In light of the exposed misspending by Chris Grayling on a ferry company with no ferries, we believed it was a worthwhile exercise to dig deeper into some areas of spending that may also raise questions.
It is obvious that key figures in government care little about ‘accountability’ and believe themselves to be Teflon coated when their blatant disregard for taxpayers’ money comes under scrutiny.
It was revealed that Chris Grayling not only offered up a lucrative 13.8m contract to a company that not only had no ferries, but also had no staff and its website was stolen from a takeaway pizza company. But, looking further into the matter, there was something of greater concern which maybe the £13.8m distracted away from. The total amount award in contracts was actually £103m.
While the media outraged at the £13.8m contract awarded to Seaborne Ferries, there were even larger sums handed out to larger firms (with actual ferries of course). A whopping £46.6m was gifted to French company Brittany Ferries and £42.5m to Danish company DFDS. So, where was the outrage over this? Was this all a distraction to move our attention away from the fact that non-UK companies were given the bulk of the £103m in contracts.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46704522
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-to-spend-over-100m-on-ferries-in-case-of-no-deal-brexit/
Even in its efforts to increase the country’s presence on the world stage, the UK government regularly awards companies on its home soil to a far lesser degree than it does its European neighbours or even its friends across the Atlantic. Making it increasingly obvious that there is not only still a very strong relationship with Europe, but one so bonded that we appear to be more content with propping up non-UK businesses than supporting our own.
Our efforts in becoming a player in the Space industry are a typical example of this where recent funds awarded for the development of a spaceport and launch capabilities were mostly distributed to the huge US company, Lockheed Martin, with a meagre £5.5m given to Danish company, Orbex, out of a total £50m.
Clearly Lockheed Martin have greater resources and are better positioned to accelerate the race for Space than the small Danish company that at the time of the grant didn’t even have any rockets (sound familiar?). In fact, further scrutiny of the recipient of £5.5m and subsequent news articles have revealed that the directors of the company are resident in Germany and the engines for their first rocket were 3D printed in….. Germany. So, quite possibly we don’t even have the resources and expertise on our own soil and that is the real reason why so much of our government spending leaves the island (even when it is under the pretence that it is staying here).
At a time when we have thrown the country into chaos by voting ourselves out of Europe with the result of some of our largest employers moving their operations overseas, isn’t it even more important that we look towards funding our own industries and spending our valuable taxpayers money at home by financing home grown development of industries. Maybe the £13.8m that was to be awarded to Seabourne Ferries wasn’t such a bad idea after all. If it was done with more transparency and with a statement that the UK government was looking to build upon our sea freight capabilities maybe more support would have been given. But, sadly, it was handled so badly that the essential trust factor was gone.
Trust and transparency seem to have been almost entirely absent throughout the Brexit process with lucrative ‘consultancy’ contracts being handed out left, right and centre without as much as detailed description of what these ‘consultants’ will actually be doing for their money. It seems almost £75m worth of contracts in total, with a large chunk of that going to giant US companies.
An article published by the metro back in January suggested £25m was spent with 3 US consulting firms.
Bain & Company (US) – £10m
The Boston Consulting Group (US) – £10m
McKinsey and Company (US) – £5m
https://metro.co.uk/2019/01/09/secret-brexit-contracts-worth-75000000-awarded-top-firms-8328084/
According to the article, the documents mentioning the contracts did not include the names of the government officials who signed off on the deals and did not suggest what the scope of the work actually was, other than to say it was for ‘consultancy support for EU exit’.
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