You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below:

Transcript:

00:01 Tom

Hello, and welcome to episode two of the Corporate Watch podcast. My name’s Tom and this is our Eco-defence miniseries, which we recorded at the Earth First! gathering in the UK. This interview is with Katy and Merry from Biofuel Watch and the Stop Burning Trees Coalition. As with all these interviews, we recorded this outside in the midst of an ecological direct action gathering, you might be able to hear the wind or the noise of people chatting. We hope that this background noise isn’t too distracting, and allows you to hear the atmosphere of the gathering. We hope you’ve enjoyed listening to all the interviews in this mini-series. And that you check out our work at www.corporatewatch.org.

And now back to the gathering…

[Recording cuts to the interview at the Earth First! gathering]

Hey, so I’m here with Katy and Merry from Biofuel Watch and the Stop Burning Trees Coalition. Thanks a lot for talking to us. We’re here at the Earth First gathering on the Sunday. Could you tell us a bit about the organisations that you’re a part of and about the Coalition?

01:01 Katy

So Biofuel Watch works to campaign against the use of bio-energy. Focusing a lot at the moment on woody biomass. So [are] forests being used to create electricity, but also liquid biofuels from crops like corn and soy. And we campaign to highlight the issues for biodiversity and the climate, and [their] impacts on human health.

01:27 Merry

And the Stop Burning Trees Coalition is a fairly new coalition. That [began] around the time of Drax’s, one of the biggest biomass companies in the world, AGM with groups from across the north [of England] and the UK coming together for that. And since then, trying to organise a more grassroots campaign against biomass, but in particular, Drax because a lot of us are located in Yorkshire in the north, where Drax is a huge problem. And it’s right on our doorstep. So [we are] working quite closely with lots of different groups from trade unions and trade union councils to health campaigners, and environmental groups campaigning against biomass.

02:03 Tom

And you were talking a little bit in the workshop you did here about the Axe Drax campaign. Could you talk about that briefly?

02:08 Merry

Yeah, so Axe Drax as a group came about just before the first lockdown from people in Yorkshire again, wanting to take action against Drax. It’s done various different actions and protests and that sort of thing. And then it’s sort of moving more towards direct action, trying to cause more disruption and respond in a way that seems appropriate to the destruction that Drax is causing. So there’s been a few different actions that have happened with Axe Drax. There’s this train line, that’s a private railway that goes straight into Drax, which brings all the wood pellets from all the trees cut down abroad to be burnt.

‘Halt the felling’ Protesters stop a train carrying biofuel – via Axe Drax

There has been a couple of protesters who have disrupted that train line, just trying to bring attention to what Drax is doing, and the amount of harm it’s causing around the world. More recently, there was an action taken by Axe Drax on the day of Drax’s AGM – targeting the Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), where they did some creative redecorating of the outside of BEIS bringing attention to the billions in subsidies that BEIS gives Drax that will come out of our energy bills. Drax currently is receiving £2.6 million a day in subsidies from BEIS, which is a horrible misuse of public money. And it’s meant to be going to actual renewables, but instead, it’s going [towards] destroying our forests and polluting our communities. So Axe Drax is a member of the coalition working again on a grassroots level to campaign against biomass, but with a particular focus on Drax because they’re so prevalent in the north.

London, UK. 27 April 2022. A protestor from Axe Drax sprays paint to the outside of the entrance to BEIS (Department for Business, Energy and Industrial strategy)

03:32 Tom

And for people who aren’t so familiar with biomass – and some of the issues you’ve talked about here – could you explain a bit more about what the campaign is about?

03:40 Katy

Yeah, so focusing specifically on Drax as that’s our main focus and [it’s] the biggest biomass burner in the UK. So, Drax is currently in receipt of £2.6 million [a day] in subsidies, which comes from BEIS from a surcharge on energy bills – as Merry’s explained – and they get that money because biomass or wood burning, which is how Drax now generates electricity after transitioning from coal is currently classed as renewable. And it’s also classed as carbon neutral under carbon accounting rules. In reality, Drax is the single biggest carbon emitter in the UK. And burning wood actually releases more CO2 for the amount of energy produced than coal does. So that’s also the first lie that is told – that burning wood is carbon neutral. We’re also told that it’s sustainable, and Drax will claim that the wood it uses to make pellets comes from waste wood [and] sawmill residues. But the reality is that the demand for wood from the biomass industry – particularly Drax – is driving forest destruction around the world. The wood that is burnt in Drax comes from overseas. 60% comes from the southern US, [and] the remainder comes from Canada and the Baltic states: Estonia and Latvia.

And in Estonia, there is evidence of Drax sourcing wood illegally, from old-growth forests that are protected. But the majority of the wood that Drax burns is classed as sustainable under the UK sustainability criteria. But that’s because the bar is set so low that it basically means if it’s legal. And because forests aren’t classed as old growth unless they’re over 150 years old, they can use wood from 100-year-old forests and that’s classed as sustainable.

Truck loaded with logs on logging road – via Wikimedia Commons/University of British Columbia library

Investigators on the ground have filmed logging trucks [coming out] of forests that have been clearcut and filmed the logs getting taken to the pellet mills to be turned into wood pellets. So this idea that the wood is a byproduct of other forestry industries isn’t true. And one of the things that they would class as waste wood – they would class a tree that isn’t uniform. And so if the tree isn’t completely straight and can’t be used for, say house building… [but] obviously if you’re that tree, or you’re the animal that lives in that tree, [then] that’s not waste wood, it’s your home. And particularly in the southern US, there are environmental justice issues with the pellet mills being cited predominantly in – over 50% of them – in areas that are classed as ‘environmental justice communities’. So poor communities of colour and the health impacts from the pellet mills are horrendous – people suffer[from] cancer, heart disease, and asthma. They can’t put their washing out else it gets dust on it, dust all over their cars. This is impacting communities that are already suffering economic hardship. And there are now issues over here with Drax being in court [CW note, this case was ongoing as of August 2022], they’ve been taken to court by the Health and Safety Executive [in the UK] because the same health issues that are being created by the pellet mills are actually now taking their toll on the workers at Drax in terms of exposure to wood dust. And the pellets once they’ve been processed come over to the UK by ship, obviously there is pollution involved with shipping wood pellets for such long distances. And the pellets come through ports in the north of England, so Liverpool, Hull, Immingham and sometimes to Tyneside. And those have been focal points for action in the north [of England] taken by the Stop Burning Trees Coalition that we’ve set up.

Climate justice campaigners taking part in a demonstration at Leeds Magistrates Court today in support of health and safety charges against Drax Power Station – via Axe Drax

07.35 Tom

And we heard a little bit about how Drax is planning to make money from BECCS [Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage], would you like to explain what that is?

07.43 Katy

Yeah, so it gets worse. Because a lot of people aren’t aware of all the issues with biomass… It’s not sustainable and it’s not renewable and it’s not a climate solution. And so already kind of communicating this can be bursting people’s bubbles. But the next thing that Drax [is] trying to claim is – not just that burning wood is carbon neutral – but that by applying BECCS, which is Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage, they can make wood burning carbon negative. So a lot of people will be familiar with CCS – Carbon Capture and Storage – which the fossil fuel industry has been promising for years is going to make it viable to keep burning fossil fuels and not contributing to climate change because they’re going to capture the carbon and store it underground. So far, that’s only happened on a very limited scale. And [it’s been] incredibly expensive, and not viable as a climate solution, certainly not within the timescales that we’re talking about in terms of needing to reduce emissions. Drax now is claiming that they’re going to use this technology but with bioenergy [CW note – in fact Drax has submitted a proposal to try and do it] proposed to, and they’ll thereby store the carbon from the trees that they burn. And then in theory – by regrowing those trees – create a kind of cycle where they are sucking carbon out of the atmosphere.

One, it’s a completely unproven technology. And at the moment, it’s at very initial stages of technology development. So again, just not at all within the timeframes that we need to be addressing climate change. And then, very worryingly, governments are accepting that this is a technology that works, and plugging it into climate projections and policies. And instead of addressing the need to reduce emissions now. They are saying that we’re going to get net zero by [2050], by being heavily reliant on BECCS technology that doesn’t work, and Drax knows is unlikely to work because the subsidy regime that they are asking for to implement this has the subsidies for capturing carbon, separate to the subsidies for continuing to burn wood – which they are keen to get. And the other thing that’s really important to highlight, is that the whole concept of it being renewable and sustainable is based on a false promise that if you replant trees, they will reabsorb carbon at the same rate as old trees. And that’s not true, increasingly, there’s evidence that old-growth forests, mature forests, are our biggest allies in climate change mitigation, because they’re the biggest absorbers of CO2 and saplings don’t absorb CO2 at the same rate. And so the timescales that we’re talking about for it to be renewable and sustainable – again – they’re not in line with the urgency of needing to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels.

10.44 Merry

Yeah, so the research shows that it takes about 44 to 104 years to reabsorb the carbon emitted from burning these trees, which is obviously, way, way longer than we have in all the other different estimations of how urgently we need to cut carbon. And it also doesn’t take into account all the biodiversity, the fact that these forests act as vital flood defences for these communities, again, often ‘environmental justice communities’. And also all the biodiversity and the rare and protected species that exist in these forests. So it’s on far too long a timescale for it to have any real impact on us hitting the tipping points, and harming the planet even more, not to mention all the other impacts that come alongside it.

11.22 Tom

So it’s an unproven technology. And you’ve said lots of reasons why it’s it’s not an adequate way or even a real way of addressing climate change. So what’s in it for the government subsidising these projects? And what’s in it for Drax? Why is it being done?

11.37 Merry

Drax Power Station from West Hill, High Hunsley, by Nick Theasby for Geograph Britain and Ireland

I mean you look at [what’s going on] and you think, obviously, this shouldn’t exist when you think about it. But there’s a lot of money in it. So, in 2009, when the EU declared that biomass was a form of renewable energy, there were subsidies given out to coal power plants to transform [them] into biomass energy plants. So Drax – having been a huge coal power plant – saw this opportunity to keep going, and to keep making money. It took the subsidies and started transitioning. Since then they’ve been receiving billions in subsidies. By 2027, they’ll have received about £10 billion in renewable energy subsidies to keep burning our forests. There’s a very close relationship between Drax and the government. In the last year or so there were about 70 meetings between DRAX and BEIS [CW note – it was actually 32 meetings with Kwasi Kwarteng after he joined BEIS in 2019, and a total of 69 meetings with ministers since 2020. These figures are from Biofuel Watch’s own research]. Whereas it took the same amount of time for MPs who are resisting biomass to have one meeting with BEIS. So there’s a very clear, close relationship. And you have people who used to sit on Drax’s board, [and] also on the climate change commission designing the government’s net-zero strategy, which funnily enough features BECCS very heavily. And also, I think, because it was something they could already do, they could transition these existing power plants into biomass plants, they can then count that as part of their renewable energy and say: ‘Look, we’re meeting our targets! We’re producing this much renewable energy because Drax is burning trees’, and therefore it counts as renewable energy, and there’s very close relationships between lots of government officials and MPs and Drax. The local Selby MP, Nigel Adams – which is where Drax is located just near Selby – has received tens of thousands in donations from Drax [CW note – also fellow Biomass firm Eggsborough], and then has also gone on to lead biomass working groups in Parliament and push biomass very heavily. So there’s all these lobbying relationships, and there’s money to be made that’s coming out of our energy bills that should be going to genuine renewables.

13.19 Katy

I think as well, it’s really expedient for the government that they can just look at BECCS and say, ‘Oh, great, we don’t really need to change anything. We don’t need to ask people to change their lifestyles’. ‘We don’t need to decentralise the electricity grid’, you know, ‘we can keep the base loads there using Drax and not invest into the sorts of battery technologies that we need to transition to more sustainable, genuine renewable technologies such as wind and solar’, which are now… the costs of those have massively come down. And whereas Drax is taking money from people’s energy bills through this levy, wind and solar are now paying back. My view is the government doesn’t want our energy systems here to become too decentralised, because it’s a way of controlling people and having power over people if you have that very centralised grid. But also it means we don’t have to really address the actual situation we’re in, which is that we need to start limiting economic growth. We need to look at our economic model, which is constant extraction of resources to make profit for companies. And by relying on these pie in the sky technologies, we can just keep going with business as usual. And ultimately, it’s a way of them trying to appear to be addressing the climate crisis, but within capitalism. Ultimately it can’t work, because we need to start addressing consumption and resource use in terms of economic resources and extraction and looking at different sorts of economies that are sustainable. But governments don’t want to make those changes because they want to keep making money, and their mates being able to make money.

15.17 Merry

Fundamentally, it’s another form of so-called green capitalism that doesn’t require addressing – as Katy was saying – the root causes of any of these issues, and we can continue [to] export – as England has done for a very, very long time – the harm to other countries, to communities that are already marginalised and harmed by different polluting industries. We can cut down forests abroad, pollute those communities, and then the UK can continue acting as it always has done by harming other communities, continuing these economic systems, these systems of profit, and these very close relationships between all these people in power so that nothing ever really has to change. And I think it fundamentally comes down to that. It’s just green capitalism and greenwashing so that they can continue making money and harming everyone else.

16.14 Tom

And can you tell us a bit more about campaigning around this issue, about the Stop Burning Trees Coalition and maybe some highlights or inspiring things that have happened during your campaign?

16.47 Katy

The AGM was a particular highlight because we had Axe Drax’s amazing action outside BEIS coinciding with a very, very noisy demo outside Drax’s AGM in London. And then there were a range of actions across the north along the train line routes, like Hull, and Liverpool [which] are both ports where pellets come in, and then Leeds and York close to Drax. We had very colourful, visually exciting actions. And we’ve also been challenging Drax’s greenwash successfully.

