Sheila Oliver
Editor, Romiley Gazette
Also by this author
The “Vexatious? Moi?” series:
Book 1: Harcourt Street and Vale View Primary School
Book 2: Padden Brook
Book 3: The Bent Bypass (the A555/SEMMMS Manchester Airport Relief Road)
Book 4: Sandringham Road
Book 5: Offerton Precinct
Book 6: Marple Money (the Marple Active Communities Hub)
Book 7: The Wall of Silence — How Stockport Council Blocks the Questions It Doesn’t Want to Answer
Book 8: The Foggbrook Files
Book 9: Arms Length — The Story of Stockport’s Own Companies
Book 10: For Hire — The Consultants Councils Can’t Refuse
Book 11: The Price of Civic Duty — How Stockport Council Spent While It Cut
And, outside the series:
Learning Law From a Lawless Council (Stockport) — the Michael Parnell case
Contents
Introduction: What the Allowance Was For
Chapter One: The Going Rate
Chapter Two: The Minister Who Marked His Own Homework
Chapter Three: Friends at the Treasury
Chapter Four: Shouting from the Sidelines
Introduction: What the Allowance Was For
Parliamentary allowances exist, in theory, to let an MP do the job of representing a constituency: an office, a caseworker, research support, a way of keeping in touch with the people who elected them. They do not exist to fund the political party that put the MP up for election in the first place. That distinction is the whole subject of this book.
Stockport had two Liberal Democrat MPs across the period this book covers: Andrew Stunell, who represented Hazel Grove until his death, and Mark Hunter, who represented Cheadle and has since returned to serve as a councillor. Both were councillors before they were MPs. The documents in this book — invoices, House of Commons claim forms, and a newspaper cutting or two — show both of them using public parliamentary allowances to pay their own regional and constituency party organisations, year after year, for services with descriptions vague enough to mean almost anything.
I want to be fair about what this book can and cannot claim. Every payment in it was made through an official House of Commons form, in most cases with the relevant Green Book rule cited on the form itself, and at least one category of spending — work commissioned or bought in services — was explicitly permitted to come from outside suppliers, including, on the plain wording of the rules, a political party. Nothing here has been shown to be against the rules that existed at the time. What this book does show is a pattern: two MPs from the same party, in neighbouring seats, repeatedly directing public money toward the infrastructure of that party, in amounts that escalated year on year, using invoice descriptions that a reasonable person might struggle to distinguish from ordinary party campaigning costs.
Chapter One: The Going Rate
Start with Mark Hunter, MP for Cheadle. The earliest invoice I have for him is from North West Liberal Democrats, dated 3 October 2005, for “professional services from Regional Party in support of Parliamentary duties,” £3,000.00.
EXHIBIT: North West Liberal Democrats invoice, 3/10/2005
“To: Mark Hunter MP — Professional services from Regional Party in support of Parliamentary duties — 3,000.00”
North West Liberal Democrats invoice to Mark Hunter MP, 3 October 2005
The following year, the same description recurs on a Liberal Democrats invoice dated 12 July 2006, this time for the period April 2006 to April 2007, at £4,000.00 — a third more than the year before, for a service described in exactly the same four words. A further £500 followed in December 2006, “contribution towards the cost of away days held to provide training and support, parliamentary preparation and policy development.” By September 2007, the invoice for April 2007 to March 2008 had settled at £4,000.00 again, this time claimed through a House of Commons C2 form — Incidental Expenses Provision/Staffing Allowance, direct payment of suppliers — naming the supplier simply as “N.W.L.D.”
EXHIBIT: House of Commons C2 form, Mark Hunter MP, claim dated 3/10/07
Suppliers: N.W.L.D. — Amount: £4,000.00 — Total: £4,000.00. Stamped received 9 October 2007.
House of Commons C2 direct-payment-of-suppliers form, Mark Hunter MP, October 2007
Four invoices, four years, one recipient, and a description that tells a reader almost nothing about what was actually done for the money: “professional services,” undefined, from the Regional Party, unspecified. I do not know what research, media support or professional service £3,000 to £4,000 a year actually bought. Neither, on the evidence available to me, could anyone reading these forms without further explanation.
Andrew Stunell’s paperwork tells a similar story with different numbers. A Liberal Democrats invoice to “Andrew Stunell MP/Fees Office,” dated 20 April 2006, billed £5,000 for research and briefing services connected to his becoming Shadow Secretary of State at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister — £3,000 for “Local Government special Briefing and Research” and £2,000 for “Sustainability special Briefing and Research,” covering a three-month start-up and hand-over period.
EXHIBIT: Liberal Democrats invoice, Andrew Stunell MP/Fees Office, 20 April 2006
Local Government special Briefing and Research: £3,000.00. Sustainability special Briefing and Research: £2,000.00. Total: £5,000.00.
