Four members of the House of Lords have quit the chamber in the wake of new rules excluding “non-doms” from membership of the upper house. The peers, three of whom are Conservatives, will no longer sit in the Lords but will retain their titles. All had faced a deadline forcing them to choose between their Lords privileges and their status as non-domiciled individuals – whereby no UK tax need be paid on worldwide income.
They include Lord Laidlaw, a Monaco-based businessman who has given £4m to the Tory party, and Lord McAlpine, a former party treasurer. Lord Bagri, another Tory peer, who is former chairman of the London Metal Exchange, has also stepped down. The fourth peer to step down is Baroness Dunn, former deputy chair of HSBC bank. In a letter to the Lords’ clerk, she wrote that she had been living and working in Hong Kong – her birthplace – when offered a peerage in 1990. “I have naturally retained my Chinese roots and Hong Kong domicile and connections,” she wrote. “If the statute had given me a reasonable length of time in which to make transitional adjustments to my personal affairs, I would have wished to retain my seat.”
Any non-dom peers who had not stepped down by last night must start paying tax on their income to the UK exchequer under a law passed in the spring. Lord Ashcroft, former deputy chairman of the Tory party, promised to meet the rules in full, admitting before the election he had not been paying tax on offshore earnings. Lord Paul, a Labour peer, also promised to end his non-dom status. Under British tax rules, a “non-dom” is someone who has a strong affiliation with another country where they or their parents were born. They must spend no more than 183 days per tax year in the UK.