19.24 Merry

I think one of the really amazing things about the coalition is building these connections between people who are campaigning on different issues, whether it’s [highlighting] the health impacts [of Drax’s business] or working with trade unions and that sort of thing. One of the things that Drax does incredibly well and pours a lot of money into is greenwashing on a local level. So they have very close relationships with schools and universities in the north. And just recently, they were sponsoring this thing called the York Nature Fair, where there were lots of really lovely organisations coming together to educate people more about nature and biodiversity. Drax was the main sponsor of that and had their branding on everything, Propagating this image that they are this lovely, friendly company. So the coalition obviously noticed this and weren’t too thrilled about it, and contacted a lot of the different organisations involved. And they ended up dropping Drax from all their branding and the sponsorship and reassessing their own relationship with Drax because a lot of these organisations – without doing like a lot of their own research into biomass – it can be very easy to say, yeah, that seems fine. It’s classified as renewable. So I think that was a really wonderful thing that happened, just like very quickly and from all these different groups coming together and just educating more people about biomass.

And at the moment, the coalition is working quite heavily on looking at things like a just transition for workers, because Drax is a huge employer in the north. And you can’t deny that people rely on these jobs. And it’s a very big employer. So we’re building up more connections in the local area is something we’ve been putting energy into. Drax workers are currently [as of September 2022] doing wildcat strikes every two weeks, and people from the coalition go down to support those there’s sort of been this veil lifted on the working conditions within Drax because whenever you speak to someone who used to work for Drax they have nothing good to say about them, like really just genuinely awful stuff. But then when people are still working there, it’s hard to speak out. But then you’re hearing people are working in 50-degree conditions every single day and being paid very poorly and all these things. So what we’re trying to do with our work with the trade unions in the coalition is looking at how we could actually transition away from Drax in the north, and how those people could be supported and have genuinely green jobs and not actually be harmed by the shutting down of Drax. Because there’s such a diversity of groups within the coalition, it allows us to have this real diversity of tactics. You’ve got Axe Drax doing more direct action, more disruptive things, and then people working very closely with trade unions and local campaigning groups in the Selby area, and doing these sort of more theatrical, very colourful protests and stuff like that, or just like outreach and talking to more and more people about it, because even in the north, not many people really know what Drax is doing. So yeah, it allows us to have a really wide range of tactics and [a broad] campaigning strategy, which I think is really beautiful and really wonderful.

19.32 Tom

I was wondering if you could tell me a little about the relationship between Drax and a Canadian company called Pinnacle Pellets.

20.41 Merry

Yes, so Pinnacle Pellets is a Canadian logging company. They’ve previously been accused of – or known – for logging on unceded indigenous land in Canada home to over 600 indigenous communities with lots of biodiversity and protected species. Last year, Drax purchased Pinnacle Pellets, because they’re expanding into the pellet production business – not happy with just burning everything. They’re also trying to, you know, cut down the trees and turn them into pellets, they’re now the world’s second-biggest pellet producer. So this is all happening in Canada, which is where they’ve been increasingly sourcing wood from. And another part of that is the Head of Forestry in that province [Diana Nicholls], who was deciding which companies could log where has now recently [joined] Drax’s board. And there’s a very clear connection between them. Part of this as well is because Drax has expanded so much in this part of Canada in the logging business, the unions and the workers who have been working in the forestry business have actually published open letters to Drax, basically saying that their huge expansion in that area is putting them out of work and taking jobs away from all the people that been working there for a very long time. And it’s just another example of how Drax is trying to expand and trying to grow its business into cutting down and burning more and more trees around the world and harming communities as it goes.

20.50 Tom

And you were saying that the campaign back in the UK has been going after the financiers of Drax. Could you say a bit more about that?

22.07 Katy

We’ve been focusing recently on Barclays in particular, which is one of Drax’s biggest financiers. They’ve come under fire from fossil fuel campaigners because of their investments in fossil fuels. And they’re trying to greenwash their way out of that by saying that they are investing in renewable energy as well. But one of the big things that they are investing in is Drax. So we’re really trying to expose that burning fossil fuels and burning trees amount to the same thing. And Barclays is complicit in both. We recently had a very noisy and lively day at the Barclays AGM in Manchester with people inside disrupting the AGM and causing it to be delayed for quite a long amount of time. And then lots of campaigners outside campaigning on fossil fuels, and biomass burning a really lively, noisy demo. Also, there was some subvertising campaigns with spoof adverts exposing Barclays’ bad practices. We had an E-Action as well calling on Barclays to drop Drax, just to let people know that big biomass is not a climate solution, and the banks need to drop that as well as dropping fossil fuel investments.

22.16 Tom

And are there any moments in the campaign, or any aspects of the campaign that you think comrades can take inspiration from, or learn from?

23.07 Merry

I think so. The Coalition is very new. It only came out of the AGM in April [2022], and it sort of just sprung up from people who had been organising against Drax coming together to realise that we can unite all these groups and that by working together, we’re much stronger. And there’s a lot of expertise, and skills and energy from all these different groups around the north of the UK, coming together to campaign against Drax, I think we’re still in our very early stages. So we’re still learning as we go as well. But seeing the power of having different health campaigners and trade unions, environmentalists, and people working on a just transition coming together to campaign makes us so much stronger. If we can unite and see all the different connections between these issues, and how all these different aspects of capitalism and colonial capitalism come together, and feed into one another. Understanding how that all functions together, makes us much stronger, and makes resisting it much better.

Protest at Drax, via Axe Drax

23.12 Tom

And finally, how can people get involved in the campaign and support you?

23.52 Katy

If people want to find out more about Biofuel Watch, we’ve got loads and loads of really useful information on our website, which is biofuelwatch.org.uk. And also you can sign up to our newsletter and get updates for online actions. You don’t get too many emails. [The mailing list is designed to inform] how you can take action on biomass and how you can learn more. Also, we’ll support you if you want to organise a local screening of a film called ‘Burned: Are trees the new coal?’ Which we absolutely recommend you watch and analyse to learn more about biomass and then try and show it to other people.

24.26 Merry

If you want to get involved in the Coalition, you can sign up for updates on our website as well stopburningtrees.org. Or you can find us on social media: SBT Coalition. We hold regular welcome meetings, and we’re holding different actions over the coming months, which hopefully you’ll see. And if you’d like to get involved, you can contact us. All of our actions, events, and that sort of thing will be on the website and on social media. So you can find us that way. Come to our welcome meetings and if your group would like to sign up, or you would like to join, [you’re] very welcome. And we can give you as much information as you’d like and support you in taking any sort of action you want against biomass.

24.37 Tom

Oh, thanks very much. And we’ll put all those links and everything in the notes for the show. And thanks so much for your time. And I hope you enjoy the rest of Earth First!

24.48 Merry

So you can also join Axe Drax, you can find us on our website, which is axedrax.uk or on social media: axe_drax. And if you want to do direct action, that sort of thing, we’d love to have you there.

Music by Oz Lockley

The featured image is of Drax Power Station, taken by Richard Brownbridge, CC BY-SA 2.0

The post Eco-defence podcast episode two – an interview with Biofuel Watch appeared first on Corporate Watch.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the play button below:

TRANSCRIPT:

00:01 Tom – Corporate Watch

Hello and welcome to the Corporate Watch podcast. My name’s Tom, and I’d like to welcome you to this first episode in our eco-defence miniseries of interviews that we gathered at the UK’s Earth First! Gathering. Featuring interviews with comrades involved in campaigning against the ecological destruction that’s caused by corporate greed.

But before we start, here’s a word about us:

Corporate Watch is a research group that helps people stand up against corporations and capitalism. We investigate exploitative bosses, landlords and property developers, companies profiting from prisons, profiting from deportation flights, from animal exploitation and more, as well as the mega-corporations devastating our planet – and the wider systems of power and profit they work within.

At the heart of everything we do is our idea of “information for action”. We know that people can fight and win, even against powerful enemies like corporations and governments. Good information helps to understand the forces we’re up against, spot their weaknesses, and so campaign effectively.

This is our first venture into the world of podcasts – so we apologise if things aren’t as polished as they could be. Because of this, it’s also taken us a good while to get these interviews ready for broadcast, so we’ve provided updates to the original interviews where that’s proved necessary. This interview – for example – includes an update on the situation as of March 2023.

All of these interviews were recorded outside, in the midst of an ecological direct action gathering – and you might hear the noises of people preparing the dinner, or shouting for the next workshop, and so on. We hope that all this adds a sense of atmosphere to the interviews.

Okay, so without further ado, here’s our first interview of the series.

[cut to the interview from the Earth First! gathering]

01.39 Tom – Corporate Watch

Okay, so I’m here with Daniel and Anne from Coal Action Network. And [the] first question I was gonna ask is about the Coal Action Network campaign, about how long it’s been going on for and what the aims of the campaign are?

An opencast coal mine in South Lanarkshire

01.50 Anne – Coal Action Network

So Coal Action Network started around 2008. It came out of an Earth First! gathering because at the time, there [were] around 45 new open cast coal mine applications proposed, and a similar number of operating open cast in the UK. So it was a big issue. The amount of carbon that’s released by the burning of the coal from the mines is significant, but also the environmental devastation on a local environmental level, when everything over the coal is destroyed. So all of the habitats, [and] the biodiversity is taken away. The very bedrock is taken away right down to the coal itself. And this has a huge impact on local communities and the local communities were… very isolated in their own fights. And they felt like it was only them – only their village – that was affected. And so, the Coal Action Network was formed, originally under a different name. It was formed in order to unite the groups together so that they could share their learning. And so that people could take direct action as well as working through the planning system.

02.46 Tom – Corporate Watch

Can you tell me a little bit about some of the successes of the direct action and the campaigns against coal over the years?

02.52 Anne – Coal Action Network

So over the years, we have fought a lot of campaigns, we didn’t end up fighting all 45, they weren’t necessarily necessary, but we stopped 22 open cast applications or extensions… 2020, was the kind of the end of that era – where we stopped: a new application at Druridge Bay, a new application at Dewley Hill and stopped an extension at Bradley in the Pont Valley. So that was a kind of accumulation of the work. But lots of people – community activists, environmental activists – over the years fought against these applications, through all sorts of different methods. Very much a holistic approach to fighting the campaigns. And in 2018, things kind of came together in the campaign to protect Pont Valley, where we had a big protest camp. That lasted, I think, for 54 days. We had the camp and then after that, there were further actions against the mine, sadly, the mine did happen. It did succeed. It had been rejected… by the local council in 2011. And then it had been approved at a second appeal. So it was like a really long drawn–out process, and the local community were really downtrodden because they felt like the mine was going to go ahead. And then we all came together for this really empowering, but sadly, ultimately unsuccessful campaign to stop the mine.

Demonstration at Bradley mine in the Pont Valley (photo via Glen Black)

But, in a way, it wasn’t unsuccessful, because the coal mining companies like to expand, because there isn’t [just] coal in a small pocket. They kind of keep eating up a whole valley and moving down the area. And because of the campaign to protect Pont Valley, and how successful that campaign was at making the headlines and keeping the issue in the news when they asked for an extension application, and to get even closer to people’s houses, they were rejected. So that was a big turning point for us.

But there were a lot of other camps prior to that. In Scotland, there were Coal Action Scotland camps, there was a camp in Huntington Lane [in Shropshire], they were across the coalfields of the UK. And yeah, lots of different types of tactics kind of brought about that change, to see we’re very near to the end of open cast coal mining in the UK. There’s a couple of mines operating, and there’s one extension application, but it’s a very different picture to the one that we started with when we started Coal Action Network.

04:50 – Tom – Corporate Watch

And is there anything from that history of campaigning that really sticks out as like a really inspiring moment or a really inspiring action?

04:59 – Anne – Coal Action Network

via Coal Action network

There was an action in the Pont Valley that really inspired me, we went to the company that was building the access road to enable the coal mine. The access road had to be completed before the third of June, otherwise, the coal mine wouldn’t be able to start. So it was very clear for us that if we stopped the access road being built then we would stop the coal mine and we were successful in that. Sadly, the authorities didn’t care. But the action – what was inspiring for me about it – was that three non-binary people blocked the road. And the support involved quite a lot of local queer women who had never been part of anything like that. And just seeing those movements come together, and people fighting for the area where they lived and an area where they had just met and people coming together in a fantastic action where ultimately, the road building company built a new road out of its own compound [laughs]. You can’t predict everything that might happen. But we won that, we stopped them from building their access road in the time available. And then the authorities pushed through the mine despite that happening, but there were lots of successes along the way – even though we weren’t successful in stopping the valley… from being destroyed.

06:02 – Tom – Corporate Watch

And, what’s the situation now? You were saying that opencast is less of an issue for you now, can you explain that? And talk about what is going through the planning process in terms of new projects?

06.13 – Anne – Coal Action Network

So open cast has become much less of an issue because of the obvious environmental impact locally, whereas [for] deep mining the environmental impacts are less clear. But the global environmental impacts are much greater because there’s a much greater amount of coal that’s extracted. When the organisation started, we were fighting coal mines… which provided power for power stations, so for the electricity grid. Though, there was a point when the UK was using 40% of its electricity coming from coal and now it’s down to less than 3%. And so there’s been big changes in that, and the government has said it will phase out coal by 2024. However, when they say phase out coal what they mean is close the power stations, they don’t mean stop the mining. And coal is not only used in power stations it’s also used in steelworks – is the second biggest – or has now become the biggest consumer of coal and so, things have changed in that direction.

Scottish Coal site – aerial view

07:07 – Tom – Corporate Watch

And did you want to talk about the current projects that are going through the planning process and that are live at the moment?

07:13 – Daniel – Coal Action Network

So we do have a working open cast coal mine in South Wales called Ffos-y-Fran, that is due for closure on the sixth of September [2022] this year [but the mine has applied for an extension], so, at that point, there shouldn’t be any active opencast coal mining in the UK. We are looking at an extension for Glan Lash, also in South Wales, that is opencast – [they] currently don’t have a licence to operate but they are looking to extend a coal mine. There’s also a deep coal mine in South Wales called Aberpergwm, that is going to mine 42 million tonnes of coal, so it’s a large extension.