Liberal Democrats invoice to Andrew Stunell MP/Fees Office, 20 April 2006
His Communications Allowance claims for 2007/08 add a further layer. A single Comms2 form lists Hazel Grove Constituency Liberal Democrats as the supplier for an NHS survey and a freepost mailing, £3,133.96; Park Communications Ltd for his MP’s Annual Report, £1,013.00; “Printrip Printing Society” for a part-share of a Risograph printer and, separately, a part-share of a leaflet folding machine, in the region of £5,070.00; and a further £954.32 for paper and envelopes. Public money, in other words, bought Andrew Stunell’s constituency party a share in its own printing equipment. Whatever else can be said about the rules that permitted this, it is not obviously what most council taxpayers would picture when told their MP’s allowance pays for “goods and services incurred on Parliamentary duties.”
House of Commons Communications Allowance (Comms2) claim, Andrew Stunell MP, including the part-share of a Risograph printer and a leaflet folding machine
Chapter Two: The Minister Who Marked His Own Homework
In the Coalition government formed in 2010, Andrew Stunell became a junior minister at the Department for Communities and Local Government — the department responsible, among other things, for the framework within which councils like Stockport operate.
I sent him evidence relating to the Harcourt Street/Vale View School case, the subject of the first book in this series. Rather than referring that evidence to someone with no prior connection to the matter, he looked into it himself, and found no wrongdoing. I believe the correspondence recording this is held on WhatDoTheyKnow.
I want to be precise about what I am and am not claiming here. I have not established that Mr Stunell’s conclusion was wrong on the facts, and this book does not assert that it was. What I am entitled to point out is the shape of the arrangement itself: a sitting MP for the constituency in question, who had for years been directing his own parliamentary allowance toward the regional party organisation that helped keep him in that seat, chose to personally investigate serious allegations against the council whose conduct he was in a position to have looked at independently — and cleared it. A minister marking his own homework is not evidence of a wrong answer. It is, at minimum, evidence of a process that should never have been allowed to happen the way it did.
Chapter Three: Friends at the Treasury
Chapter Three: Friends at the Treasury
Readers of Book Three in this series, on the A555/SEMMMS bypass, will recognise the pattern in this chapter, even though the politician at its centre is a different one.
A newspaper cutting headlined “Road is backed by Chancellor” records that Chancellor George Osborne backed the £290 million Manchester Airport Relief Road, after Stockport MPs Mark Hunter and Andrew Stunell, together with Macclesfield MP David Rutley, met him ahead of the November 2012 public consultation on the road linking Hazel Grove to the airport. Hunter is quoted directly: “The chancellor seemed very receptive to the case we put forward and I am extremely hopeful we will see this road built sooner than currently expected.”
EXHIBIT: newspaper cutting, “Road is backed by Chancellor”
“Chancellor George Osborne is backing the £290m Manchester Airport Relief Road. Stockport MPs Mark Hunter and Andrew Stunell, plus Macclesfield’s David Rutley, met with Mr Osborne ahead of the consultation on the road that will link Hazel Grove with the airport.”
“Road is backed by Chancellor” — newspaper cutting on the Osborne/Hunter/Stunell meeting
None of this is improper in itself; lobbying a Chancellor for a scheme two MPs believe will benefit their constituents is a normal part of the job they were elected to do. What it does establish, set alongside the previous two chapters, is a consistent picture of both men working the same political and financial channels — party structures, ministerial colleagues, Treasury access — in ways that repeatedly served the same road scheme this series has already shown to be plagued by unexplained cost rises, questionable consultants, and drainage that its own investigators said “could have been avoided.” A direct line to the Chancellor is exactly the kind of access that makes it harder, not easier, for a resident asking awkward questions about consultants or cost overruns to be taken seriously.
Chapter Four: Shouting from the Sidelines
Chapter Four: Shouting from the Sidelines
This final chapter is more impressionistic than the rest of this book, and I present it as such: not as a documented pattern of payments, but as my own observation of a manner of conducting public business.
Mark Hunter, in my experience, does a good deal of shouting even through the newspapers. His public criticism of East Cheshire Council is one example. His approach to my own questions about contamination at the former Trident Foams site and the adjacent Foggbrook land, covered in Book Eight of this series, is another — the same readiness to make a public issue of other people’s shortcomings that I have not seen matched by an equal willingness to explain his own party’s invoices, or the six years of silence some of my own questions about NPS Stockport were met with.
An MP who is quick to demand answers from a neighbouring council, while his own regional party has been quietly invoiced through his parliamentary allowance for years at a time, is not necessarily a hypocrite — the two things are not, on their face, in tension. But a reader is entitled to notice the asymmetry: scrutiny loudly demanded of others, and rarely, on the evidence gathered in this book, applied with the same energy closer to home.
This book, like the ones before it, is built from documents I obtained myself, very often against resistance. Every invoice, every claim form, every quoted line in it exists because someone, at some point, had to be asked directly — and because Freedom of Information law, imperfectly, still requires an answer. That two MPs elected to serve Stockport spent years directing public allowances toward their own party’s infrastructure is, I think, exactly the kind of fact that Parliamentary allowances were never supposed to quietly obscure.
