Magnox: Early Contract Terminations

Dennis Skinner Excerpts

Monday 27th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

One reason I have asked Mr Holliday to make a report by October is so that that can happen. I will meet him in the coming days, as he sets out the scope and timetable, but that is one of the key reasons for the report, and I am sure he will want to make his recommendations available for the new process.

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

What were the terms of the pay-off? The Secretary of State has not mentioned it.

[Greg Clark]

I have mentioned the settlement—it is nearly £100 million for the settlement of the litigation. The chief executive of the NDA has come to the end of his contract.

Opel/Vauxhall: Sale to PSA Group

Dennis Skinner Excerpts

Monday 6th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

I accept the hon. Gentleman’s advice, based on his experience. As I said earlier today, I am cautiously optimistic. I think that the commitments go in the right direction. Actually, the language that I have used is the language that Len McCluskey has used, and I dare say that he is a veteran of negotiations such as these. I think we all need to welcome a positive future for Vauxhall, but we also need to do everything we can to ensure that it is delivered.

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

Is the Minister aware that he has twice—twice!—praised Len McCluskey in this House, and that he has mentioned the trade unions as though they were part of the CBI five times? Is this the same Minister who walked through the Lobby to attack the trade unions’ authority and introduce that lousy Act of Parliament?

[Greg Clark]

I am not sure that Len McCluskey would want me to praise him. I think I acknowledged that we had been working together on this, as I hope the hon. Gentleman would expect. I hope that the hon. Gentleman, and every Member of this House, would want us all to put party political differences aside and to do what we can to secure jobs in every constituency in this country represented by colleagues here.

Green Investment Bank

Dennis Skinner Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hurd]

The right hon. Gentleman is extremely experienced, and I am not sure what part of a confidentiality agreement he does not understand. As I have said, the Government’s criteria could not be clearer: we are selling a going concern, and we are not interested in proposals that do not respect that.

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

When are the Government going to learn the lessons of the past when it comes to selling off public assets? I was here when Mrs Thatcher decided to sell off not only electricity but gas, and then, finally, water. She said we were going to be a British share-owning democracy: that was the phrase. If we look at the list now, we find that some of those companies are owned in Germany and some are owned in France—and Macquarie, in Australia, bought the Birmingham toll road in a flash under a Tory Government.

Today we are being given another lecture on how the Minister will preserve the identity of the Green Investment Bank. History tells us that that is not possible. The bank will go to those who are bidding for it, and they will not be just in Britain. We are in the process of leaving the EU, and the chances are that somebody in the EU will be buying up British assets—although maybe not this one. Why don’t you learn the lessons?

[Mr Hurd]

Of course, one of the lessons of privatisation can be seen in the record levels of investment that have flowed into those organisations since they were privatised. I respect the hon. Gentleman’s experience, and I respect his sincerity and integrity, but I think he is totally wrong. All I will say is that I have a strong instinct that he would like British Telecom still to be a public company. I will leave it at that.

BHS

Dennis Skinner Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Frank Field]

Again, that is an incredibly relevant point, and it links to the previous one. We were certainly left with the impression that the problem would be sorted shortly. There is no concrete proposal on the table to bring justice to the pensioners, and a question of corporate governance is raised about how someone can take over a company with its pension fund in surplus and a good order book. An interesting aspect of Sir Philip’s evidence to us was that he said he could have annuitised all the pension liabilities when he took over BHS, but decided not to do so. Had he done so, we would not be in this position today.

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

Only a small point: this Napoleon thing has reared its head. I had always thought that Sir Philip Green was more of a Maxwell. He had the money and he had the yachts. He had the workers and he robbed them of their pensions. It is almost a parallel.

[Frank Field]

Sir Philip has threatened to sue me over my comments about that. I am still waiting for the writ to arrive. I long to be in court to have a trial by jury, but that will be for another day.

I return to what I see as the main findings. There was some pretty important engineering going on from the early years in respect of the profitability of the company. We were much amused in Committee when Sir Philip said that his business prowess extended to halving the cost of coat hangers. It would have been more interesting, of course, for him to have told us about his secret share dealing with one main supplier who during those early years, because they were party to BHS decisions, knew the costs of other orders for which tenders were coming in and was therefore able to bid accordingly.

I maintain that thanks to that measure, Sir Philip was able to get perhaps artificially low supply costs, boosting BHS profits during that period, so it looked even more profitable than it was. That individual shareholder, as I say, was involved in a secret share deal. When he came to sell his shares, he managed to sell them for £90 million. Going on from there, we know that this played a key part in allowing £400 million in dividends to be taken from BHS, which most observers would not necessarily have seen as anything extraordinary.

The next stage of this sorry saga—my second theme—is, what was Sir Philip able to achieve from that BHS base? Gaining ownership—control—of BHS allowed him to acquire the group of companies known as Arcadia. From Arcadia, he managed to sponsor a huge gearing operation. Was it £2.6 billion? Was it £2.9 billion? However, the key thing about the ownership of Arcadia, which came only from what appeared to be the adequate —or more than adequate—running of BHS, was that there were huge sums of money sloshing around Arcadia. All too soon, £1.3 billion of money geared—loans acquired—on Arcadia through a number of companies found its way up to Lady Green.