WENDY ALEXANDER, the Scottish Labour leader, faces a new crisis after it emerged that she and senior colleagues have given thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money to a company that helps with campaigns for the party.

Alexander is already under pressure to resign after she admitted receiving an illegal donation for her leadership campaign from Paul Green, a businessman based in Jersey who is not a UK voter.

Now it has emerged that she, along with eight senior colleagues, used parliamentary allowances to pay £5,000 to Computing for Labour (CfL), a company owned by the party and based at its London headquarters. It provides IT services that are offered free by the Scottish parliament.

CfL provides software which helps politicians to organise files on individual constituents.

It is used not only by 13 Labour members of the Scottish parliament (MSPs) but also by 260 Labour MPs and 16 Welsh assembly members. Between them, they pay the organisation an estimated £68,000 a year from their parliamentary allowances.

The money is paid even though similar software has been available free to MSPs of all parties through the Scottish parliament’s IT department since 2003. Westminster politicians said the only other systems available to them had to be paid for.

CfL helps Labour to campaign during elections, designing candidates’ websites and software that allows them to send text messages directly to voters. Its website states that it is “a membership organisation set up to encourage and support the use of computers so that they contribute to achieving the party’s aims”.

Parliamentary authorities prohibit the use of office equipment paid out of allowances to be used for party purposes but have permitted payments to CfL on the grounds that MSPs require support to help to deal with constituents’ problems.

However, a former CfL employee said that income from elected representatives made the company’s election campaigning work possible. “Basically it pays for the salaries of the same employees who help out with political support at the time of election campaigns – so in that sense it is all the same. It cross-subsidises it.”

Murdo Fraser, deputy leader of the Scottish Conservatives, said it was “astonishing” that taxpayers’ money appeared to be used to subsidise Labour campaigns.

He is demanding an investigation by the parliamentary authorities and calling for the practice to be banned, adding that Alexander has made “another serious misjudgment”.

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