The former Tory MP Nadine Dorries has said she will pay back £16,876 she received in severance pay because of a mistake by the government.
The former cabinet minister, who resigned and triggered a byelection last year, received the money for her tenure as culture secretary under Boris Johnson. Under current rules it should not be paid to departing ministers over the age of 65, which she turned several months before leaving her job.
Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme Dorries said she had only seen an email about the error on Friday and promised to pay back the sum as soon as possible. “I’ll pay it back on Monday morning, there are no details in the email on how to do that but I will, I’m sure, find out. I was gutted,” she said.
Dorries was MP for Mid Bedfordshire from 2005 to 2023 and a close ally of Johnson, as well as being a bestselling author.
Labour recently pledged to reform the rules surrounding ministerial redundancy payments, which are worth three months of salary for departing ministers.
It emerged recently that the high turnover of cabinet ministers under the past three prime ministers generated a severance bill worth more than £930,000 in the last financial year.
Labour believes it could make savings every financial year of more than 40% if it ensures ministers receive only a quarter of their actual earnings over the last 12 months as a minister instead of their final annual salary, minus any period covered by a previous severance entitlement.
Since 1991 sacked ministers under the age of 65 have been able to claim thousands of pounds in redundancy pay as long as they have been out of a ministerial post for at least three weeks. They receive the payments irrespective of how long they have stayed in their latest post, or the circumstances under which they left.
Alex Burghart, a Cabinet Office minister, said this month: “Such payments should not apply where a person has attained the age of 65. If a former minister was incorrectly given a severance payment the relevant department will contact the individual to recover the overpayment.”
