Safe Hands Funeral Plans

Debate between Margaret Ferrier and Peter Grant

Thursday 12th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I commend my hon. Friend for securing this debate. As an example of the kind of advertising that the company has been doing, it promised that customers’ money would be kept by an entirely separate and independent company. Is she aware that the trustees set up a company called SHFT Properties Ltd and that every single person who has ever been a director of that company was also a director of Safe Hands Plans Ltd? Does she share my frustration that directors of companies that repeatedly tell such blatant lies to con their customers are allowed to carry on as directors of other companies to this very day despite the chaos left behind in the wreckage, as has happened with Safe Hands Funeral Plans?

[Margaret Ferrier]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention—and I shall have more specific thanks to give him a little later in my speech. I completely agree with the points that he has made. I know that the Government intend to introduce legislation relating to economic crime and impropriety during the current Session, and I hope the Minister can confirm that it is something they are seriously considering.

I was particularly happy to note the FCA’s clear focus on consumer protections, and I fully agree with their approach in wishing to ensure that customers pay a fair price, that the plan meets their needs, that the money is looked after responsibly, and that they have all the information they need in order to make an informed decision. Unfortunately, however, that announcement is just too little, too late for many of Safe Hands’ customers.

Let me provide some context by explaining the way in which Safe Hands worked. Customers’ money was put into a trust and then reinvested. These funds are supposed to protect customer investments, and, indeed, that is how the plan was sold to my constituent Mr Hughes. The trust should have been overseen by independent trustees whose job is to make sure that funds are not misappropriated, and are ring-fenced from the funeral provider’s business assets. When Safe Hands suddenly left the market after withdrawing its application to be an approved seller under the upcoming FCA rules, administrators found a significant shortfall between the value of this trust and the cost of the funeral plans that it would need to finance.

Apparently, what the administrators found was that the trust’s assets had been wildly overvalued. What was even more concerning was that most of the assets were actually owned by third parties, as was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant). Reports indicate that over £60 million of the trust’s reported £64 million valued assets were high-risk investments based offshore. If that is true, we are talking about fraudulent misappropriation of the trust’s assets. I will refrain from speculating on who might have benefited from all of this, which can only be described as a scam.

Cost of Living and Food Insecurity

Debate between Margaret Ferrier and Peter Grant

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

It is a valid point. Every so often, I go back through all the scare stories that have been pushed through my letterbox—mainly from the Labour party, because we do not really have a Tory presence in my constituency, or certainly not in my part of it. When we go through all the horrible things that they say will happen if Scotland becomes independent and leave them for two or three years, we find them happening anyway. It started with the closure of the naval base in Rosyth and it is still happening today with the end of freedom of movement and increasing food prices.

It is estimated that 1 million adults, equivalent to more than 3.5% of the UK population, are having to go without food at least once a month because they cannot afford to eat. About 640,000 people in Scotland cannot afford their energy bills, and that is before they got put up by 50%. That is in a country that has more energy than it needs and that, most years, exports energy to England and other countries because it cannot use all the energy it produces.

Where else in the world would we find any commodity in surplus that is, at the same time, priced beyond the affordability of its own citizens? What on earth is wrong with the way that Scotland is run that means that the people who produce almost more energy per head of population than anywhere else in the world cannot afford to pay their bills, keep their homes heated and keep their families healthy?

The Chancellor’s response is better than nothing but it is woefully inadequate. He is basically offering a payday loan: “We’ll give you the money just now to pay off your fuel bills and we’re going to hope and pray that they come back down again in the next few years.” If they do not, what on earth happens? The Scottish TUC has said that the Treasury’s buy now, pay later loan

“comes nowhere near tackling the problem…It is nothing short of shameful that people are being forced to choose between food and heat.”

If emergency loans are such a good idea to tackle the problem of increasing energy prices, why not go to the source of the problem and give them to the energy companies? They are struggling because of many global factors that have been covered in other debates. At least that way, the Government would be giving the loans to people whose shareholders should be able to meet the cost. Why give the loan to somebody who will not be able to afford to pay it back next year, the year after or the year after that?

Given that the decision has been made to give that money directly to citizens, the SNP says that it should be turned into a grant. People should not be made to choose between taking the money now and not being able to pay it back later. The Chancellor must also cut VAT on energy bills, which is within his gift. Why has he not done it?

