HOW COME?

Fair play to the House of Lords who, without any grunts of discontent, yesterday doled out the `sentences` to the three `Noble` Lords who had transgressed the rules relating to the claiming of expenses.   Labour peers Baroness Uddin and Lord Paul, and crossbencher Lord Bhatia, were suspended after the upper chamber approved the damning judgments of its Privileges and Conduct Committee.

Baroness Uddin was suspended until the end of the parliamentary session in 2012 and told to repay £125,349.  Lord Bhatia was sidelined for eight months and has  ­already repaid more than £27,000.  Labour grandee Lord Paul was suspended for four months and has already ­returned £41,982.

Baroness Uddin (pictured) claimed more than £100,000 by ­stating that her main home was a small flat in Maidstone, Kent, not far from where I live.   But she has been living in east London for more than 20 years. The arrangement allowed her to claim almost £30,000 a year in expenses she would not otherwise have been entitled to.

Now, whilst these may be the harshest penalties dished out by the Lords for 300 years, what do they amount to in reality?   Well, this ignoble trio have simply been required to repay the cash they fiddled from the taxpayer anyway, so there`s no element of `fine` involved, and they are not allowed into the Lords until their suspensions have been completed.   I presume this means they will not be able to claim the daily attendance allowance or any other expenses that go with being a member of the House of Lords.   But that`s it.   No prosecutions for what amount to clear cut cases of defrauding the taxpayer;  no problem with them coming back to start claiming all over again and no question of their titles being taken away.

In the real world where most of us don`t have the privileges enjoyed by the ermine clad members of the House of Lords, we would have been fired from our jobs, prosecuted and jailed for committing the kind of offences carried out by this trio.   So how come these three are getting away so lightly?   I`ve no quarrel with the judgements reached by the House of Lords yesterday - they were simply invoking the sanctions at their disposal - but it really is time for a fundamental change so that elected politicians, whether in Parliament, the EU or local councils and especially the unelected Members of the Lords, are subject to the same laws and judicial procedures as the rest of us.