You're turning MPs into visiting squires: Tory Ministers' fury at changes to second home allowances
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Solicitor General’s fury over rule change that stops him claimimg £24,000 a year to rent second home on 5,600
acre estate
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Mail Online
Two Tory Ministers have accused Commons expenses chiefs of wrecking their right to have a family house in their constituencies by slashing their second-home allowances.

Solicitor General Edward Garnier and Northern Ireland Minister Hugo Swire each charged around £24,000 a year expenses to cover the costs of renting elegant country homes in their constituencies, while living most of the year in private houses they own in London.

Mr Garnier claimed the maximum allowance of £24,006 last year for his beautiful house, Little Dalby Hall, which is on a 5,600-acre estate in Leicestershire.

His allowance this year to cover the rent has been slashed to £8,366.

Mr Swire’s claim for £23,103 to cover the cost of renting a large farmhouse in Devon has been reduced to £9,756.

Both have protested to IPSA, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, after they were told they can only claim for the equiv­alent of a one-bedroom flat.

Mr Garnier is said to have accused IPSA of turning MPs into ‘visiting country squires’.

He was backed by Mr Swire, who said the new system threatened to take politics back to pre-Victorian times when some MPs rarely visited their constituencies.

The move comes amid a growing revolt by MPs who have called for IPSA to be scrapped, arguing it is a shambles and has robbed them of thousands of pounds a year.

Mr Garnier and Mr Swire say the strict new expenses regime is biased against MPs like them who live in London most of the year, but go to their constituencies at weekends and during the long Commons recesses.

They deny they are trying to ‘have their cake and eat it’ by demanding the right to live like gents with two full-sized family homes – one in London and one in the country – with the second funded by the taxpayer.

Mr Garnier has had lengthy discussions with IPSA, by phone and letter, in an attempt to persuade them he is entitled to carry on living in Little Dalby Hall, near Melton Mowbray, with the full cost met by the public purse.

He clashed with IPSA operations director Nigel Gooding, who quit the expenses authority last month after a series of rows with a number of MPs, saying he left the job for the sake of his ‘health and sanity’. It was Mr Gooding who told Mr Garnier his claim for Little Dalby Hall had been cut by more than half – to £8,366 for rent and an extra £2,500 for council tax and bills.

Mr Garnier protested, arguing he would struggle to make up the difference. At the time of his initial protest, he earned £65,000 a year as an MP and he has regularly topped up his salary with considerable earnings as a judge and barrister. In 2003, it was reported that he earned an additional £236,000 in a single year. He was recently appointed Solicitor General on an annual salary of £126,000.

A source said: ‘Mr Garnier became very exasperated in his talks with IPSA. He kept saying the system was rubbish and was turning MPs into visiting country squires. He said if he couldn’t keep Little Dalby Hall, IPSA would be breaking up his family and separating him from his children. Then it turned out two of them are adults. Everyone at IPSA was talking about it.’

Mr Garnier appealed to IPSA chairman Sir Ian Kennedy, who refused to back down. The MP has now asked him to reconsider.

Mr Garnier, 57, is the MP for Harborough. He was educated at Wellington College and Oxford and is the pheasant-shooting grandson of the 8th Baron Walsingham.

His ancestors have been MPs for nearly 500 years. His father, Colonel William d’Arcy Garnier, was a distinguished British Army officer; his mother, the Hon Lavender Hyacinth de Grey, descends from Thomas de Grey, an MP during Henry VIII’s reign.

Mr Garnier’s great-great-grand­father, Thomas Garnier, was a Commons chaplain while another ancestor, Edmund Beckett Denison, the 1st Lord Grimthorpe, designed the clock and bell of Big Ben.

Little Dalby Hall, which dates back to Elizabethan times, is in keeping with the blue-blooded roots of Mr Garnier and his wife Anna, an experienced huntswoman and the niece of a baronet. The couple have two grown-up sons who were educated at Eton and a daughter at university. Conveniently for sporty Mr Garnier, shooting is one of the main activities on the Little Dalby estate.

Their home is the principal house on the estate, which is owned by an educational charity, the Ernest Cook Trust.

But Mr Garnier says it is not as grand as it appears. ‘It looks big but it has four bedrooms and I have a wife and three children. It has a lean-to kitchen, an office, a sitting room and a dining room.’

The MP’s friends say he has been put in an impossible position

by IPSA. One said: ‘In effect they have told him to live in a billet like a bachelor in his constituency.

‘He wants to have a family house there so he can attend to his constit­uency duties properly. These rules threaten to break the link between MPs and their constituencies and reduce them to being tourists.’

Mr Garnier’s London home is an £850,000 Victorian house in Lambeth, just a ten-minute taxi ride from the Commons. He bought it 16 years ago and its value has increased nearly three-fold since then.

Mr Swire, 50, the MP for East Devon, is a close friend of David Cameron and related to the Swire Hong Kong trading dynasty.

Last year, he received £1,400 a month in second-home allowance to rent the pretty Lincombe Farmhouse near the Devon resort of Sidmouth. It has been cut to £812 a month, with extra for council tax and bills. He too complained the

ruling was unfair.

Mr Swire and wife Sascha and their two young children live in a £1 million house in the heart of affluent Fulham, West London. The property is owned by Mrs Swire.

Educated at Eton and St Andrews University, Mr Swire served with the Grenadier Guards before becoming a director of Sotheby’s auction house.

In his bachelor days, he dated Jerry Hall before she married Mick Jagger. The late Joe Strummer, singer with the punk band The Clash, was his brother-in-law.

A friend of Mr Swire said: ‘Hugo is not whingeing. If he is forced to give up his Devon house for a one-bedroom flat he could not take his children down there and so obviously would spend less time there. His constituents would lose out.

‘We will go back to the bad old days when MPs went to their constituencies once every five years before election time.’