond, because claims that the fees office refused to pay out are not being published.

Parliament continues to be hit by scandal.

Yesterday it emerged that Shadow chancellor George Osborne claimed £47 for two DVDs of himself giving a speech on Value for Taxpayers' Money and Junior Treasury minister Kitty Ussher quit the Government on Wednesday night following allegations that she avoided paying capital gains tax by "flipping" her second home.