Category Archives: Whitehall

Parliament: How an Old Etonian triumphed over an anti Establishment right winger

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The election victory of Rory Stewart, over Julian Lewis  by 14 votes for the chairmanship of the Commons defence committee had all the hallmarks of  a well  orchestrated  Conservative Establishment manoeuvre. The full result is here.

It meant that one Old Etonian replaced another. James Arbuthnot, as  Tory chair of the defence committee, stood down. Rory Stewart. replaced him. It also blocked a troublesome Tory who helped humiliate Cameron by stopping  him arming the rebels in Syria, which could have let jihadists obtaining chemical weapons. 

The voting – using the single transferable vote- among the most sophisticated electorate in the country – allowed loyalist Tories two stabs at the post.

 The first choice was probably ” safe pair of hands” Keith Simpson, Mp for Broadland, but when it became clear that Lewis had garnered enough support  from Labour to overtake Simpson.they had another figure up their sleeve, Rory Stewart.

Stewart, who had military experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, has been a tutor to Princes William and Harry and is regarded as a rising star. He attended recently along with George Osborne the influential Bilderberg Group. And significantly a very busy Chancellor took time out yesterday to vote. David Cameron himself did not have time.

Lewis who has encyclopaedic knowledge of defence matters  might not be so good as  Rory as a TV presenter but he would have been trouble.It will be very interesting to see how Rory handles the chairmanship of the committee and whether he makes waves or even wants to make waves.

 One fascinating fact: We have a new chair of defence who has tabled only one question on defence to the government in the last year. He’ll have to ask a lot more now to make an impact.

 

 

 

 

Phone Hacking Trial: Edis, Brooks would have had to be a “complete fool” not to suspect source was public official – Martin Hickman

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Prosecutor doesn’t buy Brooks’ claim that she had no idea big cash payments for military exclusives were coming from well connected Ministry of Defence official. Hardly from ” someone in a pub in Aldershot” says Andrew Edis.

INFORRM's avatarInforrm's Blog

Rebekah Brooks at the Old Bailey in MarchDay 102, Part 2: Rebekah Brooks would have had to have been a “complete fool” not to suspect that a Sun journalist’s “No 1 military contact” was a public official, prosecutor Andrew Edis QC told the phone hacking trial yesterday.

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Exclusive: How the French are squabbling over the spoils they can make by privatising and removing jobs from Britain

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Steria, the French IT company favoured by Whitehall and the NHS

Steria, the French IT company favoured by Whitehall and the NHS

An extraordinary battle is under way across the Channel between three big French IT companies who have a massive interest in British government contracts over the privatisation of Whitehall, town halls and the NHS including removing jobs from Britain to India.
Atos,hated by the disabled in Britain for its harsh policy in implementing Iain Duncan Smith’s policy of getting the disabled back to work, has made a hostile bid to take over Steria, the company chosen by the government to privatise NHS and Whitehall jobs and remove some to India.
Steria is trying to merge with Sopra, another French IT company,in a ” sweetheart deal ” to make big profits by combining new technology with removing jobs from Europe to India.
Steria is furious with Atos for what it calls ” disturbing ” its talks with Sopra. But Atos has left its lucrative offer on the table to tempt Steria shareholders
All this is revealed in a small report from the Paris reporters on the influential Bloomberg website over Easter.
For Atos the deal is simple. It a double whammy – they make money from Iain Duncan Smith’s privatisation of benefit medical tests and more money by offshoring jobs from Britain to India.
For the disabled not such good news, they are forced back into the job market say in Sheffield just at the point when jobs are being moved to India by the same company.
The deal merging Steria and Sopra is equally as good. the game is given away in a press release on Sopra’s website which reveals that it will create a three million Euro company, which could rapidly grow to four million Euros by economies of scale, more jobs shifted from Europe to India and a big jump in profit margins.
It says:”Sopra brings the power of its organisation in France, the strength of
its banking, human resources and real estate products and its effective application management model.
For its part, Steria brings its international reach (Europe and Asia) with a strong
positioning in the United Kingdom.”
“Industrial-scale production capacity would be significantly reinforced with an array of offshore and nearshore service centres representing a workforce of approximately 8,000 people,including over 6,000 in India.”
The company would be 35,000 strong with 8000 jobs in India and other offshore sites.
It also adds that “Steria would be able to leverage Sopra’s offshore capacity in India for its French clients.”
These include the Department of Work and Pensions, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the NHS. Soon,no doubt to be joined by the Home Office and Ministry for Justice.
It predicts profit margins – currently 6.8 per cent for Sopra in the UK will soon top 10 per cent.
For ministers like Francis Maude, Jeremy Hunt and Iain Duncan Smith, this must be bliss – the French squabbling over the best way to make loads of money from their privatisation programmes. It is a global capitalist’s wet dream with even the prospect of a few non exec directorships for retiring Tory politicians when they leave office.
For the disabled, civil servants and those who believe in and want good local services with a public service ethos, it probably can’t be worse. How long before a disabled claimant denied benefit by Atos is told there is a good company vacancy in Pune, India so go and get the job.

