In STaN's Law, Part 1, I wrote about our current Neath MP, Christina Rees, and asked some questions as to whether the full recruitment procedures for employing staff had been adopted for new staff in her office. At least one of the appointments she had made runs the risk of accusations of blatant cronyism/nepotism, something followers of Welsh Labour politics are well used to seeing. I had hoped for something different from Ms Rees, but it looks like the same old book just in a different cover.
However, Christina is but a lightweight compared to her predecessor, Peter Hain, who has always boxed in the Heavyweight Division when it came down to looking after family and friends. There's an untold tale I'd like to tell you - because people like the Orange Baron should never think that because things happened a few years' back and no-one found out, that the story will ne'er be told.
In 2007, MPs were granted an allowance of about £10K a year called the Communications Allowance, to spend on such things as publicising and promoting their services, including the production of websites. The Allowance was done away with after a few years due to concerns about how it was being used. I'd advise you read this next link suggesting among other things that MPs were using the Allowance for self-promotion. Get away - I am absolutely certain that wasn't the case in Neath. No way would that nice man Peter Hain have done that.
http://puffbox.com/2009/11/04/mps-to-lose-communications-allowance/
But while it was available, Hain, never one to look a gift allowance horse in the mouth, predictably used it to its full, entirely for the purpose it was recommended, naturally. And as part of his spend he duly set up a website.
He claimed a total of £5,883 for work done by a local company called Digital Guides Ltd to set it up. The company's registered office at the time was "Y Gored", Melincourt, Neath SA11 4BD, until May 2012 when it relocated to Cambridgeshire. I think that Y Gored was once the Gored Arms or Gored Hotel, one of the very few public houses in the Neath Valley I never sank a pint (or three) in.
I was initially pleased that Hain had seen fit to use local labour (let's re-jig that and write it as "local Labour", as we'll soon see). I'd never heard of Digital Guides but why would I have? After all, in this Brave New World of home working, consultancy and IT, people can make a living anywhere - even in Melincourt it would seem. Then I checked who the company's owners/directors were. And lo and behold, the sole director at that time was a chap called Sam Hain.
What a coincidence, you may think, that there's a guy living in a really swish property in Melincourt, did nearly £6K of work for Peter Hain, shares his unusual surname, whose name doesn't appear on MPs' expenses records - only the name of his company. Well I don't believe in coincidences like this and neither should you. After all - we are dealing with MPs here, and a Labour one at that, and in Peter Hain especially, one whose reputation for looking after his own was already legendary.
Sam is Peter Hain's son, of course, but you'll already have worked that one out. And guess what? No rules were broken again except STaN's Law! You'll remember that that's the one when you see the sheer cheek and effrontery of an action by a public figure and go, "No way, WTF is going on there?"
Though I have to say that using close relatives to carry out such services is now verboten since IPSA's days (post-2010) who doubtless looked at how much of this was going on and said, WHAT! We'd better adopt STaN's Law, because this is just taking the p*ss!!
But even though at that time such practices didn't break any specific rule, surely common sense and an appreciation of what is acceptable in the Court of Public Opinion should have made people like Peter Hain sit back a moment and ask themselves, should I really be spending nearly £6K of public money on a service provided by my son? Fat chance there then!
In 2012, Y Gored was placed on the market at an asking price of £250,000, dropped from close to £300,000 from an earier marketing - a princely sum for that area and a not inconsiderable capital asset for Hain the Younger to have accumulated by his mid-30's - in a backwater like Melincourt. It irks me that my taxes helped pay nearly £6K off the mortgage of Hain's son (if he ever had a loan for the property, that is). Nice property though - plenty of space for that huge ego of Peter Hain to relax in. It doesn't appear to have sold.
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-36549077.html
One of the rubs of all this is that the website was crap anyway. Have a read of this quote from an award winning LibDem blog called Quaequam at the time.
"It has much less functionality than the average Blogger account, and yet he boasted that "I have tried to make it possible for you to add your own views" – a feature which amounted to a facility allowing visitors to send him an email. Some web designer has been paid what one guesses must be a tidy sum for coming up with this fairly useless website at taxpayers expense, all in the name of “improving communications”. If Hain had been forced to use MySpace, for free, he’d have ended up communicating with more constituents"
That's a pretty damning indictment of what amounts to a waste of nearly £6K of taxpayers' money as far as I am concerned - paid into the grateful palm of his son.
Watch this space for STaN's Law, Part 3 of 3 for more revelations in the future about how Peter Hain used that Communications Allowance. Because, believe me, you ain't seen nothing yet.........