As well as giving emergency loans to the energy companies, the Chancellor should have ruled out a rise to the energy price cap—he simply should not have allowed it, or Ofgem should not have allowed it. He could also reintroduce the £20-a-week universal credit uplift that the Tories cancelled recently. None of that by itself will solve the problem completely, but at least it would give an indication that we are dealing with a Government who care, whereas, quite clearly, we are dealing with a Government who could hardly care less.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

Single young parents under the age of 25 face lower universal credit payments despite being the sole breadwinner for their child and despite, naturally, facing more barriers to work. Does the hon. Member agree that it is unacceptable for the Government to allow children to live in poverty based only on the age of their single mother or father?

[Peter Grant]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend—I hope that I can continue to call her a good friend and colleague—has, as always, made a very valid point.

One of the most iniquitous and downright evil things about the crisis that we are now facing is that the people who get the hardest hit will be those who are least able to afford it. If we all had to take a 20% hit to our living standards, none of us would enjoy it, but all of us would manage. Most of my constituents cannot afford to take that scale of hit to their standards of living and they are the ones who are being hit the worst.

I want to look briefly at some of the things that have been done by the Scottish Government, using their limited powers to mitigate this crisis. The Scottish Government have a much more progressive income tax system than the rest of the UK. It is often attacked by Tory Back Benchers who are interested only in the wellbeing of high earners, but the fact is that, in 2021-22, 54% of people in Scotland—the lower paid 54% of people in Scotland—are paying less income tax than they would if they lived in England. There is also fact that Members of Parliament for Scotland pay a bit more income tax than our colleagues in England. I do not mind that if the money is going into essential services.

Last year, the Scottish Government invested around £2.5 billion to support low-income households, nearly £1 billion of which went directly to children living in low-income households. They have committed more than £3.9 billion to benefit expenditure in 2022-23, providing support to more than 1 million people. That figure of £3.9 billion is £361 million above the level of funding that we get from the UK Government, so while again the Tories will demand guarantees that all of the money that comes to Scotland be used for its intended purpose, the Scottish Government are spending almost 10% more than they are receiving for that purpose.

The reaction of the Child Poverty Action Group was that this was

“a hugely welcome development on the path to meeting Scotland’s child poverty targets... a real lifeline for the families across Scotland who are facing a perfect storm of financial insecurity as the UK cut to universal credit bites, energy prices soar and the wider costs of living rise.”

It said that on 29 November 2021. The British Government did not seem to wake up to the problem until about 29 January 2022.

My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow—

FOI Requests: Scotland Office

Debate between Margaret Ferrier and Peter Grant

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Westminster Hall

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of FOI Requests: Scotland Office.

Thanks very much, Sir Edward, for putting on the public record the advice that I have had previously when I have discussed my request for this debate with the Table Office, and of course I will comply entirely with that advice, as was always my intention.

I am grateful for the opportunity to have this debate this morning, but I suspect that, as with most people who secure debates in Westminster Hall, I really rather wish that it had not been necessary to do so, because I wish that not only the Scotland Office but other Ministers up to and including the Prime Minister had been a bit more open about what Ministers knew and when they knew it.

My intention in securing this debate and in raising matters related to this issue in the House on numerous occasions has nothing whatsoever to do with the former Secretary of State and the continuing right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael). My intention is to find out what else has been going on that was completely beyond the remit of either of the two inquiries that have been set up, because I understand that a standards inquiry may still be conducted into the matter.

To put things into a bit of context, I have always had a very keen interest in freedom of information legislation. As a serving councillor in the 1990s, I was on the record as saying that a proper Freedom of Information Act and proper proportional representation would make between them the single biggest improving difference to the way that local government operates, and the experience in Scotland to date certainly suggests that that is the case.

I have previous experience of working in the NHS, in the days when Michael Forsyth was Secretary of State for everything, including health, and I saw at first hand the catastrophic impact that secrecy in the NHS in Scotland had, because major financial difficulties were covered up time and time and time again, until eventually the health board in the area that I lived in and that I had previously worked for nearly went bust, as did several other health boards in Scotland.

