One Monday morning in February 2009, four investigators from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) knocked on a door in an alley off a street in Droitwich, West Midlands. It was opened by 66-year-old Ian Kerr. Looking straight at him was David Clancy, head of investigations at the ICO. Clancy had a warrant but he didn’t want the door shutting on him, so the former Greater Manchester police officer inserted his boot and announced they were coming in. Clancy had spent eight months hunting for this address. It had begun with a newspaper article. The final piece of the jigsaw had been a fax number pinpointing a mysterious group called The Consulting Association. It was an organization that didn’t appear on any official records and had no nameplate above its anonymous green door. Clancy didn’t know what to expect on the other side.
The shabby two-room office had furniture dating from the 1970s and 1980s, an electric typewriter on one of the desks, a computer and a sophisticated photocopying machine. Almost immediately the investigators found a ring binder in a tatty plastic cover. Inside were pages of names, addresses and national insurance numbers. Next they found a card index with additional information typed onto each card. Clancy recognized the set-up: it was identical to how a police local intelligence filing system works. It was organized alphabetically and each card related to a name in the folder. In all there were 3,213 names. Eventually the repercussions from this raid would be felt in the boardrooms of transnational corporations and in parliaments around the world. A 30-year covert operation involving the country’s top construction firms, with the co-operation of the security services, had just come to an end. The scene was more John Le Carré than James Bond. Kerr told Clancy: ‘You realize you have destroyed, or you appear to be about to destroy, a very effective network in the industry.’1 Having spent months tracking the organization down, Clancy’s feeling was very different. ‘It was like Christmas,’ he recalled.2
For 16 years, The Consulting Association compiled a secret database containing files on thousands of construction workers. The files had their names, addresses and National Insurance numbers, comments by managers, newspaper clippings, vehicle registrations; a number of files even contained information about their spouses. The organization acted as a covert vetting service funded by the construction industry to monitor people applying for work on building sites. More than 40 of the biggest names in the business – including Carillion, Balfour Beatty, Skanska, Keir, Costain and McAlpine – each nominated a few senior people in their human resources department or industrial relations section to act as contacts with The Consulting Association. When recruitment took place, these people would fax the names of those applying for work over to Ian Kerr at The Consulting Association (TCA) who would check his files. If the name matched they would report a hit back to the ‘main contact’ from the company. Invariably this would result in the job applicant being refused employment or, if already on site, dismissed.
The idea was simple; the effect was devastating. The building worker had no idea that their details were being checked in this way and no way of seeing if the information held was accurate. Once you had a file, it was added to over the years and you would never know – you would just be repeatedly turned down for work. Blacklisting was a secret tool used by companies to keep out people they didn’t like. Those with files were often union members who had raised health-and-safety concerns or complained about conditions. Thousands of names were checked every month. There had always been rumours about blacklisting but now the files provided evidence for all to see.
Over the course of this book we’ll reveal exactly what was on those files held by this covert organization. We’ll also show who helped to keep Kerr operating. And we’ll demonstrate that it wasn’t just building workers this hidden organization monitored. The spying operation might have been set up by building firms but the security services and even some trade unions are implicated too. It is a drama whose origins date back to the years after the First World War and whose principal players range from Manchester electricians to company directors and police spies. It is a story about how far companies will go to boost their profits and the lengths to which workers will go to protect their rights. And it starts with a newspaper landing on Clancy’s desk in Cheshire.
