INVESTIGATIONS into alleged abuses of MPs' expenses will be carried out in secret, under new proposals from the Commons watchdog.

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority's (Ipsa) complia-nce officer is also planning to bar the public from hearings.

The moves put out for consultation are likely to lead to accusations that the regime is less transparent than the one it replaced in 2010 - when the identities of those under investigation were routinely confirmed.

It also amounts to a second u-turn on the issue. Initially Ipsa's rules indicated that the names of MPs under investigation should be released when probes were launched, but the body's compliance officer Luke March refused to do so on the basis it was "unfair".

He resigned and a consul-tation in 2011 concluded that the identities should be made public during formal investigations. Now a new consultation by compliance officer Peter Davis states the reputational damage to MPs of publication "outweighs the benefits of release".

Previously, the compli-ance officer had to "take reasonable steps" to allow the public to attend hearings but now "we propose to remove the reference to public attendance".

TaxPayers' Alliance spokesman John O'Connell asked Ipsa to rethink the plan, saying: "Transparency must be the watchword."