Members of Parliament are each paid £61,820. They are granted this sum in order to enable them to represent their constituents and give voters the benefit of their insight into public affairs. This week it appeared from their horrifyingly poor judgment that many of them are being paid £61,820 too much.

After six months of deliberation by a committee established by the Speaker of the House of Commons, MPs were presented on Thursday with a number of proposed reforms to their expenses system. The two most important were that it would no longer be possible to claim for household items to furnish a second home, and that MPs' claims would be externally scrutinised under the auspices of the National Audit Office. Remarkably, a majority of Members decided to reject these changes.

The motivations of the rejectionists were varied, but none do them credit. The first is that long-standing Members of the House might have lost out if the changes were agreed. The reformed allowances would have been available to pay mortgage interest or rent a property, but those who had finished paying their mortgage would no longer have been able to soak up the remaining sum by purchasing household items. It is astonishing that any MP could reason like this. The purpose of the allowance is to defray expenses, not to supplement income.

A second motivation for voting against reform is that external auditing might prove intrusive and expensive. MPs making this argument exhibited a total lack of imagination. Given the extent of concern about the way a number of their colleagues have behaved, how can MPs have decided that external auditing is unnecessary?

A third reason for the vote is more comprehensible, but should nevertheless have been resisted. Many Members have concluded that the public have become so mistrustful and unreasonable that no arrangements of any kind will reassure them. They have therefore given up on reform and determined that they may as well please themselves as they can't please anyone else.

Yet while the frustration felt by MPs is easy to understand, their response to it is not. Members of Parliament need to be compensated for the costs of running two family homes. The idea that they have been able to select any item out of a John Lewis catalogue is a myth - the catalogue was used without the knowledge of Members to provide the House authorities with guide prices. Public hysteria about the idea that someone, somewhere is getting away with a free kettle is unedifying. The remuneration and expenses of Members do not allow MPs to “coin it” as is popularly imagined and insults about “snouts in troughs” are undignified and unfair.

This newspaper has argued that parliamentary salaries are too low but expenses must be transparent. The public have a right, at a mimimum, to a system that is properly audited and that compensates MPs only for costs that they really incur. The new system would not have ended all arguments but it would certainly have been an improvement. Rejecting it shows a failure to understand how serious is the loss of faith in MPs and the urgent need to restore it.

The Prime Minister claims to have been disappointed by the defeat of the reforms. This is disingenuous. When he absented himself from the vote, claiming lamely to have been in meetings (with whom? why?), he will have known his MPs would take it as permission to vote the package down. His close allies rallied the opponents of reform while the vast bulk of Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs supported the change. Gordon Brown must now tell his colleagues that this will not do. He is becoming an expert on U-turns. His expertise is now required.