LONDON - The British lawmakers' expenses scandal spread to Europe on Monday, as Prime Minister Gordon Brown ordered his European legislators to meet stricter accountability rules amid fears that similar abuses could be taking place at the European Parliament.
For more than two weeks, disclosures over how British legislators used public money to pay for items ranging from horse manure to plasma TVs and swimming pool repairs have outraged voters and forced dozens of House of Commons lawmakers to announce early retirement.
Brown has called for sweeping reforms of the British Parliament's expense system, but has resisted calls to hold an early national election to let the public oust legislators who abused the system. The opposition Conservatives are far ahead of Brown's Labour Party in opinion polls and widely expected to win the next election, which Brown must call by June 2010.
The Labour Party said Monday that members who serve as EU Parliament lawmakers will in the future publish more detailed breakdowns of their expenses claims, including receipts, every six months. The legislators now publish limited details about their expenses, but do not show any receipts.
"We hope that the other political parties will eventually follow our lead on this," Glenis Willmott, the Labour Party's leader in the EU Parliament said.
Brown's Labour Party has 19 of Britain's 78 EU lawmakers -- who form a small fraction of the assembly's 785 members.
The European parliament is facing elections across the bloc's 27 members in early June -- and many believe the expenses system they operate under is as rotten as the one in Britain.
Many analysts predict British voters will back minority parties in the EU election as a rebuke to Britain's leading parties for the expenses scandal.
Britain's health secretary Alan Johnson, seen by some as a possible future replacement for Brown, said major reforms are needed to rebuild public trust.
"The current public mood of anger and disquiet ... demands a response," Johnson wrote Monday in an op-ed article for the Times of London.
Climate change secretary Ed Miliband urged Brown to use the scandal as an opportunity to reshape British politics. "Out of a set of terrible issues, this is a moment for big reform and government must take advantage of it," Miliband was quoted as telling The Guardian newspaper Sunday .
Colin Rallings, director of the University of Plymouth's elections data center, says as many as 325 of Britain's 646 House of Commons lawmakers could quit or be ousted by voters as a direct result of the scandal.
Husband and wife lawmakers Nicholas and Ann Winterton said Monday that they will step down at the next election. Both have been Conservative legislators for more than 25 years.
Public anger has been fueled by revelations of how lawmakers used public money to clean a moat, furnish lavish second homes or claim vast sums for mortgage loans. Most of the claims were legally valid under Parliament's lax rules, but some -- like claiming payments for mortgages that were already paid off -- could spark criminal charges.
Details of the claims were to have been released in July following a freedom of information ruling that ordered expense receipts to be made public. But the details have been published by the Daily Telegraph newspaper after it acquired copies in advance via a former special forces soldier.
On Monday, the paper reported that nine senior British Cabinet ministers spent 11,000 pounds ($17,500) of taxpayers' money to pay for advice on completing tax returns. Harriet Harman, a Cabinet minister and deputy leader of the Labour Party, also charged the public 10,000 pounds ($15,900) for media training.
Most British lawmakers are paid 61,000 pounds (US$93,100) annually, compared with an annual base salary of $174,000 for legislators in the United States. Congress allots each House and Senate office between $1.4 million and $1.9 million to cover official expenses, while British members of Parliament claimed an average of 135,000 pounds ($214,685) in expenses last year.
