Suella Braverman used £25,000 of expenses to pay her parents' energy bills for five years while occasionally staying at their home rent free.
False. The expenses claimed were for all household bills in relation to her London home which is allowed under the parliamentary expenses rules.
A series of posts on Facebook have revived an old claim that former home secretary Suella Braverman used parliamentary expenses to pay the energy bills for her parents’ home.
The posts claim this was despite her only staying there occasionally.
One says: “Suella Braverman used £25k of expenses to pay her parents Energy Bills for 5 years when she occasionally stayed there rent free. Then she calls other people scroungers.”
Full Fact has previously written about this claim which appears to have originated from a misreading of an article published in the Mirror on 2 April 2023. The paper reported that Ms Braverman had claimed around £25,000 in expenses over the previous five years to cover energy and other costs for her home in London, and that she stayed rent-free at her parents’ house during visits to her constituency in Fareham, Hampshire.
However, unlike the Facebook posts, the Mirror article makes it clear that the money being claimed was for household bills at Ms Braverman’s London home, not the home of her parents.
According to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), the independent body responsible for MPs’ expenses and pay, such payment claims are available to all MPs who represent constituencies outside London to prevent them from being “out of pocket” because they have to run two homes—one in their constituency and another in London to provide easy access to the Houses of Parliament.
In her 2018 to 2019 commentary to IPSA—the most recent available—Ms Braverman wrote: “I ceased to claim for the rental of my Fareham property in 2017 and claim solely for the utility bills associated with my London home. I do not claim for any costs at my Fareham home.”
The social media posts also claim that the £25,000 that was claimed over five years has been spent on energy bills. This is actually how much she claimed for all the household bills between 2018/19 and 2022/23. This increased slightly to £25,652 in the five years to 2023/24.
Over the last five years, she claimed £12,676 on gas, electricity and water bills.
IPSA’s records show that in 2023/24, Ms Braverman claimed £4,504 for accommodation of which £2,397 was the cost of utilities. The remainder was made up of £120 in landline and internet charges and £1,987 in council tax.
Misleading claims about politicians or political parties have the potential to affect people’s opinions of individuals and parties and how they choose to vote. We often see these types of claims spread widely online, and have written a number of fact checks on false claims about politicians.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the expenses claimed were not for energy bills on her parents’ home but rather for all household bills in relation to her own London home.
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