Told not to pay bonuses, MP gave family overtime instead

His wife Colette, and two sons Henry and Freddie received a string of bonuses, overtime and other one-off payments.

In total, Mr Conway and his family have received more than £1 million over the last 10 years in taxpayer's cash on salaries, bonuses, overtime, one-off payments and housing costs.

As disclosed in the Evening Standard yesterday, the Old Bexley and Sidcup MP was warned in writing in 2004 that bonuses that he had proposed for his wife and elder son Henry could not be paid as they were over a cap imposed by the Commons authorities.

Interestingly, he later made three bonus payments totalling £8,300 to his younger son Freddie on forms which led Commons finance officials to assume they were for overtime not bonuses as later admitted.

Freddie was also being paid £12,000 a year as a research assistant for his father despite being at university in Newcastle studying geography. In total he received more than £45,000 of taxpayer's money.

Mr Conway insists that he had not known about the limit on bonuses.

His wife Colette, who was paid an annual salary of up to £39,000, had also been receiving bonuses of just over £5,000 a year between 2001/2 and 2003/4, according to The Daily Mail, as well as one £1,500 overtime sum in April 2004.

But after Mr Conway was sent a letter informing him of the restrictions on bonuses, she was given a bonus of £2,000 in 2005/6 and £3,070 in overtime.

In its report, the all-party standards and privileges committee said the bonuses given to family members were "substantially in excess" of those made to non-family staff. Freddie, who received four bonuses, admitted he did not know why he had been paid them.

It also emerged today that senior Tories on the committee allegedly stopped the devastating report from being watered down. The Conservative chairman of the committee, Sir George Young, a former Cabinet minister, allegedly wanted to demand that Mr Conway be forced to apologise to the Commons for his breach of the rules and that he repay £4,000.

But Tory grandee Nicholas Soames as well as senior backbencher David Curry are said to have backed Labour MPs who were calling for the report to be far tougher. MPs on the committee are said to have been so angered by attempts to not severely punish Mr Conway that they threatened to call in Scotland Yard to investigate.

The committee eventually agreed a damning report, which included a proposed 10-day suspension from the Commons which is expected to start tomorrow, as well as demanding that Mr Conway repay up to £13,000.

David Cameron yesterday withdrew the whip from the senior backbencher, a key ally of shadow home secretary David Davis, and cast him into the political wilderness by making it clear he was unlikely to be allowed back into the Tory parliamentary party. Mr Conway may now be deselected by his local party. He also faces a second inquiry into payments to his son Henry, which totalled a reported £32,000, and a possible police investigation into the use of taxpayer's cash.

The committee found that Freddie seemed to have been "all but invisible" during his work for his father between 2004/5 and 2007/8.

There are calls for a full inquiry into the practice of MPs employing family members. Some 43 MPs across all parties have relatives listed as their Commons staff in the Register of Interests of MPs' Secretaries and Research Assistants. Many have employed their husbands or wives as their PA for several years, entirely legitimately. Most MPs who have listed their sons and daughters as pass-holders did so to allow them to gain work experience in Parliament. The work was sometimes paid, sometimes unpaid but most were for brief periods.