Freedom of information has been described as a snooper’s charter, but it is not; it is a way of giving the public a chance to hold all of us properly to account. My view on FOI has always been that if someone does not want to be held to account, they should not be here. The single golden rule about freedom of information is not the Sir Humphrey Appleby line, “You never try to conceal from the public that which they would be able to find out in any case”; the rule about freedom of information should always be, “If it would damage your career for the public to find out what you were doing, then you shouldn’t have done it in the first place”. That is the acid test that should always be applied.

I found it interesting that shortly before the summer recess the Government announced that responsibility for freedom of information legislation was moving from the Ministry of Justice to the Cabinet Office. When I saw a statement a few days ago that the Information Commissioner has put the Ministry of Justice on special measures because the Ministry is so bad at answering its own FOI requests, I wondered whether that had something to do with this change, because the MOJ is managing to respond to only 75% of FOI requests within the statutory time. Then I realised that the Cabinet Office is also achieving exactly 75%.

However, I will concentrate on the Scotland Office. Between 2012 and 2014, it received 280 resolvable FOI requests; in other words, requests about information that it actually held and that it was capable of responding to. Only 25 of those FOI requests were fully withheld, which is less than 10% of the total number received; in only 11 cases during that period did the Scotland Office claim any form of exemption from responses; and in only one case out of the 280 requests over a three-year period did the Scotland Office ever claim that somebody’s physical or mental health or safety would be endangered if information was released.

However, when somebody asked for a copy of a memo that had already been released to the press, the Scotland Office response was, first of all, to withhold that information fully, which immediately makes it an unusual response. The Scotland Office claimed that that request was exempt, but in 2014 it never claimed that anything was exempt, so again that shows that its response to that request was somewhat unusual.

Initially, when the Scotland Office responded to that request it claimed that releasing the memo might damage our relations with the French Government. That is an exemption that may well have merit; I would not like to comment on that in full. I could understand that there might be concerns that disclosing the contents of the memo might harm diplomatic relations with the French Government, but it is a pity that nobody thought about that when the memo was put in The Daily Telegraph in the first place. It is also a pity that the senior civil servant who phoned the French embassy to ask about a private conversation between French diplomats and the elected Head of the Scottish Government did not stop to wonder whether that was being disrespectful to the Scottish Government.

So, one of the things that I would like to have answered today, and one of the reasons why I am continuing to push this matter, is this question: is it common practice for Whitehall civil servants to go behind the back of Scottish Government Ministers and to follow up every private meeting those Ministers have with overseas diplomats in order to find out what was said? I would suggest to civil servants in the Scotland Office or in any other office of Government that if they want to find out what the First Minister of Scotland has said to foreign diplomats they should ask the First Minister of Scotland. Apart from anything else, that way there is less danger of things getting “lost in translation”, which I believe is the quote being used now.

I go back to the original FOI request. Following its being refused on the grounds that it might damage relations with the French and then on the grounds that it contained personal information, the question is this: whose personal details were in the memo? If there were the names of senior civil servants, and certainly if there were the names of Government Ministers, it cannot possibly be claimed that that is exempt information. The Data Protection Act is not there to protect Ministers from being held accountable for what they did, or even for what they knew.

The applicant asked for an internal review, which is supposed to be a chance for the answering Department to get the matter right second time around. However, rather than accepting that some of the exemptions no longer applied, the Department discovered that releasing the memo would in fact cause a danger to somebody’s physical or mental health and safety. The Department, having explicitly said in a letter of 15 June that it had considered that exemption and found that it did not apply, then discovered by 28 July that releasing the memo would put somebody’s health or safety in danger. I do not know what had happened in the meantime; I do not know whether one of these children from Syria who are actually Daesh operatives in disguise and who we keep hearing about had somehow got in under the radar.

The Information Commissioner is very clear about what the health and safety exemption means. It does not mean that it might be upsetting or stressful for somebody if a document is released. The Information Commissioner cited examples. For instance, disclosing information about a highly contentious research facility—one that is, for example, conducting research on animals—could threaten the safety of those working there and their families. So, that is a valid ground for withholding information. Equally, if someone is asking for information about a murder investigation, it might be that releasing that information would be extremely stressful or distressing for the family of the murder victim. Again, that is a legitimate case for using the health and safety exemption. But for the life of me, I cannot imagine what could have been in that memo that could possibly endanger anyone’s physical or mental health or safety if it had been disclosed. I look forward to the Information Commissioner’s response on that point, because I understand that in the particular case that we are discussing today the applicant has referred it to the commissioner for a ruling.

