Furious Boris Johnson Accuses ‘Deranged’ Privileges Committee Of Lying

Furious Boris Johnson has lashed out at the “deranged” findings of the partygate probe which found he misled parliament.

Sophia Sleigh www.huffingtonpost.co.uk  (Full 1,700 word rant published in the Telegraph – owl)

A crossbench group of MPs, on the privileges committee, concluded the former prime minister made “repeated contempts” of parliament with his partygate denials.

Their report published on Thursday morning said his actions warranted a 90-day suspension.

It would have paved the way for a by-election for the former prime minister if he had not resigned ahead of the publication.

Johnson quit the Commons last week after reading the report’s findings.

But he issued a blistering statement as the report was published, hitting out at what called a “deranged conclusion”.

Johnson called the committee led by Labour veteran Harriet Harman “beneath contempt” and claimed its investigation had delivered “what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination”.

He said: “The committee now says that I deliberately misled the house, and at the moment I spoke I was consciously concealing from the house my knowledge of illicit events.

“This is rubbish. It is a lie. In order to reach this deranged conclusion, the committee is obliged to say a series of things that are patently absurd, or contradicted by the facts.”

Johnson argued that the police investigated his role in events highlighted by the panel, adding: “In no case did they find that what I had done was unlawful.”

The outgoing MP also said Downing Street did not believe that what they were doing was wrong, adding: “After a year of work the privileges committee has found not a shred of evidence that we did.”

He also took aim at Tory MP on the committee Sir Bernard Jenkin who has been accused of attending a gathering during covid rules.

“The hypocrisy is rank,” Johnson said. “Like Harriet Harman, he should have recused himself from the inquiry, since he is plainly conflicted.”

During his lengthy statement, Johnson claimed the “craziest assertion” was their “Mystic Meg claim” that he saw a December 18 event with his own eyes.

He goes on to describe the report as a “charade” and that it marked a “dreadful day” for MPs and for democracy.

“For the privileges committee to use its prerogatives in this anti-democratic way, to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination – that is beneath contempt.”

The MPs recommended that Johnson should not be given a former member’s pass, which would grant him access to the parliamentary estate.

“We have concluded above that in deliberately misleading the House Mr Johnson committed a serious contempt,” the MPs said.

“The contempt was all the more serious because it was committed by the prime minister, the most senior member of the government.

“There is no precedent for a prime minister having been found to have deliberately misled the House.

“He misled the House on an issue of the greatest importance to the House and to the public, and did so repeatedly.

“He declined our invitation to reconsider his assertions that what he said to the House was truthful.

“His defence to the allegation that he misled was an ex post facto justification and no more than an artifice. He misled the committee in the presentation of his evidence.”

“The question which the house asked the committee is whether the house had been misled by Mr Johnson and, if so, whether that conduct amounted to contempt. It is for the house to decide whether it agrees with the committee. The house as a whole makes that decision. Motions arising from reports from this committee are debatable and amendable. The committee had provisionally concluded that Mr Johnson deliberately misled the house and should be sanctioned for it by being suspended for a period that would trigger the provisions of the Recall of MPs Act 2015. In light of Mr Johnson’s conduct in committing a further contempt on 9 June 2023, the committee now considers that if Mr Johnson were still a member he should be suspended from the service of the House for 90 days for repeated contempts and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process, by:

a) Deliberately misleading the house.

b) Deliberately misleading the committee.

c) Breaching confidence.

d) Impugning the committee and thereby undermining the democratic process of the house.

e) Being complicit in the campaign of abuse and attempted intimidation of the committee.

We recommend that he should not be entitled to a former member’s pass.”

House of Commons Committee of Privileges: Matter referred on 21 April 2022 (conduct of Rt Hon Boris Johnson): Final Report. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 15 June 2023

Emotional appeals have been made to stop potential cuts to adult services by Devon County Council.

Ollie Heptinstall, local democracy reporter www.radioexe.co.uk

The local authority has consulted on plans to withdraw a number of services across adult social care, including stopping £1.5 million being spent on preventing homelessness and closing its North Devon mental health and wellbeing service.

It could also close a respite service for people with learning difficulties in East Devon, seven learning disability and older persons day services, and stop its funding contribution towards a scheme called Wellbeing Exeter.