Coal Action Network has launched a judicial review against the decision for that extension to go ahead. And we’re likely to have the hearing for judicial review around January or February 2023. There’s also Whitehaven which is being widely publicised in West Cumbria, that is a deep coal mine that is awaiting a determination by the Secretary of State in October [2022]. And finally, there’s a coal mine that’s at a very early stage in the planning process on the Scottish/English border, in Dumfries and Galloway. I think what’s really critical about this is all of these coal mines are claiming to primarily mine coal to make steel. So the government cut off for 2024 for coal for power in the UK, [and] these applications will be completely unaffected by that target. Globally, the steel industry uses a billion tonnes of coal every year to produce 1.7 billion tonnes of steel, that process emits 11% of global greenhouse gases. If we don’t solve this we can’t get a handle on climate change. It’s a really key issue, and not enough people know about it. In the UK, these four coal mines cumulatively – that are going through the planning process at the moment – account for 140 million tonnes of coal, that will produce around 430 million tonnes of CO2.

We need to get active on steel, and we need to stop the steel industry from consuming the level of coal it currently does. In the UK. There are two main steelworks in the UK that consume huge quantities of coal. The largest of those is in Port Talbot. And it’s called Port Talbot steelworks, it’s owned by Tata Steel. The other one is British Steel in Scunthorpe. These account for the second and third highest sources of [CO2] single–site emissions in the UK.

09:46 – Tom – Corporate Watch

So could you tell me about the companies that are involved in these four projects?

09:52 – Daniel – Coal Action Network

So in Whitehaven, the company behind the coal mine is called West Cumbria Mining Limited, they are majority owned by a Singaporean investment company serving people in Australia and elsewhere. Aberpergwm is run by Energybuild Ltd. They bought the coal mine in 2004. And we suspect that they might sell the coal mine at some point in the future to another coal–operating company. And there’s Lochinvar which is owned by New Age Exploration Limited – rather dystopically named – and they run gold mines in New Zealand and Australia. And they, until recently. also owned a stake in a tungsten mine in Cornwall but sold that. And finally, Glan Lash is owned by Bryn Bach Coal Limited.

10:40 – Tom – Corporate Watch

And out of those four projects, which one do you think is likely to be a campaigning focus in the near future?

10:47 – Daniel – Coal Action Network

A demonstration in support of legal challenges to Whitehaven coal mine

So in the order that these coal mines are in the planning system, Lochinvar is the earliest and then Glan Lash which is currently awaiting a determination by Welsh Ministers. Whitehaven is awaiting a determination by the Secretary of State in October [2022] [update – this has now been approved, but is subject to a legal challenge]. So that’s coming up quite soon.

And Aberpergwm is a massive extension. We’re looking at a judicial review in January or February [2023] with an outcome from that several months later. We’re hoping to win. We’ve got a crack legal team and it’s looking optimistic. If we don’t win, there are no other options than direct action. And we really hope that people will come out and join us in taking direct action against that coal mine from happening.

Whitehaven – we’re expecting a decision on that very shortly. But there are other options that might be explored before direct action becomes the last option available to us.

11:49 – Tom – Corporate Watch

And how will people who want to support that direct action know, where should they look for information?

11:55 – Daniel – Coal Action Network

Coal Action Network, we share our information [through] our mailing list, which you can sign up for on our website. We put out information via Twitter and Facebook. I’m afraid we’re all a bit old to be putting information out on Instagram. But we would appreciate it – if you see that information – to share it amongst yourselves on Instagram. So keep your ears peeled and follow us on our socials and our mailing list, so you can find out news as it happens.

12:20 – Tom – Corporate Watch

Okay, and I wanted to ask – what do you think that the campaign… the struggle that you’ve had so far highlights about the links between the coal industry and corporate power and greed in general?

12:35 Anne – Coal Action Network

So there are lots of examples of how the coal industry links into corporate greed and how the state protects that. For example, when opencast coal mines start, they produce a lot of waste, what’s called overburden – everything that’s over the rock, and it costs millions of pounds to put that back. Coal companies don’t make any money whilst they’re putting that back. They’re supposed to put money to one side to pay for that later. However, often what these companies do is set up shell companies – subsidiaries. For example, Celtic Energy in South Wales escaped over £100 million pounds worth of restoration costs on four different sites, so Selar, Margam, East Pit, and Nant Helen.They created companies that were based in the Virgin Islands and gave them names that weren’t related to coal, weren’t related to the business… things like Ash Energy and Oak… and things like that. So subsidiaries that are basically meaningless.

UK coal did it as well. They also went for the plant theme and called it Juniper Number Three.

So they create these companies that then own the land, the land that is opencast – and the actual company behind the whole thing keeps operating the site, but the liability goes with the land. So planning permission goes with the land and who has to put it back goes with the land. If that company is then in the Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands abroad, then there’s no recourse for that to ensure that restoration happens.

Consequently, local communities who were promised to get their footpaths back, to have the water that fills in the void dealt with safely, to have woodland planted or whatever – kind of things that we know are bullshit remediation -those don’t happen. And so communities who’ve dealt with all of the dust, all of the noise, all of the loss of amenities, lose everything once the company has gone. In the case of Celtic [Energy], it went to involve the Serious Fraud Office and it involved a court. And the people high up in the companies had their premises raided, [and] they were arrested. And when it went to court, the judge said it was dishonest, it was wrong, but there [was] nothing they could do. It was legal. And that just shows that the state is set up – as we all know – to criminalise people who try and create a better world and a more sustainable world. It isn’t set up to penalise the people who have a lot of money, and who walk away having extracted from places, which have had the negative impacts of coal, and then none of the benefits – and so it’s just another example that we’re well aware of, of the way in which the state benefits and companies benefit, and local people don’t.

photo via Glen Black, from a protest in the Pont Valley

15.02 – Tom – Corporate Watch

And the last question I had was, out of all those years of struggle against the coal industry, what do you think the lessons are, that comrades that are involved in struggles against corporate power, can learn or take from the struggles that you’ve been involved in?

15.15 – Daniel, Coal Action Network

So in my experience, the things that we can see through the work that we’ve taken on coal, that are equally relevant in other contexts are that communities that resist coal mines or resist extractivist projects are much more successful when the community works together. If there’s like land being bought and things like that, the communities need to work in partnership with their neighbours. And that community groups that start up around the point where a planning application is expected, they are most strong and most likely to win if they fight on other issues in their local area.

So if they create positive events in their area, or they tackle other problems, that they have – other environmental problems that they have – they’re more likely to stay together as a cohesive group and then be able to re-invigorate themselves on the issue of coal, or whatever extractivism it is, at a later stage.

I would also say that it’s really important to break down the narratives of ‘activists’ and ‘local people’, I think, sometimes I fall into it myself! But that, that we’re all part of the same struggle, and that the struggles that can seem fairly single issue [do] inspire people and enable people to meet connections that they wouldn’t have otherwise met. And also that within direct action movements, it’s very easy to [think] that direct action is the most successful thing, but often the fairly dull dealing with the planning system can actually result in a secure victory. And that direct action is often necessary at the last point when we really don’t have anything else. And so it’s better if we can stop getting to that point because it’s [the] endgame. Whereas if we can stop it at planning, or you can stop it through other methods, then that’s better, it’s a bit more laborious, it’s a different sort of way of working, but it can give really useful results.

A tussle with security at Bradley (photo via Glen Black)

16.54 Daniel – Coal Action Network

I think I would just go into more detail on Margam, which was operated by Celtic Energy. And although Celtic Energy pulled a similar trick at all four of its coal mining sites, Celtic Energy particularly screwed over people living around Margam in Park Slip in South Wales. They lobbied the council planning board to give them an extension to the coal mine. And they said ‘we’ll use the money that we earn from this extension to pay for the restoration’. And the council who were looking at a huge liability if Celtic were to walk away, which they could because they’d sold the land already, they were held over a barrel. And so they said ‘yes, fine, you can have this extension. We just need to restore this massive void that you’ve dug out, to put the soil back’. Celtic Energy said ‘yeah, yeah, yeah. Great, we’ll do it’. At the end of that extension, the council came to Celtic Energy, [and] they said ‘right, great! It’s time for you to down tools, [and] restore the land. Keep your promise!’ Celtic were like, ‘yeah, we’ve not sold as much coal as we though we would. We need another extension’. At this point, the council said ‘no!’, ‘you’ve had enough, we’re not gonna do it any more’.

Unfortunately, only £5 million had been put to one side for restoration. £5 million might sound like a lot, [but] it’s a pittance to their amount that was required to just drain the water that was accumulating in the site… Because of that the council took Celtic Energy to court to pay for the restoration they’d promised to do. And over the course of that court process, the water had been filling into this coal mine, and just draining that water would cost over £10 million. So the council had no option than to just dig a bit of a ditch at the top of the coal mine that would drain the water away, so it will stop it from overflowing and flooding to the residences below. So these people now live with this massive void of water massive millions of cubic metres of water near to their homes, and they feel that threat.

And Celtic Energy said to the council, ‘you know, if you don’t accept this proposal, well, we’re gonna turn off our pumps [that] keep maintaining the water levels where they are, you’ve got a few months. So not only did the council accept this proposal, they paid Celtic Energy to do that – to dig this ditch. They paid them that last £5 million because Celtic Energy had their gear there, it would cost more to pay another company to come in. And that’s just such a galling example of company abuse of power, and abusing the legal system that our state creates. And ultimately, it’s the local communities that always pay the price. And there are so many communities still living beside unrestored or poorly restored sites around England, Wales and Scotland. We’ll be releasing a report [update – it’s now been released] shortly on the state of restoration of coal mining sites around South Wales. So keep your eyes peeled for that. We’ll be sending a mailing out to our mailing list and it’ll be on our website.

19:52 – Tom – Corporate Watch

Anne and Daniel, thanks so much and [I] like really encourage people to check out the website and go on the mailing list and be ready to take action when it’s needed. And, we’re gonna go and get some dinner pretty soon. But thank you so much for speaking to me.

Okay, so that interview was recorded in late August 2022. And some things have changed since then. So I asked Daniel for an update.

20.16 – Daniel – Coal Action Network

It’s March 2023. and much has changed. The Whitehaven coal mine has been approved by the Secretary of State in December 2022. Since then, local environmental group SLACC [South Lakes Action on Climate Change] and Friends of the Earth have both launched legal challenges against that approval. And we’re looking at other ways that we can challenge the Whitehaven coal mine from progressing.

Ffos-y-Fran did submit an extension application just five days ahead of the planning permission running out on the sixth of September 2022. But that extension application is still being considered by the local planning authority. In the meantime, though, all reports indicate that the coal mining company has not stopped coal mining at Ffos-y-Fran despite the fact that the planning permission has run out. We’ve done everything that we can to highlight this, and to report it to the local planning authority, but they’ve just sat on their hands. As far as we’re aware, they’ve not done any independent investigation of what would be a serious breach of planning permission at the site, they are due to formally consider and make a decision on the extension application in April. That’s almost six months of coal mining at the site without planning permission for six months, that’s terrible!

A demonstration outside the first day of the Aberpergwm judicial review hearing

At Glan Lash, that application for an extension is still alive. It is due to be considered by the local council of Carmarthenshire in three months from now. And we’ll be there to resist that.

In Scotland. slightly brighter news, the Scottish Government have announced a de facto ban on all forms of coal mining within Scotland, very similar to what they’ve done against fracking. We think that this means that the Lochinvar Coal Mine application is dead in the water.

And finally, at Aberpergwm, the deep coal mine in South Wales, that judicial review hearing is happening in a few days from now [cw note – it started on March 16th. A judgement is expected within three months]. So we’re very busy preparing for that, we’re optimistic that we’ll win. And that will save nearly 40 million tonnes of coal from being potentially extracted from that coal mine, and restore a bit of Welsh sovereignty around what happens in their future – ensuring that they can put into action, the strong anti-coal policies that they have.

Music by Oz Lockley

The post Eco-defence podcast episode one – an interview with Coal Action Network appeared first on Corporate Watch.

We ask: who is profiting from supplying our energy? How much are the bosses getting paid? And how have these companies been cosying up to government?

We hope that our research can be a useful resource for those organising towards a mass non-payment of energy bills.

We have released our alternative company profiles of the Big Six energy suppliers in reverse order over the last few weeks; E.ON, OVO, Octopus Energy, EDF and Scottish Power. Next up:

British Gas: the UK’s number one energy supplier

British gas is still capitalising on its image as a publicly owned energy provider of the past. However its motives these days are anything but for the public good. From mis-selling to customers to mistreating workers, rampant greenwashing and enforcing a poverty premium for customers by aggressively installing pre-pay meters; today British Gas only serves its shareholders and directors, as it makes obscene profits despite the cost of living crisis.

British Gas is the UK’s biggest energy supplier and is owned by Centrica Group plc. It supplies 28.2% of the UK’s gas and 20.2% of its electricity. The majority of British Gas’ supply is from renewables, nuclear, and natural gas.

Created in 1812 under the name The Gas Light and Coke Company to develop and maintain gas supply, it was the world’s first public utility firm. In 1986, almost two centuries later, the Thatcher government privatised British Gas under the Gas Act.

Centrica, the current parent company, was created in 1997. It does business outside the UK in Ireland, the United States and Norway. Part of the reason it has fared better than other energy firms in recent years is because of its diverse portfolio of subsidiaries, which buy and sell energy amongst suppliers, produce energy, or sell it directly to customers.

Centrica’s businesses include:

• British Gas Energy, which supplies energy to residential and small business customers in England, Scotland and Wales.
• Bord Gáis, which supplies energy to customers in Ireland.
• British Gas Services, which provides services to residential customers in England, Scotland and Wales.
• Centrica Business Solutions, which provides energy supply to larger business customers in England, Scotland and Wales, and ‘low-carbon energy solutions’ for business customers internationally.
• Energy Marketing & Trading, which is the trading arm of Centrica, and is also responsible for sourcing energy on behalf of the Group’s energy supply activities in the UK.
• Upstream, which includes Centrica’s oil and gas assets, its 20% interest in the UK’s nuclear power generation fleet and the Rough field, a gas storage facility in the North Sea.

HOW MANY UK ENERGY CUSTOMERS DOES BRITISH GAS HAVE?

Electricity (excluding pre-payment): 4.9 million

Gas (excluding pre-payment): 5.6 million

HOW MUCH IS IT MAKING?

Centrica is raking it in at the moment, after performing so poorly in 2020 that it had to stop paying dividends to its shareholders. Company profits for the six months ending in June 2022 rose to £1.34 billion from £262 million a year before. This means that Centrica’s half-year profits were five times higher than a year earlier. This is in the aftermath of a wave of energy companies going bust in 2021.

