Lynne Jones gave her Lambeth flat a £22,000 facelift, including £6,100 for a new bathroom, £600 for Persian rugs and £518 for an LCD television.Miss Jones, a leading member of the Socialist Campaign Group founded by supporters of Tony Benn, gave her Lambeth flat a £22,000 facelift which also included £6,100 for a new bathroom, £600 for Persian rugs and £518 for an LCD television.
Almost £7,000 of claims for painting and decorating, furnishings and a new boiler were paid out after the date in 2007 when Miss Jones announced her intention to stand down as MP for Birmingham Selly Oak at the next general election.
The cost to the taxpayer would have been even greater if the parliamentary fees office had not refused to pay for other items deemed “excessive”, that included two limited edition etchings by the artist Phil Greenwood which cost a total of £725, and £1,105 of decorating work for which the bill was put in too late.
Many of the claims submitted by Miss Jones appear highly questionable in the light of rules set out in the parliamentary Green Book, which ban claims for any items which are “luxurious or premium grade” or work which “enhances” a property.
Miss Jones, 58, a former Birmingham city councillor who has been a backbench Labour MP since 1992, is a staunch opponent of the New Labour project, and threatened to stand against Gordon Brown to prevent him being elected unopposed as Labour leader. Between 2004 and 2008 she claimed a total of £61,468 in second home allowances for her London flat, where the mortgage interest repayments in 2008 were just £314 per month.
In the same period, Miss Jones claimed £5,074 for a painter and decorator. In addition she claimed for 11 rolls of block printed Farrow & Ball “St Antoine” wallpaper, at £63.99 per roll; eight rolls of Farrow & Ball Toile Trellis wallpaper at £52 per roll, and £71.50 for Farrow & Ball paint.
The mother of two also submitted two invoices for the refurbishment of a bathroom, totalling £6,100, £323 for two pictures, £1,298 for a bed from the Iron Bed Company, £600 for bookshelves and £878 for new floorboards. She claimed £600 towards the £1,300 cost of two Persian rugs.
An £815 bill for the replacement of two radiators was submitted twice and appeared to have been paid for twice.
In January 2007 Miss Jones announced that she would not be standing at the next general election, but the refurbishment of her London flat carried on, with another £6,761 spent on renovations. Miss Jones, who has already published details of her expenses on her website, yesterday said she had decorated her London home to a similar standard to her constituency home, often using the same brands, such as the Farrow & Ball wallpaper, which she regarded as being “in both the spirit and letter of the rules as I understood them”.
She said the old bathroom had been “tatty and unhygienic” and that she would be contacting the fees office to see if the plumbing bill had been paid twice.
She also said she would pay capital gains tax on any profit she made.
Lynne Jones
Job: backbench Labour MP for Birmingham Selly Oak
Salary: £64,766
Total second home claims:
2004-05: £16,319
2005-06: £17,576
2006-07: £14,045
2007-08: £13,528
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