The council says no decisions have yet been taken but it needs to “prioritise spending on our statutory responsibilities” as part of savings of around £45 million.

Final proposals are expected to come before Devon’s ruling cabinet for a decision in mid-July, but the council’s health and adult care scrutiny committee has agreed to hold a special meeting before then to look at the plans.

It comes after hundreds of consultation respondents criticised the potential cuts. On Tuesday [13 June] the committee heard from several public speakers – including heads of local homeless charities – urging councillors to think again.

Peter Stephenson, head of St Petrock’s, a charity in Exeter, said: “Instead of enabling people to live in a place they call home, ending this funding will render some of the most vulnerable and traumatised people in our county homeless, without any real hope they will ever be able to access shelter, let alone a home.

“The numbers of vulnerable adults sleeping rough will rocket, making the government’s commitment to end rough sleeping by next year completely unattainable.”

Mr Stephenson described the consultation as “half-baked at best, with almost no effort to make the public aware it was even taking place … Despite this, the people of Devon have spoken. They recognise the dangerous injustice of this proposal and the 990 responses were almost entirely opposed [to the council’s proposals].”

He called on the committee to ask Devon’s ruling cabinet to scrap the proposed homeless budget cut “for the sake of basic humanity and democratic accountability.”

Si Johns, joint CEO of YMCA Exeter, also criticised the consultation process. He said the council had posted more times on social media about a cycle path consultation and claimed that both service users and homeless people weren’t properly consulted.

He added the scrutiny committee was being “bypassed” with no firm proposals on the table before they’re due to be decided by Devon’s ruling cabinet in mid-July.

“Aren’t you meant to see what is being recommended and scrutinise it?” he asked. “Maybe tweak a proposal or two before it goes on. Aren’t you meant to scrutinise the recommendations on health and adult care, as the health and adult care scrutiny committee?”

Meanwhile, on the future of the North Devon mental health centres, which provide day services and drop-in sessions, one public speaker warned their closure would lead to a “large increase in mental health related emergencies,” as well as “self-harm and suicides.”

And, in a tearful address to the committee, a user of the service said they had been made to feel like “second-class citizens,” adding: “This should be about lives, not money.”

“We have the right to preventative care,” they said. “The link centre often prevents escalations to a mental health crisis.

“Please treat us with respect and dignity. We are not stupid. We are intelligent people. This is going to detrimentally affect service users and our families.

“So, please don’t close our support network. Save the links. Save our lives.”

Several members of the committee then criticised the potential impact of the cuts, and why it had no formal proposals to scrutinise. Councillors subsequently voted for a special meeting once plans had been drawn up, so it could look at them before July’s cabinet meeting.

In a statement, Councillor James McInnes (Conservative, Hatherleigh & Chagford), cabinet member for adult social care, said: “I would personally like to thank everyone who has responded to our consultations. No decisions have been made and won’t be until we have fully analysed all the feedback.

“These are challenging times, and I do not for one moment underestimate the impact of these proposals.

“I said at the very start of these consultations that these are the difficult decisions a council has to make. We have a duty to deliver the best value out of every pound we spend; to make sure services are as effective as possible; and that they are services people want to use.  Never has that been more important than now, amid rising costs and increasing demand for our adult social care services.

“And having put forward these proposals, it is only right now that we take this time to fully consider all the responses we’ve received before reaching our decisions at our cabinet meeting in July.”

The UK government knew as early as September 2020 that its desire to free up hospital beds in the early stages of the pandemic had been “to the detriment” of care homes, openDemocracy can reveal.

So why contest the Cathy Gardner Judicial Review?

Cathy gained permission from the court to proceed in November 2020. – Owl

Jenna Corderoy www.opendemocracy.net 

It is one of a number of explosive admissions in a highly secret Covid “lessons learnt” review document that was released tonight following a two-year transparency battle between the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and openDemocracy.

Ministers have publicly maintained they “threw a protective ring” around adult social care and “specifically sought to safeguard care homes” even after losing a high-profile court case last year over their failures. But behind closed doors, the department admitted the “operational response centre” (ORC) at the heart of the government’s Covid response had prioritised hospital capacity and failed to fully understand social care.