WHO OWNS IT?

In November 2022, 38.3% of Centrica was owned by institutional shareholders, with Schroder Investment Management Ltd holding the largest share at 9.49%. One of Schroder’s portfolio managers was accused of fraud in the United States in 2010. It was also fined in Hong Kong in 2016 for failing to properly disclose the stocks held by the company.

The usual suspects, such as multinational investment companies like the Vanguard Group and BlackRock as well as governments such as Norway and New Zealand also have shares in Centrica. BAE Systems – an arms company which supplies supplies dictatorships – also holds shares in Centrica, according to business information databases.

WHO RUNS IT?

Chris O’Shea is Centrica’s chief executive. He worked for Shell in Nigeria in the mid-2000s; the oil giant has a horrific legacy of repression in the country and has so far avoided calls for justice. For his role as Chief Executive at Centrica he received £875,000 in 2021.

Chief financial officer at Centrica is Kate Ringrose, who was paid just under £1 million in 2021. Despite the increasing poverty caused by rising energy prices, she also accepted a hefty bonus, although Chris O’Shea refused his. In fact, her bonus, pension and other benefits more than doubled what she would have been paid if she had accepted her salary alone.

Scott Wheway is the company chair and was paid £410,000 in 2021.

Ex-Home Secretary and former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Amber Rudd, was appointed to the board of directors in 2022 when she was no longer an MP. Nevertheless, her appointment is another example of the revolving door between the Conservative party and the boards of the UK’s top energy companies.

IS BRITISH GAS ENERGY SUFFERING AS A RESULT OF THE COST OF LIVING CRISIS?

Not at all. In fact, in June 2022, Centrica received so much criticism over how much money it was making that the company promised to donate 10% of its profits to vulnerable customers, and CEO Chris O’Shea agreed to forego his massive 2021 bonus. Yet it didn’t stop O’Shea from criticising a government windfall tax, which would likely be much higher than the 10% the company has voluntarily offered.

British Gas’ Charity PR stunt

Centrica’s charity arm, which is set to distribute this 10%, is the British Gas Energy Trust. Centrica claims the charity’s aim is to help tackle fuel poverty, but this is a corporate sleight of hand.

While people nationwide face massive bills and the UK’s biggest energy supplier makes excessive profits, Centrica’s charity aids those struggling most with handouts, normalising unaffordable energy bills and stigmatising those who can’t afford them. With Centrica starting to pay dividends to shareholders for the first time in three years, the company needed this PR move to pacify upset customers.

GREENWASH AND THE HYDROGEN LOBBY

Centrica has been using carbon offsetting as a way to market itself as “green” despite being a fossil fuel company. According to an openDemocracy investigation on British Gas:

Under one [carbon offsetting] scheme Centrica buys into, a firm has declared ownership of a chunk of the Amazon that actually belongs to an Indigenous tribe, and is demanding a ransom fee not to deforest it.

The openDemocracy investigation also found that almost half of the carbon offsets held by Centrica were in actual fact bought from a chemical factory in China that was accused of cheating the system.

Whilst claiming green credentials via a so-called “People and Planet Plan“, the company has used its profile and government access to quietly promote an anti-environmental agenda. In 2016, it was found to have donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) a US-based climate denial group with links to Donald Trump.

The company has used the rising cost of fuel to call for the scrapping of environmental policies such as the green levy (an environmental tax on energy bills to finance carbon-saving initiatives). Meanwhile, Centrica – which has also been an investor in the UK fracking industry – has even used the energy crisis to suggest that the government reopen the debate on fracking, which is currently subject to a moratorium.

Like many companies in the UK gas industry, Centrica has been advocating for the adoption of “hydrogen-ready” boilers, claiming this technology will “help us to reach net zero together”. It was part of the “Hydrogen Zone”, a large display at the 2022 Labour Party Conference which promoted the fuel. According to campaigners, hydrogen-ready boilers would still largely run on natural gas, and simply don’t compare to solar or wind power in terms of energy efficiency or sustainability. However, the hydrogen option would be far more profitable for Centrica, as it would rely on the continued use of gas industry infrastructure. It seems that lobbying is having an effect; the government is now considering requiring that all boilers be “hydrogen ready” from 2026.

CONSUMER RIGHTS

According to the company’s latest annual report, Centrica received nearly 2000 more complaints from customers in 2021 than the previous year. Back in 2011, British Gas was handed a £2.5 million fine by energy regulator Ofgem for not dealing with complaints properly, and one has to wonder whether its record in that department has improved since then. A survey by the GMB Union in 2021 showed that 95% of British Gas’ workers thought that the company was mis-selling to customers, something for which it has also been fined.

In early 2022, British Gas failed to fix customers’ boilers for months in the dead of winter – leaving thousands cold and without hot water.

Pre-pay meters: The poverty premium and vulnerable customers

According to a freedom of information request lodged by the Telegraph newspaper, British Gas has been granted more than 186,000 warrants in the last five years to replace customers’ energy meters with prepayment alternatives. This means 2.6% of its 7 million customers were forced to have pre-pay meters, almost triple the industry average of 0.9%. Smart meters can also be changed to pre-payment meters remotely to circumvent the need for a warrant, which energy providers did 100,000 times to UK households in 2021.

Pre-payment meters can turn electricity and/or gas off once the money has run out, leaving vulnerable people (such as the elderly, or individuals dependent on electricity to charge a ventilator or wheelchair) in a potentially dangerous situation. They are also more expensive than paying standard energy bills, plunging people deeper into fuel poverty.

MPs have singled out British Gas as having a “heavy-handed approach” due to the sheer volume of warrants the company has obtained. A recent Ofgem report named British Gas as one of the 17 energy suppliers that need to do far more to support vulnerable customers.

DOES THE COMPANY HAVE CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE GOVERNMENT?

According to Transparency International, Centrica has met with UK prime ministers on 14 separate occasions since 2012. In that same period, company representatives also attended at least 234 meetings with government ministers.

A 2016 investigation by Unearthed shows that Centrica employed three people with links to the Conservative Party in its communications team. According to the report:

Benedict McAleenan, the company’s public affairs manager, was formerly Tory campaigns manager from October 2006 to September 2010. Head of public affairs for Centrica, William Heald, interned for William Hague in 2008.

Before becoming the company’s director of public affairs in September 2014, Sarah Richardson was a Conservative Party election candidate for the European Parliament in 2004 and 2009, and ran to be an MP in 2005. She was also a long-time Conservative Westminster councillor.

The report also highlighted how one of Amber Rudd’s key 2015 speeches on the phasing out of coal – in favour of gas and nuclear – bore a suspicious resemblance to a Centrica document published the previous year.

COMPANY ADDRESSES

Centrica plc registered office: Millstream, Maidenhead Road, Windsor SL4 5GD, UK

British Gas: Millstream Maidenhead Road, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 5GD

The post Heat the Rich? Part six: British Gas/Centrica appeared first on Corporate Watch.

We ask: who is profiting from supplying our energy? how much are the bosses getting paid? and how have these companies have been cosying up to government?

We hope that our research can be a useful resource for those organising towards a mass non-payment of energy bills.

We will be releasing our alternative company profiles of Big Six energy suppliers in reverse order over the coming weeks, starting with…

No 6: Scottish Power

About Scottish Power

Scottish Power Ltd is the sixth biggest energy supplier in the UK, currently controlling around 8% of the market as well as profiting from generating energy too. On top of its retail energy arm, the company operates wind farms, as well as several electricity networks across Britain.

Despite being called Scottish Power, the company is owned by Spanish multinational energy company Iberdrola, one of the largest electricity utility companies in the world. In 2021, as the cost of living crisis began, company top brass collectively paid themselves almost £10m, and Scottish Power paid the Iberdrola corporate group over a billion pounds. Iberdrola’s CEO’s salary was at least £5.49m, and Iberdrola shareholders were paid hundreds of millions in dividends.

As well as owning Scottish Power, Iberdrola group companies can be found in Brazil, US, Mexico and Spain. The Iberdrola group is focused on expanding its offshore wind farm business globally. It employs 40,000 workers worldwide.

Scottish Power is a major donor to the Tory party, and enjoys a cosy relationship with the UK government. Company directors include an ex-Conservative minister, as well as an ex-member of the Spanish parliament and World Bank executive.

Scottish Power’s parent company is implicated in several scandals, and has subsidiaries in a tax haven.

How many UK energy customers does Scottish Power have?

Electricity (excluding pre-payment): 2.24 million

Gas (excluding pre-payment): 1.58 million

Who owns it?

Scottish Power is owned by Spanish energy giant Iberdrola, which is listed on the Madrid Stock Exchange. According to We Own It, its biggest shareholders include the Qatari sovereign wealth fund the Qatari Investment Authority and BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company.

How much is it making?

Iberdrola recorded profits of €3.88 billion in 2021 (approximately £3.42 billion), an increase from €3.61 billion in 2020 (approximately £3.17 billion). It paid €570m in dividends to its shareholders.

Scottish Power itself had net profits of £102m in 2021, significantly down from £585m in 2020. Its total revenue from energy retail/wholesale was £4.1 billion in 2021.

The company also made £863.4m from renewable energy generation, with most of the energy used to supply Scottish Power’s own customers.

Who runs it?

Scottish Power’s highest paid director – likely to be CEO Keith Anderson – received £425,000 (up from £383,000 the previous year) in pay, as well as £69,000 in pension benefits in 2021, in addition to share benefits. In total, Scottish Power’s directors received £1.05 million in pay, an increase from 2020. When share-based payments are included, the 15 key management personnel received a total of £9.8 million.

Chair Ignacio Galán, who is also CEO of parent company Iberdrola, earned at least £5.49 million in 2021, an increase from the previous year.

15 key management personnel received £9.8 million in benefits, including share-based payments.

Picking on the most vulnerable

In September 2022 Scottish Power was warned by energy regulator Ofgem about the way it is treating customers who fall into energy debt. Ofgem ordered the company to:

• “Pause disconnections for those customers with active, agreed or overdue repayment plans of £5 per week (per fuel) or below.”
• “Review and update all call scripts, training materials, policies, communications with customers and provide training for company staff, to ensure they reflect that there is no default minimum repayment amount when sufficient information is available on a customer’s ability to pay.”
• “Contact and review all customers on debt repayment plans of £5 per week, per fuel, or below to ensure they are based on each customer’s ability to pay.”

The company is also paying 157,236 customers a total of £1.9m after overcharging them when they switched supplier or tariff. In April 2022, the Guardian reported that the company had acted with “staggering incompetence” after one customer had asked for their gas to be disconnected, but had continued to receive charges.

Scottish Power has also been criticised for forcibly installing pre-pay meters in customers’ homes. Energy companies can apply to have a pre-pay meter installed if people fall into arrears, but they are not supposed to do it if customers are ‘vulnerable’. Scottish Power customer James Collins told iNews that the company had forcibly installed a pre-pay meter at his home despite him telling them that he had diabetes, and that he needs a consistent power supply to keep his insulin refrigerated.

International scandals

Ignacio Galán appeared before the Spanish High Court in 2022 over allegations of corporate espionage that go back 15 years. Four Iberdrola executives are currently being investigated for bribing a Spanish police officer to spy on rival companies. Unsurprisingly this scandal has attracted some negative press attention, and the company is trying to silence it. Iberdrola is currently seeking $20m in damages from Spanish news site El Confidencial over its reporting of the alleged spying. Reporters without Borders has urged Iberdrola to drop the case, calling it “an attempt at intimidation”.

In the US, a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Iberdrola’s subsidiary Avangrid claimed that the company had been racketeering by buying large quantities of unnecessary computer equipment at inflated prices, and passing on costs to its energy customers. Avangrid maintained that the allegations were baseless, and the lawsuit was withdrawn.

Is the company suffering as a result of energy caps?

Despite paying no dividend to parent company Iberdrola last year, Scottish Power is still making Iberdrola rich. It repaid a massive £3.5 billion in loans and paid £50.3m in interest to Iberdrola Group companies.

Does the company avoid paying tax?

Iberdrola has a number of US subsidiaries registered in Delaware, a state known as a tax haven and for its corporate secrecy laws.

Political donations in the UK

Scottish Power has donated at least £48,000 to the Conservative Party since 2010. In 2021 the company paid £7,000 each to both the Conservatives and Labour to sponsor receptions at each of their party conferences.

Does the company have close connections with government?

Scottish Power took part in at least 85 ministerial level meetings, and company representatives attended at least six registered meetings with British Prime Ministers over the last decade.

Scottish Power CEO Keith Anderson recently met with Kwasi Kwarteng, the now UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, about the government’s multi-billion pound support for energy companies.

Anderson chairs CBI (Confederation of British Industry) Scotland, is a member of the Scottish Government’s Energy Advisory Board, and has previously been a vice-chair of the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency’s national task force.

Scottish Power Director Claire O’Neill started off as a policy advisor to George Osborne before becoming a Conservative MP. She went on to become Climate Change Minister and then Minister for Energy and Clean Growth under Theresa May.

Another director – Jim McDonald – is vice-chancellor of Strathclyde University, Glasgow. Two further directors also have links to the university. One, Lesley Anne Glover, has previously been Chief Scientific Adviser to the Scottish Government and the President of the European Commission.

Director Inigo Fernandez De Mesa served in the Spanish government, including as Secretary of the Treasury. He has sat on the board of the Bank of Spain and has been an Alternate director of the World Bank.

Greenwashing

Scottish Power was a ‘Principal Partner’ of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, partnering with the UK government on opening and closing ceremonies, and hosting events with the International Energy Agency’s Executive Director and leaders of cities from across the UK. Company representatives also attended an “intimate” breakfast roundtable with former US vice-president Al Gore.

Company Addresses

Scottish Power: 320 Vincent Street, G2 5AD, Glasgow, Lanarkshire, United Kingdom, www.scottishpower.com

Iberdrola: Plaza Euskadi 5, 48009, Bilbao, Spain, www.iberdrola.es

The post Heat the Rich? Part one: Scottish Power appeared first on Corporate Watch.

