Senior Labour minister Tony McNulty is under pressure to return Commons allowances after he admitted that he didn’t feel too good about claiming for a house his parents lived in. Since 2001-2 Mr McNulty, who became an MP in 1997, has claimed a total of £59,998 in allowances for his second home. In an attempt to halt the row, he has now stopped claiming the hand-outs and urged other MPs who live near London, and claim the benefit, to do the same.
The employment minister is the latest MP to be caught claiming the Common's controversial "additional costs allowance" for a property that is not strictly his home. Mr McNulty lives with his wife Christine Gilbert in a house she owns in Hammersmith, three miles from Westminster. Yet the minister has been claiming up to £14,000 a year in parliamentary expenses to help pay for another house he owns in Harrow, 11 miles from the Commons, in which his parents live. The MP can claim the money because the house is in his Harrow constituency and so qualifies him for the second home allowance.
After the arrangement was disclosed by the Mail on Sunday this weekend, Mr McNulty announced that he had decided to stop claiming the money, which he has benefited from since becoming an MP in 1997. Mr McNulty, who is also Minister for London, said: "There are senior shadow frontbench figures who live five miles further away from Westminster than me who claim the lot. Currently 157 MPs live within sixty miles of London, including 26 inner London MPs who already cannot claim the money, worth up to £24,000 a year. Of the remaining 131, 105 claim the additional costs allowance. If they stopped doing so it would save the taxpayer about £2 million a year.
Mr McNulty accepted that his use of taxpayers' money for the property looked odd and admitted that he has always felt "discomfort" in claiming the money. I would suggest that if he really wants to get rid of that discomfort, he could hand those readies back to the rightful owners, Britain’s taxpayers.
Now to something completely different. The nearest metropolis to where I stay has become somewhat of a ghost town over the past few months, due to the closure of some factories and one of the most successful Woolworths stores in the country. (That £60,000 in Mr McNulty’s back pocket would have given each staff member there £1,000 each, enough to keep them indulging in Pic’n Mix for the next 10 years.) Anyway, I don’t usually like going there nowadays, as it’s difficult to find someone to talk to apart from the gulls. I get the feeling sometimes that I’m about to see a horse making its way along the main street, with Clint Eastwood aboard, complete with a tartan poncho.
However, I had to venture there last Friday afternoon, and was pleasantly surprised to see a more than usual array of cars and human beings. It must have been the glorious sunshine that prompted so many to abandon the homestead for a couple of hours. They were there to be seen and to be admired, from the women flaunting their beauty and obesity, to the men, hoping to get a tan on at least part of their beer bellies. Of course, I have to admit that, being a nine stone walking skeleton, having to wear two or three jerseys, and boots with steel toecaps, in order that I won’t be blown away by the slightest gust of wind, I am simply very jealous.
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