OpenDemocracy

North-east mayor slams Starmer’s green rollback after quitting Labour

Spread the love
Labour leader Keir Starmer (centre) with then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo (R) and then US ambassador to Britain, Woody Johnson, in London, 21 July 2020.
Labour leader Keir Starmer (centre) with then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo (R) and then US ambassador to Britain, Woody Johnson, in London, 21 July 2020. Pompeo said in 2019 “we will do our level best” to stop Jeremy Corbyn getting elected. (Photo: US State Department)

Original article by Adam Ramsay republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Exclusive: Jamie Driscoll says some voters think Starmer is ‘a liar’ and backing ULEZ would win votes

The ex-Labour mayor of the UK’s poorest region has slammed Keir Starmer for watering down the party’s environmental commitments.

In an exclusive interview with openDemocracy in his office in Newcastle, North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll said: “There is no contradiction between protecting us from the climate emergency, and prosperity. In fact, if you fail to protect us from the climate emergency, you’re going to lose all prosperity in the future.”

Labour’s leadership has blamed its failure to take Boris Johnson’s former constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip in the recent by-election on London mayor Sadiq Khan’s plan to expand the city’s ‘ultra-low emission zone’ (ULEZ) into the area. But Driscoll, who dramatically quit Labour last month, said the party would have won the seat if it had stood by the scheme and campaigned against Tory cuts to bus services in the capital.

“Labour would have won the Uxbridge by-election if they had said: ‘Yes, it [ULEZ] is a problem, because the Tories have cut public transport in London – if we had better buses here, which we will do, you’ll be better off,’” he said. “That would have won them it… A lot of people who voted Green because they were outraged by Labour’s abandonment [of ULEZ] probably would have voted Labour.”

Labour’s candidate in the by-election had publicly opposed the ULEZ expansion during the campaign; the Green candidate won 893 votes, more than the margin separating Labour from the Tories.

Driscoll also argued that politicians’ failure to take climate breakdown seriously contributed to falling trust in politics: “We’ve got a climate juggernaut hurtling towards us, and [politicians] are saying ‘some people in outer London didn’t like ULEZ so let’s just burn the planet because we need their votes’. Almost any rational person, which is the majority of the electorate, I still believe, would say: ‘It doesn’t add up any more.’”

Deselected by Labour

Driscoll is currently mayor of the North of Tyne region, which extends northwards from Newcastle to the Scottish border. He has successfully negotiated an expansion of the region, meaning that when the post comes up for re-election next year, it will also cover areas of north-east England south of the Tyne, including Sunderland, Gateshead and County Durham.

With an engineering background and his own software business, Driscoll was first elected as a councillor in Newcastle in 2018. He was quickly chosen by Labour members to be the party’s candidate for North of Tyne mayor when the post was created in 2019, beating the longstanding leader of Newcastle Council in the selection. Calling himself a “pragmatic socialist”, he is generally identified with the left of the party, and was supported by Momentum.

But when Labour announced its shortlist of candidates for the mayor of the newly expanded North East seat, Driscoll’s name was notably absent. Party insiders briefed that he had been ‘purged’ because he once spoke at an event alongside the filmmaker Ken Loach, who was himself banned from Labour because of his prior support for the Left Unity party. While much of the media parroted this line, a simpler explanation is that he was binned because of his left-wing views, and as revenge for defeating one of the party’s big beasts.

Driscoll’s deselection was slammed by politicians across the political spectrum, with Labour mayors Andy Burnham and Steve Rotherham praising his approach to the role. His interview with openDemocracy is the first time he has so clearly attacked the Labour leadership since standing down from the party.

Speaking about Starmer’s recent equivocation on previous climate spending commitments, Driscoll characterised the Labour position as: “We might put £28bn into tackling the climate emergency at some point in the future if the fiscal rule allows it – a fiscal rule which we decided on, which is not real and has no legal basis in anything, on the basis that we just think it makes us look a bit more credible to some people.”

If you do a vox pop and say ‘do you think Keir Starmer keeps his word?’ you would have no one say ‘yes’

He added: “There is an underlying reality to people’s lives. Either your bus comes, or it doesn’t. Either you can get an operation, or you can’t. These are the things that are concrete and in the real world. The climate emergency is absolutely one of those.

