A cabinet minister who has criticised Whitehall waste has claimed tens of thousands of pounds in expenses to rent a London flat despite her husband owning a property a mile away.
Esther McVey, who was appointed “minister for common sense” last year, has received £39,000 in taxpayers’ money to rent the flat over the last two years. She lives there with her husband, the Tory MP Philip Davies.
The Daily Telegraph, which first reported the story alongside the campaign group Led By Donkeys, said McVey and Davies had been claiming expenses on the property since 2017 and could have received as much as £250,000 from the taxpayer.
Davies owns and lets out a flat about 25 minutes’ walk away in Waterloo. In his register of interests, Davies has declared an annual income of more than £10,000 from this property.
Davies told Led By Donkeys he would have been happy to continue claiming mortgage costs on the flat he owns, “but that option was removed from me”. After the 2009 expenses scandal, rules were changed so that MPs could not claim their mortgage payments back from the taxpayer.
McVey is the MP for Tatton in Cheshire and Davies represents Shipley in West Yorkshire.
They are not breaking any rules but it raises questions about whether the arrangement represents value for money. As a minister, McVey has repeatedly railed against Whitehall waste.
Last year McVey wrote in the Daily Mail that she did not “want you to see a single penny of your hard-earned cash wasted on unnecessary public spending”.
In February she told GB News she had written to independent government agencies asking them to spend more efficiently. “We want to make sure there isn’t any waste … You can’t put up taxpayers’ bills and ask the government for more money, and yet not get rid of wasteful spending yourself,” she said.
According to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, the watchdog created after the expenses scandal, both MPs claim rent for a property in London.
Led By Donkeys has highlighted the cases of several parliamentarians who own and let out properties in London while at the same claiming expenses to rent flats in the capital.
The group said at least another eight MPs were claiming rent in London while also registering income from letting out their own properties in the city, claiming more than £1m in rental expenses since 2017.
Davies told Led By Donkeys: “If I owned the flat outright and I could stay there without incurring any cost then I would agree that I should do that, but that doesn’t remotely apply in my case.
“As far as I am aware, all workplaces cover the accommodation costs of people working away from home, and I am surprised … [you] … think that should no longer be the case. That, of course, will lead to only the wealthiest people in the country being able to become MPs.”
