No Expenses Spared

by Robert Winnett

  Some soldiers didn’t have the luxury of choosing; five years after tank commander Sergeant Steve Roberts was shot dead after having had to hand in his body armour because of kit shortages, troops were still having to share, and some were still having to go without. If one patrol came back to base later than scheduled, the next patrol would in some cases have to go out unprotected because they would not be able to take the returning patrol’s body armour.

  Pete knew from his fellow soldiers that the lightweight Kevlar body vests favoured by US soldiers cost between £500 and £750, depending on the model. He didn’t have that sort of money, but he resolved that when he finished his tour and went home, he would scrape enough together to get his own Kevlar vest.

  For Gary, the main problem was his boots. British Army issue boots had also proved to be woefully inadequate for the searing heat in Iraq; many soldiers had discovered the soles were literally melting after a day on foot patrol, and even when improved models were introduced, troops often found them impossible to get on with. Gary had decided that when he got home he would buy his own boots, having been recommended American 5.11 Tactical desert boots, with a heat-resistant sole, which he knew he could buy online for around £125. He also wanted a good-quality pair of gloves to protect his hands from burns during weapon firing, and a pair of Oakley wraparound sunglasses with reinforced glass to protect his eyes both from the sun and from spent bullet casings, which had caused eye injuries to other soldiers.

  Both Pete and Gary were experienced soldiers, and they could live with the discomfort of their standard equipment in southern Iraq, where the danger was now relatively subdued. However, both men were expecting to be posted to Helmand province in Afghanistan the following year. That was an entirely different war. British soldiers were having ‘contacts’ with the Taleban on a daily basis, and the fighting was getting more, not less, intense. In 2006 the then defence secretary, John Reid, had said he ‘would be perfectly happy’ for British troops to complete their mission in Helmand in three years ‘without firing one shot’. But by 2008 the Army was firing four million bullets per year in the province during its fiercest engagement in half a century, and before long the number of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan would outstrip the total in Iraq. There would be a very real possibility that having the right kit would mean the difference between life and death. Pete, in particular, was likely to get plenty of chances to test his theory about the greater agility afforded by lightweight body armour being critical in the heat of battle.

  Like every other soldier in their regiment, Pete and Gary had lost friends during their service in Iraq. By the time Britain’s six-year military mission in the country came to an end the following year, the armed forces would have lost 136 personnel as a result of enemy action. Pete had been to more than one funeral in between previous tours; both he and Gary had become used to losing friends, and they accepted it as part of the job. No war had been fought without soldiers getting killed, and they knew that when they joined up.

  But what they didn’t accept was being sent to war without the proper tools for the job. Lives were being lost unnecessarily because of the government’s failure to supply adequate kit. Dozens had been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan while travelling in Snatch Land-Rovers, vehicles originally designed for use in Northern Ireland and totally unable to protect their occupants from the blast of a roadside bomb. In the months ahead, controversy would also rage about the Army’s chronic lack of helicopters.

  The military’s top brass had become increasingly critical of government policy, complaining that they were being asked to do too much in too many different theatres without the money or resources to do the job properly. Overstretch, they liked to call it. With Britain in the grip of the worst recession for eighty years, though, there wasn’t any prospect of defence spending being increased. Pete and Gary were resigned to the fact that if they wanted to have the best equipment for the job, they would just have to earn some extra money so they could go out and buy it themselves.

  1Both names have been changed to protect the soldiers’ anonymity.

  The Leak

  July 2008

  CHAPTER 3

  WHEN SOLDIERS PETE and Gary returned to the UK, one of their first priorities was to find temporary work during their leave period so they could earn enough cash to buy the body armour, boots and other kit they wanted to have before their next deployment overseas. Although moonlighting is technically forbidden under Ministry of Defence rules, many soldiers do it to top up their modest wages and senior commanders usually turn a blind eye to the practice; so when an opportunity to work for a security firm presented itself, they took it.

  Pete and Gary were told to report to The Stationery Office (TSO) in south London, which was gearing up for an important contract. TSO, which had been Her Majesty’s Stationery Office until it was privatized in 1996 and later bought by the multinational Williams Lea Group, processes thousands of government reports and official documents every year. The Hutton report into the death of the government weapons inspector Dr David Kelly and the annual budget report were among the documents which had passed through the doors of TSO; so security was paramount.

  When the two soldiers turned up for their first day, however, they were told they would be securing not government reports, but details of MPs’ expenses claims. More than one and a half million individual receipts put in by MPs over the previous four years were to be electronically scanned and then ‘redacted’, meaning the electronic copies would have sensitive information such as bank account numbers blacked out, before the documents were made public the following year. It all sounded pretty straightforward. The main parts of the soldiers’ job would involve keeping a register of who went in and out of secure rooms; making sure staff emptied their pockets of phones, cameras and other personal items before they started work; and transporting sensitive documents between government offices and TSO for processing.

