Jeremy Hunt Expenses Claim Sees Health Secretary Ask For 27p Car Journey

He's thought to be worth around £10 million.

Millionaire Jeremy Hunt claimed 27p in expenses for two trips of 0.6 miles it has emerged.

The health secretary - believed to be worth more than £10 million - billed the taxpayer for the journeys in his South West Surrey constituency in December of last year.

Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd also claimed the same amount for a similar journey according to the Daily Mail.

Hunt retains a 48% share in Hotcourses netting him around £2.6 million in the last five years.
Hunt retains a 48% share in Hotcourses netting him around £2.6 million in the last five years.
Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire

Remarkably, these weren't the smallest submissions made by an MP, that honour goes to Tory Julian Smith who claimed 9p for a journey of just over 300 metres in Skipton.

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), has released details of MPs' expenses from the last financial year.

Hunt owns a 48% share of Hotcourses, which he founded with childhood friend, Mike Elms.

Earlier this month he netted a £960,000 windfall from the company and has made around £2.6 million from it over the last five years.

Hunt is currently dealing with the ongoing fallout from the junior doctors strike.

He made a speech last year claiming 6,000 excess NHS deaths a year happen because care is worse on Friday night through to Monday, but the figure has been torn apart repeatedly.

The claim underpins both the Government’s push for a seven-day NHS and trashing out a controversial new contract with junior doctors.

The Secretary of State was confronted by doctor-turned-MP Philippa Whitford on Monday over studies showing “you do not have extra deaths”, and that he should “know what the problem is before you spending billions on fixing it”.

But the Tory minister swatted away the criticism, arguing that while he was “not an academic” the ‘weekend effect’ was not going to “get off the hook by disputing the methodologies”.

His comments come as researchers from Oxford University argued the claim was a “shambles”, and blamed inaccurate data entry.

Prof Peter Rothwell, the lead author of the report and professor of neurology at Oxford University, said there was “very little evidence indeed of a ‘weekend effect’”.

“It really is an excellent example of how poor quality data, badly interpreted, can lead to the wrong answer,” he said after examining a report on stroke victims.

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