Lords to get £100 a day of taxpayer money for hotels
PEERS can now charge taxpayers for hotel stays for the first time.
Members of the House of Lords have been given permission to claim up to £100 a night when they have to stay in London on parliamentary business.
Their overnight allowance comes on top of the £342 they already receive for each day they appear in the Upper House.
It has been agreed by all three major political parties after concerns from peers that the high cost of staying in the capital is unfair to those who live elsewhere.
‘We recommend that a new allowance should be introduced for overnight accommodation for Members from outside Greater London,’ a report published yesterday by the House of Lords Commission stated.
‘Members attending the House from outside London face greater barriers to attendance. We consider it important that voices from across the country should be heard in the House of Lords and that the scheme for financial support for Members should enable this.’
The new rules – set to be introduced on April 15 – are expected to sail through the Lords’ voting and will only apply to peers with registered residential addresses outside Greater London.
Current orders allow them to claim on ‘attendance travel costs’ including mileage, rail fares and even plane tickets if they live in Scotland or Northern Ireland.
John o’Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said ‘taxpayers are fed up with the growing cost of legislators’. He added: ‘Parliament should do the right thing and scrap this change.’
The overnight allowance follows complaints that the House has
‘Do the right thing and scrap this’
been forced to sit late into the night to discuss key legislation.
one session in June was held from 9.30pm until 4.16am, to which the chairman, Lord Lexden, said: ‘My doctor, who has been a little concerned about some aspects of my ageing system, telephoned with warm congratulations.’
A House of Lords spokesman said: ‘It is important that all parts of the UK are represented in the House of Lords, and that Members who live outside London are not prevented from participating in the business of the House due to rising accommodation costs.’
THE House of Lords has its first red-and-purple-headed Goth. Lady Smith of Llanfaes (Plaid Cymru) came clopping in, dressed in ermine and white slingbacks. Her ladyship, who took her seat at the start of business, turned 28 last week.
She spoke the oath in both Welsh and English. The latter went well except that she swore allegiance to the King’s ‘hairs’, not ‘heirs’. She then shook her own dyed mane, signed the Lords register and slapped down the ballpoint pen as if she’d just filled in her National Lottery numbers.
Which in a way she had. The Lords sits some 200 days a year and the current daily attendance allowance is £342. If Lady Smith retires at 80, she may have pocketed the equivalent of £3.5 million in public funds. As they say in the posher banlieues of Bangor, that should butter a few leeks.
Some will say it’s daft to have someone so inexperienced in the Lords. Others may observe that Lady Smith is no likelier to spout rot than the slurry pit of ex-judges, diplomats, mandarins, MPs, prelates, party donors, trade unionists, dukes, think- tank Berties, halo- polishers, tilt merchants, bottom-pinchers and failed Lib Dem candidates who currently infest the red benches.
The Lords is already a parody of a legislative chamber, the parliamentary plaything of our snooty elite who sneer at popular radicalism, as it again showed this week when halting the Government’s Rwanda policy. Their lordships prefer to play power games than try to stop migrants drowning in the English Channel.
Lady Smith may have accepted her seat but she wishes, simultaneously, to see the Lords abolished. Maybe she is taking her lead from the head of MI6, Sir Richard Moore, and the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Simon Case. Before their resignation from the all-male Garrick Club this week, both men, while claiming to be ardent feminists, said they’d joined not because they were fond of scotch woodcock or the club’s terrific port cellar, but because, as Case put it, he wished to ‘make the change from within’. If Lady Smith comes in for any gyp from impertinent journalists, let her cite the Moore-Case doctrine.
In the Commons we had the habitual casual violence of business questions, where the Leader of the House, Penny Mordaunt, takes her rounders bat to Labour’s increasingly tinkling-toothed Lucy Powell. Ms Powell’s sally against HMS Mordaunt was rewarded with cries of ‘Who writes this pap?’ from Tories. That was a little unfair, for luckless Lucy was marginally better than last week, but it did not stop another terrible beating. Cruel Penny drummed her long fingers on the despatch box, flared her nostrils and inspected Ms Powell like a beetle.
SHE proceeded to describe Labour’s position on the Armed Forces as ‘ frottage’, surely the first time that word has been heard at Westminster since Lord Longford’s day.
Penny projected an air of such withering contempt – her response to the SNP was pure sarcasm – you wonder if she might jack it all in and run a brothel in Kampala.
A government whip, Stuart Andrew, brought a message from the King. He was holding a wand of royal office which looks like a billiard cue. Speaker Hoyle quipped: ‘You’ve forgotten yer chalk.’
In other news Huw Merriman, transport minister, created a sensation by sighing: ‘I do wish the House would be a bit more intellectual.’ How would Bill Esterson ever cope with that?
Oh, and I upset Ed Balls. It happened on the electric television before breakfast. I suggested the Good Morning Britain presenter might not be entirely impartial on Rwanda, given that his wife Yvette Cooper is Shadow Home Secretary. Jumped like a squawking pheasant, did presenter Ed. Marty Feldman eyes.
If Ms Cooper becomes a Cabinet minister, the Balls family income will jump by £67,000. How is that not a conflict of interest?