The Profits of Penzance: Part One
Do you recall that £70 billion ‘Net Zero’ contract? Here’s (half a) scoop
In 2020 the MP for a constituency encompassing Newmarket racecourse, then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock, gave oversight of Covid Test and Trace to Jockey Club board member Dido Harding, and awarded Covid contracts worth almost £777 million to Grand National sponsor Randox, paymaster of disgraced lobbyist-MP Owen Paterson, whose late wife was chair of Aintree racecourse and also on the board of the Jockey Club, which owns Aintree.
More than the labyrinthine, malodorous connections concerned, what has really raised eyebrows ever since is the total value of Harding’s project: £37 billion. NASA’s entire annual budget was then around £19.8 billion. It cost NASA just over £66 million to put a helicopter on another planet. Unlike the Test and Trace system overseen by Harding, the Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, actually worked.
The UK has been groomed to normalise ever-more eye-watering sums of public expenditure in return for ever-less effective, privately delivered outcomes. The current government doesn’t seem much better when it comes to the private bit, especially in relation to the NHS. Donors, bay-bee. Lobbyists and donors.
Even accepting all of that, a report in July 2022 by Cornwall Live of a £70 billion Net Zero contract being given to a two-person company with assets of around £350,000 registered in a smallish town in the far West of England – awarded by another seemingly small company registered as being on a farm between Baldock and Biggleswade in rural Hertfordshire – proved too much even for the gaslit electorate. Absolute scenes. Well, okay, on Twitter, anyway.
Unlike nearly all of the press, I wrote about it then. Few paid attention, even though it involves connections to an absolutely fascinating series of global scandals and skullduggery. And I thought it was time for a follow up. What are those staggering contract scamps up to nowadays? Stay tuned.
Are we going to memory-hole a kaleidoscopic story touching on American ‘edu-grifting’, a lightly-punished dodgy Cornish accountant, Tony Blair, The Wolf of Wall Street, classrooms for 60-90 students, Michael Gove, the Panama Papers, Donald fucking Trump, the island of Sarawak, Carphone Warehouse, Where’s Waldo company directors, Goldman Sachs, Ofsted, Saudi money laundering, Leonardo DiCaprio, and the London offices of global law firm Clyde & Co? Girl, no. And in honour of Pride Month, there will be added gif gorgeousness.
Feral frameworks and feline folk
Net Zero is the global term for neutralisation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. Inevitably and tiresomely, the Tory government named its Net Zero policy Build Back Greener. In his foreword, Boris Johnson claimed we could achieve it by 2050 if we ‘unleash the unique creative power of capitalism’. The Cat People lyric ‘putting out fire with gasoline’ comes to mind.
Indeed, some climate scientists are concerned that the concept is a problem, not a solution; a licence to keep doing what got us into this mess, but more ‘greenly’. Given the magical thinking around UK ‘policy’ – MOAR houses! Fuck the newts! – those chosen to ‘deliver’ Net Zero may not be the climate specialists, public policy pros, career communicators, or sustainability experts you’d expect.
In 2022, it emerged that this gobsmackingly gigantic Net Zero ‘contract’ was in fact a ‘framework agreement’. The teeny awarding body wasn’t paying a tiny organisation £70 billion of public funds for direct delivery of goods or services. The figure was its estimate of the maximum the framework could generate over four years. It just halved the estimated cost of achieving Net Zero, £140 billion?
Framework funnelling
Most outrage and patchy media coverage died away. “Oh, it’s a framework, a sum pulled out of someone’s arse, that’s okay then.” But I disagreed that there’s such a fine distinction now that capitalism has gone fully feral. The Good Law Project (GLP) didn’t back off, either. You can read about its concerns, and see the letter it sent to awarding company East of England Broadband Network (E2BN) saying the agreement might breach the Public Contracts Regulations 2015.
A framework agreement … allows public bodies when contracts are subsequently awarded through the agreement, to avoid the usual rules about open advertisement and competition. But unless it is tightly drawn and specific it can provide a cloak to obscure bad procurement practice.
To be clear: neither the GLP or I were saying that’s what happened in this case. But they sought judicial review of the contract as they believed its award was unlawful. In November 2022, E2BN pulled it, citing “commercial expediency”. You’d think people who can fire off a contract with a value nearly a fifth that of Elon Musk’s wealth could afford the risk, but hey-ho.
What I wondered was: who were those involved? What’s their expertise? Was this know-how or know-who? An example of the accelerating transfer of public assets into private hands, or Net Zero in safe hands, climate change sorted?
Net Zero Lounge
In July 2022 there were around 21 businesses located in or connected to a building that used to be a hotel, and apparently quite a fun bar called Zero Lounge, on the most historic street in Penzance. The Cornish town is the terminus of the Great Western Railway line from London Paddington. But some businesses registered at the Regent are really closer to the other end of the line.
That includes the sole director of Regent Penzance Ltd since 2019, Arthur Rixon, whose registered address is in West Sussex. According to Companies House filings, it’s a ‘residents property management’ company but also a dormant business, that is, ‘has had no significant transactions’. Which is, er, confusing, given the number of flats and businesses connected to the Regent online.
Rixon used to be a director of various London-based trading and finance concerns, and of West Sussex-registered Chelwood Beacon Management Company Ltd. A secretary and director of that firm on 30 August 2006 only was Swift Incorporations Ltd, which was a Nominee Secretary on 28 December 2000 only of Aston Chartwell Associates Ltd, a secretary of which was Dudley Miles, among whose other 800+ Companies House-listed appointments was a directorship of the Regent’s fun former basement bar/club, Zero Lounge.
One firm registered at the Regent was, and is, Place Group Ltd. The company changed its address from London to Manchester to London to Poole to London since its 2002 incorporation, finally coming to rest in Penzance in 2014.
Claire Elise Delaney and Simon James Rule have been directors of Place Group Ltd since 2009 and 2002 respectively. Addition Corporate Services Ltd was appointed its company secretary in January 2020. Michael Barry Adams, an accountant, is Addition’s managing director.
Adams was a director of oh hi again fun bar Zero Lounge Ltd! He was appointed a director of Schools Buying Club Ltd in February 2013 and resigned that July. In 2021 he was convicted of fraudulent evasion of nearly £160,000 of tax and ‘jailed’ for 16 months, suspended for two years, aka just four months of electronically-monitored 12-hour nighttime curfew. He wasn’t barred from company directorships as the judge said it was unnecessary for public protection.
Schools Buying Club
This company was also run by Delaney and Rule, and was dissolved in December 2023. Oddly, its website and Twitter are still live. They’re also trustees and members of Bellevue Place Education Trust (BPET), registered at a London address. In Part Two next week, I’ll look at the three firms, and the two people briefly appointed to help every UK public body access what it needed to help achieve Net Zero, arguably the most important goal in human history, for an unknown fee paid from presumably public money of unknown provenance.
Then I’ll peer at E2BN, the school internet filtering organisation that chose them from among … apparently no other firms … to oversee the potential spending of half the nation’s Net Zero ‘budget’. A company that awarded a £4 billion contract — or framework agreement? — in 2020 for ‘facilities management services’. To small to medium enterprise (SME) … Place Group Ltd t/a Schools' Buying Club.
This takes ages, but in an era of bombardment by information and scandal so we can’t possibly keep up, I feel it’s important. The Bite is a reader-supported publication. To support my shade, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.