Revealed: How Francis Maude and Chris Grayling are actively working to remove jobs from Britain to some risky terrorist destinations

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Francis Maude: Actively encouraging off shoring Whitehall jobs

Francis Maude: Actively encouraging off shoring Whitehall jobs

David Cameron and George Osborne have been boasting how many new jobs their new economic recovery has created.

What they haven’t told you is that their Cabinet colleagues are actively working to strip Britain of existing jobs and replace them with new cheap skate jobs overseas, including some countries which have high risks of riots and terrorist attacks. And further the new jobs will mean the transfer of personal data on staff, possibly police and criminal records and the transfer of patient details from GP to GP to a foreign country.

I have written about this in Tribune magazine this weekend. But the two ministers are being very crafty – they are leaving it to a private company to sack the former civil servants and  transfer your records  and appointing a man who can hold both a Whitehall job and a private sector post at the same time to hand the companies the power to do it.

 

Peter Swann: the man enabling Steria to outsource jobs to his own company's high risk terrorist destination

Peter Swann: the man enabling Steria to outsource jobs to his own company’s high risk terrorist destination

The man is Peter Swann – or Peter S as he likes to hide under his Linked In entry unless you know him well. His entry shows he is currently Director of Crown Oversight at the Cabinet Office under Francis Maude and his job description according to his own Linked In Entry is “transforming the delivery of Civil Service back office functions to over 500,000 staff across the UK and in all Government Departments.”

 His other simultaneous job is  executive director of Aon Risk Solutions which in his words is famous for ” relocating corporate Head Office functions and aligning this strategy to Aon’s captive offshore arrangement and existing outsourcing contractual arrangements.”

 To put it simply he is an outsourcing and off shore fanatic whose company has had a 43 per cent rise in dividends this year. Incidently  his firm provides a Terrorist Tracking Tool and up to date world guide on the dangers of strikes, riots and terrorist attacks in dodgy foreign countries. Download the map here.

So it should be no surprise that within a year a French firm, Steria, have now taken over all the back room jobs for the Department of Work and Pensions, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Environment Agency and is now looking at bidding for the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice. Again the move is subtle, Whitehall has created a new UK company to do it, 75 per cent owned by the French. It came one year after the Department of Health ensured that Steria also took a majority holding in a NHS data  company providing the ” invisible information” through NHS Shared Business Services, including patient information to GPs and clinical recall services.

And now Steria is arranging that jobs currently in Newport, Cardiff, Sheffield and Leeds are destined to be replaced by ones abroad and staff in Newcastle, Blackpool,Peterborough and York are facing the sack. An analysis of Steria’s accounts – which they are required to disclose under EU law- reveals that they make the most money out of their British operations – but their biggest off shore operation is in India with lesser ones in Morocco and Poland. They also derive 39 per cent of their income from the public sector,

 So what will be Sheffield’s loss could well be Pune and Chennai in India’s gain. And here’s the irony  Peter Swann’s company, Aon, rates India as a high risk country for riots, commotion and terrorism, while Sheffield is low risk. It is also amazing that to save money our justice secretary, Chris Grayling, and Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, are quite happy for Steria to do what they like with our personal data. I bet they don’t take such risks with their own personal security. Perhaps both of them should be removed to exile in Pune.

