Kings Science Academy (Bradford)

Debate between George Galloway and David Ward

Tuesday 28th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Ward]

When we asked the police in e-mails what they had received, they said that they had received nothing. Despite what the DFE said, they did not receive the reports.

As for the questions we have been asking, there are simply too many discrepancies between the answers to parliamentary questions and the other evidence available to us. The Department made its original report on 25 April 2013: that is when the matter was reported—so we are told—to Action Fraud. Let us not forget that that is eight months after the CCW report. If the DFE had seen that report at that point, why was it not made public?

[George Galloway (Bradford West) (Respect)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate, but I congratulate him more on the excellent forensic speech that he is making. The more he speaks, the more I am bound to ask whether he agrees that it is already obvious that the nub of this question is that Alan Lewis is a very senior member of the Conservative party, and so for party political reasons the Secretary of State for Education simply could not come clean on this matter with the people of Bradford and with the Members of this House.

[Mr Ward]

That is an excellent point. We have to ask why. There must have been a justification for the cover-up. It can be one of only two things. It is either because free schools are such a flagship policy for the Conservative party that it could not afford the embarrassment or because of Alan Lewis’s involvement and his association with the Tory party. If there are any other reasons, I cannot think of them.

I will make the point again about deception—I cannot use any other word, really. As I said, the Department’s original report was made on 25 April 2013, a long time after it knew about the matter. We are told that Action Fraud inadvertently logged the report as an information-only report, and subsequently apologised for that error. But how did that occur? If, as the Department claimed, information on fabricated invoices was submitted to the National Fraud Investigation Bureau, how could that be? Unless there was just a passing reference in a short telephone call, it is hard to believe that the correct message could not have got through. How could it have been logged as an information-only report if the audit report had been made available? In that case, the reaction could have been nothing other than a decision that the matter required a criminal investigation and needed to be dealt with quickly.

The Minister must be interested to learn the answer to those questions himself. In answer to a parliamentary question, the Department said:

“Action Fraud notified the Department on 1 November”.—[Official Report, 6 January 2014; Vol. 573, c. 98W.]

Action Fraud notified the Department of its mistake in classifying the report on 1 November, but—as we know thanks to a freedom of information request by John Roberts—on 5 September the Department had received a communication from Action Fraud saying:

“Thank you for your email to Action Fraud concerning your Information Report.”

That was received seven weeks before the Department says it was notified that the report had been wrongly classified as an information-only report. In those seven weeks, it did nothing.

In a parliamentary answer, the Department said that it had contacted Action Fraud on 5 September and

“in response Action Fraud stated that the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau had assessed the case but determined that there was not enough information to progress the case further.”—[Official Report, 6 November 2013; Vol. 570, c. 229W.]

End of story, it seems—the police had looked at the matter and there was nothing to do. But the truth is that the e-mail from Action Fraud to the Department on 5 September told the DFE not only that the report had been wrongly classified as an information-only report, but that more information would lead to the report being

“re-assessed to determine its viability for investigation.”

Even if we believe that it was through some error back in April that the report was inadvertently misclassified, on 5 September the Department was told not only that it was a report that could lead to an investigation—something it claimed subsequently to have been told on 1 November—but that if it gave additional information the matter could be turned into a crime investigation.

Of the three parties to this situation I have mentioned, who do I blame most? Is it a businessman who wants to make a lot of money and sees a quick opportunity provided by a political party with which he is closely associated? Is it a young man who is, I think, idealistic but is also egotistical, and is led on by politicians and senior civil servants to believe that for him the normal rules of integrity, honesty and propriety simply do not have to apply? Or is it the Department for Education, which became a Government agent of change and forgot that the basic rules of public accountability and scrutiny in the spending of millions of pounds of public money must always take precedence over the desire to support its political masters?

The real surprise is not that, eventually and thankfully, we have been made aware of what has happened via the whistleblowers, but that there were not more whistleblowers earlier—people within the Department, who were looking at what was going on and saying, “This is just not right.” That is the real problem. I have been to the Department recently and seen the whole floor that has been taken over by the academies and free school organisation within the DFE. The massive shift that has taken place has also, I believe, brought about a cultural change in the Department. The policy has become such an important driver and part of the Government’s strategy that anything goes.

The big unanswered question is, if the Department could behave in this way once, with this particular school, how many other academies and free schools has it supported in a similar manner? Unfortunately, unless we get some answers we will have to wait until another whistleblower comes forward to find out.

National Media Museum

Debate between George Galloway and David Ward

Wednesday 19th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

I, too, express my gratitude to the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway) for initiating this debate. A little earlier he referred to the leaking of the state of the group as a whole, and the media museum in particular, and I am annoyed that we should have to rely on a leak, rather than a more mature approach that would have involved MPs at a much earlier stage. The hon. Gentleman has made a number of suggestions tonight, but I believe that collectively we could have worked much harder, much sooner, and that the hysteria and huge anxiety created across the Bradford district could have been avoided.

[George Galloway]

Indeed, and the hon. Gentleman was right to be cross about that in our meeting, although being a glass-half-full man, I saw it as giving us an opportunity to shine. The hon. Gentleman is right, which brings me to the only discordant note I intend to make—the Minister must listen to this please.

The performance of the leadership of the Science Museum Group has been sadly lacking in this affair. Indeed, we had the spectacle of the leadership of the group rubbishing the performance of museums under their own purview, apparently oblivious to the obvious fact that if the museums were underperforming, they themselves were being paid rather a lot of public money to preside over that underperformance. I do not normally attack public servants because they have difficulty responding, but I was not impressed by the leadership of the museum’s group before our meeting this week, and I was less impressed after it.

There is a serious question mark and I am not confident about leaving the fate of the National Media museum in Bradford in the hands of the leadership of that group, and that is in part because of the point raised by the hon. Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward). It is obvious that it leaked the potential closure of one or more of these three museums, which makes its position now—negotiating in public—much more difficult. When the Minister said, in that first sentence, that the museum in Bradford would not close, I could sense that sinking feeling on the part of the officials, as he shot their fox—just as, in a way, he shot mine, given that I had already applied for this debate. I believe the Minister. I agree with Nick, as they used to say—or, in this case, Ed. It is all very well these panjandrums of the culture industry sitting in London, in the Victoria and Albert, deciding which of their northern chess pieces they can dispose of, but it is Ministers who must decide, and it is Parliament, to whom Ministers are accountable, and democracy, to which we are all accountable, that really count.