“The unprecedented speed with which this new virus emerged inevitably focused attention primarily on how the NHS would be able to cope,” reads the draft document, which is marked “OFFICIAL SENSITIVE”. “This prioritisation of the protection of hospital capacity, without adequate acknowledgement of key interdependencies, was to the detriment of ASC [adult social care].”

The Covid-19 public inquiry is a historic chance to find out what really happened.

The review also reveals the precarious staffing levels of the ORC itself as the disease crept towards Britain. As late as February 2020, 37% of shifts in the unit – also called the “incident response team” – were unfilled because civil servants who had received special training for emergencies could not get permission from their bosses to be released from regular work.

The DHSC carried out the review, dated September 2020, “as an informal, internal-only” overview of the first wave of the pandemic.

It used a “mixture of interviews with senior figures”, including “stakeholders” outside the department, and a survey that received 276 responses from across the DHSC. According to the DHSC, the review was not intended for publication, was not finalised, and “remains in draft form”.

Under the heading ‘Organisation’, the review says staff worked slower because the department did not have the right software: “The lack of a collaboration document management system, such as SharePoint or Google Drive, impacted teams’ ability to work at pace.”

In a passage that is likely to catch the eye of data privacy campaigners, the review also criticises Foundry, the controversial database software provided to the NHS by digital giant Palantir – saying even health secretary Matt Hancock was unable to use it.

“There is no single departmental overview of the range of available [DHSC] datasets, their origins, ownership and structure and the governance arrangements relating to access to those datasets,” the review states. “NHSE created the ‘Foundry’ data sharing platform to partially address these issues but staff (and the Secretary of State) experienced access issues and its utility as a central resource was limited.”

Palantir initially offered its services to the NHS for just £1, openDemocracy investigations revealed at the time, but subsequently won contracts worth £22m after getting its foot in the door. openDemocracy successfully sued the government over the deal and secured a vow that it would not work with the CIA-backed ‘spy tech’ firm again without consulting the public – a promise that was not kept.

The ‘lessons learnt’ review also reveals that documentation about key early decision-making may not exist – something that is likely to create a headache for the official Covid-19 inquiry, which began taking evidence this week, as well as the government itself, which has already been hauled over the coals for its refusal to release unredacted information.

“Due to the dynamic situation,” the document says, “complex discussions were sometimes taken in senior meetings without a formal submission to set out accountability. While this assisted decision-making at pace, it meant there was not always a clear audit trail for rapidly evolving strategy.”

Ministers have been heavily criticised for not doing more to protect care homes, where more than 20,000 residents died in the first wave of the pandemic.

Respondents to the survey criticised “glaring omissions in strategic direction of integration and preparedness” within the sector, “meaning that the social care system was not able to respond to a major health emergency”.

Indeed, some said they had not anticipated that the government would need to have a centralised role with care homes at all, assuming – wrongly – that the largely privatised care sector would be “responsible for their own response” to Covid.

The review also admits that putting a hold on routine care home inspections by the Care Quality Commission watchdog “removed one of the department’s lines of sight into ASC [adult social care] and limited its direct knowledge of what was happening on the ground”.

The DHSC says in the document that it “would have benefitted from a fuller understanding of the response by Asian countries (recognizing the contexts are very different) earlier in our planning, which might have enabled us to start to build testing systems earlier in January 2020”, but does not go into detail about what information officials lacked, or why it was unavailable. It also notes there was an “absence of a unified leadership for Test and Trace” at the start of the pandemic, but again stops short of going into detail.

On the subject of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as masks, gowns and gloves, the review recommends “more rigorous… vetting of PPE suppliers” in future. During the pandemic, the government set up a so-called ‘VIP’ lane for suppliers of the kit – a separate channel for politically connected firms.

But PPE supplied through the government’s VIP lane was three times more likely to be useless to the NHS than normally procured PPE, according to analysis by openDemocracy. The total value of contracts awarded to suppliers through the high-priority lane was £1.7bn. Some £4bn of unusable PPE bought by the government in the first year of the pandemic later had to be burnt.

The existence of the ‘lessons learnt’ review was first revealed by HuffPost UK in May 2021. The DHSC refused openDemocracy’s request to see a copy, but the information rights watchdog – the Information Commissioner’s Office – ruled in our favour. The DHSC initially appealed against the ruling, threatening to take the ICO to court, but has now handed it over.