  Pete and Gary were joined on the job by another two soldiers, family men, who were working so they could afford Christmas presents for their children and to pay for the odd family treat during the summer holidays. Like Pete and Gary, they had also lost comrades in the increasingly bitter Afghan war.

  On arriving for their first day’s work at TSO, the soldiers were given details of exactly what they would be required to do. A secure document storage company was holding the MPs’ receipts at a secret location. From there, they were being transported in batches to a room in a parliamentary office building in Millbank – a short walk from the Houses of Parliament – where officials were collating files for each MP, divided into different folders for each financial year. Every day, a van would be sent by TSO with a private security guard on board to pick up several cardboard boxes, known as lawyer’s boxes, to take them to TSO.

  The work of processing the MPs’ receipts was to be carried out in two rooms at TSO. First, the receipts, the MPs’ claim forms and any other relevant material were taken to a room where a small team of Stationery Office staff, together with parliamentary officials working on secondment, fed the documents into photocopier-sized scanners to make electronic copies of them. This room, unsurprisingly, was known as the scanning room. At the end of each day the boxes were returned to the Millbank office and then put back into storage.

  That was the easy part. The really painstaking part of the job, which was scheduled to take several months, involved redacting the documents, which was done in a 20-foot-square office known equally unsurprisingly as the redaction room. Around two dozen people had been chosen to carry out the tedious process of redaction. Most of them worked either for TSO or as civil servants in Parliament, with a few agency staff hired to make up the numbers for the job. They included men and women, ranged in age from the twenties to the sixties, and came from a broad range of social and ethnic backgrounds. The soldiers would not only secure the rooms and the documents but also observe the people carrying out the redaction. The soldiers themselves would not be directly invo
lved in the redaction process.

  The workers were surprised, to say the least, when they were greeted at the door on their first day by well-built military men who asked them to surrender all mobile phones, pens, cameras and anything else which could be used to copy anything they saw inside. A couple of the staff claimed their human rights were being infringed, but submitted to the restrictions. TSO, well aware of the sensitivity of the data being handled, had gone to extra lengths to protect the MPs’ expenses files – but others had not been so careful.

  Most government or parliamentary documents are given a security classification – confidential, restricted, secret or top secret. It was Parliament’s job, not TSO’s, to decide whether to give the documents a protective marking. However, in this case Parliament had not assigned the MPs’ expenses files any security marking at all. Why would such sensitive and potentially embarrassing information not carry a protective mark? Was it because the Speaker, Michael Martin, had thought it unnecessary? Was it sheer arrogance on his part, or perhaps a failure to consider the implications of any possible leak? Or was it simply that Speaker Martin decided the material did not warrant any protection because the High Court had already ordered its publication? Whatever the reason, the decision meant that those seeing the documents could freely discuss the contents of what they were reading without falling foul of the Official Secrets Act. It was an oversight which was later to prove crucial for the Telegraph’s investigation.

  Despite the lack of a security classification, Stationery Office executives were concerned about the situation and had privately consulted the security services about how the material should be treated before the project started. ‘Treat it as if it were a secret document,’ was the advice from intelligence officers.

  Once the redaction team had handed in their personal belongings, they filed into the room to find computers arranged in a square around the walls of the redaction room. A security guard was stationed at all times at a desk in the corner, another just inside the door. One worker commented that it was like entering an exam room. A line manager entered and explained the mammoth task that lay ahead. Each of them would be going through MPs’ expenses claims, which would arrive as PDF files from the scanning room next door. Using specialist redaction software, they would blank out certain details, referring to a list (provided by the parliamentary authorities) of twenty-two different types of information which had to be removed. These included bank account numbers, home addresses, and information on suppliers of goods and services. The guide handed out to workers said: ‘The overall aim is to remove information which would impact on the privacy, financial interests or security of MPs and third parties.’ The information to be censored would be highlighted in light grey so that it could be checked by the MPs before being blacked out at a later stage.

  During the first morning the redaction team, accompanied by two line managers and an IT manager, practised on dummy files. They broke for lunch, and when they returned the ‘live’ files began to be distributed.

  For the first day or so, the staff concentrated on getting to grips with the software and the task in hand. But by the second day the workers, having mastered the technical side of the job, began to pay more attention to the material on the screens in front of them. All of them were troubled by what they saw.

  It usually began with a quiet sigh or a shake of the head. Some workers folded their arms and sat back in their chairs, staring in disbelief at the screen. Aware that they were being observed by security staff and managers, the workers were reluctant, at first, to voice their opinions, but by the afternoon of the second day they were beginning to nudge colleagues sitting at neighbouring desks.

  ‘Have a look at this!’ one would whisper to another.

  ‘That’s nothing, look at this one,’ was a typical reply.

