ean a DOUBLE-DIPPING JOLITICIANS who sit on more than one council in North Yorkshire have enjoyed a nice little earner in recent years by accepting IT allowances from both authorities while only incurring one lot of expense. North Yorkshire county council (NYCC) pays £500 a year, as part of councillors’ basic allowance, to cover the cost of having a broadband connection at home — very generous, as it’s about four times what broadband actually costs. Meanwhile eight NYCC councillors who also sit on Scarborough borough council receive a handy £255 a year from that council for having broadband at home. Senior Tory Cllr Jane Kenyon, whose difficulties in keeping her register of interests up-to-date we reported in Eye 1318, nobly does not take Scarborough’s £255 broadband allowance — although she did claim £712.15 for IT from North Yorkshire Police Authority, which she chairs, in 2010-11, as well as NYCC’s £500. Responding to a campaign on a local website, Real Whitby, NYCC’s monitoring officer, Carol Dunn, states that the double-dipping councillors are merely claiming their “entitlement” — so there’s no need for*her to take any action. The question of whether they are morally entitled to that “entitlement” is ignored. Any locals expecting Scarborough and Whitby MP Robert Goodwill to take a lead are likely to be disappointed. Back in 2000, as a member of the European parliament, he boasted that when booking flights to Brussels “we get a set fee of around £500, but if I buy a cheaper ticket, economy class for, say, £160, I can pocket the difference and, as a capitalist, also as a British Conservative, I see it as a challenge to buy cheap tickets and make some profit on the system because that is the system.” Trebles all round!