Nine Lords (and Ladies) a-leaping for joy!

Sir Ian Kennedy, the chairman of the Commons standards watchdog is reported today to be in a hurry to fix a new regime for MPs’ expenses before the next election ushers in a new slew of MPs.

There is no such hurry in the House of Lords.

Nor is anyone in the Lords over anxious about speaking publicly about the closed door un-minuted meeting that last week came up with the brilliant scheme whereby their Lordships have only to visit their ‘primary residence’ just once a month to qualify for out-of-town allowances and travel expenses that in many cases run into many tens of thousands of pounds.

So who chaired this hugely important committee in the crucial deliberation that arrived at this bizarre decision? Quite naturally perhaps, it was the Lords Speaker, Baroness Helene Hayman.

But hang on a moment, is this the same Lady Hayman who has claimed some £200,000 for what she describes as her main residence in Norfolk, whilst continuing to live in a London home that she bought and has lived in since 1975?

Lady Hayman is one of nine all-party peers cleared of abusing the out of town allowances totalling tens of thousands of pounds. Times Online conveniently lists them all:

“Lord Colwyn, a Tory peer who claimed £170,000 by designating a Cotswolds property as his main home; Baroness Hayman, the Lord Speaker, who claimed £200,000 over eight years for a property in Norfolk; Baroness Morgan of Drefelin, the children’s minister, who claimed more than £140,000 for a cottage in West Wales; Baroness Northover, a Lib Dem frontbench spokeswoman, who claimed £90,000 on her mother’s home in Sussex; Baroness Thornton, a Labour whip, who claimed £22,000 on her mother’s bungalow in Yorkshire; Lord Morris of Manchester, who claimed on a house in Manchester before flipping his main residence to London; Baroness Whitaker, a Labour peer who claimed £150,000 on a rented cottage in Sussex; and Lord Haworth, the Labour peer, who claimed £100,000 on a property in Scotland.”

Lady Hayman may have set the rules in her committee, but she did not execute them.

This was left to Michael Pownall, the Clerk of the Parliament – a career Lords civil servant who has toiled on their Lordships expenses and welfare for nearly forty years. He was party to the Lords continuing un-receipted expenses system during the period of the controversial expenses payments.

So here we are.

The new expenses system in the House of Lords now allows a peer merely to “visit” a property out of London once a month to claim it as his primary residence. He, or she, does not need to own it nor provide proof of rental payments. The property can be owned by a relative.

Whilst most of the attention has focused on the Commons, and upon police investigations, the House of Lords could appear to some to have been left somewhere adjacent to the Mad Hatter’s tea table, oblivious to the real world spinning beyond.

Are these self made “behind closed door” deals really going to be allowed to prevail? Who’s to stop them? What do they say of this significant limb of our legislative system?