To pay or not to pay? That is the question facing many MPs as the return of the expenses scandal begins to rumble louder and louder just days after the end of the summer recess. Party leaders have said that MPs must repay the money asked of them by Sir Thomas Legg in order to stand at the next election, but there is a growing body of dissent across the parties from representatives who feel the retrospective approach taken to the review is unjust - one Labour MP today challenged Legg to test his demands in court, while Ann Widdecombe yesterday said that if any other employer acted this way they would be up before a tribunal.

So, what is the right way to deal with this troublesome issue? Politicians and voters alike want the whole sorry episode brought to a satisfactory close as quickly as possible so that we can begin to restore confidence in our government, but Legg’s review has quite clearly achieved the opposite. Is this a case where one side — either MPs or voters - will inevitably be disappointed, or is there a way of resolving it to everyone’s satisfaction?

When party leaders ordered their MPs to pay back any money that was asked of them by Legg after retrospective rule changes, saying those who didn’t would be banned from standing at the next election, they were pandering to what they thought the public wanted to see — politicians being forced to reach into their pockets in humiliation, leaders taking decisive action to ‘clean up politics’. Perhaps they thought it would be the quickest and easiest way to put the whole thing to rest, and wanted to avoid the negative headlines that they feared would follow any refusals.

They should give voters more credit — most people are able to distinguish between those MPs who knowingly benefitted from home-flipping, making extravagant expenses claims, not paying capital gains tax, or illegally receiving money on non-existent mortgages, and those who were probably not trying to play the system, but are nevertheless being forced to pay money back retrospectively. We want the former to be punished, not the latter.

Yes, the rules were wrong, and MPs should arguably not be allowed to claim taxpayers’ money for things like their cleaning and gardening bills, but had such rules not existed, or had the limit for such claims been at the level Legg deems reasonable, honest MPs would have followed those guidelines too. I expect they didn’t even think much about it, which one could of course use as an argument against them, but with such a difficult job I’m sure the cost of their cleaners and gardeners is probably not top of an MP’s list. The fact of the matter is that if your average law-abiding person had been in their place, they would most likely have behaved in exactly the same way.

It seems rather unfair to punish retrospectively the politicians who had no intention of swindling the public for their own financial or material gain, just to convince people that things in Westminster are changing. Trust in politics will not be restored by this catch-all approach — many more politicians are being painted with the brush of suspicion than deserve to be, exacerbating the issue rather than resolving it. I suspect some people will also think less of the party leaders for bowing to a perceived popular agenda, rather than acting with some conviction to ensure that the outcome of Legg’s review is a fair one.