Croydon’s longest-serving MP, Steve Reed OBE, is the latest cabinet member to be named in the mounting scandal around the new Labour government’s apparent endless capacity for accepting gifts and freebies from big-money donors, industry interests and lobbyists.
Big shot: Steve Reed has been accepting gifts from firms who own polluting water companies, according to today’s Torygraph
Reed, now the MP for Streatham and Croydon North, has been accused of being “wined and dined by the very family of firms he must now take to task”.
Reed was Labour’s shadow environment spokesperson in December 2023 when he attended the Chelsea v Crystal Palace football match with the prawn sandwich brigade at Stamford Bridge, all paid for by Hutchison 3G UK Ltd, a subsidiary of CK Hutchison Holdings.
“CK Hutchison Holdings owns 75% of Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings, the owner of Northumbrian Water,” the Daily Torygraph reports today.
Northumbrian Water spilt sewage into England’s waterways for 280,000 hours in 2023.
Reed enjoyed tickets and hospitality valued at £1,786. All have been properly declared and recorded in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
Reed attended the football match at the same time he was publicly calling for tighter controls on the water industry, to force utlity companies to clean up their acts and stop pumping millions of gallons of raw sewage into our rivers and streams, lakes and on to our coastlines.
“That Steve Reed, then the shadow secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, accepted hospitality from a water company owner is extremely disappointing,” Ed Acteson, co-founder of the anti-sewage group SOS Whitstable, was quoted as saying in the Torygraph.
Labouring a point: from this week’s issue of Private Eye
“Frankly, it is the latest question mark over an industry riddled with double standards and conflicts of interest.
“Mere weeks after attending this event, he was pledging to put water bosses ‘in the dock’ for illegal releases.
“How are we supposed to believe those words carried any sincerity when, at the same time, he was receiving blatantly inappropriate hospitality of this nature?”
Reed has said he will crack down on the water industry, but not by nationalising the privatised monopoly suppliers, but by blocking director bonuses and introducing criminal charges for blocking investigations, reforms that have been criticised by campaigners as inadequate.
A spokesperson for DEFRA said that, “Steve has taken the toughest action against water companies of any minister in decades”, although that’s hardly much of a claim.
There’s a growing stench around Keir Starmer and his team’s capacity for gobbling up freebies.
It is not known whether Reed wore his new, top-of-the-range country wellies when he strolled along the King’s Road to the Premier League football match last winter – though his boots were reportedly a gift, too.
Zarah Sultana, the MP who has been suspended by Labour for voting for the removal of the two-child benefit cap, last night flagged up the increasing conflicts of interest between Starmer’s government and big business. “Google provided £10,000 of hospitality to senior Labour figures and the party ditched plans to raise the Digital Services Tax,” Sultana tweeted.
“Quadrature, a Cayman Islands hedge fund which invests in fossil fuels donated £4million and [Labour’s] climate advisory board co-chair is now climate envoy.
“It stinks.”
Scott Ainslie, the Green councillor in Lambeth who was his party’s General Election candidate against Reed in Streatham and Croydon North in July, said, “I stood against him in the election and I’m a Crystal Palace fan. I came second.
“To be honest, I can’t really afford to go to see matches. I follow them on the telly. I was offered a suit, maybe because people felt I was too unkempt as an MP candidate. I didn’t accept. Just saying.”
And Cat Hobbs, of the campaign group We Own It, who want utilities re-nationalised, reacted to the Reed news report by writing, “Government is ignoring 8-in-10 of us who want public ownership to clean up our rivers and seas.
“Government spokesperson wants you to think they’ll be tough on bosses’ bonuses.
“Don’t be fooled. This is irrelevant.”
Read more: Suited and booted: Norbury Alli’s donations and No10 access
Read more: Reed group fined for slow declaration of £800,000 donations
Read more: #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
This was my MP. He has had his nose in the trough for years as listed in his declared interests.
While he was snuggling up to CPFC PR firms, the community affected by the New Stand have been ignored. He never met with those compulsory relocated from Wooderson Close nor visited or engaged with most families of Regina Road.
He represents himself not the people.
I too was a constituent of Mr Reed and in his time here he was truly invisible. He’s barely more visible now.
In 2010, David Cameron described lobbying as the next big scandal. I’m not defending various Labour politicians’ actions, but my understanding is Labour have operated within the law, if not the country’s morals (unlike Boris hiding the wallpaper). I’ll get downvoted for this, but it’s unfortunate that the right-leaning press have chosen to pick up this issue at this time, and not in the years since 2010. Lets have a discussion, but it’s about drawing new parameters on a long-standing problem.
Ho ho ho. No one, or hardly anyone, reads the ‘right leaning press’ or what’s left of it. This is an old canard that needs to be put out to grass. Most people today get their news and views from social media. Especially well-informed, if ‘left-leaning’ channels like Inside Croydon
I just went and re-read the first sentence of this Inside Croydon article. It says “named in the mounting scandal”. So the IC article is about what is being written about in the press. Whilst you may not think they control our views, they control the narrative of the national discourse.
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