A Whitehall scandal that's bigger than lobbying?
Revealed: the top public officials involved in awarding companies lucrative contracts - and who then go to work for them
It was the week that Bell Pottinger, one of Britain’s largest lobbying firms, was secretly filmed bragging of its intimate access to government. But there is a potentially even worse scandal than lobbying: the practice known as the “revolving door”, where ministers, officials or military officers involved in controversial public-sector contracts then go on to work, at high salaries, for the beneficiaries of those same contracts.
The stakes here are higher than Bell Pottinger’s boast that the Prime Minister will take your phone call. Billions of pounds of public money are on the line. In one of the biggest-spending departments, the Ministry of Defence, almost 250 staff – including 20 generals, admirals or air marshals – have joined defence companies in a single year, new figures obtained by this newspaper show.
And a Sunday Telegraph investigation has established that the organisation supposedly responsible for vetting the most senior “revolving-door” appointments has not vetoed a single application in the last 15 years.
According to the annual reports of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), it has considered 944 applications for private sector jobs by former top mandarins and ministers since 1996. Of these, 412 were approved with conditions, and 532 – 56 per cent – were approved unconditionally. None was rejected.
Among the most heavily criticised deals of recent years is that for the Royal Navy’s two new aircraft carriers, which will cost taxpayers more than £6 billion, even though one will be immediately mothballed and the other will carry no aircraft until 2020. At least four top military officers and ministers, including the heads of the Navy and the RAF, a former vice-chief of defence staff and the former minister for defence equipment, Ann Taylor, have since joined companies with an interest in the aircraft-carrier project. Their appointments were approved by Acoba.
Read more here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/8948475/A-Whitehall-scandal-thats-bigger-than-lobbying.html
