Former British home secretary Jacqui Smith has been ordered to apologise to the House of Commons after a parliamentary watchdog found she "clearly breached" rules on second-home expenses.
Ms Smith, whose resignation in June made her the highest profile casualty of the expenses scandal, designated the house she shared with her sister in London as her main home and then claimed second-home allowances on her Redditch family home.
The House of Commons Standard and Privileges Committee published the results of a six-month investigation undertaken by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, John Lyon, on Monday which strongly criticised Ms Smith.
While acknowledging "mitigating circumstances" it said: "Ms Smith clearly breached the rules of the House by wrongly designating her main home from 2004 to 2009. We recommend that Ms Smith apologise to the House by means of a personal statement."
It also said she had accepted she also breached the rules by failing to notify Commons authorities for one year that she had changed the address of her designated main home. However, it said she "gained nothing from this lapse, and the public interest was not harmed. We therefore recommend no further action."
In a written response to the inquiry, Ms Smith said she was disappointed at the outcome, but apologised to the inquiry. She has not been asked to repay any money.
Ms Smith is expected to make a formal apology to the House of Commons on Wednesday, according to media reports.
The report was published as letters were sent to all 646 MPs by a separate independent body charged with auditing their expenses and as Prime Minister Gordon Brown said politics had to be cleaned up to restore trust.
A retired senior civil servant, Thomas Legg, has been scrutinising MPs' expenses since the scandal broke earlier this year. According to media reports, several MPs have said they will not repay the money.
But in an interview with GMTV, Mr Brown said it would be unwise for any MP to refuse to pay back some of their expenses. "We have got to clean up politics, we have got to consign the old discredited system to the dustbin of history, so this is part of the process of doing so," he added.
Speaking on behalf of MPs, Stuart Bell, who sits on the Members Estimate Committee, which will decide whether to accept Legg's findings, has said that if MPs were asked to pay back approved expenses it would amount to a change in criteria and be unfair.
"It's like that thing on the telly where you saw the goalkeeper moving the goalposts. I understand that he may have gone beyond that," he told BBC radio.