The ICO held that there were “significant public interest arguments in favour of disclosure”.

Pollution from farms has prevented housing developments being approved by 35 councils, analysis by The Times and Watershed Investigations, the not-for-profit organisation, can reveal.

Rachel Salvidge | Leana Hosea www.thetimes.co.uk 

Natural England, the regulator, has issued advice to 74 local authorities where water bodies were already in “unfavourable conservation status”.

The public body told them that new developments should be approved only if they would not worsen the already polluted rivers. Nutrient pollution, in the form of excessive nitrogen and phosphorus from farm fertilisers, animal slurry and human sewage, damages rivers by causing an overgrowth of algae. With the water starved of oxygen, the wildlife is suffocated. In extreme cases, this can lead to dead zones.

The Home Builders Federation estimates that more than 120,000 houses have been stuck in the planning system.

Developers are trying to work out how to show they are “nutrient neutral” — that the extra sewage they bring to an area will not add to the pollution.

The Times and Watershed Investigations used Environment Agency data to determine why rivers failed to meet “good” environmental standards at 64 of the affected councils. Agriculture was found to be the main problem facing 35 councils. Of the known reasons, across all 64 councils, 44 per cent were reported to be due to agricultural pollution and 21 per cent a result of the water sector.

The Times’s Clean It Up campaign has called on the government to maintain the nutrient neutrality rules laid out by Natural England. The campaign is also to encourage farmers to curb their pollution of rivers.

Several housebuilders said they backed the scheme but wanted the burden shared between water companies and farmers. The analysis found farm pollution was a problem in Cheshire and Devon, while the water sector was the main cause in 14 local authorities.

Stewart Baseley, executive chairman at the Home Builders Federation, said his members were “committed to protecting the environment”. He called for measures “that address the contributors to the poor quality of our rivers”.

Mike Burke, director for sustainable development at Natural England, said “comprehensive action across all sectors” was needed. “Pollution in rivers comes from a range of sources,” he said.

Richard Benwell, of the Wildlife and Countryside Link coalition, called for an end to “intensive” agriculture. He said the government should encourage “agro-ecological” farming.

An official at Water UK, the industry body, called for more innovative approaches and partnerships with farmers “to deliver benefits”.

The National Farmers’ Union was approached for comment.

The future of Plymouth’s troubled city centre redevelopment is again in question after a key subcontractor went bust. Somerset-based groundworks and civil engineering firm GWKS Ltd has collapsed into administration blaming inflation, supply issues and the war in Ukraine.

William Telford www.plymouthherald.co.uk

The company was a subcontractor working on the regeneration of Plymouth city centre and staff in Plymouth have been told they have been made redundant. Plymouth City Council – which is behind schemes in Old Town Street and New George Street, Civic Square and the stalled Armada Way revamp – has been asked whether the projects will be affected.

Construction giant Morgan Sindall is overseeing all three schemes and would only say that GWKS, trading as G Works Construction, was “part of the public realm” works. PlymouthLive has been told staff were given their cards on Tuesday with one worker saying: “I’ve just got off a team call. We’ve just been told we’re now redundant and the company is in administration.”

In total 88 of the 109 staff working for the Bridgwater-headquartered company have been axed as soon as the company went into administration. Lucy Winterborne and Dan Hurd, of EY-Parthenon’s turnaround and restructuring strategy team, were appointed as joint administrators of GWKS Ltd, but said subsidiary G Works Surfacing Ltd is not in administration.

They said the firm is mainly focused on site preparation for customers across the South West. They said they will be undertaking “an orderly winding down” of the company and will look to realise assets for the benefit of creditors.

Ms Winterborne said: “Rising operating costs, supply chain challenges and labour shortages combined with the Covid-19 pandemic and wider geopolitical disruption has had a significant impact on the financial performance of the company. Our priorities as joint administrators are to protect the interests of the company’s creditors and to support the impacted employees who will be offered appropriate advice and support.”

Details of GWKS involvement in the city centre revamp are still being awaited. But it is another potential blow for the regeneration project which has been hit by setbacks, protests and even a legal battle.

