The below Parliamentary question was asked by Peter Grant on 2015-10-27.
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if he will estimate the monthly running costs of administering benefit sanctions.
Priti Patel
The department does not hold information on the monthly running costs of administering benefit sanctions.
This information cannot be captured at this level even at disproportionate cost.
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Peter Grant on 2015-10-26.
To ask the Secretary of State for Scotland, on how many occasions officials of his Department have contacted representatives of a foreign government to ask for an account of private meetings or discussions held between representatives of that government and Scottish Government Ministers in each of the last five years.
David Mundell
On no occasion have Scotland Office officials contacted representatives of a foreign government to ask for an account of private meetings or discussions held between representatives of that government and Scottish Government Ministers.
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Peter Grant on 2015-10-26.
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, on how many occasions officials of his Department have contacted representatives of a foreign government to ask for an account of private meetings or discussions held between representatives of that government and Scottish Government Ministers in each of the last five years.
Mr David Lidington
Foreign policy is reserved to the UK Government. The UK Government recognises the interests of the devolved administrations (DAs) in international policy which touches upon devolved areas. Under the framework of the relevant Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and concordats, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) frequently supports overseas visits by DAs ministers and officials. FCO officials generally attend such meetings overseas and expect the DAs to provide details of any international meetings at which FCO officials were not present. The FCO maintains a broad overview of bilateral relations with all countries.
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Peter Grant on 2015-10-26.
To ask the Secretary of State for Wales, on how many occasions officials of his Department have contacted representatives of a foreign government to ask for an account of private meetings or discussions held between representatives of that government and Welsh Government Ministers in each of the last five years.
Stephen Crabb
On no occasion have Wales Office officials contacted representatives of a foreign government to ask for an account of private meetings or discussions held between representatives of that government and Welsh Government Ministers.
The speech made by Peter Grant, the SNP MP for Glenrothes, in the House of Commons on 24 November 2022.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
My colleagues on the Public Accounts Committee are at an important evidence session this morning, otherwise I have no doubt that many more of them would be here. The report on PPE contracts, which was unanimously agreed by the Committee earlier this year, stated:
“At no point was consideration given to the extent of the profit margin that potential suppliers would be taking on payments for PPE. Neither was consideration of any potential conflicts between individuals making referrals through the VIP lane and the companies they were referring. We”—
the Public Accounts Committee, unanimously—
“are therefore unsurprised to see the reports of excessive profits and conflicts of interest on PPE contracts.”
Yet if today’s Guardian reports are correct, the extent of lobbying of Cabinet Ministers, one of whom is back in the Cabinet, by a senior Conservative politician went significantly further than the Public Accounts Committee was aware of at the time. Can the Minister confirm that the reports of additional lobbying in today’s Guardian are accurate and, if they are not accurate, can he come back with a statement to confirm that?
Neil O’Brien
I read the same article as the hon. Gentleman. I notice that it did not lead to a contract—the case that was mentioned in The Guardian—but more generally, absolutely, there are many lessons to learn about this process. However, we were having to pay, in some cases upfront, for PPE because, as part of the global scramble for PPE that I have described, if we were not prepared to go that extra mile, we would simply not have had the PPE and we would have had more nurses without the vital protective equipment that we all needed.
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Peter Grant on 2015-10-09.
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, which other EU member states have stated that they are prepared to support proposals to amend the EU treaties.
Mr David Lidington
The Prime Minister. my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) has spoken to his counterparts in all other EU Member States, setting out the case for substantive reforms. He has been very clear that these reforms must be legally binding and irreversible and that in some areas that will mean treaty change. Technical talks are currently ongoing.
The speech made by Peter Grant, the SNP MP for Glenrothes, in the House of Commons on 13 October 2022.
Being a Scot, and in deference to the sensitivities of supporters of Celtic, Rangers and the Scottish women’s football team, I will maybe not talk about football, if that is okay by everybody else. Hopefully we will still have somebody left in Europe after tonight.
I welcome this long overdue Bill, but let us not kid on that it was made necessary by the illegal war crimes that have been committed in Ukraine over the past year, or even by the illegal war crimes that started in 2014. This Bill was needed 20 years ago, if not earlier. I welcome it because it gives us the opportunity to turn Companies House into what most people probably thought it was: an effective regulator playing its part in the fight against fraud, rather than an innocent bystander that watches while companies on its register scam our constituents out of billions of pounds every year and enable some of the most evil regimes and criminal gangs on the planet. Companies House has become a spectator because this Government and generations of previous Governments could not be bothered to give it the powers to be anything else.
