THE disgraced former leader of Essex County Council is again at the centre of a huge fraud investigation in which 50 peers are being accused of conning taxpayers by simply clocking in and clocking out of the House of Lords.
The Met Police have reopened their probe into allegations that Lord Hanningfield routinely claimed for a full day's £300 allowance, instead of the half-day £150 allowance, to foot the bill for his dog and chicken-sitter.
The 73-year-old, born as Paul White, denied using that as an excuse for the latest "clocking-in-and-out" parliamentary scandal in which he was ordered to repay £3,330 worth of falsely-claimed £300-a-day attendance allowance by a House of Lords conduct panel earlier this year.
He claimed to know at least 50 other peers who had been using the same clocking-in and clocking-out method to claim thousands of pounds for doing no more than turning up at the House of Lords
He has now been challenged to reveal those other names by sitting members of the Lords.
A Met spokesman said: "Following receipt of a letter in December 2013, officers within Specialist Crime and Operations undertook a review of allegations of unlawful claiming of allowances at the House of Lords.
"The review considered specifically whether there was evidence of any criminal offence.
"The conclusion of the assessment was that based on the information officers had access to at that time, there was no evidence that a criminal offence had been committed and that the matter should be investigated by the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards.
"Following the publication of the Lords Commissioner's report in May 2014, officers conducted a thorough review of both the contents of the report and the full material available to them and a decision has been taken to instigate an investigation.
"We can confirm a 73-year-old man attended by appointment an east London police station and was interviewed under caution in relation to an allegation of fraud."
Speaking to the Chronicle from his home in May, he said: "No, I did not use the chickens as an excuse, it's ridiculous. You can see my list of employees. You will find out everything in due course."
The House of Lords launched an investigation in December last year after the Daily Mirror filmed him clocking into Parliament on 19 occasions in July 2013, collecting a total £5,700 in attendance allowance and claiming £470 for travel costs.
But on 11 of those occasions he was there for no more than 40 minutes, with his shortest stay just 21 minutes.
In December last year he told the Chronicle: "It's a storm in a teacup – I haven't broken any rules, I haven't done anything wrong."
Hanningfield, who was handed his peerage in 1998 for his help founding the Local Government Association, was forced to step down from the Government front bench in the Lords, resign as Essex County Council leader and suspended from the Conservative Party in February 2010 after being charged with fraud over £14,000 of Parliamentary expenses.
Between 2006 and 2009, Hanningfield had falsely claimed for hotel rooms in London when in fact he had been chauffeured back to his home in West Hanningfield at the Essex taxpayer's expense.
He served nine weeks of a nine-month jail sentence in 2011 and was reinstated into the Lords in April 2012, after repaying £30,000 to Parliament.
In November 2012 Essex County Council released full details of Hanningfield's credit card spending, amounting to £287,000 between 2005 and 2010, including lavish meals out and trips abroad. Despite this, a further police investigation was dropped. The authority said about £40,000 of his bill was irrefutably wrongly claimed and is to this day attempting to reclaim the money.
He is currently suspended from the Lords until the next general election.
