Tag Archives: margaret moran

Mark Pack

Margaret Moran makes £177,000 profit on tax-payer funded house

By Mark Pack | Sat 10th April 2010 - 5:20 pm

MPs’ expenses – the scandal that just keeps on giving:

MPs’ expenses: Margaret Moran sells taxpayer-funded Luton home for £177,000 profit

The MP for Luton South, who was suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party over the expenses and lobbying scandals, bought the semi-detached property for £72,995.

She “flipped” her second home designation to the house for just one year but in that time used £22,341 of public money on it, which included the installation of a new central heating system and bathroom, a complete overhaul of the garden and the redecoration of several rooms…

Her three-bedroom house is now being sold for £250,000, making

…

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Mark Pack

Viewing MPs’ travel expenses on a map

By Mark Pack | Fri 3rd April 2009 - 11:10 am

There’s a nifty little Google Map at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/maps/mpTravelExpensesMap.html which is a great example of how you can use maps to make statistics clearer. In this case, the big issue is that MPs do have genuinely different legitimate travel needs depending on where they live. It’s only reasonable for an MP from Scotland to have much higher travel expenses than one who lives in London, for example.

Putting the sums on a map helps show the patterns which are reasonable. And it also highlights those which are a bit more surprising, such as the previously mentioned Margaret Moran, Labour MP …

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Mark Pack

Why does one Labour MP claim £80k more in expenses than another MP living on the same street?

By Mark Pack | Tue 24th March 2009 - 8:55 am

The two Labour MPs for Luton, Kelvin Hopkins and Margaret Moran live on the same street in Luton. You could argue over whether or not they should be able to claim a second homes allowance. But what’s really rum is that whilst Kelvin Hopkins has claimed £8,894 from the second homes allowance in the last five years, which could be for reasonable occasional costs such as the odd night in a hotel after a very late night at work, his near-neighbour Margaret Moran has claimed nearly ten times as much: £87,206. Is that really right?

Hat tip – Duncan Borrowman.

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