"Campaigners have criticised as too lenient the punishment handed to a Conservative hereditary peer who has been found to have broken the House of Lords rules for the second time. In a report published on Wednesday, the House of Lords concluded that the Earl of Shrewsbury had fiddled his expenses and that he had done so in an unacceptably casual way. The lords' authorities are intending to suspend him from the upper chamber for two weeks."
"The House of Lords investigated the peer, whose full name is Charles Henry John Benedict Crofton Chetwynd Chetwynd-Talbot, after the Guardian revealed he had claimed travel expenses from public funds that he had not incurred. Shrewsbury used a publicly funded first-class rail ticket to attend a board meeting of a company of which he was a non-executive director. In a leaked email he wrote to fellow directors that the government pays for his travel to the meeting."
"He is the fifth peer who the House of Lords has concluded have broken its rules following the Guardian's months-long investigation examining the commercial interests of peers. In his report, Martin Jelley, the House of Lords standards commissioner, decided that the peer, who has been in the Lords since 1981, had wrongly used a first-class rail pass that should only have funded his parliamentary work."
The Earl of Shrewsbury was found to have broken House of Lords rules by wrongly claiming travel expenses. The House of Lords concluded he had used a publicly funded first-class rail ticket to attend a company board meeting and had claimed travel costs he did not incur. The Lords' authorities plan to suspend him for two weeks. The misconduct occurred three months after he returned from a nine-month suspension for lobbying for a commercial company. Campaigners described the punishment as too lenient and warned of a worrying disregard for the rules among repeat offenders. The House of Lords investigation followed Guardian revelations.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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