The £7m upgrade of Old Town Street and New George Street got back on track recently after delays and the exit of original contractor Dorset-based Mildren Construction in 2022. The first phase began in lower New George Street in late 2021, the second phase began in April 2022. The overall idea includes creating a better link between Drake Circus Shopping Centre and The Barcode leisure and cinema multiplex But in July 2022 work stopped after the construction turned out to be more difficult than originally thought and Mildren Construction left the site.

The council then appointed Morgan Sindall, which was already chosen for the upgrade of Civic Square, to complete the work. The revamp was stopped before Christmas to give traders a break during the busy shopping season.

In January 2023 the council said the site had thrown up surprises including a length of Victorian tramline still embedded in cobbles buried beneath concrete. There was also discovered rubble from bombed out shops, cellars and other voids. Construction began again in February.

Meanwhile, Plymouth City Council is attempting to end the legal battle over the delayed £12.7m Armada Way regeneration. The authority will make an application directly to the High Court asking it to consider stopping the judicial review brought by protesters.

The newly-elected Labour council has already decided to take a fresh look at the design of the regeneration after the furore following the destruction of 110 trees in March.

GWKS’ most recent accounts, for the year to the end of June 2022, revealed the company was concerned about increasing labour and material costs. Nevertheless, it boasted a strong balance sheet and full order book, and said it had a “positive outlook” for 2022/23. Although turnover had fallen by £2m to £27.6m, it made an increased pre-tax profit of £431,664. It was the fifth straight year of profit. It paid out £100,000 in dividends.

Independent Woking councillor, John Bond, now retired when he dared to raise issues.

How many of us have been belittled, talked over or ignored, in Tory EDDC or Tory DCC either as an independent councillor or public speaker”? – Owl

Bust Woking council to cut ties with firm behind debt-ridden skyscraper

Richard Partington www.theguardian.com 

Woking council plans to sever ties with the Northern Irish developer behind a skyscraper venture that helped tip the tiny Surrey local authority into effective bankruptcy.

Amid ballooning costs and delays, a dramatic plunge in the value of the council’s Victoria Square development – which is 52% owned by Moyallen, a business from Dungannon, County Tyrone – is at the centre of the local authority’s financial meltdown.

Built as the tallest towers outside a major city in England – with the ambition they could be seen from the top of the Shard in central London 30 miles away – the scheme was first planned in 2013 as a £150m taxpayer-funded regeneration project, before costs more than quadrupled to £700m.

Involving a shopping centre, public plazas and a four-star Hilton hotel, the council warned last week that Victoria Square was among the main reasons for the failure of a risky investment spree overseen by its former Conservative administration, leaving the council facing a £1.2bn deficit.

Woking’s crisis comes amid intense pressure for the owners of physical retail after a collapse in footfall in the Covid pandemic and dramatic growth in online shopping, made worse in recent months by the cost of living crisis.

Ann-Marie Barker, Woking’s Liberal Democrat leader, told the Guardian that plans were being made to sever relations with Moyallen.

“The intention, always, with the relationship with Moyallen was that it was there for the development period [at Victoria Square], and that the relationship would come to a natural end at some point,” she said. “That is something we would anticipate happening.”

The details come as documents filed in the past month at Companies House show Moyallen had amassed debts worth £188m to Bank of Ireland in connection with its ownership of three other shopping centres, including another site in Woking.

Bank of Ireland placed four of Moyallen’s other operating units into administration – including two entities used to control the Peacocks Centre, a separate 1990s shopping centre adjacent to Victoria Square. Moyallen is run by the brothers Peter and John Robinson. The company did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Those four entities are separate from Moyallen’s Victoria Square joint venture with Woking council, which continues to operate as a going concern. However, the details pose fresh questions over the suitability of the firm as the majority partner in a taxpayer-funded project costing more than the 2012 Olympic Stadium.

Documents filed at Companies House show the council was forced in the administration process to chase repayment of a £6m loan it made to Moyallen for running the Peacocks Centre, which was settled in full earlier this year. While the company operated the lease on the Peacocks shopping centre, Woking remained the freehold owner.

“We have been watching it [the administration] with some interest. There was work that had to be done by the council [to recover the £6m loan],” Barker said.

