Carillion — House of Commons, 2018-01-15
Topic: Mixed Topics
Jon Hedley Trickett (Labour, Centre-left): I thank the Minister for an advance copy of the statement. The House will conclude that it was recklessly complacent for the Government to seek to avoid responsibility and to place it on to the company. After all, Carillion provides 450 separate taxpayer-funded contracts to the public, with 20,000 people working directly for it and many thousands more in the supply chain. All those thousands of people will have heard his reference to Jobcentre Plus with a shudder of fear for their futures at the beginning of a new year Will the Minister confirm that Carillion provides services to this Conservative Government in 50 prisons, 9,000 schools, 200 operating theatres and 11,000 hospital beds, as well as across a whole series of infrastructure works? Two fifths of Carillion’s income is paid by the taxpayer, so when did the Government first realise that Carillion was in trouble? After all, it had three chief executive officers in a short space of time, made three separate profit warnings and its stock was already subject to short selling on the stock exchange back in 2015. The Minister says that the Government were monitoring the company, so why did they leave the position of the Crown representative observing Carillion vacant for more than three months? How can they explain that £2 billion-worth of Government contracts—taxpayers’ money—was awarded despite all the information that has clearly been in the public domain? I have been asking questions about Carillion in this House for over three months. Why was it apparent to everyone except the Government that Carillion was in trouble? The Secretary of State for Transport in particular has questions to answer. Can the House be told what the Government knew about Carillion’s financial health when they awarded a £1.4 billion contract for HS2 quite recently The Minister has failed to satisfy the House that the jobs of Carillion’s employees and all those in the supply chain will be safeguarded. Will he confirm that the pay, conditions and jobs of those staff are the Government’s priority? Why has he apparently not had a single conversation with representatives of the workforce about their jobs and pensions? Those people should be a higher priority than the executives’ bonuses, which appear to have been safeguarded. Will he assure the House that Carillion is not the first in a series of suppliers that will fall one after the other like dominoes The Government have announced that public money will be given, presumably to the liquidator, to carry out vital public service contracts, but does that not mean that decisions about those contracts have now slipped out of the Government’s control and into the hands of an unaccountable administrator? Would not the simplest, most effective and most democratic way to handle all the contracts have been to bring them back into the public sector, where the ethos of serving the public prevails, rather than that of private profit? Is it not the case that the Government themselves and the Conservative party have too cosy a relationship with the chair of Carillion’s board who—believe it or not—is the Government’s chosen corporate responsibility tsar? He also urged people to vote Tory during the 2015 election. It is a chumocracy Is it not time that we reversed the presumption in favour of outsourcing once and for all? After all, this is not about the failure of a single company, but of a whole ideological system of contracting out public services. The Government are incompetent in office, reckless with taxpayers’ money and helpless with public services. Is it not time that they made way for an Administration that care, and will exercise due diligence?