Corruption in the United Kingdom

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2022 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the effects of corruption in the United Kingdom.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords very much for coming today. It has been incredibly difficult for me to finalise what to say this afternoon, simply because I wanted to mention a current fiasco—a current example of corruption—and there were so many popping up that I had to keep delaying what I was putting into my speech. I decided to go with the Kwasi Kwarteng issue, because I thought that was a rather nice one.

For me, the point is that political corruption is absolutely endemic in our country, and we really ought to be ashamed of that. It is embedded in our system. We often fail to recognise it simply because we do not know about it, because it is covered up. It does a huge amount of damage. It damages our social fabric and individuals who engage in it. It is not all about personal greed—it is sometimes about corporate greed—but it is about greed, and it contributes to the growing gap between rich and poor. It also stops us dealing with major issues such as poverty and our climate emergency.

In 10 minutes I do not have enough time to deal with all forms of corruption, as noble Lords can imagine. For example, I cannot deal with corruption in the police, in prisons, in local government, associated with our borders, in the construction sector or even among Lords appointments, which of course would be a rich source of stories about corruption. I will deal with four types of corruption, and there is some overlap: political access, corporate lobbying, party donations, and procurement and privatisation.

First and foremost, and most obvious, is political access. In his previous job, our Chancellor held undisclosed meetings with—I could list them all—the chief executive of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer; the chief executive of SABIC, the world’s fourth-largest petrochemical company; and the chair of Alfanar, an industrial conglomerate. Obviously, meetings with these people are absolutely fine and could easily be part of his job, but they are meant to be logged by civil servants. A government spokesperson said there had been an “administrative oversight”. It leads to the question: how many administrative oversights of this kind never come to light? Kwarteng was flown around the kingdom by various helicopters and jets, which apparently provided the opportunity for the oil company to lobby the Minister then responsible for the UK’s energy policy on opportunities for the company. Other points of discussion on the flights were redacted, so we do not know what they talked about. Although it is perfectly okay to take lifts, he really should not have taken them from private companies.

Then we have people such as Owen Paterson working for Randox as a second job and David Cameron using his inside track to lobby for Greensill. Money buys access to, for example, the personal phone numbers of civil servants, Ministers and officials. A recent Public Accounts Committee report said that it could not be sure that all the Randox contracts, which were worth £777 million, were “awarded properly” and that there was obvious potential for conflicts of interest. On Greensill, the Treasury Committee accepted that

“Mr Cameron did not break the rules governing lobbying by former Ministers, but that reflects on the insufficient strength of the rules”.

So we cannot hold people to account.

The public view becomes that there is one rule for people like us and another for them. Of course, it is not only things such as partygate, which showed a clear division on what people were allowed to do—it is also clear from the way in which the Government tried to change the rules to get Owen Paterson off the hook. This is systemic corruption, not isolated, individual corruption. We should all be very concerned. These examples are the tip of the iceberg—the individual cases that we get to hear about because of media activity.

My second issue is corporate lobbying, and its influence over policy. Uber spent £75 million a year on public relations and lobbying to successfully swing policies in its favour. Companies spend that kind of money only because they think that it will guarantee them a profitable return. Many second jobs that MPs have are actually a form of corporate lobbying, a value-for-money addition to the company’s PR budget that buys them the access they need. For example, Nadhim Zahawi allegedly earned £1.3 million from his second job at Gulf Keystone Petroleum. Again, this is not illegal—he can do that—but it is a much bigger and more damaging influence on our politics and policies than parliamentarians want to admit.

As well as individual companies lobbying, there is a network of right-wing think tanks that refuse to declare their corporate donors but launch policy reports on issues that directly benefit those donors. The media should be demanding transparency, and so should Parliament, when we see those policy institutes give us opinions disguised as evidence. Sometimes their members are even promoted to jobs in government. To quote George Monbiot in 2011, “Downing Street and government in the last decade has been completely captured by this network.” He is referring to the right-wing think tanks.

The third form of corruption, party donations, is more direct and visible, because big donations to political parties have to be declared. We can strongly suspect that the reason why we are still building houses and new developments without solar panels, without the best energy conservation standards available and without charging points or heat pumps is that property tycoons account for around one-fifth of donations to the Conservative Party. The reason why people are buying new homes and are energy bill payers rather than net contributors to the grid is because developers paid a toll of £891,000 to the Conservative Party in the first quarter of 2021 alone. The reason we are struggling to get a common-sense measure such as charging points for electric vehicles as standard on new buildings is that developers do not like it, and they pay good money to ensure that the Conservative Party listens to them more than it listens to climate scientists.

Is it not strange that oil and gas companies are getting new licences in the North Sea despite the climate emergency, or that they are getting £150 billion of taxpayers’ money which they have not done anything extra to earn, or that taxpayers are carrying the burden of that £150 billion for the next 20 years, instead of a windfall tax? Systemic political corruption has real-world consequences and real victims, so it is important to put this on the record now so that the next generation understands how Parliament did relatively little while the world started to heat up and burn in our climate emergency.

The fourth category of corruption, and perhaps the largest in terms of profitability, is the British system of procurement and privatisation. It has become a visible form of corruption due to the excesses of the Covid crisis. The system for preventing conflicts of interest failed, with firms referred to the Government’s VIP lane, a dedicated mailbox for parliamentarians and officials, where they were 10 times more likely to win contracts. Twenty-five of the 50 companies in this VIP lane supplied PPE worth £1 billion that was not fit for purpose, amounting to 59% of all money awarded to VIP-lane companies for PPE. The Covid purchasing fast track was open to abuse, and that is what the Government encouraged in the middle of a pandemic.

This is a reason why the Government are now burning £4 billion of unusable PPE supplied by donors and friends of the regime and bought with taxpayers’ money. This corruption was hidden behind a wall of lawyers, who worked on behalf of the Government to hide the most basic information about who benefited from the contracts and who they spoke to in order to get them. This is collusion or corruption and points to systemic corruption.

Of course, we are not immune here in your Lordships’ House. In June, it emerged that one Conversative Peer accepted £3,000 a month from a private firm to open doors with No. 10 and Ministers. Now I like open doors. I nudge a few doors open myself to help people. But I do not take money for it. I do it for people who cannot afford to pay for it, and I make sure that they get their voices heard. It is not a democracy if you have to pay for access. It is more like a Putin-style oligarchy run for and by the rich and corporations.

I think I am running out of time, which is absolutely infuriating because I have another two or three pages. Of course, I could spend all day here listing the problems and the corruption. We need this Government gone. I am not so naive as to think that that will be the solution to everything, because of course it will not. What we need is strong, decent rules and for people to understand that they are going to get caught.