“The science is uncontroversial – we already now have enough CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that even if they remain stable at that level, global heating is going to continue and we will pass way beyond 1.5°C. Even if we live in a magic world where no tipping points kick in, that will lead to mass people movements and crop failures around the world.”

For Labour’s leadership to respond to this reality by saying “yeah, but we need a fiscal rule” isn’t good enough, he argued. Criticising his former party for saying it won’t cancel oil and gas licences recently issued by the Tories, and for comments Starmer reportedly made to shadow climate change secretary Ed Miliband that he “hates tree huggers” (which he denied) and isn’t “into hope and change”, Driscoll asked: “What are they there for?”

‘Dishonest’

Speaking more broadly, Driscoll said some people perceive Starmer as a “liar”. He claimed: “If you would go out and do a vox pop and say ‘do you think Keir Starmer keeps his word?’ you would have no one say ‘yes’. Or some people think, ‘yes, he’s a liar but he’s not as much of a liar as the Tories’ – you know, lesser of two evils. But the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.”

Referring to an event during Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign, Driscoll added: “I interviewed him in 2019. He said that you have to inspire people to party unity – you don’t discipline people to party unity.” Referring to Starmer’s promises at the time, Driscoll said: “Ten pledges, has he kept any of them? I don’t think he has. And the public know that.”

He added: “Regardless of what people say in politics, regardless of their ideologies, there is an objective reality. And when politicians forget that, they find themselves unable to tell the truth. The reason they are unable to tell the truth is that what they propose does not tally with reality.”

He also claimed Starmer and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting are unduly influenced by big business, pointing to Streeting’s donations from a hedge fund manager heavily invested in private healthcare and Starmer rowing back on commitments to tax Big Tech after a meeting with Google. “To abandon that,” he said, “shows you in whose interests they are operating.”

Whatever you’re interested in, there’s a free openDemocracy newsletter for you. HAVE A LOOK

Original article by Adam Ramsay republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingNorth-east mayor slams Starmer’s green rollback after quitting Labour

Left Foot Forward

Spread the love

Catching up with articles published by Left Foot Forward, an excellent UK political blog.

Government caved to wealthy landowner lobbying in U-turn on public path access

Thérèse Coffey gave landowners what they wanted, putting at risk public access to thousands of miles of historic paths

Public access to thousands of miles of historic paths in England could be lost due to a government U-turn, following successful lobbying by wealthy landowners.

An investigation by openDemocracy found Environment Secretary, Thérèse Coffey, U-turned on a government commitment to remove restrictions on registering a claim to protect lost paths in England, after receiving a letter from landowners.

…

Via a freedom of information request, openDemocracy revealed that Thérèse Coffey’s U-turn came after a request was made by the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), who represent owners of rural land, property and business.

The letter expressed ‘concerns’ about the complete removal of the cut-off date due to land managers ‘uncertainty’ over what they referred to as, ‘frivolous claims of historic rights on their land holdings’.

The letter then asks the MP to consider a new deadline of 2031, shortly followed by Coffey announcing the government U-turn, which appeased the landowners request. It seems it didn’t take much to sway the minister in the interests of the wealthy, at the expense of the general public.

…

Labour has failed to stand against the Tories’ attack on the right to protest

Image of Keir Starmer sucking up to the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum, Davos
Image of Keir Starmer sucking up to the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum, Davos

Green Party peer Jenny Jones gives her account of the parliamentary battles over the Tories’ protest laws

Last night, the Labour Party made a disastrous misjudgement that will impact on hundreds of thousands of people attempting to protest and exercise their democratic rights in the coming years. By failing to support my Fatal Motion that would have stopped serious disruption being defined as anything “more than minor” Labour have managed to alienate lots of their natural supporters. 

Many of the 64,000 people who signed the petition asking them to act like an opposition, are now wondering why Labour let them down and why the media don’t report this stuff?

Perhaps Labour felt that they could sit this one out and no one would really care. After all, political journalists and media organisations like the BBC very rarely report on anything that isn’t a Blue/Red clash. So many issues and viewpoints are excluded simply because they don’t fit this cosy Blue/Red duopoly. The narrative was that if Labour wasn’t backing the Fatal Motion then it wasn’t worth reporting on and all my attempts to generate coverage were met with silence, with the honourable exception of James O’Brien on LBC and the Guardian.