My criticism of the Bill, like that of most other hon. Members who have spoken today, is that in too many areas it does not go anywhere near far enough. As has been mentioned, it is completely silent about one of the biggest obstacles to tackling corporate fraud: the fact that literally any company can easily dodge the existing requirements, and the requirements in the Bill, just by making sure that its ultimate owner is not a human being but a brass nameplate on the door of a building, probably in some dodgy Crown dependency. And while we are talking about Crown dependencies, why is it that we still allow Crown dependencies and British overseas territories to be such willing enablers of the evil perpetrated by Putin and so many others? That has to stop.
A few hon. Members have reminded us that, as well as enabling large-scale acts of barbarity around the world, economic crime hits our constituents very hard. I do not apologise for bringing up Blackmore Bond again; I will keep bringing it up until Phillip Nunn and Patrick McCreesh have been properly brought to book. They were able to move on from the £1 million they had made on the fringes of the London Capital & Finance fraud to set up their very own £46 million scam called Blackmore Bond.
At about that time, Nunn and McCreesh were directors of 35 companies registered at Companies House. Last time I checked, those 35 companies had collected 59 formal notices of disciplinary action—59 formal notices of compulsory wind-up—because they were acting illegally. They were failing to comply even with the woefully weak requirements currently imposed by Companies House. There was no way of flagging up the fact that the same directors were in charge of all those defaulting companies. There was no way of totting up their offences, like bookings for a footballer or speeding points for a motorist. Indeed, it was as if the motorist were able to get off by arguing that his licence could not be taken away because each time he was caught speeding he was in a different car.
We need to tighten that up. We need to be able to identify those who are directors of several companies that are all in default. There must be an accumulation of culpability; there must be speedy action, which means not just closing down the companies—that is often exactly what the directors want to happen, and it was certainly what Nunn and McCreesh wanted to happen—but taking effective sanctions against the directors.
A year or two before Blackmore Bond finally collapsed, it said in the accounts that it submitted to Companies House that it was relying on incoming money from future investors to pay back what it had previously claimed was guaranteed money to previous investors. In other words, the directors sent a document to Companies House, which put it on the website, saying, “We are a Ponzi scheme.” No one at Companies House noticed, because it was no one’s job to notice.
The auditors who signed off the accounts of one part of the group, which was a plc, were required to express a view on whether the company could be truly regarded as a going concern, but they were under no obligation to run up a red flag and say, “Not only can we not be sure that it is a going concern, but this company is designed to collapse, and it is going to collapse very soon.” Because they were under no obligation to tell anyone, client confidentiality meant that they were under an obligation to tell no one.
I commend to Members who have not seen it the BBC’s “Panorama” programme on Blackmore Bond—and not just because I am in it for about 10 seconds; the rest of it is very interesting as well. From that programme, I learned that Phillip Nunn—poor diddums—had been declared bankrupt. What a shame! I checked the Companies House records this morning, and found that he was still a registered director of two companies. I thought it was an offence for a bankrupt person to be a director of a company. Why has no one picked up on that? Perhaps we can at least find something for him to be charged with while the Serious Fraud Office and others are carrying out their checks.
However, you do not need to set up a company to get rich. Mr Nunn’s latest scheme is to set himself up on social media as some kind of lifestyle self-help guru. To be fair, helping himself is something that he seems to be quite good at. No one could fail to see what this is about. He is going online in order to reach a much wider audience. He comes across as very plausible and very personable, but he is grooming innocent victims, not just in the UK but all over the world, until he is ready to say to them, very confidentially, “Do not tell anyone else, but I have just found about a brilliant investment scheme: you are guaranteed to get money back.” It will be Blackmore Bond and LCF all over again, and at present there seems to be nothing anyone can do to stop it. They know it is going to happen, but they have to wait until it is too late and then try to console the victims.
Let me draw attention to one feature of many corporate scams and frauds. Instead of setting up one company, people set up a whole sequence of small companies. They run a company for about 18 months to two years, and just at the point when they have to publish a set of accounts, they close it down, shift what is left of the assets to a different company and start all over again. It is possible to run a business for 20 years without ever having to tell Companies House, or anyone else, anything about the money going into and out of the accounts. That should raise the reddest of red flags. If the same one or two directors are seen to be setting up a sequence of fairly small companies that never seem to do anything and are then wound up, Companies House should be looking at that, as should the fraud squad, because 90% of the time fraud will be the answer.