 

Kuttner’s Notes of Conversation with Goodman Just After his Arrest

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Here is the News International hand written document released by the Crown Prosecution Service and written by Stuart Kuttner that contains the evidence that Andy Coulson knew about information leaked from MI6 bugging reaching the paper

peterjukes's avatarThe Criminal Media Nexus

As discussed in evidence yesterday and today, the CPS have released a redacted version of Stuart Kuttner‘s contemporaneous notes of his discussion with former NOTW Royal Reporter Clive Goodman, dated 10th August 2006, soon after he was released from his arrest and questioning by police in the initial Operation Caryatid investigation into phone hacking.

This evidence is currently being adduced by Andrew Edis QC, as he cross examines Kuttner in the witness box. The original pages are from the NI archives, where Kuttner explains he filed most his notebooks. The transcript is an agreed document

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Phone Hacking Trial: Reporter: Coulson knew about MI6 buggings – Martin Hickman

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An extraordinary disclosure about Andy Coulson, the editor of the News of the World, being told by Clive Goodman that he got MI6 intercepts

INFORRM's avatarInforrm's Blog

Clive GoodmanDay 88:  Andy Coulson, the News of the World’s then editor, was alleged by a senior journalist to have been part of a criminal plot to receive information covertly obtained from MI6 wire tappings, the phone hacking trial heard today.

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Parliament: Computer says No (again!)

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Just when Parliament’s IT boss had promised that their new computer system was up and running again and ready to expand, guess what happens.

 It takes just 90 minutes for another crash with a hasty call  to IT experts to convene to sort out why so many MPs and peers offices still can’t access the internet.

 Full details of the story are on the Exaro News website and in Computer Weekly .They come from the latest leaks from inside Parliament – one general memo to all staff telling them everything is working well  and another to the IT team saying everything has started to go wrong.

At this rate it looks as though Parliament with its thousands of internal subscribers  is going to join other institutions in Whitehall and the NHS with a system plagued with problems.

 

The child sex abuse customs video: Why didn’t the police act?

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Over the weekend my intrepid colleague, Mark Conrad, broke a very detailed story on Exaro News and in The People, about a pornographic child abuse video seized by the customs way back in 1982. You can read the full story on both sites.

 The customs officer, Maganlal Solanki, then handed over the tape to senior managers at Customs and Excise. They took over the case. took no further action, and are understood to have passed the video cassette to the Security Service, MI5. No one was prosecuted.

The officer says a prominent  Tory Cabinet minister was on that tape but he is still too scared to discuss what he is doing and there still seems an attempt to gag him.

Again like the scandal at Elm Guest House, the failure to pursue paedophile  Sir Cyril Smith, and what is being revealed about the scale of sexual abuse in a Durham detention centre, the police and the security services and special branch( who certainly knew about Smith) have questions to answer.

 Why  is it taking 40 years for the police to review cases ? It begs the question of whether it will be covered up yet again.  Or have people destroyed all the evidence?

Given such a video would have provided prima facie evidence for any prosecution why was nothing done about it and why was the person who brought it into Britain at Dover allowed to go on his way?

 The more we look into this murky area, the more unanswered questions there are and the nastier the cover up.

 

 

Iain Duncan Smith’s election present for the Golden Oldies: Bye Bye bus pass and fuel payments

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Iain Duncan Smith's endangered species the free bus pass

Iain Duncan Smith’s endangered speciesthe free bus pass

George Osborne has made a lot of noise about how  pensioners  with spare cash are going to get  a fabulous deal under the Coalition – high interest pensioner bonds and the chance to spend, spend their pension  pot.

 All this is seen by political commentators as a  brilliant move by the  Chancellor to get the grey vote out for the Tories next year – with many of the measures timed for the election.

He also made it clear that pensions were going to be exempt from the new welfare cap – which will hit everyone else from lone parents, the disabled.and the working poor on housing benefit.

