8 Thursday November 11 2021 | the times
News
A former defence procurement minis-
ter has called for more military spend-
ing without declaring his £425-an-hour
job with an aerospace company.
Philip Dunne, the Tory MP for Lud-
Boris Johnson receives a police escortStarmer was
paid for
legal advice
while an MP
Eleni Courea Political ReporterSir Keir Starmer has been asked un-
comfortable questions about his own
income after it emerged that he has
earned tens of thousands of pounds
from legal work while being an MP.
The Labour leader has called for MPs
to be banned from working as directors
and consultants and for the rules sur-
rounding second jobs to be tightened.
However, Starmer’s register of parlia-
mentary interests shows that he has
earned more than £25,000 for legal
work during this parliament, carried
out before he became Labour leader.
He also earned thousands for legal
work between when he first became an
MP in 2015 and the 2019 election. In
2015 he was paid £9,480 for advising the
government of Gibraltar, which offers
low-tax incentives to businesses.
Labour has criticised Sir Geoffrey
Cox, the former attorney-general, for
taking a job defending the government
of the British Virgin Islands in a
corruption case brought by the UK
government.
Anneliese Dodds, chairwoman of the
Labour Party, called on Boris Johnson
to launch an investigation into Cox’s
“second job acting on behalf of a knownNews Politics
Ex-defence minister did
not reveal aerospace job
George Grylls Political Reporter
Billy Kenber, George Greenwood
low, has earned £51,000 since July last
year working for Reaction Engines, an
Oxfordshire-based manufacturer of
propulsion systems, according to his
register of interests.
At the same time, Dunne, 63, who
was minister for defence procurement
from 2012 to 2016, has consistentlyasked questions in parliament demand-
ing greater military spending. Reaction
Engines has been awarded several
multi-million pound government con-
tracts in recent years.
In November last year, Dunne com-
plained about the “stop-start nature of
political decision-making on multi-year projects”. In December, he said
that for every pound spent on defence
procurement, there was a “multiplier”
effect on “the levelling-up impact on
the UK”. In February, he demanded “in-
vestment in innovation”, saying that re-
search and development spending in
the Ministry of Defence had suffered
an “annual salami-slice” of budget cuts.
In March, he demanded more data to
show that defence spending was “help-
ing to level up Britain”. On each occa-
sion he failed to declare his £3,400-a-
month job at Reaction Engines.
Dunne, an Old Etonian who was first
elected in 2005, was introduced to the
company in July 2014 when he was a
minister in the coalition government.
After being sacked by Theresa May
in 2018, he was commissioned to write
a report for the MoD on defence pro-
curement where he cited Reaction
Engines as a company that could bene-
fit from greater investment. A year
later, it was granted a two-year £10 mil-
lion MoD contract.
Representatives of Reactions En-
gines have met ministers 11 times since
the start of last year. In July, the UK
Space Agency awarded the company
another grant worth £3.9 million.
The disclosures raise further ques-
tions over MPs’ second jobs as West-
minster is engulfed in a sleaze scandal
after Boris Johnson’s botched attemptto spare Owen Paterson from a 30-day
suspension for paid lobbying.
Paterson was one of Dunne’s fellow
MPs in Shropshire before he resigned
last week. Dunne’s neighbour is Daniel
Kawczynski, the Tory MP for Shrews-
bury & Atcham, who also has a second
job outside parliament. Kawczynski
works for an international mining com-
pany while serving as the government’s
trade envoy to Mongolia, a country rich
in copper, gold and coal deposits.
They both voted to overhaul the
parliamentary standards system last
week in an attempt to save Paterson.
Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour
leader, said: “The public have a right to
know what role, if any, Philip Dunne
played in the awarding of contracts to
Reaction Engines so the details of all
correspondence and meetings between
the company, Dunne and ministers
must be published in full.”
Dunne declined to comment.
Reaction Engines insisted that it was
not a defence company, saying that its
technology could be used in a range of
applications. The company said: “Reac-
tion Engines is a UK-headquartered
technology company and has received
research and development funding
from both private and public sources as
well as revenue from civilian commer-
cial customers. All funding received
from UK government sources has fol-
lowed strict due diligence procedures.
“Philip Dunne has been employed as
a nonexecutive director at Reaction
Engines since July 2020 and has not ar-
ranged or attended any meetings with
ministers, nor has he been involved in
any of Reaction Engines’ discussions
with ministers or officials related to
government contracts or investment
decisions.”Philip Dunne was a
defence minister
from 2012 to 2016