Dame Disaster walks off with £2.4m pension
CONTROVERSIAL Whitehall mandarin Lin Homer will walk away with a £2.4million pension pot, it emerged last night – as ministers tried to bury bad news on the last day of Parliament before the summer recess. Dame Lin, 59, who quit HMRC in April, was dubbed ‘Dame Disaster’ after presiding over chaos at the tax authority and in her previous role in charge of the immigration service.
But details buried in the HMRC’s annual report, which was slipped out yesterday, reveal she will walk away with an indexlinked pension of £125,000 a year – almost two-thirds of her £190,000 annual salary.
Her pension pot grew by £225,000 last year, when she also received a £20,000 bonus, despite criticism of the taxman’s performance. John Mann, a member of the Commons Treasury committee, described the award as ‘totally outrageous’.
Details of the payment came amid more than 30 announcements and a string of embarrassing reports released yesterday. On a shaming day: The Foreign Office admitted that diplomatic immunity would protect foreign officials and family members suspected of serious crimes, including people trafficking and child sex offences.
A study revealed that up to 7,400 migrants working in the public sector cannot speak English well enough to do their jobs.
The NHS admitted paying £2.6million damages to a sacked whistleblower who exposed a hospital’s failings.
Lin Homer was made a dame in the New Years’ Honours after a 35-year civil service career that was strewn with controversy.
Before coming to Whitehall, she was chief executive of Birmingham City Council, which was caught up in a postal votes scandal. Dame Lin went on to lead the immigration system in a period when the then Home Secretary John Reid described it as ‘not fit for purpose’.
Under her tenure, 1,000 foreign criminals were mistakenly released and 450,000 asylum case files were discovered dumped in boxes at the Home Office.
When she was promoted to the HMRC top job in 2012, the Home Affairs Select Committee said it was ‘astounded’ after her ‘catastrophic leadership failure’ at the immigration service.
Mr Mann said Dame Lin had been ‘a total disaster’, adding: ‘This is the government rewarding abject failure and giving a message that it is one rule for senior officials and another for everyone else.’
Dame Lin drew criticism for flying first class to take a holiday to the US earlier this year when the tax office was facing a massive backlog of phone calls.
She apologised about her department’s failure to answer 18 million phone calls – a quarter of all those it received. She was also forced to defend HMRC after it secured only one prosecution from a list of 6,800 secret Swiss bank accounts linked to the UK that were provided by the French authorities in 2010.
MPs yesterday criticised the release of other announcements in a way that meant they could not be scrutinised properly.
Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth pointed out that Theresa May had complained about Labour making announcements in a similar way a decade ago.