MONITOR is tasked to secure NHS value for money
Yet its chief spends £25 a time on taxis to commute
short hop across bridge
Baroness Hannam, Monitor’s Chairman of the NHS watchdog supposed to secure value for
taxpayers’ money, spends £25 a time on taxi journeys of less than a mile to hop between her offices in the House of Lords (whose members get a daily expenses allowance) to travel to Monitor’s offices just across Westminster Bridge.
The Bridge supposedly that “earth has not anything to show more fair”. Yet the Baroness scorns advice of her employer, NHS, to exercise more for health – and walk across it. Now, someone has “whistleblown”, and Monitor is “urgently reviewing” its expenses policy.
Hannam’s excuse? She WAS “horrified” and “didn’t know”, rings a bit false, when for years she was a Councillor of Kensington and Chelsea Council, so one assumes she got to know London very well.
The Baroness apparently clocked up a bill of almost £1,000 in two months for the short journeys across the Thames, on 38 trips between the Houses of Parliament in Westminster and Monitor’s HQ, the regulator of NHS foundation trusts, in Waterloo.