Jeremy Hunt has been accused of breaking Parliamentary rules over the advertising of tours of Westminster for the second time in less than two months.
The Chancellor’s team have been promoting weekly tours of Parliament to constituents at a charge of £22 each. The rules for MPs explicitly forbid the offering of access in exchange for payment.
In February, Mr Hunt referred himself to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards after i revealed he had offered access to the House of Commons for school fundraising.
MPs offering tours of Parliament are permitted to charge for travel and associated costs such as booking fees and refreshments during the trip, but must make clear in the advertising of such events that there is no charge related to the tours themselves.
Mr Hunt’s Godalming and Ash Conservatives association uses a ticketing website to book the tours, and it was not made clear on this platform that the £22 charge for the visit was for the associated coach travel and booking fees.
After being approached by i, the Chancellor’s team rectified this and the distinction is now made clear.
When paying for the tour tickets the website states: “You are ordering directly from Godalming and Ash Conservatives.”
The ticketing website is currently advertising four upcoming events simply called ‘Tour of Parliament’ with dates during April and May.
In a social media post last December, Mr Hunt said he had “met over 300 constituents who attended tours of Parliament” and he looked forward “to continuing that next year”.
A source close to Mr Hunt told i: “The website in question was used as a processing page, and constituents would only have been referred to it by an email or letter, which made clear that the charge was for coach travel and booking – as is standard practice for very many MPs and consistent with parliamentary rules.
“The Chancellor’s office run these tours as a service for his local constituents. He and his local party have never made a penny out of them, and it is categorically wrong to suggest otherwise.”
A senior Labour Party source suggested that Mr Hunt ought to be “ultra cautious about appearing to commit another [breach]” after having to refer himself to the standards commissioner for a previous rule break.
Earlier this year it was revealed that he had donated £100,000 to his local association after it was newly formed to take account of boundary changes at the next general election.
While the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards declined to comment on Mr Hunt’s self-referral over auctioning tours of Westminster to raise money for the school attended by his children, it is understood that after assessing the matter this will not be investigated further.
This decision comes after the Commissioner reprimanded four MPs – Ruth Cadbury, George Freeman, Caroline Lucas and Kate Osamor, for providing access to the House of Commons as an auction prize since 2019.