Woking’s former Conservative council leader had been warned about Moyallen’s financial position in 2018 by John Bond, an independent councillor at the time, who raised concerns that its Bank of Ireland debts posed risks to the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.

Bond, who has since retired as a councillor, said: “Everything I thought was wrong has since happened.”

“I was shouted down, literally shouted down by the Conservatives. I was very concerned [about Moyallen], but they had the backing of the senior officers.”

The council’s former Tory leadership dismissed Bond’s concerns at the time, arguing that Bank of Ireland had indicated it was supportive of the company. Bank of Ireland declined to comment.

The latest available accounts for Victoria Square Woking Ltd, the joint venture company behind the project, show the council loaned it £700m. However, the value of its assets plunged by more than £360m in 2021 to stand at just £116m – leaving the joint venture with a financial shortfall worth more than half a billion pounds.

Moyallen, which does not have a website or publicly available phone number, was paid £1.1m in development manager fees for the year.

The fresh details come as commissioners installed by Michael Gove’s levelling up department investigate Woking’s financial dealings to establish how the projects were approved and structured, with the aim of extracting the council from costly schemes and recovering money by selling assets.

Most of the council’s spending had been financed by an obscure arm of the Treasury – the Public Works Loan Board – with £1.3bn worth of borrowing that Woking could now struggle to repay.

Documents show the administration of Moyallen’s shopping centre assets is not expected to recover the full £188m owed to Bank of Ireland, after efforts to sell them were hit by the economic turmoil triggered by Liz Truss’s mini budget.

The business was forced to sell its three shopping centres as part of the Bank of Ireland administration process – including the Peacocks Centre, alongside the Magowan West and Rushmere shopping centres in Northern Ireland.

The two businesses behind the Peacocks Centre, which Moyallen had acquired in 2008 for £166m, owed the bank £88m out of its £188m debt at the time it was placed into administration by its creditors in April 2022.

Documents from the administrator Grant Thornton show a prospective buyer pulled out of a deal for the Peacocks Centre “with the specific reasons being linked to the UK’s economic instability and wider macro-economic factors … the Liz Truss mini budget occurred on 23 September 2022, followed by her resignation on 20 October – these factors most definitely had an adverse impact on our sale.”

After slashing the asking price and finding a new buyer, documents show the Peacocks Centre was sold for £15m, out of about £65m recovered overall from the Moyallen fire sale – less than half the value of the Bank of Ireland debt.

A dye test that was supposed to determine the site of a storm overflow in Devon has failed.

[It is possible the pipe could be in a different location to where SWW had understood it to be! – Owl]

By Brodie Owen www.bbc.co.uk

Campaigners looking to see the release of dye at Exmouth. Image source, Geoff Crawford

South West Water (SWW) said it released the dye near Maer Rocks on Exmouth Beach at the request of the community but the test was “inconclusive”.

The company said it would “explore further options” to confirm the discharge location.

Campaigners said beachgoers needed to know the location of the outfall pipe due to concerns over water quality.

Geoff Crawford, from End Sewage Convoys and Pollution Exmouth, said the exact location of the pipe would determine how frequently the water would need to be tested.

He said it was possible the pipe could be in a different location to where SWW had understood it to be.

SWW said the dye test was inconclusive. Image source, Geoff Crawford

“The dye test is for all of us – for them to know where it is – and for the public to be confident,” he said.

“At the moment they test once or twice a week – if the pipe is closer to the beach they would have to test more often.”

SWW said the dye test did not work as planned on Wednesday.

A spokeswoman said: “The purpose of the dye test was to confirm the discharge location of our outfall pipe to provide reassurance to the community that our outfall functions as designed.

“Unfortunately, the test was inconclusive. We suspect this was due to lack of available water to flush the dye in the network out through the pipe.

“We were grateful for the support of the local community during the test and we will explore further options in order to confirm the discharge location.”

Mr Crawford said all parties were “in a situation now where we haven’t proven anything and we have dye in the tank”.

SWW had reassured swimmers before the test that the dye was “harmless” and turning the water yellow or green would only be “temporary”.

It said the dye had the potential to show on swimmers or animals but this was unlikely.

The firm agreed to conduct the test to reassure the community that the outfall functions as designed.