The Scottish Government has been asked to intervene after a North Lanarkshire Council held a secret meeting to award a £ 1.4 billion contract to a firm that has a board member as a councillor.
The council held a meeting in private where officials voted on plans to award the Mears group a housing, repair and maintenance contract.
But it has now emerged that Councillor Michael Coyle, who was in the meeting, is on the company’s board. He claims he took the advice and was allowed to participate in the meeting to discuss the contract.
Coyle said: “I was given authorisation from the monitoring officer to participate in the meeting.”
However, fellow councillors have written to Local Government Minister Joe Fitzpatrick to raise concerns about the contract and the plans to hand it to one company. They claim taxpayers won’t get the best value for money if only a single firm has put in for the work and questioned the lack of scrutiny by councillors before and at the secret meeting on August 17.
Both councillors and the Mears group have been told they must not share contract details as they are deemed commercially sensitive.
On the face of it, it would seem the council, Cllr Coyle, and Mears haven’t done anything wrong, and we have to make it clear that they haven’t legally. However, you can’t help but smell a rat here.
Coyles’ fellow councillors are right about the lack of transparency in this deal, which would see Mears be paid over £100 million a year for the next 12 years. It was very probably a done deal long before any vote took place.
This commercialisation of council and government infrastructure has been a growing market for private companies. Since the reforms by the conservative Government led by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, public assets and infrastructure have been slowly consolidated into the hands of international conglomerates.
Take the Mears Group; Mears is a publicly traded company. The largest shareholder is Fidelity Investments, which holds around 10% of Mears stock. Fidelity is an American multinational corporation with an annual revenue of $24 Billion and assets under management of about $4.5 Trillion.
The Homeland Party is deeply concerned to learn that the Scottish National Party supports the extension of Margaret Thatcher’s policies. The choice of the Mears Group for the contract raises questions about potential ties to global monopolies. All parties involved must thoroughly investigate this matter to ensure complete transparency and accountability.
Suppose you believe that public funds should be used to create opportunities for the people of Scotland instead of benefiting private global corporations. In that case, the Homeland Party is the right choice for you.
