The detailed expenses of every Member of Parliament are likely to be made public for the first time. An all party committee chaired by the Speaker looks set to recommend that the claims made by MPs over the past three years should be published later this year.
Sources have told me that there appear to be no legal grounds for an appeal against a recent Freedom of Information tribunal ruling, which orders the publication of the expenses of 14 prominent MPs and former MPs including Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and John Prescott; David Cameron, George Osborne and William Hague; and Sir Menzies Campbell.
Within weeks the Commons will publish the receipts and bills submitted by those MPs and the authorities are already preparing for a flood of other FOI requests. In theory, they could delay granting each of these requests, dragging out the process of publication over many years. However, sources have told me that senior MPs on all sides of the House now believe that it would be better to publish the claims of all MPs by the end of this year.
Earlier today the Commons published the so-called John Lewis list of items that could be paid for using MPs allowances. Later this month the House of Commons Members Estimates Committee will publish options for replacing the allowances with either an increase in salary; a daily allowance - which could amount to £160 to cover accommodation and food; or a mixture of the two. Whichever of these systems MPs agree to would end a system which allows MPs to claim up to £750 for a TV, £200 for a nest of tables and £10,000 for a new kitchen. It would also end the possibility of further embarrassing FOI requests.
Britain's most effective pressure group appears at first glance to be... the Conservative Party.
Want cuts in inheritance tax?
They call for it. The government does it.
Want a tax on non-doms?
They unveil plans then so does the government.
Want a tougher crack down on incapacity benefit claimants?
Yes, you've guessed it, the Tories called for it and today ministers will pledge to do it.
Now I did say "at first glance" because the truth is, and the Tories privately acknowledge it, that many of the ideas they've called for have originally come from the Labour Party or - to be more precise - from Blairites.
Take today's example. It was Blairite John Hutton who, as minister for welfare, commissioned the Freud Report which recommended new medical tests for all existing incapacity benefit claimants. The Tories took up the idea when they saw Chancellor Gordon Brown resist it.
Their claim that they could cut taxes with the money saved convinced Prime Minister Brown that he was, after all, in favour of it.
So it is with the more important part of today's welfare announcement which is a dull-sounding accounting change but which has huge significance. It's called AME-DEL - not after the names of two benefit claimants but as an acronym of two budget headings - Annual Managed Expenditure and Departmental Expenditure Limits.
Benefits - a whopping £37 billion for those of working age - are paid for under AME which are controlled annually as the name suggest. Back to work programmes are, however, paid for from the much smaller three year departmental budget set aside for them - around £420 million in 2006/7 - covered by DEL.
David Freud - who was commissioned by John Hutton - had the idea - which he borrowed from America - and which the Tories advocated - and which the government will today announce pilot schemes for.
The idea is to make money from AME and give it to DEL. In other words, to change the rules to allow ministers to spend some of the money they've set aside for future benefit payments on getting people back to work now.
Simple sounding but a truly radical step for the Treasury as they'll be spending money before they've saved it.
