Nadine Dorries, former Tory MP and cabinet minister, has stated that she will repay £16,876 in severance pay that she mistakenly received. According to government accounts, she wrongly received the exit payout for her time as culture secretary under Boris Johnson. However, the rules dictate that since she had reached the age of 65 when leaving office, she should not have been eligible for the payment. In an interview with BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, she confirmed that she would repay the sum on Monday, but was “gutted” to find out about the mistake because “now everybody knows I’m not 49.”
The erroneous exit payment was listed in her department’s latest set of annual accounts and was initially reported by The Times earlier this week. Five exit payouts appear to have been mistakenly issued to former ministers aged 65 and over during the last financial year. Tory peer Baroness Stedman-Scott was paid £17,742 after departing as a pensions minister, while former Tory MP Peter Bone, former health minister Maggie Throup, and former whip Sir David Evennett were also mistakenly paid, with payments of £5,593, £5,593, and £4,497, respectively.
On Thursday, the Cabinet Office announced that relevant departments would be reaching out to those who received erroneous payments to recover them.
Labour has committed to revamping ministerial severance pay rules should it win power by linking the amount received to the actual time spent in office, reducing payouts to ministers who spend less than a year in their roles. Ms Dorries, who entered Parliament as the MP for Mid Bedfordshire in 2005, had been a minister at the health department before being promoted to culture secretary by Mr Johnson in September 2021. In August last year, one of the former prime minister’s closest political allies formally quit as an MP with a blistering attack on current PM Rishi Sunak.
Ms Dorries said that there were “no details” in the email she received about how she could repay the money, but she was confident she would “find out.” Her former department’s HR division is understood to be liaising with her
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