Between 2019 and 2022, a gentleman called Richard Philip Wells set up 24 such companies. Members who are interested in motor racing may recognise the name, because Richard Wells owns a motor racing team; he is not a poor man. Most of those 24 companies have never filed a set of accounts, and most have lasted for less than two years before being wound up. The few that have filed accounts have filed them on the basis of being dormant: it is basically, “Nothing to report, Sir.” But just how dormant were those companies?
On 15 November 2020 two of his companies, SHP Litigation Ltd and SHP Security Trustee Ltd, were set up on the same day. Companies House knows that two weeks later, on 30 November 2020, SHP Litigation granted a charge—effectively, a mortgage—to SHP Security Trustee. The charge document was signed on behalf of one company by its only director, Richard Wells, and a wee bit further down the page Richard Wells signed on behalf of the other company to confirm that he agreed with the conditions of the money that he was lending to himself.
A few months later, the same Richard Wells certified on the accounts of both companies that they had not traded, that they had been dormant and that they had carried out no activities during the previous 12 months. One of the statements that he submitted to Companies House has to be a lie. We cannot possibly have money being lent back and forth between two companies and then say that the companies did nothing—unless a company that did not have money lent money it did not have, secured against the assets of another company that had no assets at all. There is clearly something very sinister going on in that network of companies. On 5 July 2022, he shut down both companies, because by that time they had achieved their purpose.
It is noticeable that a lot of Richard Wells’ more recent companies had SHP in their names. One of them, SHP Capital Holdings Ltd, he set up on 29 November 2019. He used that company to buy a funeral plan company called Safe Hands Plans Ltd, which we have all now heard of. Why would somebody buy a funeral plan company that would never be able to comply with the Financial Conduct Authority’s requirements for the running of a funeral plan company after July 2022? Why spend money buying a company when he knew it would be illegal to operate less than two years later? The reason was that he was not interested in the company; he was only interested in an associated company where its money lived.
That money was not the company’s, but the customers’. The previous directors had lied to the customers that the money was held securely in an independent trust, but it was held in an associated company, with the same shareholders and the same directors. One of Mr Wells’ first acts was to sack the fund manager and move the fund management to a different, newly set up company that was run by his best mate. Fast forward a couple of years, and the whole façade crumbles. Safe Hands Plans goes into administration, thousands of people discover that their funeral plan money has disappeared and nobody knows where it has gone. I know where it has gone, Madam Deputy Speaker, and so does the Serious Fraud Office. I hope that it can quickly establish that sufficiently to bring charges.
There is no legitimate, lawful business reason for Wells, Nunn, McCreesh or dozens of others to set up so many tiny companies for a relatively small-scale operation. Companies House records show all the hallmarks of the kind of company set-up that is a red flag for money laundering, but nobody at Companies House spotted it. Nobody looked more closely to see whether there was a legitimate reason for it or whether it was a scam in preparation, because nobody in this place had ever made it the job of anybody at Companies House to prevent fraud, rather than to try to chase down the money afterwards.
I ask the Minister to confirm, in summing up, where in the Bill Companies House is given the responsibility, the legal powers and the resources to identify and investigate suspicious patterns of company formation and dissolution. If it is not in the Bill just now, will the Government undertake to bring forward an amendment in Committee to enable that?
I also ask the Government to consider some other amendments. HMRC has the power to look through the labyrinth of a company’s structure and tax the company based on what it does, rather than how it structures itself. Why do we not give the same powers to bodies such as Companies House? Why do we not extend the circumstances in which directors can be held personally and speedily liable in civil and criminal courts for their misconduct? Why do we not just outright ban the registration of any company whose ultimate owner is not a person with a pulse? The Minister may be able to explain why it is sometimes necessary to allow a computer bot to own a company that trades in the United Kingdom. I cannot think of an answer, but I hope he can enlighten me on that.
Why do we not base the reporting and audit requirements on the total size of the undertaking, rather than ignoring the fact that if we chop a big company into 30 bits, they all become so wee that they do not have to publish accounts and nobody is allowed to see what is going on? When the Financial Reporting Council publishes a sanction against a company’s auditors because of some flaw in the company’s accounts, why not also require that company to lodge the same document at Companies House so it appears on the front page of the record, rather than as a footnote on page 26 of the accounts in a couple of years’ time?