What Labour under estimated is the power of social media and influential commentators like Carol Vorderman and Marina Purkiss. The Vlogger, Peter Stefanovic reached over a million people with his first video outlining what was going on. He explained the constitutional issues in a way that the BBC’s one attempt at coverage failed completely to understand, as our state media bought the government narrative that this was a law aimed at Just Stop Oil.

Meanwhile, Labour’s regret motion, a loud tut tut in parliamentary terms, led to a Daily Mail front page attacking them for supporting Just Stop Oil. The result is that many voters see them as a pointless and feeble opposition, while the government label them as on the side of disruption.

…

 Left Foot Forward News

Post-Brexit border charges will further increase food prices, industry leaders warn

The Government has made clear its intention to implement full border checks on food imports from this October.

There could be further increases in food prices yet, even after UK food and drink price inflation hit a 45-year record of 19.2 per cent in March, as a result of new border checks caused by Brexit.

It comes after the UK government this week published proposals to charge a flat-rate inspection fee of up to £43 on each consignment of food coming from the EU.

The decision to impose full border checks on food imports from the bloc, will hit smaller firms harder, industry leaders have warned.

Shane Brennan, the director of the Cold Chain Federation, told the Financial Times that the proposals made little sense, especially given that the government was actively discussing imposing price controls on UK supermarkets to keep down the cost of food.

He said: “It is crazy that one week the government is holding a crisis meeting in Downing Street to discuss out-of-control food inflation and the next is willing to nod through a multimillion new import tax on EU food imports.”

…

Former Eton Master admits ‘failure’ in educating ‘entitled’ Tories

Image of Oxford's Bullingdon Club including Boris Johnson
Oxford’s Bullingdon Club including Boris Johnson

‘They have harmed the ‘very fabric of the country’.

Finally, someone has called a spade a spade. A former Master of Eton College has admitted that the school failed to rein in entitled Tories such as Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Kwasi Kwarteng, whose sense of entitlement has harmed the ‘very fabric of the country’.

In a scathing letter to the Times, John Claughton, who was a master at Eton from 1984 to 2001, said that the school, which has educated 20 Prime Ministers, now had a mission to ‘ensure that its pupils are saved from the sense of privilege, entitlement and omniscience that can produce alumni such as Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Kwasi Kwarteng and Ben Elliot and thereby damage a country’s very fabric.’

Claughton goes on to add: “Sadly, I failed in that purpose.”

…

The Sun forgets its owner’s taste for luxury travel in dig at Rachel Reeves’ business class flight to US

The newspaper didn’t dwell on Rupert Murdoch owning an $84 million private jet.

In a week dominated by yet more Tory sleaze and scandals, the right-wing media must have been desperate to dish some dirt on the shadow cabinet. Sure enough, The Sun came up with the goods, taking aim at Rachel Reeves’ trip to the US in business class.

The Murdoch-owned newspaper did not hold back in reporting that the Shadow Chancellor had been accused of hypocrisy for ‘taking the posh seat while attacking Rishi Sunak and the government for luxury travel.’ Reeves informed the newspaper that no taxpayer money was used to fund the trip, and that a donor paid for it. 

This in itself contrasts to the Prime Minister’s luxury travel which has been funded by the taxpayer. In March, Sunak decided to travel to Southampton and back to London by air rather than by car or train. The PM’s official spokesman confirmed that the helicopter trip was funded by the taxpayer.  Even the Sun had to reference the criticism the Prime Minister came under for the taxpayer-funded helicopter flight to Southampton.

… [Read more to get to Murdoch’s jet]

Continue ReadingLeft Foot Forward

Revealed: How ‘unfit’ PPE helped former playboy buy two mansions

Spread the love

Original article by Adam Bychawski republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Glove tycoon Robert Gros splashed millions on luxury homes and planned to build cinema, disco and golf simulator

An estimated £27m worth of gowns supplied by Gros’s company were later deemed “not fit for use”. Image: Katia Ponnampalam, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

A former ‘playboy’-turned-businessman made a fortune supplying PPE during the pandemic, even though the NHS may be unable to use millions of the gowns his company delivered, openDemocracy can reveal.

