16 the spectator | 29 february 2020 | http://www.spectator.co.ukA dirty business
Criminal gangs are growing rich on public-sector contracts
ALASDAIR PALMERviolent) gangster were surprised to discov-
er that the taxi company had been given a
contract worth more than £2 million by NHS
Glasgow to take patients to and from hospi-
tals. The discovery was particularly surpris-
ing as Glasgow police had warned Glasgow
NHS that the taxi company was linked to
organised crime.
The incident upset several senior Glas-
gow police inspectors. They wondered how
many public sector contracts in Scotland
were being awarded to what were either
straightforwardly criminal enterprises or
linked to companies that were ultimately
controlled by criminals. So they obtained
Scotland’s public sector procurement data-
base, which lists each good or service thatis purchased with the roughly £11 billion
worth of public money that is spent every
year in Scotland. The inspectors matched
the information up with Police Scotland’s
list of individuals and companies known to
be involved in organised crime.
They were shocked by what they found: a
significant portion — perhaps as much as 10
per cent — of the amount being spent every
year on the purchase of services by the pub-
lic sector in Scotland was going to criminal
organisations. And that was just the compa-
nies known to the police. Their own list was
not a comprehensive index of every criminal
enterprise, and they knew it. But even using
that list, it was clear that tens of millions of
pounds of taxpayers’ money was being hand-
ed to criminals. Local councils, the NHS and
other government agencies were purchasing
transport, security, waste disposal and other
services from criminal gangs. Criminals were
growing rich on public sector contracts.
One might have thought that this dis-
covery, which the Scottish inspectors shared
with everyone they thought needed to know,
including ministers in Westminster, would
have led to an instant reappraisal of pro-
curement practices across the UK. If the
process of criminal infiltration is happen-
ing on anything like the same scale in Eng-
land as it is in Scotland, then hundreds of
millions of pounds of public money is beingT
here were headlines recently about
how more than half of local coun-
cils had recorded a large increase in
the number of ‘fly-tipping’ incidents: cases
where rubbish and waste are collected, then
illegally dumped and left to rot in open
fields. That practice normally has dire con-
sequences for the local environment, and
sometimes for the health of animals and
people who live close by. Various sources
were quoted claiming that organised crimi-
nal gangs were usually responsible for illegal
fly-tipping. On the face of it, that is an aston-
ishing claim. What is organised crime doing
disposing of rubbish? But no one seems
interested in finding out what lies beneath it.
When I worked at the Home Office, I
was amazed to discover the existence of this
criminal underworld — and government’s
unintentional complicity in it. Some of the
worst fly-tipping is committed by waste
management companies working under
contract for local councils. Dig deeper, and
many of these companies turn out to have
been run by organised criminal gangs. They
appear to be effective and respectable, and
offer astonishingly low bids for disposing of
the council’s rubbish. Their bids are irresist-
ibly low because they skip the most impor-
tant part of the contract: detoxifying the
rubbish. They just dump it instead.
It isn’t only councils that have handed
contracts worth large sums of public money
to organised criminals offering suspicious-
ly cheap rates. The police themselves have
done so as well: one force I’ve spoken to dis-
covered that it had awarded its own waste-
disposal contract to a company affiliated to
an organised criminal network.
Behind the increase in fly-tipping is a
frightening development: the infiltration
of public sector procurement by organised
crime. It is happening on a very significant
scale. ‘Waste management’ is just the start —
as it was in Italy in the 1950s for the Mafia.
What propelled the Italian Mafia from a
relatively small-scale criminal gang into a
nationwide organisation that could control
politicians and parts of the legal process was
its takeover of the waste-disposal business- and in particular of government contracts.
The lack of concern from central gov-
ernment is astonishing and alarming. A dec-
ade ago, Scottish police investigating a taxi
company owned by a well-known (and very
What propelled the Italian Mafia
from small-scale gang into national
organisation was waste disposalThe PM is insisting
that the briefings he finds in his red box
every evening should be, well, brief, and
has limited them to four sides of A4.
That is three too many. Emperors too
had in and out boxes and knew what
hard work they could be.
Seleucus, Greek king of Asia, was said
to have complained that ‘If people knew
what a burden it was reading and writing
so many letters, they would not bother
to pick up a discarded royal crown’.
It was a common gripe of Roman
emperors, too, who had a remarkably
small secretariat — Julius Caesar
famously annoyed the crowd at the
games when they saw him answering his
correspondence — and were expected to
be able to communicate personally with
everyone who wrote to them, including
ordinary Romans who could not get
justice back home.
A friend of the emperor Marcus
Aurelius wrote to him saying he had
better cultivate his eloquence because
his duties included: to instruct the
senate; address the people; correct
injustices; send letters all around the
globe; maintain the pressure on foreign
kings; keep provincials in order; praise
the good, suppress the seditious and
terrify the bloodthirsty. The emperor
Julian talked of letters and petitions
to which he had to respond ‘travelling
round with me everywhere, following
me like shadows’.
This is where brevity came in. We
are told how the emperor Vespasian
started his day: ‘He got up early,
even when it was still dark, and read
the letters and the official breviaria
(“reports”; Latin brevis, “brief”).’ One
such report to the emperor Augustus
covered everything from finance to
troop strength across the empire.
We have other examples in the
letters from Pliny, governor of Bithynia
(northern Turkey), to Trajan, asking for
advice. Most of them are very brief and
so too are Trajan’s replies. An exception
is Pliny’s long letter to Trajan about his
treatment of Christians. It receives a
crisp, four-point reply.
It is said that one of the virtues of
Latin prose composition is that it trains
you to cut through the guff. Perhaps the
PM should send out instructions for his
breviaria to be written in Latin.
— Peter Jonesancient and modern
Brevity goes a long wayAlasdair Palmer AM_29 Feb 2020_The Spectator 16 26/02/2020 11: