Council tax, not failed investments, to blame for Conservative-run Thurrock going bust, claims leader
“Disinfectant is the best form of decision-making.”
It’s an odd quote, but it’s been an odd interview. Forty-five minutes with Mark Coxshall, leader of beleaguered Thurrock Council, the local authority which has amassed the largest single-year deficit in history thanks to a policy of pouring hundreds of millions of pounds into secretive and ultimately disastrous investments.
Hours away from voting on a budget dependent on a £635m bailout from the government and a referendum-busting council tax increase of 10%, you might expect the man left carrying the can to be more sombre and contrite. Instead he is combative, bullish and apparently happy to be speaking to me.
It’s been a long time coming. Coxshall is the first Conservative politician in Thurrock to have agreed to be interviewed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism since our investigation into the council’s business deals began in October 2019.
Back then he sat in cabinet, the council’s decision-making body. In September last year Rob Gledhill resigned as leader after “grave concerns” about the council’s financial position prompted urgent government intervention. A month later Coxshall, his deputy, took up the unenviable task of resolving a crisis recently described as “unprecedented in scale and complexity”.
He began with a public promise to bring about a “new era of openness, transparency and honesty” at a council which had, for years, kept the details of how it gambled with £1bn of taxpayers’ money hidden from the public, journalists and its own councillors (even, they claim, the Conservatives who championed, defended and ultimately had political responsibility for the policy).
It’s this pledge that led to our interview and it’s also the inspiration for that half-remembered saying. “There’s nothing wrong with being transparent and open,” he tells me. “Disinfectant is the best form of decision-making”. The actual wording — sunlight is the best form of disinfectant — is fitting given the main cause of the council’s financial collapse is the near £700m tied up in solar farms through investments with businessman Liam Kavanagh.
Not that you could tell from talking to Coxshall, or any other Conservative politician in the area.
The latest spin is that Thurrock’s dreadful position — a deficit approaching £500m this year and a further £200m in 2023/24 — is somehow the result of failing to increase council tax over a ten-year period (an email to residents following last week’s vote made no mention at all of investments). By their calculation that decision cost Thurrock £55m in potential revenue. It’s a lot of money, but a fraction of the £275m estimated to have disappeared as a direct result of the four most ruinous deals the council has made since 2016.
Council officers recently warned of “substantially reduced services” and a burden on taxpayers for decades to come. The most immediate impact on local people will be a 10% increase in council tax during a cost-of-living crisis, Thurrock having received permission from Michael Gove to ignore the requirement to have a referendum before increases above 5%. The resulting question is obvious — why should local people pay the price for this scandal?
“They’re not paying the price,” replies Coxshall. Does he believe, without the collapse of the council’s investments, Thurrock would have permission to impose an increase of 10%? “We’re correcting a wrong of ten years,” he replies. “The investment strategy was a root cause of not putting [council tax] up. The council wanted to keep council tax low. The council chose to invest to make money so they didn’t have to put council tax up.” Asked if he is genuinely going on the record that the tax hike has nothing to do with the failure of the council’s investments, Coxshall repeats that he is “putting right a wrong.”
The wrong, I point out, is an investment policy which has gone disastrously wrong on a scale not seen before in local government. He finally agrees. As a result, residents of Thurrock will be asked to pay an average of £150 extra per year and get substantially less in return. Why should they do that? “It’s still the lowest council tax in Essex,” he says. What’s more, he claims public opinion is with him: “I’ve talked to over 2,000 local people in the last three weeks, slightly more than you.”
In between apparently speaking to an average of 95 people a day for the last 21 days, Coxshall has been preparing for the findings of an inspection undertaken by Essex County Council, which was appointed as commissioner as part of the government intervention. The so-called Best Value Inspection (BVI) has considered whether Thurrock has “effective arrangements in place for securing best value in governance, audit, risk management, overview and scrutiny functions, and their impact on service delivery”.
The extent to which the inspectors have delved into the specifics of each investment is not yet clear, but they must surely have looked in detail at the roles played by Lyn Carpenter, the council’s now former chief executive, and Sean Clark, the chief finance officer who oversaw the deals and the borrowing that fuelled them. The Bureau’s investigation uncovered serious concerns about Clark’s conduct, including that he repeatedly ignored independent expert advice about the “unprecedented” risks he was taking.