  One of the first claims to attract attention was that of Yvette Cooper, the Labour MP married to schools secretary Ed Balls. The worker looking at her claims was dismayed that Cooper had been able to claim tens of thousands of pounds even though her husband was also an MP, and also claimed expenses. Another worker was incensed to discover that the Cabinet minister Hazel Blears had billed the taxpayer for a Kit-Kat bar she had eaten during a hotel stay.

  Many of the staff had just received a modest 1.3 per cent pay rise, and they were appalled to see that their taxes were being spent by MPs on household goods which the workers could never afford for themselves, but which the MPs deemed to be ‘essential’.

  Gordon Brown’s expenses were among the first to be redacted. The staff were particularly vexed to discover that the Prime Minister was claiming back the cost of his Sky TV package, as well as claiming for a burglar alarm, despite having round-the-clock police protection. One member of the parliamentary staff pointed out that Brown had to keep up with current events, hence the Sky TV, but his colleague replied: ‘Why can’t he just watch BBC News 24 like other people?’

  As the managers in the room began to sense that anger was brewing in the room, one of the supervisors decided to intervene before the atmosphere deteriorated any further.

  ‘OK guys,’ he said. ‘I know some of the stuff you’re seeing on your screens isn’t good, but we’re here to do a job, it’s as simple as that, and you have to remain detached from the subject matter. You have to be professional about this and do what you’re being paid to do. You can’t leave this room and share this information down the pub with your mates over a beer tonight. You’re dealing with highly sensitive information, and you’re all here because you’re cleared to work with information of this sensitivity, so let’s keep our opinions to ourselves and get through this.’

  Over the following days the workers became less vocal, but every now and then the anger would resurface with a shake of the head, deep breaths or other tell-tale signs. They were frustrated not only by what the MPs had been claiming, but also by the fact that they were actively taking part in concealing these claims from the public, removing evidence of wrongdoing or abuse. Some workers began openly to question why they were having to take out certain details. Their managers simply replied that that was what they were being paid to do.

  The security team, who were becoming increasingly aware of the apparent abuses from the conversations between the workers, were also finding the MPs’ claims hard to stomach. They were operating a shift system, and when a new shift came in each day, they would be filled in on the day’s highlights of who had claimed for what.

  ‘You should see some of the stuff they claim for their second homes,’ one of the soldiers said to a colleague as he came on shift one day.

  ‘Second homes? I’d just like a decent first home,’ replied the other, referring to the parlous state of service accommodation.

  Having caught the end of a conversation about MPs’ travel expenses, another member of the security team, also a member of the armed forces, pointed out that he and other servicemen were given just two travel warrants per year for rail journeys, after which they had to pay their own way.

  Some of the workers, overhearing the conversation, nodded their heads in agreement as the veterans, who had put their lives on the line every day in Iraq and Afghanistan, contrasted their own living and working conditions with the lavish lifestyle of some of the MPs who had sent them there. The soldiers swapped stories about the unforgiving conditions they had experienced on their tours of duty, sleeping in tents, if they were lucky, though they had often had to sleep in the open when they went on long patrols in the desert.

  A line manager quietly asked the security team to keep their personal opinions to themselves. The soldiers apologized, but the manager waved the apology away, making it clear that everyone in the room had their own opinions, but that the job needed to be done without fuss.

  As the staff got over the initial shock of seeing what their tax money was being spent on by the MPs, the atmosphere in the room gradually began to settle. However, TSO had decided that because of the laborious nature of the work the staff wor
king in the redaction room should be rotated every few days, and each time this happened six of the workers would be replaced with new faces who weren’t familiar with what they were about to see.

  One of the first files to be handed to the first batch of new entrants was that of Anthony Steen, a Conservative MP who had claimed for thousands of pounds for maintaining his country estate in Devon, including a bill for a forestry expert to inspect up to five hundred trees in the grounds. The rookie worker reacted in the same way that the other staff had done when they had seen their first expenses files, questioning how Steen could possibly have been allowed to claim for so much gardening work.

  Over the coming weeks, the security team began to open up more and more to their civilian colleagues with their thoughts on what was going on.

  ‘The thing is,’ explained one soldier, ‘we’re sent out to Iraq or Afghanistan to do a job. Sometimes we lose people, but that comes with the job, and it’s a job that we signed up for. These MPs send us off to Afghanistan, and we’ve got no problem with that either; as far as we’re concerned, we’ve got an objective to achieve and we’re there until we achieve that objective.

  ‘But how come these MPs are getting paid £64,000 and claiming another £100,000 on expenses when we’re having to work in our time off to afford presents for the wife and kids or to buy kit that the MoD doesn’t supply? How can they possibly justify getting all this money?’

  As well as filling in the civilian workers on the shortcomings of Snatch Land-Rovers and ill-fitting body armour, the soldiers also talked about Headley Court, the rehabilitation centre for injured servicemen. A lack of investment in the facilities there means veterans have to use a local public swimming pool, where members of the public have objected to the presence of amputees, saying they might scare the children.