The Bill will make things better, but it will not make them anywhere near better enough. There is very little in the Bill that I am opposed to, but there is a lot that I am disappointed not to see in it. I became interested in this subject, as I suspect many Members did, after having people break down in my surgery because they had been cleaned out by people like Wells, Nunn, McCreesh and so many others. It became obvious to me quite quickly what changes needed to be made to legislation, first to stop these chancers scamming our constituents, and secondly to make sure that those who do it in the future and those who have done it in the past are brought speedily to a court of law, dealt with and locked up.
If I were the sort of person who broke into someone’s house and stole £1 million, no police force in these islands would rest until I was safely behind bars. If I set up a company and stole £20 million, the chances of me getting away scot-free would be very high indeed. The Bill makes it a wee bit more likely that I would get caught, but if I were criminally minded, it would still be a gamble worth taking. Until we make the law tight enough that economic crime never pays, our constituents will continue to pay the price of our failure.
The speech made by Peter Grant, the SNP MP for Glenrothes, in the House of Commons on 11 October 2022.
I do not often say this, but I welcome the decision that the Government have taken, which is to U-turn on their increase in national insurance contributions, although I utterly reject any suggestion that it should be coupled with any watering down of the previous commitments on funding for health and social care services.
I do not think that national insurance is the right name for this tax. It is an income tax—a jobs tax—and we should be honest about what it is doing. It is a jobs tax because if a person has a job, they pay tax on the money that they get paid for doing their job— unless they are earning way below the minimum full-time wage. If they are an employer, they pay tax on the wages that they pay someone for doing the job for them. It is only if a person is lucky enough to be able to make most of their money from owning shares or property that they can earn significant amounts of money without paying national insurance on that income. I have to say that not many of my constituents who are struggling on a minimum wage and part-time jobs are that impressed by the fact that they can get national insurance-free income from their share portfolios, because they cannot afford to buy them in the first place.
This is a form of income tax—a jobs tax—specifically targeted at working people. It is not even an insurance as such. I pay insurance on my car. If I am involved in an accident, I have a guarantee that the insurance company will pay its share of the costs. People do not get that guarantee just because they have been paying national insurance contributions all their life. Just ask the WASPI women—of the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign—how much of an insurance scheme guarantee they actually get from national insurance.
The legislation that we are being asked to repeal today—and it looks like it will be repealed today without a Division—introduced a form of hypothecated tax, which is not something that I would generally support. Nobody has really mentioned that in this debate, and it did not get much coverage in the debate last year. Other than for very time-limited and precisely defined purposes, hypothecated taxes do not really work. Filling in a small part of the decades-long underfunding in some of our most important public services is neither time limited nor specific.
Whatever we are going to do to change the tax system to get adequate funding for these services, a single, specific hypothecated tax is never going to be it. I have been consistent on this. I find it interesting that nobody who has spoken in this debate in favour of repealing the levy has explained why they voted for it in the first place last year. I note that sometimes people are allowed to change their minds regularly, whereas at other times people are not allowed to change their minds from eight years ago.
Our health and social care services are among our most precious public services. Universal healthcare—including free prescriptions—free at the point of delivery, based only on clinical need rather than the ability to pay, is surely an essential part of any civilised society. I would say the same about social care. I am proud that in Scotland we have free personal care for those who need it, regardless of whether they can afford to pay for it. I welcome the steps that the Scottish Government have taken to reduce the financial burden on those who need other forms of social care as well. All of these services are available to everybody and they should be paid for by everybody according to our means through general taxation. I am not ashamed to say that if I had to pay a wee bit extra tax that I could easily afford in order to provide a civilised society for my people to live in, I would do so willingly.
Those principles are now under direct attack, even more so than they were under the previous Prime Minister, and even more so than they were in the dark days of Margaret Thatcher. We now have a Prime Minister who has chosen to surround herself with people whose links to the NHS privatisation lobby are not hard to find. It does not need to be direct privatisation; it is very easy to privatise the health service by stealth, simply by strangling it of funds so that the waiting list becomes so long that people choose to pay for a health service that they have already paid for through their taxes.
That is why it is essential that we get a commitment from this Government that not only will there not be a reduction in cash terms in health service funding or in social care funding, but that those budgets will increase by enough to cover the cost of inflation as it hits those services. Historically, inflation in the health service has usually been higher than the headline rate of inflation. The headline rate of inflation is savage enough just now. It is likely that the true cost of inflation to the health service is even higher. I asked the Chancellor about this directly a few weeks ago when he issued his mini-Budget. Scandalously, he refused to give a commitment that funding in the health service will even keep pace with inflation, never mind increasing to meet what we can all see is an unmet demand.