The ongoing cleaners’ campaign targets both the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), the healthcare giant which runs the private hospital, and Compass Group, the company outsourced by HCA to provide cleaning staff to LBH. Many of the cleaners at LBH are organised with the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB).

This article is part of a series supporting the cleaners’ struggle.

Headquartered in Surrey, Compass is a global outsourcing company and the world’s largest caterer. It profits from pretty much every sector it can: defence, catering, education, healthcare, leisure – you name it. Much like Serco, Capita and Carillion, it thrives as more public services are privatised.

Compass has been associated with numerous controversies. Like other multinational companies with many subsidiaries, the scandals it is embroiled in don’t always name the beating heart: Compass Group.

One of Compass’ specialities is scandals. For the full list read below, here are just a few:

• In 2006, Compass settled up to £40 million out of court after it was accused of attempting to bribe a UN official to award the company catering contracts worth in excess of $350 million (£188m).
• In 2012, Compass Group subsidiary Chartwells was forced to pay $18 million to New York state, as well as $19.4 million to Washington DC in 2015, for financial mismanagement and late, spoiled and poor quality school catering.
• In 2021, the same Chartwells was embroiled in the infamous school meals scandal in the UK where it was revealed that it cashed in whilst providing meagre sub-standard food boxes to schoolchildren.
• Unite, one of the biggest trade unions in the UK, christened ESS – another Compass subsidiary – as “Britain’s most heartless employer” in a dispute where outsourced cleaners and catering staff at the Ministry of Defence faced false redundancy in a “fire and rehire” manoeuvre.

Contents

• What is Compass Group?
• Who’s in charge?
• Who owns Compass Group?
• Chartwells: Compass’ school meal scandal
• Working for Compass: conditions and resistWhat is Compass Group?ance
• Compass scandals worldwide
• Where’s the Living Wage?
• Conclusion

What is Compass Group?

Compass Group operates across 45 countries. According to its website “food is our core competence” but the group, via subsidiaries, operates a wide range of services across various institutions, including prisons, schools and the military. The group is split into five different sectors: Business & Industry, Healthcare & Senior Living, Education, Sports & Leisure and Defence, and Offshore & Remote.

Compass was created in the UK by Jack Bateman in 1941 under the name Factory Canteens Ltd. Part of its business was to feed British munitions workers who were promised one hot meal a day by law. In 1960 it was acquired by conglomerate Grand Metropolitan, after which it was known as Grand Metropolitan Catering Services. Subsequently, there were many more mergers and acquisitions with other companies (full list here). In 1987, the company was relaunched as Compass Group and was listed on the London Stock Exchange the following year as Compass Group PLC.

The US is Compass Group’s top market, making up 59% of Compass’ annual revenue in 2020. By comparison, its second-biggest market was the UK, which generated 8% of total revenues. As of September 2020, Compass’ annual reserves were at £20.2 billion.

These days, Compass is keen to keep its image in check. The Group boasts about its inclusivity and diversity and presents itself as a living wage employer (see below for more on this). In 2021, it announced it would go net-zero by 2050.

Compass in UK healthcare

LBH cleaners are part of Compass’ Healthcare & Senior Living business, a sector that generates 33% of the Group’s annual revenue according to the 2021 annual report. HCA outsources LBH cleaners via Medirest, part of the Compass Group UK’s healthcare branch. Medirest employs 7,500 people across 20 different NHS Trusts. The Compass private hospital subsidiary promises patients an exclusive “experience”:

“Medirest Signature is our private healthcare solution that can be tailored to the needs of hospitals, health centres and care homes. We prepare freshly cooked food using the finest ingredients and deliver a high level of service. It’s the small touches that patients expect in private healthcare, an experience that reaches the standard of a five-star hotel.”

Compass may be patting itself on the back, but Marino Giraldo, a LBH cleaner, described an experience far from five star for both workers and hospital clients:

“We have to work with human stools and blood and there is no appropriate way to deal with them, we have to reuse material to get rid of them or clean them up.

Due to the lack of staff, we have been forced to work extra time so our working hours are not respected.”

Compass’ profits from UK healthcare don’t stop with HCA’s outsourcing or private healthcare. Even in an NHS hospital, you’re likely to be adding a few quid to Compass’ coffers. Medirest Steamplicity operates cleaning, security, and catering in NHS hospitals. It also oversees Compass’ lucrative Healthcare Retail gig where Costa Coffee, Starbucks, M&S Food and many more outlets in NHS hospitals are licensed by Compass. Effectively Compass makes money from staff and visitors needing something to eat or drink in hospital shops, cafes, or vending machines.

As Compass cashes in on the UK healthcare industry, it is clear it cares more for the health of its bank account than its workers. LBH cleaners (and Medirest workers across the UK) are paid poverty wages and work without proper PPE or sick pay, despite the Coronavirus pandemic.

Who’s in charge?

Dominic Blakemore took over the reins of Compass in January 2018 as the Group CEO. Blakemore has his fingers in several other pies as the director of the London Stock Exchange and part of the governing council at University College London, his former university.

Blakemore was shamed after the backlash over the free school meal scandal, when it was revealed that he received a £4.7 million pay package while schoolchildren were left hungry. It emerged that in at least some cases, the company may have been spending less than half their allocated budget of £10.50 per child, per week, when a mum bought the same items from her local supermarket for £5.22. Since the scandal, Blakemore took a salary cut, that is to say, he now earns a base salary of £1 million a year. In 2021 Blakemore was paid a total of £3.2m, including bonuses. That puts Blakemore’s earnings last year as 170 times higher than than the annual salary of a cleaner outsourced by HCA to Compass Group.

Alongside Blakemore – at the top of Compass – is Ian Meakins, the Board Chair since December 2020. Meakins is also the non-executive chair of Rexel SA, a French electrics company, selected and recommended by the Department of Education to sell the pricey (rated 5th most expensive on Which?) ‘air-cleaning’ units to fight the spread of COVID-19 in schools.

Cambridge- educated Meakins has had a long stint of being at the top of the ladder. He has been a CEO for over 20 years, at Ferguson PLC, Travelex and Alliance UniChem. Meakins also previously worked at Bain & Company, the parent company of Bain Capital, which was previously a key HCA shareholder (see more in our profile on HCA here).

Meakins’ predecessor, Paul Walsh (who stepped down in 2020) was formerly part of David Cameron’s business advisory group and is a board member at FedEx and McDonald’s.

Another key player is Steven Cenci, the newly-instated Compass Group Global Healthcare Lead, who oversees the LBH cleaners. Up until April 2022, Cenci was the UK manager for Hospitals & Senior Living for twenty years. During his time at the helm, there were multiple campaigns led by unionised workers exposing Compass’ exploitation and demanding an end to poverty pay in Compass’ health subsidiary Medirest (see below for the details). It remains to be seen if Russell Blake – his replacement in that role as of April 2022 – will cough up worker rights and fair pay. Only time will tell.

Who owns Compass Group?

Beyond the boardroom, owners can often swing decisions. A corporate database shows the biggest shareholder, BlackRock – world’s biggest asset manager – only holds 10% of the company. So no shareholder has majority ownership, and therefore control of the company. Other investment firms such as Artisan Partners and Invesco Advisers, each own 5% each.

Other noteworthy investors – despite only owning a very small percentage of shares – are governments, including the UK, Japan, South Korea, Liechtenstein and Norway. The Norwegian government often boasts about its “no tobacco or guns” ethical investment policies, and yet continues to invest in Compass Group with its track record of worker exploitation. Another interesting shareholder is the Mormon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Various state governments also hold shares, such as Quebec and California.

Chartwells: Compass’ school meal scandal

The school meals scandal which Compass subsidiary Chartwells was embroiled in started when Louisa Britain’s (@RoadsideMum) tweet exposed one of the company’s sparse free school meal packages during the pandemic.

The company was eventually forced to apologise after footballer Marcus Rashford stepped in to criticise the unacceptable amount of food. The criticism had a certain sting as Chartwells was a signatory of Rashford’s campaign to end food child poverty.

The scandal pushed Compass and its subsidiary into the limelight. It didn’t take people long to find out that in 2021 Chartwells was the UK’s largest school meal provider and that between 2016 and 2021 it had earned nearly £350m in primary school catering contracts. This is despite the fact that the company had already been exposed for providing cheap, sub-standard meals to schools back in 2005.

The 2005 scandal led Channel 4’s Jamie’s School Dinners to campaign against Scolarest, another Compass subsidiary, for feeding the now-infamous Turkey Twizzlers to schoolchildren. At the time, the controversy led to promises that the government would investigate the amount paid per child to outsourcing companies for school meals. Yet over a decade later, the problems remain the same. As so often happens when corporate , the Scolarest brand quietly faded into the background, while Chartwells took its place, enabling Compass Group to continue profiting from primary school catering.

Between the Turkey Twizzlers and last year’s school meal scandal, there were two further blunders. In 2011, inspections of Chartwells “found 18 notable health and safety violations, serious enough to cause food poisoning” in London schools. Just two years later, in 2013, Chartwells was at the centre of the horse meat scandal. The company was accused of illegally failing to declare horse meat in a range of food, including burgers with up to 30% horse meat sold at 13 sites, including two secondary schools.

Chartwells’ catering scandals aren’t confined to the UK. In 2012, Compass Group was forced to pay $18 million (approximately £14 million) to New York state after an investigation found Compass overcharging for meals in 39 schools and public lunch programmes over seven years. In 2015, a whistleblower revealed Chartwells was providing insufficient and poor quality food to schools across Washington, DC. The whistleblower lawsuit resulted in Chartwells being forced to pay $19.4 million (£15.4 million) compensation to Washington, DC.

Working for Compass: conditions and resistance

In 2021 Compass subsidiary Medirest won Best National Support for Key Workers at Springboard Charity awards, Steven Cenci the UK manager for Hospitals & Senior Living at the time said:

“Our people are at the heart of all that we do. We strive to ensure our colleagues always feel valued”

But for Marino Giraldo, Cleaner at London Bridge Hospital and member of the IWGB Cleaners and Facility branch, profit not workers at the heart of Compass operations:

“We have had to face members of the management that treat us with disdain and disrespect, if we raise our concerns we get moved especially new members of staff, or reprimanded, this is a struggle that is ongoing and we demand this to stop. We are treated as second class citizens.

We had to fight through unionisation to get something required by law for people who work in the health system which is the vaccines for immunisation. Up to date, new people that happen to join the team are not offered vaccines.”

The cleaners currently earn £9.69 p/h, according to Giraldo. They are seeking a pay increase from HCA (which contracts Compass) to £12.50, and proper sick pay.

The IWGB’s Cleaners and Facilities branch’s ongoing campaign joins a history of resistance by hundreds of Medirest workers in the UK. Their aims have been to end two-tier pay systems (where outsourced workers get a lower pay rate for the same work as in-house workers) and to improve Compass Group’s exploitative working conditions:

• Back in 2011, 180 porters, caterers and cleaners hired by Medirest for £6.35 an hour took strike action at Wycombe and Amersham NHS hospitals in Buckinghamshire. The workers, organised with Unison, had been demanding the basic NHS pay rate and standardised terms and conditions such as holiday and sick pay since 2006.
• In 2012, 30 outsourced cleaners in Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge staged protests against a 21% pay cut. Medirest, their employer, undercut other bidders by promising a £600,000 discount on cleaning services at the hospital. 50% of Medirest’s proposed discount was budgeted by cutting cleaners’ wages.
• In 2014, 150 GMB members at Ealing NHS Hospital Trust called off a strike after winning an end to a two-tier pay structure. This resulted in Medirest workers’ wages increasing by 15% as they joined NHS staff on £7.31 an hour, as well as gaining two extra days’ leave.
• In 2019, Unison cleaners, caterers, porters, and security members in two Liverpool hospitals won a pay rise following a 14 day-long strike after Medirest refused workers an 82p hourly pay rise to match their NHS colleagues.

Medirest is not the only branch of Compass synonymous with worker exploitation. Compass’ treatment of workers was used as a case study for the UK’s controversial fire and rehire policies in a parliamentary debate. Compass introduced a policy forcing hundreds of outsourced workers at the Ministry of Defence to accept either a wage cut or risk immediate job loss. The policy drew criticism from Labour MP Grahame Morris, who made a statement in parliament:

“Fire and rehire is not restricted to the aviation sector, although there are some terrible abuses in that sector. ESS, part of the multi million-pound Compass group, has been branded Britain’s most heartless employer by Unite, due to the manner in which it is treating staff working on Ministry of Defence bases.”

The exploitative work conditions faced by Compass Group employees are documented by the UK employment tribunal records where individual workers have brought cases of unfair dismissal, age discrimination, and breach of contract.

Furthermore, the poor working conditions employed by Compass Group are not limited to the UK. In 2014, when Compass first entered the Australian healthcare sector, the Australian Workers’ Union produced a fact sheet detailing Compass’ shoddy track record in providing public services worldwide. The union’s factsheet traces how Compass Group’s takeovers in Canada, the US, and Ireland routinely fired and rehired staff on contracts with fewer benefits, up to 50% lower wages, and lower job security.

Where’s the Living Wage?

Against the backdrop of multiple strikes around second-tier pay and low wages, in November 2020 Compass Group bragged about its newly-awarded status as a Recognised Service Provider by the Living Wage Foundation. The current living wage is £9.90 in the UK and £11.05 in London. Receiving the news Robin Mills, the UK and Ireland Compass director declared:

“By tackling low pay head-on, together we can make a real difference to the lives of our people and in turn their families.”

However, six months later the IWGB cleaners campaign revealed that Compass workers are still not being paid a living wage. Cleaners are campaigning for £12.50 p/h but are currently paid £9.69 p/h more than £1 short of London Living Wage. So what’s the small print? Compass will only pay its workers a living wage if its “client” pays, demonstrating the lengths Compass is willing to go to pretend that labour exploitation is a thing of the past.

