Picture this heart-warming scene at a Department for Work and Pensions office in, let's say, Darlington. A family, fallen on hard times, is pleading for money from the Social Fund to buy furniture for their sink-estate home. A kindly official hands them a list and on seeing it - oh, joy! - their faces light up. For it is the famous “John Lewis list” and our protagonists see that they can have £6,000 to spend on a bathroom, £2,000 on a three-piece suite and - crack open those Kestrel lagers, mother - £750 on a well-wicked plasma telly.

No, wait. I've got it wrong, haven't I? What our needy family is entitled to, now I come to check, is a maximum £1,500 budgeting loan to furnish the entire house and then they have to pay every penny back. Possibly until the day they die.

Not like Westminster MPs, thank goodness. They get help with the worrisome task of furnishing their second homes by claiming up to £22,000, scot-free, from the taxpayer, as we learnt from the Freedom of Information Act last week. The “John Lewis list” - so-called because it is based on prices at the upmarket store - advises them that they can spend, say, £200 on a nest of tables and £300 on a “freestanding mirror”. Quite right. Can you even begin to imagine life without a standalone mirror and an occasional table?

It's just a thought, but do you think the parliamentary officials who drew up this list have ever heard of Ikea? They allow MPs to claim £1,000 for a bed, yet not that long ago I bought an Aspelund double bed for under £200, including the mattress and bedding.

Why do MPs require such luxury at a house they kip in for two days a week? Possibly because their consciences won't let them sleep after they have submitted a chit claiming £10,000 - that's half a nurse's salary, folks - on a fitted kitchen. They get to lash £500 on a “bookcase”, yet the world over the houses of ordinary mortals are filled with the ubiquitous twenty quid Billy bookcase. If there was ever conclusive proof that MPs inhabit a parallel universe then surely the John Lewis list is it.

Perhaps it is thought that MPs might lose their dignity if they shopped at Ikea because of their sniggerish product names. Yes, there might well be a danger that we'd poke fun if we discovered that a Cabinet minister had a Jerker desk or indeed the Speake had, a Nob shelf storage system.

I know that if I was a dfs advertising manager I'd be feeling pretty depressed today. All that wall-to-wall TV advertising about its never-ending double-the-discount sales, with Linda Barker sofas at £300, and it's as if Parliament never noticed. According to The List, MPs get £2,000 - enough to get them to get a three-piece suite at Heal's.

We cannot blame John “never knowingly undersold” Lewis for being used as the benchmark by which MPs should be expected to furnish their front rooms. It treats its staff nicely, by all accounts, and does a lovely range in lined curtains.

It is the Parliamentary Resources Department that uses the list when considering whether to authorise MPs' expenses claims. It had previously declined to release the list fearing that MPs would “automatically claim to the maximum on each item”. What! Politicians filling their boots on the back of the taxpayer? Have you ever heard such a fanciful notion?

Just for MPs' information, the DWP advises the hard-up to ”apply to charities such as the Salvation Army” to help to find them cheap second-hand furniture, or “to local councils that can sometimes provide vouchers for places such as B&Q and Homebase”. A call to the Salvation Army shop in Southport reveals that it has a dressing table for £15 (MPs' allowance £500); a fridge at £45 (MPs' allowance £550); and a mirror for £4 though we don't, unfortunately, think it's freestanding.

Yes, I think a reality check around TJ Hughes and other dirt-cheap furnishing stores should be the next fact-finding mission for MPs. I'll go with them if they want. We'll start with the very reasonable £6 scatter cushions at Matalan.