Tackling Fraud and Preventing Government Waste — House of Commons, 2022-02-01
Topic: Government Operations
Alexander Cunningham (Labour, Centre-left): Today, we have heard many extremely worrying examples of fraud, waste and corruption by this Tory Government, with the NHS getting the headlines. Sadly, that kind of behaviour is not limited to Westminster. In the Tees Valley, waste and dodgy deals are happening on a concerning and escalating scale under the leadership of the Conservative Tees Valley Combined Authority Mayor A few days ago, The Northern Echo and the Daily Mirror revealed that the majority of shares in Teesworks, the former steelworks site, have been handed to Tory donors. Until recently, half the shares were owned by the public, but at the end of last year, 90% were held by joint venture partners JC Musgrave Capital and Northern Land Management, with no procurement or open tendering process to oversee the site’s development A director of the same Northern Land Management has donated to the political funds of not only the Tees Valley Mayor but north-east Tory MPs. Joseph Christopher Musgrave, who gives his name to JC Musgrave Capital, has also donated to the Conservative party. The whole thing smacks of cronyism but, as today’s debate has shown, that is no surprise. Sadly, the Tory party and the Tory Government are becoming synonymous with the mismanagement of public money Teesworks has benefited from huge sums of public money since the steel producer SSI was closed in 2015 after the Tory Government let it go to the wall. That led to the redundancies of 2,300 steelworkers and the end of 170 years of steelmaking on Teesside—the industry on which the entire area was built. Taxpayers in both Teesside and across the country have paid tens of millions of pounds to purchase the site, keep it safe in the meantime and clean it up for regeneration What return will taxpayers have if the site ever returns a profit and what say will the public have over who comes there? Is the 10% share that the South Tees Development Corporation still has sufficient to ensure that taxpayers get value for money? To me, that seems very doubtful. We all want to see the successful development of the site, but if it is successful, 90% of the profits will go to the private companies that now control Teesworks There are also hugely valuable materials in the land at the site, including millions of pounds’ worth of sandstone, steel and copper. I am told that lorry loads of materials are leaving the site every day without proper audit—to where, who knows? I would also like to know who got those contracts and how they were won. Was there a tendering exercise or was it just the old pals act? Now that so much of the site is under private ownership, I wonder whether the public will reap the financial benefits of the assets when they are sold on, or whether instead the millions will line the pockets of the Mayor’s donors The site is fundamental to the economic future of Teesside. It has the potential to be a major site for new green industries such as carbon capture and storage and hydrogen. It can help us to rebuild a sustainable modern industrial future for Teesside, but who will be making the decisions on who invests there and what industries and businesses are allowed to set up shop? Surely such decisions are too important to our local economy to be left in the hands of property developers who will always put profits before anything else I am at a loss about where to turn to get answers for local people on these pressing issues. One of the most frustrating elements of the Tory Mayor’s apparent leadership of the combined authority is how difficult it is to access information about how public funds are being managed and spent because he acts behind a cloak of secrecy. Deals that involve such large amounts of public money should benefit from public scrutiny, but there is a complete lack of transparency in the Mayor’s dealings, which seems to me to be evidence of a contempt for his constituents, who have a right to know how their money is being spent It has become impossible to get information that in the past would have been routinely available to the public. The Mayor has created layers of organisations through which his dealings take place, some of which are not even subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Teeswork itself is a classic example: the Mayor set it up in summer 2020, promising that the body would oversee the regeneration of the SSI steel site. But it is not clear what Teeswork actually is. Is it a brand name? Is it a company? What is its constitution? How are decisions made? None of that can be found anywhere online. Its board was hand-picked by the Mayor—a mix of local Tory businessmen, local government officials, the independent leader of Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council and the Tory MP for Redcar. There are no published minutes or paperwork anywhere on the website It is appalling—this is simply no way to run a public administration. Taxpayers footed the bill for the site when it was purchased and it is only right that they should reap the benefits of what the site has to offer. As my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) said, there needs to be a full investigation into all of this I have seen the Mayor commenting that handing over such a large proportion of the site to private firms was apparently necessary to create jobs. To which I say: we lost 2,300 jobs when Conservative inaction shut down the steelmaking industry on Teesside after a proud 170-year history. Local shareholders lost out when the Conservative Government and Tees Valley Mayor stood by when the Sirius mine project needed support, instead leaving it to be taken over by a multinational company, which left local investors—some of whom had put their life savings into the project—high and dry. We lost jobs when the Tories failed to support the world-famous Cleveland Bridge Company, which built the Sydney bridge. It just had a cash-flow problem. Despite the Tories’ promises to save the company, it closed, with the loss of a large number of highly skilled jobs. I understand that the Mayor has been in the news this week throwing his weight behind our disgraced Prime Minister. He shared his concern that, without the Prime Minister, levelling up will be dead. I am sure that, like all of us here, the Mayor is looking forward to reading the levelling-up White Paper tomorrow. I wonder if he will find it to be the rubbish that the Secretary of State apparently says it is. I wonder whether this is what the Mayor means by levelling up—giving more power to Tory donors at the expense of local people, who should be benefiting from investment and jobs. I wonder whether he thinks levelling up includes billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money being mishandled while a town such as Billingham, in my constituency, fights to get £20 million from the levelling up pot but keeps being rejected, even though it has a higher need than other areas that have been awarded cash That is what so-called Conservative levelling up looks like to me—more money for the Tories’ friends and crumbs left for the local community. The message is clear: the Conservatives, both nationally and locally, cannot be trusted to treat taxpayers’ money with respect and get them the value they deserve.