Compass scandals worldwide

As though exploiting workers wasn’t enough, here is just a brief history of contract breaches, lawsuits and payouts by Compass Group to hush up scandals over the last 16 years:

• In 2006, Compass Group hit the headlines after allegations emerged of “an illegal conspiracy” to bribe a UN official to give the company contracts to feed (so-called) UN peacekeepers in conflict zones around the world, worth in excess of £188 million. It was forced to settle the case out of court for around £40 million.
• In 2008, Eurest Dining Services, a Compass catering subsidiary in Canada, served food with traces of the listeria bacteria in seven prisons in Ontario province in Canada.
• Between 2008-2009, Compass was linked to regular outbreaks of Clostridium difficile in Canadian hospitals. Investigations also revealed that Compass employees lacked proper training and protective equipment.

Conclusion

Far from being an innocent bystander, Compass Group’s objective to make money in every sector is demonstrated by its long history of cutting corners through two-tiered pay, fire and rehire policies, sloppy health and hygiene, and providing poor quality, insufficient meals.

Has the Group changed? Clearly not. Compass is eager to pocket the cheques from public institutions such as schools and councils. But ploys like waving around a Living Wage Accreditation or pledges to end child food poverty mask the reality of a company profiting from child hunger and poverty wages for its staff.

Time and time again workers have taken on Compass Group and won, solidarity with the LBH campaign!

Appendix:

The Compass Group’s headquarters can be found at:

Compass House
Guildford Street
Chertsey
Surrey
KT16 9BQ
UK

The post Broken Compass: the scandals of Compass Group appeared first on Corporate Watch.

HCA is the world’s largest private healthcare company, as well as being both the UK’s and US’ biggest private hospital group. It runs London Bridge Hospital (LBH) as a for-profit business, as well as five other central London hospitals and partnerships around the UK.

Many of the cleaners at LBH are organised with the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB). They are currently demanding fair pay, accusing their employers of failing to provide proper personal protective equipment (PPE) and bullying those who speak out.

Corporate Watch has investigated HCA and its business model, to provide information for action for the cleaners’ ongoing campaign.

In summary:

• HCA made billions from the pandemic in the US and the UK, yet it wouldn’t even supply workers with adequate PPE, let alone pay them properly.
• The pandemic created a perfect storm for the Tories to push more privatisation through the backdoor while ‘selling’ it as a strategy to help a broken NHS.
• Despite a huge government payout, HCA beds were greatly underutilised during the pandemic, resulting in the NHS terminating its contract only months later.
• Now, with NHS waiting lists at an all time high, it’s boosting profits further. The NHS has been forced to pay HCA millions for critical life-saving treatments for cancer patients. Meanwhile, record numbers of people who can afford to are paying the company privately for routine treatments.
• HCA has a long history of relationships with politicians who have pushed privatisation.
• Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has received donations from a HCA shareholder, who is a member of the House of Lords.
• Some NHS consultants are making money from shares in HCA, further undermining the integrity of the NHS.
• HCA has a documented history of fraud, negligence and malpractice: do we really want these people to run our healthcare?

This company profile shows that HCA’s agenda is to continue expanding and profiting from private healthcare, both in the US and the UK. HCA maximises its profits by hiring outsourced and underpaid workers, and cutting costs at the expense of workers’ and patients’ safety.

Henry Chango Lopez, IWGB General Secretary, told Corporate Watch:

“While HCA has made millions in profits during this pandemic and claims to value its employees, it treats its outsourced cleaners like second-class workers. Outsourced cleaners are overworked on poverty wages and are forced to work while sick because they cannot afford to take time off without proper sick pay. They also face unequal terms and conditions, worse treatment, being denied access to on-site medical care and other benefits enjoyed by directly-employed colleagues.

Their workers are not prepared to accept this discriminatory treatment any longer from such a prestigious corporation. They have launched their campaign at London Bridge Hospital with the support of their union – the IWGB, and will fight until they get the benefits, the dignity and respect they deserve.”

Unlike many healthcare companies, HCA managed to increase both profits and turnover throughout the pandemic. In fact, the company has seen its profits skyrocket as a result of Covid-19: company records show that in 2021, gross profits were up to nearly $50 billion. It reported turnover of $58.8 billion and a net profit of $7 billion.

A 2022 report from Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the largest US healthcare union, hit the nail on the head when it explained that as HCA profits soar, thousands of employees struggle on “poverty wages”.

Contents

– What is HCA?
– Who profits?
– Frist fortunes
– Pandemic profiteering, lack of PPE and union-busting
– New allegations of fraud
– Lobbyists and lurkers
– HCA in court
– Conclusion

What is HCA?

In the US, Hospital Corporation of America runs 182 hospitals in 20 states. It makes twice the profit of the US’ three other largest publicly-traded hospital companies combined. During the pandemic, its profits also soared above other private hospital groups.

HCA began operating in the UK in 1995 and now runs 30 UK facilities. The company is expanding its reach in the country, with a new joint venture partnership to build a $100 million hospital in Birmingham slated for completion in 2023.

HCA outsources the employment of the vast majority of its cleaners at LBH to Compass Group. Ultimately, because this deal saves it money.

The company has been plagued by scandals, including being implicated in “the longest and costliest investigation for health-care fraud in U.S. history”: it was forced to admit overcharging the US government for Medicare/Medicaid healthcare cases. In 2002, after pleading guilty, it paid over $2 billion in fines, the largest corporate fine in US history.

HCA has been expanding in the UK since 1995. Here is a list of its main UK facilities:

This global healthcare giant is now moving in on our NHS. It was one of several private healthcare companies paid millions by the British government to expand capacity during the pandemic. Yet most HCA beds remained empty. With further Covid waves looming, the NHS was compelled to end its agreement with HCA because, allegedly, HCA was demanding too high a fee while its beds weren’t being filled. Yet as waiting lists (for both planned and emergency operations) soared, this change meant the NHS paid further millions in vital treatments for critically ill patients. It also enabled HCA to lure thousands of people who could afford to pay into its hospitals for more routine surgery. Double whammy.

Meanwhile, the government is pushing through legislation that will make it easier for private healthcare companies to profit even more as the NHS continues to break.

Who profits from HCA?

In the UK, HCA operates through a complicated system of subsidiaries which eventually lead back to US-based HCA Healthcare Inc. The largest shareholder of the ultimate owner is a company called Hercules Holding II LLC.

In 2005, HCA was forced to pay $20 million to shareholders who sued the company following claims of insider trading and inflating share prices. The following year, HCA management and Hercules Holding II LLC, which was “a consortium of private investment funds including Bain Capital Partners LLC, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity”, bought HCA.

Since then, the investment companies (Bain, KKR and Merrill) have cashed out their shares, leaving the billionaire Frist family—who founded HCA—as the sole owners of Hercules Holdings. Other shareholders of note include BlackRock and Vanguard, two of the world’s biggest investment funds which exist only to earn more money for the super-wealthy.

HCA may not pay its workers well, but things are different if you’re a director or shareholder. In 2020, HCA’s current chief executive Samuel Hazen earned $30.4 million. Hazen’s net worth is at least $137 million, and over $100 million of this comes from HCA shares. Despite taking a salary dip in 2019, his total compensation package was 556 times more than the average earnings ($54,651) of HCA employees. Indeed, the US executive management team and most directors are also HCA shareholders. Many are also multi-millionaires with wealth boosted significantly by their HCA shares.

In contrast, Jamelle Brown—a technician for HCA in Kansas City—reportedly earned just $13.77 (£10.48) an hour, and 1,000 times less than Hazen’s salary. In 2020, he caught Covid at work. On his return, he was named ’employee of the month’ which came with a ‘reward’: a $6 coupon to spend at the hospital canteen. The SEIU report also notes that although 43% of HCA’s 2020 revenue came from Medicare and Medicaid:

“since 2010 HCA has diverted over $29 billion to the pockets of rich investors like Bain, KKR, Merrill Lynch and the Frist family.”

Another shareholding director is Nancy-Ann DeParle, who joined in 2014. She previously worked for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and was credited as one of the key players of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Also known as ‘Obamacare’, the ACA gave millions of uninsured American people access to health cover. But although DeParle may sound on paper like an altruistic supporter of cheap healthcare, the truth is far shadier. Before heading to the White House, DeParle was director of several corporations that were investigated, and in some cases found liable, for corruption, bribery or negligence. She stepped down from these directorships upon appointment to the White House, having earned millions from companies that would benefit from Obamacare. DeParle’s career has continued to flip-flop between the White House and then back to making millions from private healthcare companies.

Given HCA’s landmark Medicare fraud case, DeParle’s role suggests a clear conflict of interest.

Other directors’ previous positions read like a roll-call of honour of capitalist ‘greats’:

• Meg Crofton: Disney World
• Bob Dennis: McKinsey & Co.
• Charles Holliday: DuPont, Shell, Bank of America
• Hugh Johnston: PepsiCo, Microsoft Corporation
• Michael Michelson: Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
• Wayne Riley: Vertix Pharmaceuticals, Compass Pathways
• Andrea Smith: Bank of America

In the UK, the majority of the management team appears to have strong medical, rather than business, backgrounds. Although Andrew Coombs, the UK’s HCA commercial director, previously worked for AXA. As the Palestinian campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) notes:

“AXA’s investment in Israeli banks that finance Israel’s illegal settlements makes it complicit in grave violations of international law”.

Until 2018, AXA also invested in Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest privately-owned arms and ‘security’ company.

From 1995 – 2001 Selvavinayagam Vireswer, currently HCA’s vice president of development, worked for management consultancy giant McKinsey & Co.—notorious for “giving bad advice and working with corrupt entities”. In 2001, Vireswer worked for a year in government under Tony Blair at the Forward Strategy Unit. He was there as warnings grew about Blair’s private finance initiative (PFI), which pushed more public services into private ownership for profit and started the onslaught of outsourcing giants.

Concerns have been growing in the UK about potential conflicts of interest given that NHS consultants can refer patients to private hospitals that they also own shares in. In 2019, the Centre for Health and the Public Interest (CHPI) drew attention to the rising income of consultants with stakes in private hospitals. Among the companies concerned was HCA, which co-owns The Christie Hospital in Manchester, where oncologists had earned millions from investments in HCA. In January 2022, a new CHPI report found that London NHS trusts paid HCA £36.4 million for cancer treatments between December 2020 and November 2021 after ending its agreement with HCA. As the NHS became overwhelmed with Covid patients, there was an acute shortage of beds, particularly for cancer patients needing urgent care. But it’s worth noting that HCA also held “joint ventures with 120 medical consultants” working at these same NHS hospitals. Those consultants earned income from HCA share dividends, on top of fees for treating private patients, an NHS salary and any additional fees paid to them by HCA.

The investigation also revealed that:

• HCA has the UK’s biggest number of consultants with joint NHS/private stakes;
• HCA dominates access to 80-90% of private chemotherapy treatment in Central London;
• Between 2015 and 2020, consultants earned an estimated £31.3m from joint HCA/NHS ventures. Most of this (over £25 million) went to those with stakes in HCA.

Although the revolving door between the government and HCA is more discreet in the UK than the US, Corporate Watch has found that Labour peer Lord Clive Hollick is an HCA (and KKR) shareholder. In 2020, he donated £50,000 to Labour leader Keir Starmer, and has a long record of donations to the Labour Party and to right-wing Labour MPs. He’s seemingly unaware of HCA’s treatment of employees and claims to support gig economy workers.

Frist fortunes

HCA was founded in 1968 by Thomas Frist, Jr. and Sr., and Jack Massey (who also co-owned Kentucky Fried Chicken). The co-founders saw the potential to generate wealth from healthcare. According to the SEIU:

“Thomas Frist, MD, and his co-founders were inspired by ‘seeing what Holiday Inns 10 years before had done in changing basically the travel industry.’ HCA did change the hospital industry. Prior to HCA’s creation, the hospital industry had long been dominated by nonprofits.”

The Frists own the largest stake of HCA shares. According to Forbes, the family’s net worth at the time of writing is $21.3 billion. Between 2020 and 2021, the family’s wealth nearly doubled. Although founder Thomas Frist Jr. no longer holds an executive position at HCA, sons Thomas and William (Bill) Frist sit on its board of directors.

In 2005, when HCA was accused of insider trading, Bill Frist was a long-standing Republican Senate Leader who’d considered running for president. His political career seems ‘almost’ magically charmed.

Following the Medicare scandal, the Frists escaped any criminal charges. George Bush Jr. was in the White House at the time and reportedly:

“dictated the Justice Department deal with HCA that let the crooks escape jail just as Frist was being anointed the Senate’s majority leader. A pure coincidence in timing, of course.”

In 2005, analysis of Frist’s voting record revealed a “pattern of supporting bills that benefit HCA”. During his time as senator, Frist was also implicated in pushing through legislation to protect pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly from lawsuits over links between its Thimerosal vaccine and autism “and other neurological maladies” in young children.

Bill Frist also has a history “of race-related controversy”. He was accused of making racist remarks on a campaign tour in Tennessee during his first run for public office in 1994. He’s also openly opposed gay marriage.

HCA lobbying funding has continued to grow since 1990, totalling over $3.2 million in 2021. Although HCA donated $169,798 to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, it also hedged its bets with a $74,870 donation to Donald Trump.

Pandemic profiteering, lack of PPE and union-busting

HCA’s profits have increased since the Covid-19 pandemic. One might think this is because HCA hospitals treated increasing amounts of people suffering from coronavirus. But the reality is somewhat more complicated. In fact, the company has received large Covid-19 bailouts in the US and UK, while at the same time cost-cutting on PPE for workers, and clamping down on worker organising.

In March 2020, NHS England “block booked almost the entirety of the private hospital sector’s services, facilities and nearly 20,000 clinical staff” to expand capacity during the pandemic. This was not just to treat Covid-19, but to enable urgent care—such as cancer treatment—to be provided while the NHS scrambled to address the pandemic.

HCA received the fifth-largest contract for beds and staff from NHS England (NHSE) and was paid over £150m to treat NHS patients between March 2020 and March 2021. It also received about £3m in furlough payments from the UK government during the first eight months of 2021.

The company was one of eight private healthcare providers paid a total of £1.69 billion by NHS England for bed capacity during the pandemic. But this billion-pound payout didn’t translate into significantly higher capacity for the NHS. In fact, overall “private hospitals delivered 0.08% of COVID care”. Out of an estimated 8,000 private beds, the highest number ever occupied by Covid patients on one day was only 78.

