68. Letter to Mr Ian Kirkbride from
the Commissioner, 15 March 2010
Thank you for your letter of 11 March, responding
to mine of 17 February, with your assistance in my consideration
of this complaint. I was most grateful for your help and for this
response.
There was one point on which I hope you may be able
to help me a little further. It relates to your overnight stays
in the constituency when you were not there for childcare purposes
but were preparing to support Ms Kirkbride and her staff on IT
matters, including the maintenance of her website. I appreciate
that you did not keep detailed diaries and so cannot give me precise
figures. But it would be very helpful if I could have some sense
of how often in a month, or a year, you would spend the day or
the overnight in the property for this additional purpose. For
example, would it have been one Sunday night a month, or was it
less frequent than that? I need to ask you because it may be helpful
to me, in coming to a conclusion on this matter, to know whether
you regularly used this property for this purpose, or whether
it was occasional, or even very occasional.
It would be very helpful if you could let me have
a response to this final point within the next week or so. In
the meantime, I will be showing your letter to Ms Kirkbride and
including it with the papers on which I am consulting the House
authorities. In due course, as you know, this correspondence is
likely to be published once my inquiry is completed.
Thank you again for your help and I look forward
to hearing from you.
15 March 2010
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