Peer 'kept taxi running while claiming £300 House of Lords allowance'

A peer kept a taxi waiting outside the House of Lords so he could dash inside to qualify for a £300 daily allowance, a former Speaker of the Lords has claimed.

Baroness D’Souza, who stepped down as Lord Speaker last year, told a BBC documentary that many peers “contribute absolutely nothing” and attend only to take advantage of the daily attendance allowance.

Meet the Lords, a three-part BBC Two series, follows a number of peers over the course of a year, marking the first time programme-makers have been given free-rein to film inside the Lords chamber and behind the scenes at committee meetings.

Lady D’Souza would not name the peer in question, but said that a “sense of honour” that came with being a member of the House of Lords had been lost.

She told programme-makers: "There is a core of peers who work incredibly hard, who do that work, and there are, sad to say, many, many, many peers who contribute absolutely nothing but who claim the full allowance.

“I can remember one occasion when I was leaving the House quite late and there was a peer - who shall be utterly nameless - who jumped out of a taxi just outside the peers' entrance, left the engine running.  He ran in, presumably to show that he'd attended, and then ran out again while the taxi was still running.

“So I mean that's not normal, but it is something that does happen and I think that we have lost the sense of honour that used to pertain, and that is a great, great shame.”

Some peers questioned in the programme suggested that more should be done to persuade elderly peers to retire.

Lord Tyler, a Liberal Democrat, said the Lords “is the best day care centre for the elderly in London”. He added: “Families can drop in him or her and make sure that the staff will look after them very well nice meals subsidised by the taxpayer, and they can have a snooze in the afternoon in the chamber or in the library."

Others criticised the calibre of appointments made by recent prime ministers. Lord Blunkett, the former home secretary, said: “You have got people who may well be, out of the patronage of the government of the day, rewarded for either keeping their mouth shut or opening their mouth or their purse at a particular moment in time."

Lord Tebbit, the Conservative peer, said: "Far too many people have been put in here as a sort of personal reward.You wouldn't have imagined Mrs Thatcher wanting to give a peerage to Denis Thatcher's tailor or something like that.But we have come pretty close to that in recent years."

• The first episode of Meet the Lords airs next Monday at 9pm on BBC Two.