specially for trotsky shameless peer once kept his taxi running while he nipped into Parliament to collect his £300 daily allowance, a former speaker of the House of Lords has said.
Baroness D’Souza told a BBC documentary that many peers “contribute absolutely nothing” to Parliament and attend only to claim their daily attendance allowance.
She suggested the "sense of honour" that used to come with being a member of the House of Lords had been lost.
In the new documentary, titled Inside the Lords, Lady D'Souza said: "There is a core of peers who work incredibly hard, who do that work, and there are, sad to say, many, many, many peers who contribute absolutely nothing but who claim the full allowance.
"I can remember one occasion when I was leaving the House quite late and there was a peer - who shall be utterly nameless - who jumped out of a taxi just outside the peers' entrance, left the engine running.
"He ran in, presumably to show that he'd attended, and then ran out again while the taxi was still running.
"So I mean that's not normal, but it is something that does happen and I think that we have lost the sense of honour that used to pertain, and that is a great, great shame."
Also in the documentary, which combines interviews with fly-on-the-wall footage, Lord Blunkett and Lord Tebbit questioned appointments prime ministers had made to the upper house.
Labour former home secretary Lord Blunkett said: "You have got people who may well be, out of the patronage of the government of the day, rewarded for either keeping their mouth shut or opening their mouth or their purse at a particular moment in time."
Tory peer Lord Tebbit added: "Far too many people have been put in here as a sort of personal reward.”
Liberal Democrat Lord Tyler also gave a withering assessment, describing the House of Lords as “the best day care centre for the elderly in London”.
He said: “Families can drop in him or her and make sure that the staff will look after them very well nice meals subsidised by the taxpayer, and they can have a snooze in the afternoon in the chamber or in the library."
A House of Lords spokesman said: "All members have to certify that they have undertaken parliamentary work when claiming for attending the House.
"Where members are shown to have claimed when they have not undertaken parliamentary work, the House has the power to suspend them - as in the case of Lord Hanningfield.
"The House has a robust Code of Conduct overseen by the independent Lords Commissioner for Standards."
Meet The Lords will be broadcast on Monday February 27 at 9pm on BBC Two.
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