Revealed: Major Tory donor was handed public contract before general election

The public has a right to know how taxpayer money is spent. So why won’t the Crown Estate answer our questions about £15,000 contract awarded to a leading Tory donor without open tender?

Open government is a simple idea. Citizens should have the right to access the documents and proceedings of government. 

It’s a principle that Democracy for Sale supports. (That’s why we signed this open letter to Keir Starmer shortly after the general election.)

A key plank of open government is that how public money is spent should be transparent and accountable.

So when Democracy for Sale recently found out that Simon Blagden had been given a £15,000 contract without open tender by the Crown Estate - which controls the royal family’s portfolio of land and property - shortly before the general election we wanted to know more.

And with good reason. 

Blagden has given more than half a million pounds to the Tories. He has been a member of the ‘Leader’s Group’ of top Conservative donors. He was also a director of Fujitsu UK, the British arm of the telecoms company at the heart of the ‘Horizon’ Post Office scandal.

There’s more.

At the time the contract was awarded, Blagden was chair of Building Digital UK, a role he had been given by then Tory minister Nadine Dorries in 2022 and which paid £80,000-a-year for two days’ work a week. 

As this newsletter previously revealed, on Blagden’s watch BDUK gave out £400 million in public contracts to a broadband firm that he’d been a paid lobbyist for. In the wake of that story, Building Digital UK was forced to amend Blagden’s register of interests to include his lobbying ties and political donations. 

This, of course, isn’t how open government is supposed to work.

So we had plenty of reasons to ask the Crown Estate why Blagden personally had been handed a contract to ‘provide advisory services’ in March of this year without open competition. 

Yes, £15,000 isn’t a huge sum - and is below the level at which contracts must be competitively tendered - but handing out contracts without competition to a political donor who chairs a public body is pretty much the opposite of open government. 

As Spotlight on Corruption’s Sue Hawley told us: “There are clearly very high risks that the public will perceive public contracts to be riddled with cronyism when they are given to political donors to the governing party. It is also deeply problematic that this contract was awarded to someone in a public role, as chair at the time of the government’s digital agency.” 

But when we tried to find out more about Blagden’s contract something strange happened.

We asked the Crown Estate’s press office some basic questions: what was the contract for? Why was it awarded without an open tender? Why was it handed to Blagden as an individual rather than a company?

We waited for an answer. And waited. Eventually an email came back - saying that our questions were being treated as a Freedom of Information request. We could expect a response in 20 working days. Kafka would be proud.

As this newsletter has frequently reported, Britain’s FOI system is at rock bottom. Response rates have never been lower.

But instead of answering basic journalistic questions about how it spends money, the Crown Estate has decided to add another FOI request onto the pile.

When public authorities treat very reasonable questions like this, we shouldn’t be surprised that faith in the political process is so low.

As Sue Hawley says, “these kinds of conflicts of interest must be handled much more robustly and transparently, and political donors should be banned from receiving public contracts altogether. Otherwise the public will lose trust that the UK’s public contracting system is based on fairness and value for money.”

There is a clear public interest in understanding how and why a political donor was handed a public contract like this. As Private Eye has reported, evidence suggests that Blagden was more involved with Horizon than previously acknowledged. 

In July, less than two weeks after Labour’s general election win, Blagden resigned as chair of Building Digital UK. (Back in January we submitted an FOI asking what due diligence was done before appointing Blagden to BDUK. Five months later, we finally got a response. The government refused to release Blagden’s interest declaration form because it contained “personal data”. We have appealed….) 

We will of course let you know what the Crown Estate says in response to our most recent, unsolicited FOI.

We also asked Simon Blagden - through his firm Larkspur International - why he was given a public contract without competition a few months before the Tories lost power. We have yet to receive a response.