Goddard under fire over UK salary package

Dame Lowell Goddard, the New Zealand judge heading the UK Government’s child sex abuse inquiry, could receive more than $9 million in pay and perks amid fears hearings will drag on for a decade.

Goddard’s remuneration package, which includes numerous free flights home and a $200,000 a year rental allowance, has catapulted her to the top of the British public servants’ paylist — and put her under fire, the

Telegraph reports. Campaigners have described the flight and accommodation allowances as “highly questionable”.

The judge’s basic salary of $660,000 a year is topped up with the rental allowance, $20,000 a year for utilities bills and a car and driver for official business — all paid by the Home Office.

The four free return business class flights to New Zealand every year for her and her husband is reckoned to be worth more than $70,000 annually.

And the 67-year-old’s family — understood to be the couple’s four children — are each entitled to two return flights each between the UK and New Zealand.

Harry Davis, campaign manager at the TaxPayers’ Alliance told the Tele

graph: “Justice Goddard is presiding over a serious and sensitive inquiry, but the financial deal handed to her will rankle with many taxpayers.

“Given that she is being paid an extremely high salary, her generous ‘living allowance’ and international flights home are highly questionable.”

Goddard opened the inquiry in July last year, which was ordered by the British Government after revelations BBC presenter the late Jimmy Savile was one of the UK’s worst paedophiles, and subsequent allegations of an establishment coverup of a child sex gang centred on Parliament in the 1980s.