By Hamish MacDonell, Scottish POlitical Editor

February 18, 2006

Copies of every single receipt submitted by a member of the Scottish Parliament will be posted on the internet in a drive to make the expenses system at Holyrood the most transparent in the world.

Officials hope to have the first phase of the new system online by the end of next month and all receipts from this financial year should be available for scrutiny by the end of the year.

George Reid, the Presiding Officer, announced his intention to change the system after the resignation of David McLetchie as Tory leader in a row over taxi bills last year.

But since then, Brian Monteith, a former Tory MSP, has had to pay back £250 in taxi bills which he claimed wrongly and, as The Scotsman revealed yesterday, Alex Salmond was able to claim £8,500 in taxi fares to commute from his Linlithgow home to the Scottish Parliament on a regular basis.

Mr Salmond did not break any rules by commuting by taxi, which led to demands for a thorough overhaul of the expenses system by business leaders who warned that the public would not tolerate such a lax system for MSPs, which no-one else in Scotland could enjoy.

All these affairs, as well as the unjustified mileage claims put in by Keith Raffan, the former Liberal Democrat MSP - who claimed he was driving round his constituency when he was out of the country - have eroded public confidence in the existing system of MSP expenses.

Mr Reid said late last year that he wanted to make the whole approach more accountable and transparent but it is only now that the extraordinary scale of the changes has emerged.

A spokesman for the Scottish Parliament revealed yesterday that staff were busy scanning every single receipt and expense claim made by every MSP this year.

All these images will be placed on the parliament's website. An easy series of links will take members of the public from the name of their MSP, to their general expenses claims, to specific areas, like taxi bills, and on to the individual receipts.

The spokesman confirmed that some details will be blacked out, to prevent members of the public from finding out the names of specific hotels, staff salaries or the home addresses of MSPs, but everything else will be on the site.

He said information from the first two quarters of this financial year - up to October 2005 - will be available for public scrutiny from next month, with the remaining information available later in the year.

The spokesman stressed, however, that the process would not be retrospective and it would not be possible to place claims from previous years on the site.

He said: "It's about transparency and accountability. It will allow people to search for information which they would need a Freedom of Information request to do now.

"It will allow you to do Freedom of Information requests online."

The Freedom of Information Act has caused considerable problems for the Scottish Parliament.

Staff have been deluged with requests, mainly from journalists, for details of MSPs' expense claims, including requests for every single taxi claim made by individual MSPs.

The parliament has had to divert several members of staff away from their normal duties, just to meet the requests from journalists for information.

The total bill in terms of staff hours is estimated to have run into hundreds of thousands of pounds with one particular Sunday journalist, who made dozens of requests, costing £32,000 on his own.

The parliamentary authorities hope that this new system will cut out all these requests from journalists, simply because all the information they want on expenses is readily available on a public website.

The spokesman said there was no cost estimate for the changes yet, but he stressed that the final bill would be offset by the savings made in not processing the myriad requests from journalists for this information. The changes instituted by the Scottish Parliament take it far above any other similar institution in Britain.