A Labour baroness has received £150,000 in expenses by renting a country cottage from a Conservative colleague in the Lords and saying it was her main home.

For seven years Baroness Whitaker, a former civil servant, rented the property which is on a driveway leading to Lord Renton’s mansion in the Sussex Downs.

Renton, the former Tory chief whip, only occasionally claims overnight expenses when he has to live in London to attend the House of Lords.

Whitaker has been claiming more than £20,000 a year even though she owns — rather than rents — a £1.5m property in an area of north London where she has lived since the 1960s.

Lords can claim an allowance of £174 per night which is intended to help them meet the cost of accommodation in London if they live outside the capital.

Over the past seven months The Sunday Times has shown that at least 20 peers have been making questionable claims about the location of their main home so they can collect allowances.

One peer claimed his main residence is a manager’s flat at a hotel he never slept in; another claimed for an empty and unfurnished property; others declared a mother’s bungalow, a holiday home and even a dead mother’s home that had been sold several years earlier.

The disclosures have sparked investigations by the police and the Lords authorities. But the House of Lords has resisted calls for a retrospective audit of all claims.

Whitaker insists that her expenses claims were made properly as she had moved out of London to live in the country after her husband retired.

She is a 73-year-old former magistrate who worked for the Health and Safety Executive and was vice-chairwoman of the Independent Television Commission.

When she became a life peer in 1999 she used her home town of Beeston in Nottinghamshire in her title.

She said at the time: “Although I live in London now, I still have an affinity with Nottinghamshire. That’s why I chose to be Baroness Whitaker of Beeston rather than Hampstead.” She and her husband have lived in their flat in north London since 1998. They own two floors in a spacious terraced house. A flat next door sold for £1.7m in July this year.

However, when the Lords first published details of expenses, Whitaker said her main home was in “East Sussex”.

After initially renting a property on the Firle estate near Lewes, which Whitaker designated as her main home, they were offered the use of a three-bedroom cottage owned by Renton. Whitaker’s husband Ben, a former Labour MP, had been a friend of Renton since childhood and they moved in.

They used the cottage, while also living in London, for seven years before switching to another property in Sussex this year. Whitaker had claimed £150,000 in overnight expenses while saying Renton’s cottage was her main home and had claimed another £20,000 while previously renting Firle Tower and the new property.

During this time she and her husband gave their London address to Companies House for their directorships. Company law states that directors must give their “usual” address.

Renton said on Friday he had charged the Whitakers a “fair rent” but would not say how much they paid.

Yesterday Whitaker said she had sold her family home in London and bought the flat nearby when she and her husband were retiring and wished to move to the country.

She wrote: “I use the London flat to attend sittings in the House of Lords, which often go on late into the night, and I spend the rest of the time in Sussex, where my husband lives for most of the week.”

She said she had been on the electoral register in East Sussex since 2000 and was an active member of the local Labour party: “Our home has been in East Sussex for 10 years.”

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