Chemical Intelligence Limited was awarded a £126m contract to supply 21 million medical gowns that were desperately needed to protect NHS workers treating Covid patients in May 2020. But data released to openDemocracy through freedom of information law shows the Department of Health and Social Care later deemed 4.5 million of them – worth an estimated total of £27m – “not fit for use” in the NHS. 

Lawyers acting on behalf of Robert Gros, the sole owner and CEO of Chemical Intelligence, said Gros could not comment because he “did not recognise these figures or amounts”.

The bumper PPE contract allowed Gros, 51, to turn around his business, which had made losses two years running prior. Chemical Intelligence declared profits of £33m for the year up to September 2020 according to accounts filed on Companies House. It had just two employees, including Gros, when it landed the multi-million pound government contract.

Gros personally splashed out on a £4m country pile just four months after he clinched the PPE deal. In 2021, after his company reported a further £31m in profits, he bought a second £2m country home and asked for planning permission to fit a basement bowling alley in the first.

The businessman then paid himself £7m in dividends in January 2022 – after having already loaned himself £6m the year before. Two months later, he transferred £40m in dividends to a holding company that he entirely owns. 

Gros would only answer our questions through his lawyers, who told us that he has paid all the necessary corporation tax and that the £4om would “continue to be reinvested” in his business.

The £126m contract was one of many for which the government apparently paid over the odds as demand for PPE skyrocketed during the pandemic and it did not have enough stockpiled. Gowns cost the government 1,260% more than they did before the pandemic, according to the National Audit Office.

A fifth of gowns supplied by Chemical Intelligence were labelled “not fit for use” because they “failed the technical, clinical or regulatory compliance assessment”, openDemocracy understands. The department would not elaborate on why the gowns failed checks, but according to the data released under FOI their value has been written down to £0.

“The department has processes in place to review the quality of PPE and determine whether products are suitable to be released to the frontline,” said a spokesperson. “Upon receipt, a sample of each product is reviewed by DHSC’s Technical and Regulatory Assurance team.

“A proportion of this stock was classified as ‘do not supply’. Stock in this category has not necessarily fallen short of standards and in many cases these products can be used in other settings.”

Gros’s lawyers insisted that all the PPE the company had supplied was “fit for purpose and use”, suggesting the DHSC may have been mistaken in its record-keeping. The department confirmed that Chemical Intelligence also supplied £35m worth of face masks and disposable surgical aprons under separate contracts also awarded in 2020, none of which was deemed unusable.

Of the £12bn the government spent in total on PPE, £4bn worth cannot be used by the NHS because it doesn’t meet the right standards, according to a 2022 report by the Public Accounts CCommittee of MPs.

Gros’s lawyers said that the sharp rise in profits for Chemical Intelligence was not all down to PPE deals he struck during the pandemic, and threatened openDemocracy with an injunction if we revealed details about his mansions.

The businessman, who had a reputation as a “playboy” in the late 1990s after dating a string of soap stars, appears to have made the most of his new fortune. The Cambridgeshire house he bought a few months after the contract was signed had six bedrooms, four reception rooms, a swimming pool and a gym, all heated by three boilers.

Three months later, he lodged a planning application with Cambridge City Council to more than double the size of the property. The proposed plan included the addition of a basement housing a dance floor, a two-lane bowling alley, a golf simulator, a room for arcade machines and a cinema.

Gros was forced to withdraw the application after it was rejected by planners for being too “modern” in style; neighbours had also raised concerns about the potential noise from the proposed bowling alley and dance floor. He resubmitted a new application in November, which was approved in April.

In June 2021, through another company of which he was the sole owner, Gros bought a second mansion with six bedrooms, three garages and an outdoor pool for £2m in a neighbouring village.

Chemical Intelligence, which Gros founded in 2012, develops medical examination gloves, which have been licensed to and manufactured by Malaysian firm Hartalega since 2017.

Hartalega is one of several Malaysian glove manufacturers that have been accused of using modern slavery. A leaked report by the Home Office in 2019 found there was “strong evidence” to suggest that the majority of Malaysian glove manufacturers that supply the NHS, which include Hartalega, “exhibit forced labour indicators”.

Lawyers acting for Chemical Intelligence said that the company “takes the issue of modern slavery extremely seriously and carried out its own due diligence to seek to satisfy itself that throughout the manufacturing process all of the correct procedures and safeguards are in place”.

