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Vince Cable has just dropped in to the office after visiting Oldham College.

He was in the region to launch Lib Dem plans to provide poorer pupils with a special premium – and to encourage greater take-up on maths and science qualifications.

Mr Cable said he wanted to build a post-banking-collapse economy that saw greater emphasis put on high skills and tapped into the manufacturing tradition in areas like the north west.

“We need to construct a new type of economy that is much less reliant on London and the financial sector,” he said.

Mr Cable also denied that the Lib Dems were already preparing for the possibility of being kingmakers in a hung parliament.

“We are not planning how to manage that,” he said. “We are planning how to increase the number of seats we have in parliament.

“We have got an election to fight.

“It is not in our hands, in any event. The public will decide.

“We are not spending time in big strategic discussions about it [a hung parliament].”

In addition to the Legg report, today has also seen the publication of the list of parliamentary rooms booked for functions by MPs.

My personal favourite so far? David Cameron, Dining Room C, October 28, 2008. Tea for 14 members of the West Oxfordshire Lady Freemasons.

“The George House Trust, which is an HIV charity in Manchester, offered a positive speakers training programme on HIV. It found, when training NHS staff, that less than half of the health professionals interviewed were able to correctly identify the routes for HIV transmission from a list of routes shown to them. I spoke to a former nurse who worked at an NHS hospital in the north-west, who was diagnosed as HIV-positive and had some difficulty coming to terms with that. In a short space of time his employment at the hospital was ended because he was made to feel so uncomfortable by the staff that he had worked with. He currently receives treatment at another hospital some distance away. A lot of the problems are down to the fact that there is still a great deal of ignorance on the part of NHS staff. One would expect that people working in the health service would have the best knowledge, but that is not so at the moment.”

- David Borrow (Lab, South Ribble), speaking in parliament this week

The biggest single ‘over-claim’ in our region was £6,654.58, by Neil Turner (Lab, Wigan).

The money, which has been repaid in full, related chiefly to mortgage interest claims for 2004-05 and 2008-09.

Lady Ann Winterton (Con, Congleton) was ordered to repay £143.00 for a gas bill for which her husband Sir Nicholas Winterton (Con, Macclesfield) had already claimed.

Lady Ann has already paid back a total of £544.42 requested by Legg.

From today’s report:

A colleague mutters: “No issues? He’s got more issues than the Beano…”

First up, the curious case of Sir Gerald Kaufman and his grapefruit bowls.

You may remember that the Gorton MP claimed for two of the Waterford crystal bowls, costing £240.95, in 2006-07.

He told us at the time that a cleaner has smashed one of his existing bowls, and because of a (self-diagnosed) obsessive condition, he felt compelled to get two identical replacements. One for him, one for any guests.

Legg has demanded the money be repaid – pointing out that Sir Gerald could simply have claimed on home insurance.

Sir Gerald was also told to repay £330 towards the cost of a £1,850 rug and £2,000 towards his cleaning bill – which totalled nearly £5,000 in 2008-09.

He has already paid back the cash.

Have spent the morning gutting the Legg report. I’ll be posting a few of the local highlights in the next hour or so.

Overall, 19 MPs in our region have been ordered to repay just under £35,000.

More in a moment…