a business which makes use of public or communal property. Spain Per the Spanish Constitution, legislators in the regional assemblies of the Autonomous Communities are barred from being elected to a seat in the Congress of Deputies, the lower house of the Cortes Generales. More precisely, regional legislators can run for the seat, but if elected they must choose between the regional and national parliaments. Nevertheless, members of lower tiers of the Spanish decentralized structure, such as provincial councillors or members of local councils, including mayors, can and have held seats in the Congress of Deputies. The rule barring regional legislators does not apply to the upper house of the Cortes, the Senate: in fact, regional legislatures are entitled to appoint a varying number of members from their ranks to the Senate, according to the population of the region. Currently, the Autonomous Communities appoint 56 Senators, the other 208 being directly elected in general elections. United Kingdom At the EU level, prior to the 2009 European Parliament elections, there were a small number of members of the European Parliament who were also members of the House of Lords. However, it is now European law that a member of the European Parliament (MEP) may not be a member of the legislature of a member state. This, with regard to the United Kingdom, therefore applied to the House of Commons and the House of Lords, as the constituent bodies forming that member state's legislature. As it is impossible to disclaim a life peerage, it was ruled that peers (who sit as members of the House of Lords) had to take a "leave of absence" from the Lords in order to be an MEP; this was also the procedure for when a peer is the UK's European Commissioner, which was in recent times usually the case. The UK withdrew from the EU on January 31, 2020, ending British representation in the European Parliament. There have been members of the House of Commons also holding seats in the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Parliament, or Northern Ireland Assembly. The November 2009 report by the Committee on Standards in Public Life into the controversy surrounding MPs' expenses noted that "double jobbing" was "unusually ingrained in the political culture" of Northern Ireland, where 16 of 18 MPs were Stormont MLAs, compared to one Scottish MP being an MSP (First Minister Alex Salmond), and no Welsh MPs being AMs.