BEST DAY CARE FOR THE ELDERLY!

Peer’s amazing description of the Lords in BBC documentary

A PEER who lives in a 110-room mansion has lamented not being able to increase the £300 peers receive each day because of the ‘intolerable’ public outcry a pay rise would cause.

Lord Palmer speaks out during a programme that has given a glimpse into the pampered world of the House of Lords.

In the fly-on-the-wall documentary, another peer, Lord Tyler, calls the Lords the ‘best day care centre for the elderly in London’.

Members of the Lords get the £300 tax-free allowance each day just for turning up – even though some of them contribute nothing, according to claims in the BBC2 documentary. But Lord Palmer, who inherited his title 28 years ago and sits as a crossbench peer, said there would be an unwelcome backlash if they were paid more.

The 65-year-old, whose stately home, Manderston House at Duns, Berwickshire, boasts a grand staircase plated with silver, told the programme: ‘If you think that today a high-powered accountant or lawyer is probably charging £600 an hour… but we get £300 a day. The Press outcry if we had a tiny rise would be just absolutely intolerable.’

The documentary, Meet The Lords, which is being screened next Monday, shows elderly peers snoozing on the red benches during a debate and drinking red wine at the ‘long table’ of their taxpayer-subsidised restaurant.

Lib Dem Lord Tyler tells the programme: ‘It’s the best day care centre for the elderly in London. Families can drop in him or her and make sure that the staff will look after him very well – and he can have a snooze in the afternoon in the Chamber or in the library.’

Ex-Lords Speaker Baroness D’Souza says she once witnessed a peer leave a taxi waiting outside while he popped inside to ‘clock in’ and claim his tax-free £300 attendance allowance. There are no checks on peers after signing in, meaning unscrupulous members are free to leave immediately.

Lady D’Souza’s intervention is all the more remarkable given that she came under fire in 2015 for charging £230 expenses for keeping her chauffeur-driven car waiting four hours while she went to the opera on official duty.

During a private screening of the first episode of the three-part documentary, there were ‘gasps of shock’ when Lady D’Souza – nicknamed the Baroness of Excess – told the taxi anecdote.

One peer said: ‘The clear implication was that the peer was on the fiddle and wasn’t the only one. People couldn’t believe she said it. It was blatant double standards.’

D’Souza, 72, was Lords Speaker, responsible for presiding over debates in the Upper House. In 2015, it also emerged that she had run up a £30,000 bill for entertaining dignitaries over five years, including £1,120 for taking Russian delegates to the ballet.

In the documentary, she says that the ‘sense of honour’ that used to accompany a peerage has been lost following a wave of political appointments, and that while most worked hard, there were, ‘sad to say, many, many, many peers who contribute absolutely nothing but who claim the full allowance’.

There have been repeated calls to reform the House of Lords which has more than 800 members, including 90 hereditary peers.

A Lords spokesman insisted the documentary showed how it was doing its work as ‘an active and effective revising chamber’.