In that regard, it is perhaps worth noting that although most of these FOI requests were made a few years ago, the Scotland Office has an 80% failure rate on appeals that are referred to the Information Commissioner. In 80% of those cases, the commissioner said that the Scotland Office got matters either completely wrong or partly wrong. As I say, some of those FOI requests were from a few years back, when everybody was learning the ropes, but the Scotland Office’s record is still not a particularly clever one that it should try to defend.

It is not only in response to FOI requests that we are seeing this refusal to co-operate. I have put any number of questions to Government Ministers, up to and including the Prime Minister himself. Interestingly, when I asked the Prime Minister directly which Ministers knew the memo existed, which of them had seen it or had had access to it before the unauthorised leak—not who had leaked it—he did not answer on behalf of all the other Ministers; he declined to answer, on their behalf. All he did was refer me to the press release that the Scotland Office and the Cabinet Office had issued on 22 May, with the results of their inquiry, which does not say anything about who else had access to the memo. It refers to those who did have access but does not identify which Ministers may or may not have had that access. That, therefore, is another question I would like to have answered just now: which other Ministers and senior civil servants had access to the memo before the unauthorised disclosure?

That question is important because it starts to get to the nub of why the memo was written. We know it was written by a senior civil servant in the Scotland Office but, interestingly, we do not know who it was written for, who instructed the civil servant to go behind the back of our First Minister and ask the French embassy for its account of a private conversation involving the First Minister.

I would like to know—well, first I would like to know where the Secretary of State for Scotland is, but we might get an answer to that later—whether it is common practice for UK Government Departments to follow up private meetings between Scottish Government Ministers, or indeed Ministers from the Welsh or Northern Ireland Assemblies, and overseas diplomats, and for Whitehall to go behind Ministers’ backs and ask overseas Governments for their account of those meetings without bothering to check it for accuracy, in this case with the First Minister of Scotland. If they had bothered to do that before the memo was written it would have become clear that a lot had indeed been lost in translation.

The most important question I want answered—and I will continue until I get answers—is: which Ministers were aware of the memo? Which Ministers were sent copies of it before it was leaked? I do not know why the Government are so determined to withhold that information from us, but I am an awkward person—that goes with the badge—and the more a public body tries to deny me access to information that my people want the more convinced I become that there might be something in it that it really does not want us to see and the more determined I become, therefore, to find it.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend feel that the Government are reneging on the Freedom of Information Act? The Government explained in a 1997 White Paper that their aim was to be more open, to be a Government based on mutual trust:

“Openness is fundamental to the political health of a modern state. This White Paper marks a watershed in the relationship between the government and people of the United Kingdom. At last there is a government ready to trust the people with a legal right to information.”

Is that information being withheld?

[Peter Grant]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her question. It is not for me to say whether in this instance the Scotland Office complied with the Act; that question is now with the Information Commissioner. From my experience, primarily of the equivalent legislation in Scotland and my couple of significant successes against big public bodies—I have taken appeals to the commissioner and won—I cannot see how the physical or mental health or safety exemption can apply to a piece of paper. Similarly, I cannot see how the same exemption can apply to the Cabinet Office telling us when the inquiry was finished. Lord Chilcot was able to tell us that he had finished taking evidence in an inquiry about an illegal war in the middle east. No one would have been endangered because of that, yet it endangers someone’s health or safety if the Cabinet Office tells us the day on which the Cabinet Secretary finished speaking to witnesses about the inquiry. There is a clear question in people’s minds about why the results were not announced until after the general election, and there may well be legitimate reasons for that, but until the Cabinet Office is prepared to come clean on that particular aspect people will always wonder what is happening.

My concern is that something does not smell right. If there is absolutely nothing to hide, why are the Government going to such extraordinary lengths to keep it hidden? Can we be told today, on the record, which Ministers were aware of the contents of the memo before it was leaked? Why was the memo written and was it part of a routine process of going behind the backs of Ministers of the devolved Governments to find out what has happened in their private and confidential conversations with friendly Governments?