Sounds too good to be true for  the elderly. And guess what, it is.

Hidden in the specialist publication The House Magazine today is an interview with Works and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith by journalist Paul Waugh. And he asks: What’s your latest thinking about benefits such as winter fuel allowance and other universal, non-pension benefits for the elderly?

 The answer is : “The Chancellor has made it clear that they go into the [welfare] cap. So straight away they will be looked at in the same way as other benefits. Whether we have a specific view on those is a matter for the manifesto. It’s already very clear that they will be part of the overall balance of expenditure within the department for the benefit cap.”

So this broad brush promise on Budget Day is not true. Bus passes, TV licences, fuel payments, all available universally will join the rest of the benefits facing the chop.

What he doesn’t say – but everybody in Westminster  knows – is that the scale of cuts planned after the 2015 will make the last five years look like tiny by comparison. So it is my bet that we will see the end  of free bus passes and most fuel payments – because the size of cuts required will dictate it. And if you take the fact that Labour under Ed Balls is already committed to means testing fuel payments and the Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg want to do the same to free bus passes. there is no escape.

And the poorer elderly  will find their social care all but disappear – as a fresh wave of local government cuts come into force.

Great policy from the coalition. Splash out your pension fund on a Lamborghini – but if you can’t afford to pay the full bus fares take up your zimmer frame and walk!

Exclusive: The East Coast rail bosses tax avoidance scheme that hit the buffers

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East Coast trains at Kings Cross. Pic courtesy:; www.rail.co.uk

East Coast trains at Kings Cross. Pic courtesy:; http://www.rail.co.uk

A blunder by the Department of Transport has allowed two top state rail bosses to repeat a tax avoidance scheme which should have been outlawed in Whitehall following the exposure of Ed Lester, the former head of the Student Loans Company.

The deal allowed the highly paid chief executive, Michael Holden, and his finance director, David Walker, to avoid having tax  and national insurance deducted at source from the state-owned Directly Operated Railways, which is responsible for the East Coast mainline. They are now on the pay roll and are currently paid £244,000 and £171,000 a year respectively. Originally it appears the money was paid into their two personal service companies run with their wives.

A  full report in Exaro News today names the two top officials cited in a written Parliamentary statement from Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury last week which revealed that 128 civil servants had been caught on ” off pay roll” contracts that should be have been full-time employees, Some 125 former civil servants who quit have now been reported to Revenue and Customs.

 But the Treasury has put the blame on the other three on two ministries, Transport and the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and has fined both ministries over £500,000 between them for the lapse which they should have put an end after six months.

Michael Holden. chief executive of state-owned Directly Operated Railways

Michael Holden. chief executive of state owned Directly Operated Railways

 Michael Holden appears to be all round railway buff,competitive  swimmer, fell walker, and an advocate of the beauties of Surrey living in Woking. As non executive chairman of East Coast Rail ( which I can praise for a good service to disabled people) a member of the travelling public recently asked him to pose for a picture on their mobile.

He describes himself on his Twitter account as: “A bit grumpy, mostly old, but all man, busy with railways, being dad and lots of other stuff. Looking for that elusive work-life balance thingy.”

On his Linked-In page, he says: “I lead the UK government’s business unit capable of running rail franchises when no tendered franchise can be put in place.” He runs a personal-service company, Coledale Consulting. He describes it as: “Railway-management consultancy specialising in strategic advice to railway companies. Clients include infrastructure providers, train operating groups and companies, and client side including government. UK, Ireland, Sweden.”

David Walker appears to be  a less flamboyant and is not on Twitter. He has interesting links with Romanian as well British railways..

The third case uncovered by the Treasury was at the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency (AHVLA), which hired Claire Evans off payroll as director of corporate services in October 2012.

Her annual salary last year was between £140,000 and £145,000.

Again, the Treasury said that the AHVLA was too slow to put Evans on the payroll. 

The biggest offender for off pay roll contracts is Vince Cable’s department of business,innovation and skills and its agencies – accounting for almost half the 125.