Chemical Intelligence was one of 58 suppliers awarded a contract to supply medical gloves to the NHS in January 2022, but no information has been published on whether it has yet done so.

Original article by Adam Bychawski republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Whatever you’re interested in, there’s a free openDemocracy newsletter for you. HAVE A LOOK

Continue ReadingRevealed: How ‘unfit’ PPE helped former playboy buy two mansions

Management consultants raking in £3,000 a day from NHS

Spread the love

Original article by Adam Bychawski republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

NHS sign

Campaigners question why huge sums are being handed to multi-billion pound companies over local health experts

NHS England is paying management consultants day rates of up to £3,000, despite the government claiming it cannot afford to give nurses and junior doctors a real-terms pay rise.

Some executives from top consulting firms including Deloitte and PA Consulting are being paid the equivalent of an annual salary of more than £600,000 by NHS England for their services – more than double what its own CEO is reportedly paid.

Deloitte, which charged the most for its consultants last year at up to £3,000 a day, was ironically hired to help NHS England improve how it keeps track of its spending on private companies.

The findings come after a deal was struck between health unions and the government for a 5% pay rise for more than a million NHS workers. Ministers had dismissed demands for an above-inflation rise on the grounds that it would be unaffordable.

Unite and the Royal College of Nursing rejected the offer, with the former saying that it fell well short of the current rate of inflation. Both are planning to continue with strike action, while the British Medical Association (BMA), which represents junior doctors, is continuing negotiations. The BMA is looking for a 35% pay rise to make up for 15 years of below-inflation pay increases.

Unite’s national lead officer Onay Kasab called the figures “a damning indictment of a government that seems intent on destroying the NHS and has learnt nothing from the pandemic, when it allowed the health service to be plundered by private sector profiteers”. He added: “The money would be much better spent providing a proper pay rise for NHS staff to end the recruitment and retention crisis that is crippling health services.”

The day rates were disclosed to openDemocracy through a Freedom of Information request only after the Information Commissioner’s Office warned NHS England that it could be taken to court if it continued delaying its response.

The figures also show consultants from PA Consulting were paid up to £2,500 a day to provide NHS England with support for its Covid vaccination programme between December 2022 and March 2023.

More than a dozen consultants from Ernst and Young were paid up to £2,343 a day last year to give NHS England recommendations for a system that would make it possible to share patient health records electronically between trusts.

The health service also forked out up to £2,350 a day on consultants from KPMG to support improvements to its digital services.

NHS England told openDemocracy that the rates are negotiated centrally by the government.

“It is absolutely appalling to see huge sums of money syphoned off into consultancy firms in this manner,” Julia Patterson, chief executive of NHS campaign group EveryDoctor, told openDemocracy. “At the very least, there should be published reports annually demonstrating the added value provided by contracting strategic advice.

“Local healthcare experts – such as the NHS clinicians, who are woefully underpaid – would be much better placed to offer advice about the planning and processes within their respective areas.”

The sums raise questions about whether the government has learnt from its disastrous NHS Test and Trace scheme, which was criticised for relying too heavily on private sector consultants. Deloitte staff were paid up to £6,000 a day to work on the programme despite an inquiry later finding that it failed to slow the pandemic.

At the time, the ballooning spending prompted a Cabinet minister to warn that consultants waste taxpayer money and “infantilise” civil servants.

Then cabinet secretary Michael Gove defended the use of consultants during the pandemic but conceded the government needed to reduce its overall spending on them.

In February, openDemocracy revealed NHS England quadrupled its budget for outsourced consultancy work to £83m – enough to train more than 1,600 new nurses or pay for almost 14,000 hip operations.

Tamzen Isacsson, chief executive of the Management Consultancies Association, said: “There are strict regulations for how the government procures management consultants and firms need to show they meet stringent cost and value criteria.

“The charge from consulting firms, which operate in a highly competitive market includes various operating costs that goes well beyond consultant salaries. The per day cost charged by consulting firms working in the NHS will include security system and technical requirements, product development costs, solution developments, legal costs, overheads, training and recruitment costs.”

An NHS spokesperson said: “The NHS is one of the most efficient health systems in the world, spending 2p in the pound on admin compared with 4p in Germany and 6p in France.

“NHS England uses Crown Commercial Service frameworks with government negotiated rates for management consultancy where it is necessary, and seeks to negotiate additional discounts to ensure best value for taxpayers.”

