City Hall gives £30,000 golden goodbye to Tory Brian Coleman after he lost London Assembly vote

Conservative councillor Brian Coleman is to collect about £30,000 in golden goodbye payments after being voted out of City Hall.

Mr Coleman lost his seat to Labour’s Andrew Dismore in the London Assembly election this month. The former mayor of Barnet is entitled to a publicly-funded “resettlement grant” based on his age and the length of time he spent on the Assembly.

Aged 50 and with 12 years of service, he qualifies for 54 per cent of his final member salary of £53,439 in a one-off payment. He is also entitled to smaller grants relating to the committees he sat on. City Hall’s “parachute” payments are designed to soften the blow of losing a salary overnight as the result of a public vote.

Mr Coleman, a Barnet councillor, today refused to comment on the payments, which are made to all Assembly members who are not re-elected.

His majority of nearly 20,000 in the Barnet and Camden constituency disappeared following a campaign to remove him and he finished with 20,000 votes fewer than his rival.

He has attracted controversy in his political career, including in 2009 when he was forced to reveal details of his expenses after initially refusing to do so. In the same year he was found to have broken Barnet council’s code of conduct after a committee ruled that he had failed to treat a blogger “with respect”. He had sent the blogger an email describing him as “an obsessive, poisonous individual”.

Mr Coleman was criticised this year for receiving a free councillor’s parking permit despite the Conservative-run council having introduced a series of extra charges for motorists.

A Greater London Authority spokesman said: “Members of the London Assembly who are not re-elected qualify for a resettlement grant, the formula for which was agreed by the former Mayor and London Assembly in 2008.”