And by August 2020, the NHS reportedly ended its contract with HCA and two other providers owing to the lack of beds filled and the fees that the companies were demanding.

Following the end of the contract, there was said to be a “real and imminent threat to London’s ability to perform cancer surgery.”

HCA made profits of $3.75 billion in 2021. Yet cleaners at HCA’s London Bridge Hospital had to go through the pandemic without even basic protections. The cleaners launched their campaign complaining of woefully inadequate PPE, unsafe working conditions and the lack of proper sick pay. Ramona Marredo Mendez, a cleaner working for HCA subcontractor Compass, told Freedom News in February 2022:

“We risk our lives working here. The managers have sent us to clean areas full of infected people without PPE. When I caught covid at work, I was forced to isolate for two weeks without the sick pay that directly-employed workers get. The pay is already so low, I can’t afford to take two weeks off on £96.35 a week. When I asked Compass for support in accessing the statutory sick pay, they did nothing so I ended up at home for two weeks with no money.”

A glance at LBH’s reviews on the Indeed ratings site shows that these concerns are widespread. Reviewers mentioned difficulties in taking annual leave, long working hours, difficulties with “dealing with the supervisors”, bad management, rubbish pay, lack of progression, “class culture”, bullying and low pay. Workers used the reviewing platform branded hospital management “terrible” and “despicable”.

The story is similar in the US, where nurses and other workers spoke out about the lack of PPE in several HCA hospitals during the pandemic. Outcry over worker safety in HCA hospitals there increased in 2020 following the deaths of nurses Celia Yap-Banago and Rosa Luna, who worked at HCA hospitals in Kansas City and California, respectively. Both had contracted coronavirus, despite the alarm having been raised about the lack of PPE at work.

But HCA executives’ attention was not on Celia and Rosa, it was on crushing workers’ organising. Instead of responding to the wave of criticism and discontent by taking proper steps to ensure worker safety, HCA hired professional union busters—reportedly costing $400 an hour—to break proposed union actions by nurses in North Carolina. This followed “widespread complaints over cuts in staff, poor communication, and lack of access to basic supplies and PPE”.

HCA received billions in Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) payments as a result of the pandemic. As profits grew, it was then able to return $6 billion of this in a stunning PR stunt, while it cut costs in areas directly affecting workers.

LBH cleaners protesting at HCA’s offices. Image: IWGB

HCA and backdoor NHS privatisation

The pandemic, and the toll it has taken on the NHS, has created a perfect storm for the Tory party to extend healthcare privatisation through the back door, creating even greater profits for private healthcare giants. Not only had HCA already earned billions in revenue, it was perfectly poised to step in and profit further from a decimated NHS, exhausted staff and rising waiting lists for vital treatment.

Before the pandemic, HCA reportedly carried out “virtually no work” for the NHS. But it’s used the pandemic to increase all NHS activity, especially in London where it runs six private hospitals and a large portfolio of private healthcare partnerships and clinics. London NHS hospitals’ increased reliance on private healthcare providers such as HCA has raised alarms about “backdoor privatisation” of the NHS. Allyson Pollock, a clinical professor of public health at Newcastle University said:

“Covid has been very much used as a cover for shrinking NHS care and expanding private healthcare provision.”

After the NHS ended its emergency contract with several private healthcare firms in 2020, including HCA, struggling NHS hospitals in London were forced to buy “£36m of cancer care, cardiology and other services directly” from HCA. This spending was in addition to HCA’s chunk of the £2 billion that was initially paid by NHS trusts to private hospitals in 2020. It was also the first time the NHS paid large sums to outsource complex treatments rather than more routine operations.

With waiting lists at breaking point, this is an issue that’s growing. A 2021 survey by openDemocracy revealed that doctors and NHS staff have already advised “one in five” patients to go private to get the treatment they need. And HCA is set up to step in.

The pandemic created a perfect window for HCA which had been moving in on lucrative cancer treatments for a long time. Former HCA special advisor Karol Sikora helped set up London Cancer Group, described as “the largest UK cancer network outside the NHS”, in HCA’s London hospitals. A high profile anti-lockdown campaigner, Sikora also has a long history of pro-privatisation, anti-NHS campaigns. In 2017, Sikora called the NHS “the last bastion of communism” on Newsnight. He’s also linked to Reform, a think-tank funded “by leading outsourcing corporations”. Now director of Rutherford Health, Sikora recently proposed “the biggest public-private partnership in NHS history”and is advising Reform about ‘What’s Next for the NHS’.

A 2021 CHPI report called ‘For Whose Benefit’ analyses the government’s growing use of private hospitals in 2020, which it tried to pass off “as a strategy for alleviating the burden on the NHS”. It found that:

• Government funding guaranteed private hospitals an income which buffered them from financial losses during the pandemic.
• Although private hospitals were initially paid to take the strain off NHS hospitals, very few beds were used and government figures over the exact costs remain hidden.
• So-called elective surgery is non-urgent surgery. It’s here that NHS waiting lists are soaring. Yet, during the pandemic, private hospitals carried out 45% less NHS-funded elective care than in the previous year—the very thing they were supposedly paid to do.
• The deal ultimately benefited private hospitals more than the (already) broken NHS and paved the way for them to increase profits further.
• When the NHS ended its contract with HCA, this benefited the private hospital sector further. It was able to step straight in to perform planned surgeries for additional money—as more people paid for private treatment—because of the huge backlog of patients needing treatment during the pandemic.
• By January 2021, HCA “was performing twice as many self-pay hip surgeries, cataracts and abdominal operations as it had carried out in the previous year”. Only now, these are funded by patients who could afford to pay, leaving those who can’t on ever-rising waiting lists.

HCA has fingers in other profit pies in the UK, too, because it also owns HealthTrust Europe. Listed as an NHS partner, it has £1 billion in purchasing power to provide “procurement and related services”.

All this comes as the Conservative Party is pushing a new Health and Care Bill through the final stages of parliament. Critics say that the Bill is set to continue “the dismantling of the NHS… by adopting more features from the US health system”. HCA—and other US-owned healthcare giants—will profit even more from a struggling NHS. Although MPs and the government insist the bill isn’t about privatisation, the British Medical Association said it would likely “do more harm than good” and make “it easier for private companies to win NHS contracts without proper scrutiny”. The bill contains a sweeping array of amendments designed to benefit private healthcare providers and insurers.

openDemocracy explains that the Bill will also push more people toward private healthcare, while those who can’t afford it are left dealing with a broken NHS and spiralling waiting times.

One key part of the new legislation is to extend Integrated Care Systems (ICS). In theory, these give patients easier access to a range of services in their community: merging health, mental health, social care etc. Extending ICS regions across the UK sets up a system to pay per head providing healthcare from a set pot of funds. But this actually means the less they provide, the more surplus or profit they make. And as NHS for Sale notes, there’s no legislation to prevent private companies running, or bidding for, large chunks of ICS. Critics have warned that the true remit of ICS is to embed “private companies in running the NHS together with digital and data systems imported from the US healthcare market and insurance firms”. Over 200 companies are now accredited with NHS England to support ICS dealing with data and digital systems, many of which are US-owned giants.

Privacy concerns have been raised in the US after HCA signed a deal with Google to develop “healthcare algorithms” by selling access to patients’ medical records.

This all comes amid growing concerns over ways the government used Covid to increase digital surveillance. A 2021 report on surveillance in the UK explains that not only did the government share NHS Test and Trace App (downloaded by over 20 million people) data with police, it also “made deals with private companies” so they had access to it.

Although there’s no mention of HCA (yet), the accredited list includes companies linked to its shareholders and IT is clearly a growth industry for HCA. Given the healthcare giant’s UK dominance and recent deal with Google, it’s not a stretch to assume that it may soon line up to grab more profits.

With a current Tory majority of over 80, the Bill will almost certainly pass. There’s not much hope that the House of Lords will make meaningful amendments either as a significant number of peers (from all parties) have private healthcare interests and business links to private companies. As noted above, HCA shareholder Lord Hollick has already donated significant amounts to Starmer. There’s little chance that the Labour Party will offer serious opposition, as it’s not only backtracked on pledges to end NHS outsourcing to private companies, but Starmer has also defended employing a private healthcare lobbyist. Meanwhile, the UK’s largest union Unite has cut funding to Starmer’s Labour in disgust over lack of support for workers.

For a detailed timeline about the history of NHS privatisation, read this article from Your NHS Needs You.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

New allegations of fraud

There’s another big reason to worry about HCA’s intrusion into our tax-funded NHS. Despite settling the huge Medicare fraud case in 2000, an SEIU investigation analysing Medicare data and lawsuits involving HCA has revealed its booming profits and huge investor payouts may yet again “originate, in part, from apparent fraud” by “routinely” admitting patients for spells in hospital “regardless of medical need”.

Alongside this, the pattern of HCA’s callous quest for profit echoes the same complaints of IWGB workers at London Bridge Hospital. The investigation found that HCA’s hospital markups are at least twice the cost of actual care yet, at the same time, it:

“pays tens of thousands of its employees poverty wages, and staffing levels in its hospitals lag the national average by about 30%, despite the fact that higher staffing levels are associated with better patient care. Given this unbridled pursuit of profit over all else, it should be no surprise that HCA’s profits are astonishingly strong…”

The LBH worker’s challenge to HCA abuses is hugely important. If not stopped, the healthcare giant looks set not only to treat more employees badly, but potentially to siphon off more of the NHS’s limited funds wherever it can.

Lobbyists and lurkers

Private healthcare companies in both the UK and US are notorious for lobbying activity.

HCA was part of the Private Hospitals Alliance (formerly known as H5). This UK-based lobby group launched in 2010 at the same time as the government’s NHS White Paper, Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS. This time-frame also coincides with HCA International donating £17,000 to the Conservative Party.

As we have seen above, HCA shareholder Lord Hollick was busy bankrolling right-wing Labour figures prior to the last UK general election. Since then he has made a sizeable donation to Labour leader Starmer.

From 2015 to 2016, HCA used consultant lobbyists Burson Cohn & Wolfe. The company has a long history of working with repressive regimes, major polluters and pretty much every dodgy company going.

HCA’s public relations are currently handled by the PHA Group. The largest shareholder of PHA group is Monaco-based, multi-millionaire Simon Dolan who also owns Jota Aviation—involved in delivering PPE. Dolan is also behind anti-lockdown group Keep Britain Free, which took the government to court over lockdown measures.

In the US, there has been a huge increase in the amount HCA has spent on political lobbying in recent years, in particular since 2019. In 2021, unionised workers in the US called for HCA to suspend political donations after evidence emerged that HCA had donated to many of the Republican politicians implicated in the Capitol siege.

HCA in court

There have been a large number of UK employment tribunal hearings against the company, including cases for disability discrimination, sex discrimination, unfair dismissal and breach of contract.

In the US, HCA has a long track record of being embroiled in fraud cases. These include:

• 2000: HCA pled guilty in the Medicare/Medicaid fraud case, and eventually paid $2 billion in fines in 2002.
• 2005: Accusations of insider trading and fraud led to a large court case and a $20 million payout by HCA to shareholders.
• 2012: A scandal erupted concerning unnecessary cardiac procedures being carried out on patients at HCA hospitals. This is one of the many scandals which have been brought to light by whistleblowers. Whistleblower Justice Network wrote at the time: “with the ever-growing healthcare fraud crisis that seems to plague the nation, HCA and its subsidiaries commonly find themselves in hot water”.

The NHS For Sale? campaign also makes the point that these US fraud cases show that HCA isn’t fit to run hospitals in the UK. It writes:

“The major concerns with HCA International revolve around the behaviour of its parent company in the USA, which has been found guilty of large-scale fraud over the years, and has been the subject of an extensive investigation by the US Department of Justice into the company’s practices.”

The company consequently paid the US government over $2 billion in fines for defrauding its healthcare programmes.

Conclusion

From corporate fraud to worker exploitation, HCA is a capitalist giant with a shocking track record. Now, it’s hovering like a vulture to pick the flesh of our broken NHS and boost its profits further. And it’s been enabled every step of the way by successive governments that are hell-bent on privatisation.

The pandemic created a perfect storm for politicians to sell the lie that private healthcare companies—like HCA—are helping to relieve pressure on the NHS with empty promises that it will always be ‘free at the point of use’. The terrifying truth is, that in post-lockdown UK we’ve now got a two-tier health system. Those who can afford private insurance and treatments are the only people who can pay their way out of impossible waiting times. Meanwhile with limited funds, NHS professionals are forced to pay the likes of HCA to save critically ill patients. This adds more to HCA’s billions; a company most people may not have yet heard of. Solidarity with IWGB workers and their campaign is vital because it shines light on what increased healthcare privatisation actually looks like. That picture is shocking. We need to fight to change it.

For more information on the ongoing London Bridge Hospital cleaners’ campaign, see the IWGB.

The post HCA: Promoting US style for-profit healthcare in the UK appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Refugees in London are being housed by the Home Office in run-down, insect-infested hotels. Meanwhile, private housing providers are raking it in.

Corporate Watch spoke to an Iraqi Kurdish family who arrived in the UK in November 2020. Since then, the family – who wish to remain anonymous – have been put up by the Home Office in disgusting conditions in several hotels in London with their six children. They told Corporate Watch that – aside from the insect infestation – they have had to deal with the ceiling caving in; water pouring in from the apartment above them; insufficient food, a lack of electricity, and – when there has been power – dodgy and dangerous electrics.

Mother of the family Rojda (not her real name) told Corporate Watch:

“I’m a mother of six kids, our life is very hard here, and we have no rights.

When we arrived here [in 2020] we had two rooms for all of us… all of our accommodations have been very bad”

Rojda described how she often had to take the family to see another friend living in a different hotel in order to take showers because of the lack of hot water. Rojda said that it was a “shame” that despite living in a rich capital like London she didn’t even have electricity or hot water.

The adults in the family have not been given permission to work in the UK and are completely dependant on the Home Office for accommodation.

