Senior MPs have called for more effective parliamentary scrutiny of government expenditure.

Responding to a Treasury white paper, the Commons liaison committee - which consists of all select committee chairmen - supported reforms proposed under the 'alignment project'.

The MPs said Treasury proposals to change the way spending estimates are presented to Parliament for approval would make spending requests "easier (though not easy) to understand".

The committee said the sums that Parliament approves would be made "on the same basis as those actually used within government for setting the budgets of each department".

But there is scope for further improvements to a system which may still be "inadequate" to the task of holding the executive to account, the report said.

The report called on the government to go further and make two additional days available for Commons debates on the estimates.

And the MPs recommended that the scope of the debate on expenditure approval should be broadened to allow "genuine examination" of future spending plans.

Committee chairman Alan Williams said that effective monitoring of government expenditure is one of the "core functions" of the House of Commons.

"This function is pursued day in and day out by the House, through inquiry and debate on the policies underlying expenditure, on priorities and on overall government spending, and through examination by the National Audit Office and the committee of public accounts of past expenditure," he said.

"However, there has been a broad consensus for some time that the way the actual public expenditure figures underlying government programmes for future years are controlled, needs to be overhauled to make the process much more understandable and useful.

"To this end, we welcome the alignment project white paper, while also today proposing additional opportunities to boost the House's effectiveness in financial scrutiny."