Campaigners who fought for five years for the publication of MPs’ expenses claims reacted angrily yesterday as their moment of triumph was swamped by a sea of black ink.

As Parliament finally placed 1.2 million documents on its website for the world to see, there were claims that the extensive redactions flew in the face of a precedent set by the High Court last year and made it impossible in many cases to tell whether an MP had abused the system.

Heather Brooke, a journalist and campaigner who first asked the House of Commons about its expenses system in 2004, said that the “censored, sanitised” documents published yesterday were designed to spare MPs’ blushes rather than to address legitimate security or privacy concerns.

Yesterday’s publication makes it abundantly clear that many of the most damaging revelations might never have been exposed if the House of Commons had been able to stick to its own plan for releasing members’ claims. Perhaps most starkly, the practice of “flipping” between different second homes for the purposes of claiming additional costs allowance, employed by Alistair Darling and others, is impossible to spot in Parliament’s version of the documents because all the addresses have been blacked out.

Kitty Ussher, who became Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury only in this month’s reshuffle, resigned from the Government on Wednesday evening after claims that she had flipped her second home to avoid paying capital gains tax. There was no sign, however, of a crucial letter from her accountant, sent on December 14, 2006, that is understood to outline how she temporarily made her Burnley constituency home her main residence while she was selling it so that it would be exempt from the tax.

Hazel Blears, the former Communities Secretary, has agreed to pay back £13,332 after facing similar allegations of avoiding tax. All her address details have been blacked out.

Ms Ussher, like many of the other casualties of the expenses scandal, would probably still be in her job if an unredacted version of MPs’ claims, plus their supporting receipts and correspondence with the Fees Office, had not been leaked to The Daily Telegraph. The censorship is so broad that numerous questionable claims and practices are covered up in the 1.2 million published documents. There is no sign of some of the most outlandish requests, such as Douglas Hogg’s moat cleaning, which was apparently detailed in a ten-page letter to the Fees Office. All MPs’ correspondence to and from the office has been removed from the official version of the claims.

Nor is there any indication that Margaret Moran’s £22,500 bill for treating dry rot was for a property 100 miles away from her Luton South seat, or that the recipient of Bill Cash’s taxpayer-funded rent was his daughter.

A reader can see that Julie Kirkbride and Andrew Mackay each claimed approximately £900 a month in mortgage interest but there is no way for the public to tell that they were claiming for different homes. There was also no mention of the £50,000 extension, built after the Fees Office wrote granting permission for Ms Kirkbride to increase the taxpayer-funded mortgage on her constituency home in Bromsgrove.

There was little clue that MPs had had taxpayer-funded purchases delivered to their primary addresses, rather than to the second homes they were supposed to be furnishing. Madeleine Moon, the Labour MP for Bridgend, was criticised for spending thousands of pounds in furniture shops near her Welsh constituency home and claiming the money back in allowances for her designated second home in London. Receipts for furniture are visible on her expenses but delivery details and supplier addresses are blacked out. She insisted that the fixtures and fittings had been delivered to her London home at a later date.

Anyone searching the online documents for Elliot Morley, the former minister who has faced some of the fiercest criticism, could see that he continued to claim mortgage interest for more than 18 months after March 2006, but from the information released yesterday it is virtually impossible to discover that the loan had been paid off that month. Mr Morley initially blamed his error on sloppy accounting but announced soon afterwards that he would be standing down.

Campaigners said that the House of Commons had gone against a precedent set by the High Court last year, when it upheld the Information Tribunal’s decision to order the publication of some MPs’ expenses and set out strictly limited circumstances in which redaction would be justified.

The Members Estimate Committee, chaired by Michael Martin, which set the criteria for the redactions, has said that the High Court and tribunal rulings related only to the 14 MPs covered by the original Freedom of Information requests submitted by Heather Brooke and two other journalists in 2005 and 2006, and that further requests could be made by people who wanted to know more about the rest of the 646 MPs. Ms Brooke, however, argued that the ruling in her case set a precedent: “If it applies to those 14 it applies to all MPs. They are trying again to be obstructive and make the public submit an FOI request for every single MP to get that information, which gives the lie to all the rhetoric about openness.”

Alistair Graham, former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, said that too much information had been held back. “I am against the sort of redaction and censorship which has clearly taken place,” he told the BBC.

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader, said: “The publication of the expenses in this format has only made people even more frustrated. If people had had to rely on this information to find out about their MPs, they would have been faced with swaths of black ink rather than information about the flipping of homes and the avoidance of capital gains tax.”

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