The Real Unite

When Howard Beckett’s office at Unite HQ was raided in April 2022, as part of the live investigation into bribery, fraud and money-laundering, it was South Wales Police at the door.

Why? Because all roads, in this case, lead to Swansea. And then to Axis Court, a nondescript business park on the edge of town that was home to the Hardy Evans call centre.

You’ll have to bear with us. We’re not in the glamorous nightclub of Saint Len and the Flanagan Brothers here. But members’ money can still go missing in the quiet suburbs of Affiliated Services.

As you can read on its Companies House page, Hardy Evans Limited is the name of a now insolvent company. It has one director, Mr Frank Harrold. As explained in Howard Beckett’s Employment Tribunal, Beckett arranged with Frank to run a call centre to outsource services for Unite.

The Hardy Evans call centre had some main contracted tasks, including membership retention, calling up “lapsed” members to persuade them to renew their subs. But it also ran sidelines selling members products such as life insurance. These products were sold through a host of different company names. Harrold has at least two listings on Companies House (here and here), which show him as a director of 27 companies, many registered at the same Swansea address.

According to evidence in the Tribunal, Beckett handed contracts to Frank’s companies with “no real tendering process” and “without authority”, and contracts were “disadvantageous to the Union”. Meanwhile, investigations reportedly uncovered £1.1 million changing hands in “personal financial transactions” between Howard and Frank.

Things get still murkier because, as Howard admitted under cross-examination, Mr Frank Harrold also went under another alias. He was known to Howard’s Unite colleagues as “Peter Stephens”!

Beckett told the court this was because of “issues with his previous partner”. It’s not clear what he was referring to, but possibly this. Shortly before he started working with Unite, Frank Harrold was charged with money-laundering in 2010 in a previous insurance business. The charges against him were dropped at the end of 2011.

We’ve just scratched the surface of Howard and Frank’s world. All the points above are public information from the Employment Tribunal, Companies House, and online sources. Much more should come out soon in Unite’s interim report on alleged corruption. Even more is still being investigated by South Wales Police.

And at the bottom of it all, there’s one basic point. In Affiliated Services as in the Birmingham Hotel, we are led to believe that millions of pounds of Unite members’ money is unaccounted for.

But, wherever the police investigation leads, it’s not just about Howard Beckett. It’s much bigger than one little man in a shiny suit.

How did our Union let this happen? Why was there no scrutiny? Why were there no serious tendering processes? Why were there no proper reports on Affiliated Services deals over the ten years Beckett ran this “business”? Why were no questions asked by the Executive Council, stitched up all those years by the UL faction?

How on earth did an ambulance-chasing solicitor, with his multi-million fortune and record of misconduct (ripping off miners), get to pass himself off as Great Hero of the Left? And why was Len McCluskey the only witness called by Beckett to support his ridiculous, failed tribunal claim?

It certainly says something about the sorry state of “The Left”, and of our democratic institutions in the workers’ movement. We’ve got a big job of rebuilding to do. And it starts with cleaning up our Union.

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