Part of the reason that the NHS is coming under unprecedented pressure is that the policies and deliberate choices of this Government and their predecessors have forced people into poverty and destitution, and that has an impact on people’s health, which creates additional demand on the NHS. As others have pointed out, having people on health service waiting lists unable to work damages the economy. If the economy is damaged in such a way that it affects the funding of the health service—if, for example, people are given lower wages, are put under financial stress and are unable to afford the cost of living—that in turn damages our health, and to an extent that we perhaps have not properly realised until recently.
A recent study by the University of Glasgow and the Glasgow Centre for Population Health found nearly 335,000 excess deaths in the UK in the past seven years that were caused by austerity. Deliberate policy choices by this and previous Tory Governments since 2012 have killed more people than the covid pandemic. That is a scandalous thing to happen in any country that claims to be civilised. That is why we cannot fully consider the provisions of this Bill, or the provisions of the Act of Parliament that it seeks to repeal, in isolation from the wider policies of a Government who seem hellbent on plunging even more people into poverty, while lining the pockets of their own billionaire supporters and donors.
To give just one example, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury was delighted to tell us earlier that the combination of not increasing the national insurance levy and the previously announced changes to income tax thresholds will amount to a whopping £500 per year back in the pockets of my lowest-earning constituents. They are paying between £1,200 and £1,500 a year more just for the heat in their homes compared with last year, so the generous £500 a year that the Government are putting back into their pockets is less than half of what my constituents need just to stand still for electricity and gas prices. That is before they start to pay their increased costs of food, rent and mortgages for those able to buy their own homes.
That should not be inevitable. My constituents live in a country in which 85% of energy does not come from gas, so why do they see their bills doubling when there is a gas shortage? My constituents live in a country that supplies more energy than it needs and has a commodity that is in short supply, so why are they so much worse off when the value of the commodity that we have in surplus increases on the global market? Those are not questions that Treasury Ministers or other Ministers in this place do not know the answers to; they are questions that they are scared to face up to the answers to.
Repealing this legislation when the ink is hardly dry on the paper serves to illustrate yet again the total chaos that this Government are in. That chaos has spread to the whole of these islands, and they seem quite happy to inflict it on the financial markets, despite the impact they know it will have on people’s standard of living now and the pensions they will be able to rely on in the future.
The Government’s persistent refusal to provide a costed plan to ensure sufficient and sustainable funding for those vital services, directly through funding in England and indirectly through Barnett consequentials on the devolved nations, and their persistent refusal to put health and social care services on a proper and sustainable funding basis demonstrate clearly that our national health service can never be safe in the hands of this or any other Westminster Government.
Below is the text of the speech made by Peter Grant, the SNP MP for Glenrothes, in the House of Commons on 3 April 2019.
On 18 July 2018, the SNP became the first party in this Parliament to call for an extension of the article 50 deadline. The need for a real extension is more urgent now than it was then. Although we have a number of concerns about the wording of the Bill, we will compromise on those concerns just now, and support it. Hopefully, we can improve it at the next stage.
The Government are still trying to blackmail the House by insisting that the choice is between the Prime Minister’s rotten deal and no deal at all. That claim is simply not true; revocation is still an option. We hope to amend the Bill to make that perfectly clear. I commend my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) for the part she played in confirming that point in a court case on which Her Majesty’s Government spent £150,000 of our money; they sent lawyers to the European Court just to tell it that the Government did not have a view on the matter under discussion, which seemed a good use of money.
Ironically, in the long term, possibly the best way to get the Brexit that people actually voted for would be to stop this insane process and start all over again before it is too late. I was disappointed that Labour did not fully support a motion that my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) put forward that would have done that. I hope that Labour accepts that that was a mistake, and will support a similar motion if they get the chance. Our concern is that the Bill leaves too much in the hands of a Prime Minister who cannot be trusted to get anything right; we will seek to get that amended as well.
We need a clear reason for the extension, and that will dictate how long the extension has to be. Our preference would be for an extension to allow a people’s vote—not a rerun of the 2016 referendum, but a different vote on a different question. If the Government were confident that their withdrawal agreement had the support of the people, they would not run away so quickly from the chance to give people a say.
Earlier this afternoon, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber held up a copy of “Scotland’s Place in Europe” in the House, and it was howled down by the Conservatives. They can laugh at it, but Scotland’s place is in Europe, and Scotland will retain its proper place as a full, sovereign member of the family of European nations.