They are currently living in a hotel in just three rooms for a total of eight people. The hotel is infested with bed bugs which are causing skin irritation. They provided Corporate Watch with these shocking photos:

A baby with a skin irritation caused by bed bugs

Dead insects on a child’s cot

The family were temporarily moved to new accommodation after a housing officer intervened, but Rojda told us that within weeks they were forced to return to the bug-infested hotel.

Heartbreakingly, Rojda told us that the staff at the hotel had denied her son food, after he complained about the state of the family’s accomodation.

Rojda said that it’s not just her family who are suffering. She doesn’t have a common language to communicate with the other families at the hotel, but she can see that the conditions are just as bad for them

The Home Office’s slum landlords

Nearly 55,000 refugees are currently housed in the Home Office’s ‘contingency accommodation’ waiting to find out if their asylum claim will get approved. The UK’s asylum housing contracts have been wholly privatised since 2012.

The company that is responsible for providing the accommodation that Rojda’s family is housed in is Clearsprings Ready Homes, which reported a massive jump in profits in its last set of accounts – to £4.5m. Its surging profits have led to a seven-fold increase in dividends to the parent company. Clearsprings handles the asylum accommodation contracts for the Home Office in the south of England.

Clearsprings also runs Napier, an ex-military barracks which is being used to house refugees in Kent in conditions described as “squalid” by lawyers of the residents.

In other parts of the UK, the Home Office has awarded contracts to Serco and Mears Group. Outsourcing giant Serco reported £180m in profits in 2019, while Mears reported over half a million worth of profits from its housing business alone.

We’ve decided not to name the Central London hotel because of fears that fascists will target the residents.

“Imagine coming to school with that”

Rojda suggested that we speak to the children’s teachers so they could tell us about the effect living in these conditions has on the wellbeing of the children and their education.

The school provided a statement which says that it has had to get “more and more involved” with helping children in “temporary accommodation”, including providing support with practical things like travel and uniforms, as well as “navigating the bureaucracy”. Its statement reads:

“Living in these difficult conditions obviously impacts the children. They tell us about how overcrowded it is, how noisy, and how they have trouble sleeping.

Imagine coming to school with that. They are trying to learn a new language, integrate into a new school, adapt to a new culture when at the same time they have to deal with great uncertainty about how long they will be staying for.”

Passing the buck

The Canary contacted the Home Office about the conditions at the hotel. They passed the buck to Clearsprings, saying:

“We are dealing with unprecedented pressures on the asylum system, but despite this we continue to ensure the accommodation provided is safe, comfortable and secure.

However, we expect high standards from all of our providers, and any asylum seekers who have problems can get in touch with Migrant Help 24/7, every day of the year.”

We also contacted Clearsprings Ready Homes. A spokesperson said:

“Clearsprings Ready Homes works closely with its delivery partners to ensure that safe, habitable and correctly equipped accommodation is provided. Whenever issues are raised, or defects are identified Ready Homes will undertake a full investigation and ensure that those issues are addressed.”

The Home Office also said:

“The Nationality and Borders Bill that we are introducing will deliver the most comprehensive reform in decades to fix the broken asylum system.”

However – far from making the situation better for refugees – the Nationality and Borders Bill will make the situation even worse by introducing endless reviews of people’s asylum claims, which stretch out the asylum process. This means that people are reliant on Home Office accommodation for even longer. In general, the bill is designed to make claiming asylum in the UK even more difficult.

“Not an isolated experience”

Rojda’s family’s situation is not unique at all. The Home Office’s private contractors routinely provide dirty and dilapidated accommodation to those seeking asylum. Earlier this month, Clearsprings was forced to make improvements to flats it’s using to house refugees in Uxbridge after they “were found to be rife with damp, mould, water leaks and pest infestations”. Last year, six men won a high court legal challenge. The court ruled that their accommodation at the Napier Barracks in Kent – which is managed by Clearsprings – failed to meet a “minimum standard”.

We spoke to Maddie Harris, director of the Humans for Rights network. She said:

“The experience of this family is utterly appalling and shows a clear disregard for their health, wellbeing and rights. It is also, not an isolated experience. We have spoken to hundreds of people seeking sanctuary in the UK who are accommodated in hotels throughout England and it is clear from the testimonies shared with us that there is no attention paid to upholding even the most basic of rights. People often spend well over a year in cramped, overcrowded hotels, run by private contractors who surveil their every move.”

Medical care is limited

Harris continued:

“Medical care is often limited or restricted by staff who refuse to assist people in registering with GP surgeries. Food is nutritionally poor and small in quantity and often lacks consideration for faith, cultural or dietary requirements. Access to solicitors and legal advice is severely lacking and little to no information is provided to people. These hotels and accommodations such as Napier Barracks, are for many experienced like quasi-detention and we have heard from numerous people that their mental health is severely effected by isolation, lack of information and complete uncertainty as to the progress of their asylum claim. These accommodations are run by private companies, who profit from and are responsible for much of this harm.”

“Ultimate accountability lies with the Home Office”

Harris concluded that, although private companies are profiting from running the accommodation, the Home Office bears the final responsibility. She said:

“Ultimate accountability lies with the Home Office who are responsible for these contracts and the welfare of asylum seekers in the UK, yet there is a complete lack of oversight for how these contracts are managed, resulting in untold harm to many thousands of people seeking sanctuary in the UK.”

Solidarity

Refugees living in the Home Office’s slum accommodation can be found in many of our communities. These are people who are new to the UK, and they are bearing the brunt of a racist state which is colluding with ruthless private companies out to make a fast buck from the suffering of others. We need to be ready to stand in solidarity with people in the Home Office’s slum accommodation, and to struggle alongside them for better conditions.

Featured image via Alisdare Hickson/Wikimedia Commons (resized to 770×403 pixels), all other images used in this article were provided to Corporate Watch by Rojda’s family (with permission)

We know that Rojda’s family’s situation is just the tip of the iceberg. If you – or people you know – are in a similar situation you can talk to Corporate Watch here.

The post Refugees are being housed in infested hotels by the Home Office’s slum landlords appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Hyde, which manages nearly 49,000 homes in London and the South East of England, remains in strong financial health. In its latest annual report, Hyde says it has delivered “a healthy surplus and maintained a robust balance sheet” and that its “core financial strength has enabled us to grow and sustain our business, even through the short term COVID-19 challenges”.

Management is also keen to direct readers to the group’s credit rating, which shows how impressed city analysts are by the company’s financial position. Hyde’s rating is a very impressive A+. That’s the same as Amazon, and Nestle, and better than Goldman Sachs, Volkswagen and Disney.

So Hyde still has a lot of money. It should be easy enough to fix disrepair, make sure homes are safe and build developments with lots of social housing. And yet they regularly fail in this, as shown by the cases we have found and grouped together below.

Cases like these have not stopped those at the top of Hyde from moving up in the world. In September 2021, Peter Denton, Hyde’s former chief executive was appointed CEO of Homes England, the government’s authority responsible for distributing housing funding.

In response to news of the appointment, the Social Housing Action Campaign said: “Denton’s legacy at Hyde was a great deal of misery for tenants and residents, and a corporate reputation for fleecing them through service charges… Apparently, maladministration at a social landlord is a highly desirable qualification for a job doling out government money to housing associations.”

Local and national media contain many examples of Hyde providing substandard accommodation and unsafe cladding, evicting tenants and provoking residents. We have grouped some of these examples by issue below.

Unsafe cladding

• Hyde found fire safety problems in all 86 of its tower blocks when it inspected them following the Grenfell Tower fire. Hyde promised to invest heavily to address safety issues but residents have complained about the measures taken. In February 2018, The Guardian reported that the action taken by Hyde to limit the risk of fire in Greenwich’s New Capital Quay – the largest housing development in the country to have Grenfell-style cladding – was the “least efficient” solution of the three recommended by the London Fire Brigade. A Hyde tenant said, “people have been cutting corners for so many years and are putting people’s lives at risk and they have to be held accountable.”

• In January 2020, ITV reported that residents of Hyde’s Blake Court tower block in Gosport had been living in a building encased in plastic sheeting since safety inspections in 2018/19. The plastic sheets were installed as a temporary safety measure. Residents complained that they had had enough of “living in semi-darkness” and were becoming depressed as a result.

• In November 2020, two housing blocks owned by Hyde in Brighton’s New England Quarter were put on ‘waking watch’ – with 24-hour patrols in case fire broke out – after they failed fire safety checks post Grenfell. Leaseholders in the buildings also found themselves in the position where they were unable to sell due to the building’s fire safety status.

• In 2021, Southwark News reported that Davoll Court – a building in Bermondsey – had not been awarded a fire safety certificate. One resident of Davoll Court – who owned a 25% stake in his home – was unable to sell because of the building’s fire safety status. He had fallen behind with his rent after his relationship broke down with the co-owner of the property. Hyde Housing ignored the predicament he was in and repossessed his home.

• In May 2021, Hyde announced its intention to pass on the costs of recladding its Bolanachi building in Bermondsey to its leaseholders, billing them £26k each.

Substandard accommodation

• In November 2021, The Sun reported that mould in a Hyde Housing house had left a young asthmatic child too sick to go to school. His mum said her son has suffered from a chest infection while living at the property and at one point his health was so bad that medics put him on steroids. His school and his doctor have contacted Hyde – which manages the property – after he reportedly missed weeks of class due to repeated illness.

• A Hyde tenant in Lewisham has been living with a hole in his ceiling for 15 years. Ignatius Okafo, 58, who has a partner and three-month-old baby living with him, has won two disrepair cases against Hyde, which runs his building, but the problem is yet to be fixed. Mr Okafo moved into the top floor of a housing block on the Pepys Estate in Deptford in 2004 after Lewisham Council decided to demolish the low-rise building he was living in. He told londonnewsonline that “he saw hairline cracks in the walls before construction had even finished… In 2007, he noticed a leak coming through the ceiling of the main bedroom. Workers from Hyde found there was no insulation between the room and the roof of the building. It became so cold that he had to sleep elsewhere. He said that over the years both his joints and his mental health have been severely affected.”

• In June 2021, a 15-metre tree fell on the roof of a Hyde Housing property in Plumstead. Many local residents complained that it took 11 days for Hyde to arrange for the tree to be removed.

• The Mirror reported in July 2020 that a Hyde Housing tenant had spent the first coronavirus lockdown in a house so damp that mushrooms were growing on the walls. The tenant had been requesting that the landlord sort out the problems for over ten years and had even taken Hyde to court in 2018. Hyde still hadn’t made the improvements at the time The Mirror’s article was published, despite the court having awarded compensation and demanding that the landlord carry out repairs a year earlier.

Evictions

• In October 2019 Hyde was accused of having a family of three evicted from their accommodation by police and bailiffs. During the eviction, some of the family were seriously hurt. The mother of the family suffered a concussion. At a previous eviction of the same family, Hyde had allegedly confiscated approximately £86,000 worth of the tenant’s property, despite the fact that the tenant reportedly didn’t owe any rent.

• In 2013, Hyde Housing teamed up with the Metropolitan Police to make life harder for ex-prisoners. Hyde – whose then-CEO Elaine Bailey used to run Serco’s prison and immigration businesses – collaborated with the police in a scheme that aimed to enable fast-track evictions of tenants who broke ‘good behaviour’ conditions after they were released from prison. The trial was carried out on the Stonebridge Park Estate in Harlesden.

• Again in 2013, it was reported that Hyde Housing had carried out evictions of ‘gang members’ for breach of tenancy. The ‘gang’ label has been widely used to stigmatise and criminalise working-class people of colour, and can easily be used to uproot members of the poorest communities by evicting them from their homes. Hyde has continued to use this stigmatising label on its website, and to collaborate with the police to evict people from its homes in London. Hyde published an article on its website in 2018 entitled ‘Cracking down on Gang Culture in Stockwell’, where it reported that it had served possession notices on six tenants from the Stockwell Gardens and Studley Estates following a “joint operation with the Metropolitan Police”.

Resistance to Hyde developments

• In 2020 Hyde obtained planning permission for a controversial housing development off Falmer Avenue on the edge of the South Downs. When the initial planning application for the project was made in 2016 the council received 300 letters of objection and a 4,000 signature petition against the plans. Protests were also held at Brighton Town Hall. A local councillor – Heather Butler – said: “We have all been concerned about the design of this development and its visibility from the South Downs National Park. The view will be radically changed by a view of ‘boxy’ houses, prominent on the site with no design review or input from the South Downs National Park.”

• In July 2019 hundreds of people voiced concerns against a new Hyde Housing development in Coldean, another joint venture with Brighton & Hove council. A local resident – Becky Hobbs – said that ecological surveys carried out were “inadequate” and disputed findings about the number of badger setts in the area. The council and Hyde planned to “close” three of the eight setts. Hobbs said “this will be the next Newbury bypass. There will be protests.”

• In 2016, Brighton & Hove Council applied the brakes to a £100m housing scheme amid concerns about “the close relationship between the council and Hyde”. The idea – a scheme to create 1000 homes – had been proposed by Hyde as a joint venture with the council. The Argus reported that a similar joint venture between Lewes District Council and another company – Karis Group – had encountered problems because “Councillors were placed in a difficult position by being given commercially sensitive information they could not share with the wider public which severely limited discussion”. The proposed board for the new project was to include three Hyde representatives and three council employees, but no councillors. Councillor Mary Mears voiced concerns that the scheme would be a repeat of the Open Market development, where she said: “traders were outvoted on the board and felt it did not represent their best interests.”

• In 2015, the Campaign for a Better Harrow Environment opposed Hyde’s plans to build a 19 storey skyscraper. The objections were that the building was unsightly, would not include affordable housing and would block views of Harrow on the Hill and St Mary’s Church. The plans were rejected by the local borough council but given the green light by the Secretary of State.

• In 1999 Hyde received £9m from the Housing Corporation for the redevelopment of the Pepys Estate in Lewisham. The Municipal Dreams blog said that only “cosmetic consultations” had taken place, with the bulk of the decision making about the scheme happening “behind closed doors”. Tenants groups and housing activists mobilised against the ‘decanting’ of local residents into council flats, with relocated tenants not allowed to return to the new estate.

Images via Pedro Ramos on Unsplash and Action for Fire Safety Justice

The post Hyde Housing: still shafting tenants nationwide appeared first on Corporate Watch.