Original article by Adam Bychawski republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Whatever you’re interested in, there’s a free openDemocracy newsletter for you. HAVE A LOOK

Continue ReadingManagement consultants raking in £3,000 a day from NHS

The Home Office says you don’t need to know about its ‘spying’ on lawyers

Spread the love
Image of GCHQ donught building. Doesn't look like a doughnut. Look. Oh c'mon, can't you see - open your eye.

Original article republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Exclusive: Government refuses to answer questions about its surveillance of immigration lawyers

Jenna Corderoy 24 April 2023, 10.00pm

The government has refused to answer questions about its “monitoring” of human rights lawyers – saying revealing the extent of its surveillance is not in the public interest.

In February, immigration minister Robert Jenrick admitted during a parliamentary debate that the Home Office is “monitoring the activities” of “a small number of legal practitioners”, after claiming that “human rights lawyers abuse and exploit our laws”.

Using Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, openDemocracy asked the Home Office how many legal practitioners it is monitoring, the nature of the monitoring and when it began. We also asked which unit within the department is carrying out the surveillance or if it has been outsourced to private firms.

The Home Office has now rejected the request, saying it is not in the public interest to disclose any of the information. openDemocracy has appealed against this decision.

Paul Heron, senior solicitor at the Public Interest Law Centre, told openDemocracy: “Government ministers spying on lawyers sounds like something from an authoritarian state. It is a direct threat to the rule of law and undermines the principles of justice and fairness.

“State surveillance of lawyers, and indeed any worker, is a clear violation of human rights and civil liberties and undermines the very foundation of a free and democratic society.”

Heron added: “The Home Office’s refusal to respond openly, adequately and indeed at all to the FOI request from openDemocracy regarding the monitoring strategy of lawyers by the Home Office should be a real concern, indicating not only a fundamental lack of transparency but a fundamental lack of accountability.”

State surveillance of lawyers, and indeed any worker, is a clear violation of human rights and civil liberties

Jon Baines, a senior data protection specialist at law firm Mishcon de Reya, shared Heron’s concerns.

Speaking to openDemocracy, Baines said: “The secrecy shown by the Home Office is regrettable, particularly as there is a distinct lack of any meaningful analysis of the public interest factors weighing in favour of disclosure.

“Secret monitoring of lawyers by the state has very serious connotations, and if the information really is exempt from disclosure, it is incumbent on the Home Office to give more detail and more justification for what is an inherently oppressive activity.”

The Home Office’s silence comes ahead of the return of the Illegal Migration Bill to the Commons this week, for its third and final reading before moving to the Lords. On Monday, the Equality and Human Rights Commission warned that the bill “risks breaching international obligations to protect human rights and exposing individuals to serious harm”.

The government claims the legislation will deter people from crossing the English Channel in small boats.

In February, Tory MP Bill Wiggin used a parliamentary session about a violent incident outside a hotel used to temporarily house asylum seekers in Knowsley, Liverpool to ask about legislating to stop such crossings.

Jenrick replied: “This is one of the most litigious areas of public life. It is an area where, I am afraid, human rights lawyers abuse and exploit our laws.”

The Home Office must give more detail and more justification for what is an inherently oppressive activity

Later in the debate, Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael asked: “The minister told us a few minutes ago that part of the problem here is human rights lawyers who abuse and exploit our laws… could the minister tell the House how many solicitors, advocates and barristers have been reported by the Home Office in the last 12 months to the regulatory authorities?”

Jenrick did not answer the question or provide figures. Instead, he said: “We are monitoring the activities, as it so happens, of a small number of legal practitioners, but it is not appropriate for me to discuss that here.”

At the time, Jenrick’s comments prompted dismay and concern among lawyers.

In its FOI refusal, the Home Office stated that a disclosure would “inhibit free and frank analysis in the future, and the loss of frankness and candour would damage the quality of risk assessments and deliberation and lead to poorer decision-making”.

Explaining its decision to withhold the information, the department said: “The Home Office has a process that allows caseworkers to check companies and individuals are qualified to provide immigration advice and reporting mechanisms that allows us to escalate any issues to regulatory bodies.”

Original article republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingThe Home Office says you don’t need to know about its ‘spying’ on lawyers