Coxshall is convinced the inspectors will blame “systemic problems” within the council rather than individuals. Asked who he thinks is responsible for what happened, he replies: “I said right from day one, the actual secrecy of this council, the worrying about making mistakes and owning up to mistakes, that’s caused a systemic problem. The finance was not the root cause. This is still a fantastic council.”
Does he think the report will blame systemic issues rather than pointing the finger at individuals?
“Most BVIs haven’t named people,” he says. “It’s about culture. I’m a leader who believes in owning up to your problems quickly and internally. Then you can actually solve them. If you’ve got a blame culture you end up with hiding and secrecy. If you look at the best industries, like airlines, when they have accidents they own up to the issue quickly.”
What about his own culpability? Coxshall was a cabinet member throughout the period where the deals that would eventually bankrupt the council were struck. He was part of the executive body of the council when the Bureau repeatedly pointed out alarming holes in the investments. He sat at the top table when a High Court judge all but accused Kavanagh of misleading the council to pocket £5m (a suggestion Kavanagh denies). Did Coxshall take any steps to investigate whether these allegations were true?
“Of course I did, of course everyone did,” he says. “Internally, we asked continuously in cabinet what’s happening, what we’re doing. We got reports back. We’ve got continuous reports there.”
Pressed, he replies: “I’m in a Conservative group who’s been given…the chief executive and the finance officers [have] given us undertakings and the guaranteed undertaking.”
Unclear what he means, I ask whether he accepted what he was told by officers without question.
“No, I didn’t. I was not in the leadership group of that type.”
But he was a cabinet member at the time.
“This was set up…this is one of the problems….going back to the systemic problems of the council because all 49 councillors agreed, this bizarre way. We agreed this bizarre way of devolving that power, giving it to Sean Clark, and inside there was an answerable body that wasn’t cabinet. So that’s a strange, unusual way of working. And that’s my point. But that was the way Thurrock works.”
The problem for Coxshall is that it’s a matter of public record that he ridiculed attempts to scrutinise the investments.
Following the Bureau’s first story, in May 2020, Labour called an extraordinary meeting to discuss the policy. Conservative councillors lined up to defend the deals. Opposition members were dismissed and belittled, told they were “sanctimonious” and “disingenuous”. Coxshall was the last member to speak. Addressing the meeting, he said:
“What tonight should be is a complete embarrassment for the Labour Party. This is an overview and scrutiny meeting this should have been at. Bringing it here was political point scoring that’s completely failed. In fact I enjoyed it. I loved sitting here. I couldn’t chuckle to myself enough.”
Asked in our interview about his conduct that night, he replies: “I did not laugh at their concerns. I laughed at the way they were doing it. They voted for it.”
It wasn’t funny at the time and it definitely isn’t funny now, I point out.
“I think that’s the way I work,” he says. “You can’t use a gesture of me laughing in a video.”
Anyone watching back would get the impression he thought it was a joke, that the people raising concerns didn’t know what they were talking about because the investments were brilliant.
“That’s not true,” he replies. “I laugh all the time. I’ve been called that all my life.”
Called what?
“Because I’m always smiling. I’m a smiley person.”
Coxshall would not be drawn on whether there should be a police investigation into the investment scandal. Asked why Clark remains an employee on full pay until April, despite resigning in January, Coxshall would only say the finance director, who is paid a salary of around £140,000, was subject to an ongoing investigation — understood to be internal to the council — and was cooperating with that process. When asked whether he believed anyone would be held personally responsible for Thurrock going bust, a press officer interrupted to say Coxshall had made it clear he did not want to comment.
According to Coxshall it is too early, eight months on from the revelations that set in motion Thurrock’s collapse, for the council to try to recoup some of the money it has lost in its deals with Kavanagh, and other business partners, through the courts. Asked what efforts were being made, he would only reply “numerous”.
There are local elections in May. Why on earth should any local person vote Conservative?
“Because this is the decision of all 49 councillors,” he says.
‘We’re all to blame’ isn’t exactly a compelling, election-winning message. Why should people trust him or the party to fix the problem they created?
“They trust the Conservatives to continue to solve this issue,” he says.
“I’m the best person to lead this council right the way through this, and then get this council back on an even keel.”
Later that day Gove confirmed he was minded to approve the council’s request for a massive bailout (Coxshall says it made him feel “sick” to ask for it). The council tax rise was subsequently voted through that evening during a heated public meeting. In May the people of Thurrock will go to the polls and indicate whether they find Coxshall and the Conservatives responsible.