MPs will take the first steps this week towards a more open system for declaring expenses and registering staff.

A study to look at spot checks on the expenses claimed by up to 60 MPs a year will be commissioned by a senior group of MPs in a sign that traditionalists will drop their resistance to independent audits.

The Members Estimates Committee, chaired by Michael Martin, the Speaker, who has led opposition to such checks, meets tonight to discuss the plans. Gordon Brown will also meet key groups of Labour MPs.

The moves reflect a widespread acceptance among MPs that they must restore public confidence after Derek Conway, the disgraced Tory MP, paid excessive amounts to his son with no evidence that he did any work.

Mr Conway, whose wife works as his Commons secretary and who gave jobs to both his sons, continued to insist that he had done nothing wrong. “I am not a crook, though I understand why people put that interpretation on it,” he told the Mail on Sunday.

Latest figures suggest that 170 MPs — almost one in four — employ family members on Commons salaries. Gordon Brown has ordered all Labour MPs to list relatives they employ. David Cameron has told his frontbenchers to do the same and appealed to his backbenchers to follow suit.

The Cabinet Office minister Phil Hope admitted at the weekend that he had employed both his son and daughter during their holidays. They are reading politics at university. He said that it was good work experience.

Martin Bell, the former independent MP and anti-sleaze campaigner, said that party leaders must force all MPs to declare both the family members they hire and their salaries. He suggested there was widespread abuse of MPs’ housing and mileage allowances.

It has also emerged that Sir Nicholas Winterton and his wife Ann, both Tory backbenchers, use Commons allowances to pay rent on a flat that they gave away to their children to avoid liability for inheritance tax.

Another Tory, Bob Spink, employs his ex-wife as well as a woman with whom he had a relationship, and her daughter. A third Tory, Anthony Steen, pays his daughter £5,000 a year for doing half a day’s work a week.

Among the revelations to emerge this weekend

— Peter Hain said he had employed his mother as a part-time secretary. She earned £5,400 last year.

— The Tory MP Anthony Steen pays his daughter £5,000 a year for doing half a day’s work a week.

— David Cameron admitted on Saturday that he employed his sister-in-law Alice Sheffield, 27, as a correspondence secretary. She gets £15,000 a year from party funds.

— The Tory MP Ben Wallace published a complete breakdown of his expenses yesterday and urged his colleagues to follow suit

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