Former Minister Elliot Morley jailed over expenses
Ex-Labour MP Elliot Morley has been jailed for 16 months for fiddling his expenses. The former Environment Minister claimed more than £30,000 in bogus mortgage payments.
A Labour Party spokesman said Elliot Morley had been excluded from the party following his custodial sentence.
Morley had wept in court while awaiting sentence, but showed no emotion as the sentence was delivered.
The former Labour MP is the most high-profile of a string of Parliamentarians to appear in court since the expenses revelations rocked Westminster.
He pocketed £30,428 by claiming for a phantom mortgage and inflating the amount he was previously paying.
Read more: Former MP Jim Devine sentenced to 16 months
In total, he claimed £16,800 on a bogus mortgage and £15,200 after inflating the amount he was previously paying – for which he should have been entitled to only £1,572.
Passing sentence, Mr Justice Saunders said Morley was guilty of “blatant dishonesty” and had “thrown away his good name and character.”
He said: “I am satisfied from the nature of the mortgage transactions and the correspondence that the excessive claims were made deliberately and are not explicable even in part by oversight.”
In April, Morley entered two guilty pleas for false accounting over claims made against his home in Winterton, near Scunthorpe, between 2004 and 2007
An MP since 1987, Morley was one of Labour’s most prominent voices on agricultural issues and the environment.
He was party spokesman on rural affairs and animal welfare from 1989 until the 1997 election victory, and served under Tony Blair as Environment Minister from 2003 to 2006.