Kitty Ussher resigns over expenses

One of the rising stars in Gordon Brown's government resigned yesterday after being exposed by the Daily Telegraph for avoiding capital gains tax when she sold her constituency home in Burnley. Treasury minister Kitty Ussher has left her post immediately and will stand down as MP for Burnley at the next general election.

Details of how she changed the designations of her second home and principal residence in order to avoid CGT were published by the Telegraph as the House of Commons finally posted online all 646 MPs' expenses claims from the past four years.

However, many commentators have pointed out that so much is censored in the Commons version that many of the abuses of the allowance system would not have been exposed had the Telegraph not been leaked an uncensored version.

The First Post's Westminster insider, the Mole, reports today that the specifics of home designations are among the details that are excluded from the Commons records being published today. Ussher and other MPs who 'flipped' their home designations to avoid tax and/or to claim more in allowances would have escaped attention.

Ussher is a niece of the Tory MP Peter Bottomley and a 'Paulina' - a product of St Paul's Girls' School. But she didn't let either factor stop her becoming a high-flyer in Brown's government. She first became a minister when Brown entered Downing Street in 2007 and gave her Ed Balls's old job as Economic Secretary to the Treasury. She only began her latest job, as Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, after this month's reshuffle.

She and her husband are estimated to have made a profit of more than £40,000 when they sold the Burnley property in March 2007. The Telegraph claims today that accountants calculate that the couple saved between £9,750 and £16,800 in tax - depending on whether they made other profits on investments that year - by redesignating the house as their main home shortly before the sale.

The tactic is not illegal, but it is morally questionable given that the taxpayer had been helping to subsidise the house under the allowance system while it was designated her second home.

Ussher was already under pressure after the Telegraph disclosed that she had claimed more than £20,000 for extensive renovations to her London home within a year of being elected as MP for Burnley in 2005. ·