A former Conservative peer who was jailed for falsely claiming more than £10,000 in the parliamentary expenses scandal won £3,500 damages from Essex police on Friday after suing them over a separate arrest.
Lord Hanningfield, 72, was arrested in September 2011 in an investigation into expenses from when the peer led Essex County Council. The investigation was later dropped without any charges.
His arrest and detention, and the search of his home near Chelmsford, took place days after he was released from prison with an electronic tag, having served nine weeks of a nine-month sentence for false accounting over his parliamentary expenses.
High court judge David Eady on Friday found that the arrest of Lord Hanningfield, originally named Paul White, had not been “necessary” as defined in law.
The peer was was found guilty in May 2011 of six counts of false accounting after claiming nearly £14,000 for overnight stays in London when he was somewhere else.
He became the sixth politician to be jailed for fraud in the scandal, which rocked parliament after the Daily Telegraph newspaper obtained details of parliamentarians’ claims.
Claims by other Lords and MPs included widescreen TVs and £1,645 for a floating duck house.
Hanningfield, who had the Conservative whip withdrawn over the scandal, earlier told the court he had been suffering mental health problems at the time of his arrest in the Essex investigation.
“I had been out of prison a few days, I was on a tag, I was still in a state of trauma and shock,” he said.
Mark Spragg, his solicitor from Keystone Law, said: “This was an important case. It reminds the police that arrests should never be made without first considering whether there is a viable alternative to depriving someone of their liberty and invading their home.”
Ex-Tory peer Lord Hanningfield wins arrest payout
