A GOVERNMENT minister is claiming up to £22,000 a year in expenses by saying that her mother’s modest bungalow in Yorkshire is her main home.

Baroness Thornton, a Labour minister in the whips’ office, has lived and worked in London for more than 30 years and has a £1m family house near Hampstead Heath.

However, Thornton has claimed about £130,000 since 2002 by designating her mother’s current bungalow and, before 2005, her mother’s previous home as her main residence.

The revelation comes after an official complaint was made to the police last week about the way that Tony McNulty, the employment minister, claimed thousands of pounds in expenses on a house where his parents lived.

The disclosures will cause fresh controversy over the way peers are exploiting loosely defined House of Lords rules to claim an allowance intended for members who genuinely live outside London.

Inquiries by The Sunday Times have also raised questions about claims by Lord Truscott, one of the four Labour peers in the “lords for hire” scandal, that his main residence is a small flat in Bath. Last week the flat appeared deserted and neigh-bours said they had not seen the former Labour minister there.

A postwoman who regularly delivers to other flats in the house said the peer’s mail had been on redirect to his address in Mayfair, London, for more than six months.

Many other peers may be using the overnight allowance to fund a weekend bolt hole in the country or a holiday home.

One London-based peer has earned £190,000 from the taxpayer by designating a remote farm in Wales as his main residence and another has a “weekend” home overlooking the waterfront in Cornwall.

The latest findings follow our disclosures last week that Baroness Uddin, a Labour peer living in London, claimed about £100,000 by saying an empty and unfurnished flat in Maidstone was her main residence.

Uddin, who is now being investigated by the House of Lords authorities, has also failed to explain how she was able to claim a further £83,000 in expenses before she bought the flat when she had no obvious home outside the capital.

This weekend MPs and pressure groups called for a full inquiry into the Lords’ expenses, similar to the reform work being undertaken in the Commons by the committee on standards in public life.

Sir Alistair Graham, the former standards commissioner, said: “I hope the Lords authorities will move quickly to look at these allegations and instigate their own independent review.

“It’s time for the Lords to have their own review and it needs to be carried out by an independent body outside of parliament.”

An analysis of peers’ expenses shows that more than half the House’s 700 members are claiming the overnight subsistence allowance, costing the taxpayer £6.3m a year.

Thornton, a friend of Cherie Blair, was made a peer in 1998.

Her family life and career have centred on the capital since she studied at the London School of Economics in the 1970s alongside her husband.

However, Thornton says that her main home was in Bradford. This is despite the fact that she has owned a family home in north London since the 1980s.

During the period she has said she lived in Bradford, her son attended a comprehensive school in Camden, she consistently gave the London address to Companies House and she ran her own lobbying business based in Westminster.

The addresses she has given as the main residences are her mother’s homes in Shipley, north of Bradford. The current main residence is a three-bedroom bungalow that her mother bought in 2005 for £137,000.

When challenged last week, Thornton said her relatives lived in Yorkshire and she had Shaming of our political class, Focus, pages 12-13 decided to live there because her mother was ill. “The reason I have a home in Bradford is because I go home every weekend to look after her.”

Thornton says she pays the mortgage, although Land Registry records make clear that her mother still owns the house. “I share this house with her,” she said.

When asked repeatedly about how she defined her mother’s bungalow as a main residence instead of her family home, she avoided the question and put the phone down.

Truscott, a former Labour energy minister, bought his flat in Bath for £156,500 in 2004, months after becoming a peer. Since then he has claimed about £125,000 in allowances for living in his flat in Mayfair which he effectively deems his second home. He was unavailable for comment yesterday.

Lord Oakeshott, Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said the allowances system need to be reformed: “We need urgent reform to drag us into the 21st century. Stop pretending we are lords and ladies of leisure on expenses and pay us a transparent, taxable, daily rate for the job. Otherwise we will be the house of the rich and retired,” he said.

Insight: Jonathan Calvert, Claire Newell, Solvej Krause and Steven Swinford

Times Recommends

• Should Knox’s trial even have reached the courtroom?
• All that glitters is not sold in Wright’s world
• Believe it or not, Big Brother is your friend