MP spent £18,000 on mobile phone calls

Woodspring Tory MP Liam Fox has claimed more than £18,000 mobile phone bills on his expenses.

Dr Fox, the Shadow Defence Secretary, claimed £18,572 for the four-year period between April 2004 and April 2008. The expense claims have been disclosed on a parliamentary internet list published by the House of Commons.

Dr Fox claimed £5,137 for 2007-08; £5,191 for 2006-07; £3,102 for 2005-06; and £5,141 for 2004-05, which works out at an average of more than £4,600 a year or nearly £90 a week.

Dr Fox, who is currently in Colorado for a security conference, insisted the high bills were down to the globetrotting his job as Shadow Defence Secretary involves.

He said: "I travel abroad regularly and use my Blackberry for phone calls and data transfer.

"This includes regular trips to see our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as trips to the United States. Given the amount I travel, I am currently looking for a cheaper tariff."

Dr Fox's receipts show the charges were payable to mobile phone operator, Vodafone.

They do not itemise where the calls were made or to whom.

The company is currently quoting a contract deal of £80 a month for 3,000 minutes and unlimited texts.

A Vodafone spokesman said the tariffs vary if calls are made from abroad. For example, if calls are made from Europe, they can cost up to 38p a minute while calls from the Far East can cost between 79p and 99p a minute.

Dr Fox, a qualified GP, also claimed £1,050.72 in April 2005 for BUPA health insurance.

Dr Fox said: "This was a one-off payment to a longstanding member of staff in 2005. I haven't been able to contact her to ascertain the exact details of the claim.

"My understanding is that longstanding employees are allowed healthcare benefits, but if this is not the case, then we will consider how to rectify it."

The MP chose a few weeks ago to publish an agreement between himself and the Woodspring Conservative Association for the provision of constituency services in his Nailsea office.

He said he was doing so to quash any suggestion of impropriety after it emerged he was claiming money on his expenses to pay his constituency party for administration services and office space.

The bill includes a charge of £4,000 a year for "secretarial and personal assistant services", charged at £18 an hour based on an average minimum five hours a week for a minimum 45 weeks a year.

Unlimited use of telephones, photocopying and computers (£2,000), and office accommodation (£3,000) made up the rest. The contract, was made between Dr Fox and association president Carl Francis-Pester, also covers "any other related service reasonably required by the MP which WCA is willing to provide."

Dr Fox said the agreement was drawn up after advice from the House of Commons and that the current agreement would continue unless he was told otherwise.

The internet list of Parliamentary expenses was finally published two days ago.

But because so many of the expense claims have large sections blacked out, the Tax Payers' Alliance has called the released documents the "Black Marker Pen Edition".

The thousands of receipts and claims for MPs from the Bristol area make a stack of documents nearly two feet high. We will plough through them all to report on each MP.