THE attorney-general, Baroness Scotland, is facing serious questions about payments of £170,000 that Cabinet Office rules say she was not entitled to receive.

Scotland is already at the centre of a row after she was found to be employing an illegal immigrant as a cleaner.

It emerged yesterday that she has for years been receiving an allowance intended for peers who live outside London, despite saying her main home is in the capital.

Angus Robertson, the SNP’s leader in Westminster, said this was a “serious matter” and he would be writing to the cabinet secretary to request an investigation. He said: “This allowance is meant for people who live outside London, so for someone to be receiving these payments when their main address is already there is ridiculous.”

Scotland has a £2m home in Chiswick, west London, and since 2001 has consistently declared it on her Lords expense forms as her main residence.

Despite this she receives an allowance of £38,280 a year, on top of her £113,000 salary, to help maintain a property in the capital. She also owns a cottage in Oxfordshire.

This weekend her spokeswoman defended the payments, saying that the money is available to all ministers regardless of where they live.

However, the Cabinet Office, the Senior Salaries Review Body and parliamentary documents make clear the money should go only to peers whose main home is outside London.

In a statement, Scotland said at no time did she tell her department that her “main residence was outside London”.

This means that Scotland, who was at the Home Office before becoming attorney-general, may have been wrongly paid up to £170,000 since 2004. Instead, she should have been paid only a London supplement, which would have amounted to less than £10,000 in the same five-year period.

It raises serious questions about the judgment of the attorney-general and her officials. Did they fail to spot that their rules were out of line with others, or are they attempting to justify the payments after the event?

A statement by Scotland’s spokesman said she was paid in line with the Ministerial Salaries Act of 1991. It said: “There is nothing in this legislation which specifies that this allowance is only to be paid to ministers whose main residence is outside London.”

However, this was directly contradicted by a spokesman for the Cabinet Office, which oversees ministers’ pay and allowances. He said the original act made the allowance payable to all lords but the rules changed.

“When it goes into figuring exactly how much [the allowance] will be in future when it is linked to inflation, it links it to the allowance for backbench peers who are based outside London and backbench peers who are based inside London.

“Hence you get the £38,280 which is the main one for people [ministers] who have a primary residence outside the capital, whereas if your primary residence is within the capital you get [a much smaller payment].”

A parliamentary fact sheet on ministers’ pay makes clear that ministers in the Lords can claim the higher fee for night subsistence only if their main home is not in London.

Baroness Hayman, the Lord Speaker, wrote in a statement to this newspaper two weeks ago that the “precise purpose” of the allowance was to help peers “maintain a residence in London”.

The rules were also recently summed up by Bill Cockburn, chairman of the salaries review body, who is looking at Lords allowances.

He wrote: “Paid ministers and other paid office holders [in the Lords] cannot claim the members’ overnight allowance but instead may receive night subsistence allowance.

“This is available to those whose main or sole home is outside London and who need to fund other accommodation in order to undertake official duties. The allowance is currently £38,280; it is taxed and paid with salary.”

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