'Baroness of Bethnal Green" is condemned as "She's yet another thieving parasite on UK taxpayers"

From The Sunday Times
May 3, 2009
The Lords head for another PR disaster

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article6211393.ece


After last week’s fiasco over MPs’ expenses when Gordon Brown abjectly failed to get through his proposal to abolish the second home allowance, it would be easy to think that parliament’s problems in this area are confined to the House of Commons.

That would be a mistake. Just as this newspaper’s “cash for amendments” exposé revealed how practices that were common in the lower house years ago had migrated to the Lords, so we reveal today that the same is true of abuses of expenses. Members of the Lords receive a daily attendance allowance, ironically the route favoured by the prime minister for the Commons.

They also receive “overnight subsistence” payments to cover the cost of accommodation in London on the occasions they attend the Lords. That sounds reasonable, except when certain peers decide to find ways of milking the system.

Baroness Uddin, the Labour peer, lives in Wapping in east London, four miles from parliament. Her expenses for getting to the House of Lords should be no more than a couple of pounds by Tube or a bit more by taxi.

Yet, as we report today, Baroness Uddin claimed £29,000 last year, one of the largest such claims among peers, for overnight subsistence. In the past eight years she has claimed more than £180,000. This is because her main residence is, she says, not in the East End but 35 miles away in Maidstone, Kent.

That has all the hallmarks of a sham. She has owned a flat in Maidstone since 2005 but we can find no evidence that it has ever been occupied, until a flurry of activity in recent days to make it appear so when our reporters began their inquiries.

The property has been empty and unfurnished since it was purchased, according to neighbours, and yet it is supposed to be Baroness Uddin’s main residence. As to whether she owned any property outside London to support her pre-2005 overnight subsistence claims, neither she nor her lawyers will say.

Baroness Uddin should be a model member of the House of Lords. Ennobled by Tony Blair in 1998 for her work on women’s rights and disability, she cooperated closely with the prime minister and Cherie Blair, his wife. At the time of her appointment, the Bangladeshi-born former social worker and deputy leader of Tower Hamlets was the youngest female member of the Lords.

Now she finds herself accused of feathering her own nest at the taxpayers’ expense. She is to blame for this, but so are the parliamentary authorities who have allowed this kind of activity to flourish. It has to change if the Lords is to escape further humiliation.

HAVE YOUR SAY
If the flat was occupied she wld have been paying utility bills. She can easily demonstrate that it was occupied by providing copies of her gas & electricity bills for the past 4 years. But she can't & won't - because she hasn't been living there. She's yet another thieving parasite on UK taxpayers
Donna, Effingham, England
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