Back in 2008, investigative journalist Phil Chamberlain pitched an article to the Guardian suggesting looking at the issue of blacklisting. The construction industry seemed the obvious place to start researching this story and it wasn’t hard to find examples. An approach to UCATT – the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians – led to contact with a number of workers who claimed to have suffered from blacklisting. At the suggestion of UCATT, Chamberlain spoke to, among others, Steve Acheson, Colin Trousdale and John Winstanley. Winstanley, a joiner from Liverpool, spoke about the crushing effect of being refused work during the 1960s. Acheson and Trousdale had more recent experiences establishing a pattern of activism, jobs offered and suddenly withdrawn. Trousdale told Chamberlain:
‘I’ve had to change my address so that I didn’t have a Manchester postcode because people saw the job application and thought I was one of the bolshie ones. All I did was speak up for some lads. People I know who have been blacklisted have suffered ill health as a result. They’re under stress by virtue of the fact that they cannot get a job.’3
The insidious nature of the practice meant that a pattern of behaviour might be established but evidence beyond the anecdotal was hard to find, though not impossible. The official position remained that blacklisting did not happen. Chamberlain spoke to the Construction Confederation, the industry trade body, about the existence of blacklisting. A spokesperson was quoted saying: ‘We’re not aware of it existing. If unions have evidence of malpractice by an employer, they need to share it. Blacklisting is not the practice of a good employer.’4
Chamberlain went looking for that evidence and his search led him to the Manchester Royal Infirmary (MRI) building project. This was a huge undertaking, close to the city centre and worth millions to the contractors involved. Behind the scaffolding a low-intensity conflict was being waged by contractors to keep control of who got to work there, targeting union representatives in particular. Acheson’s solicitor passed to Chamberlain the judgment from an employment tribunal from 2007, which revealed what happened when some of the electricians carried out their lawful union activities.
Three electricians, Tony Jones, Graham Bowker and Steve Acheson, were working for a small electrical firm from Norwich called Logic Control at the £750-million Bovis project. The MRI was to be one of the largest new-build hospitals in Europe, employing thousands of workers over six years. Balfour Kilpatrick was the main electrical contractor, employing around 200 electricians. Logic Control had a separate contract running computer data cables and signals employing around 20. Tony Jones started first, in October 2005, followed by Graham Bowker in November 2005 and finally Steve Acheson in January 2006. It soon became apparent that not everyone was happy to have them there. Acheson recalled:
‘I got summoned to the canteen by Kevin McGowan, my friend. He said: “Steve, I’ve got to have a chat with you. Balfours have been onto Logic saying you’ve got to get rid of this Acheson, he’s a trouble causer”.’5
Bowker said that warnings came from several quarters:
‘There was pressure being put from Balfour’s to Logic to have us removed. The site manager for Logic said: “These guys are gunning for you.” Even the site convenor, Lawrence Hunt from UCATT, said: “These people don’t like you, do they?”’6
The three electricians were sacked but, after applying to an employment tribunal, successfully argued that they had been wrongly dismissed from working on the MRI project after they had raised health-and-safety concerns with their sub-contractor Logic Control. These were not complaints about tea breaks; they were fundamental concerns about safety raised by three people who between them had more than 70 years’ experience. The result was that all three got what was known in the trade as ‘the tap on the shoulder’.
Bowker, like the others, had long suspected he was on a blacklist.
‘We knew without knowing that there was something totally wrong. I applied for one very big project in Wales through the agency. I was told the job’s now filled, and there’s no vacancies. And, following my conversation, 300 more electricians went on that site. So that shocked me. Plus the amount of times I’ve been thrown off site, it’s unbelievable. Or I’ve been given a job over the phone, an hour later it’s gone. My phone doesn’t ring at all now, never.’
The electrician from Oldham was subsequently to find out that the file kept on him by The Consulting Association contained entries from Crown House Engineering, Carillion and Tarmac: all companies with which he’d found it difficult to find work.
The effect on Bowker was not just about lost wages – as with many others, his health and family also suffered. He said:
‘I’ve had tinnitus, alopecia, got rheumatoid arthritis; they say a lot of this stuff could be stress induced. This is what the doctors have said. It’s had a bearing on the family because I’ve totally changed character from being happy-go-lucky to dead snappy. It’s frustration, I think. A lot of it because from working all your life to not being able to work at all, the slightest thing you get agitated. It’s affected the wife. It’s an old saying, like: “when money stops coming through the door, love goes out the window”. Well, that’s a true fact. I used to take three holidays a year, prior to 2000 and I probably get one a year now. Some years I’ve had none. My wife’s supporting me now. I get no benefits because my wife works more than 16 hours a week. It’s not fair on my wife having to support me: that’s my role in life. The kids – when they had their weddings I couldn’t finance them. Two of my daughters got married while I was having all my problems and I feel guilty where I could give very little towards the weddings.’
Some workers found the debilitating experience of constantly being offered and then refused jobs too much. Mick Anderson, from Kerry in Ireland, who had more than 25 years’ experience after leaving school, applied for 250 jobs and took courses to keep his skills up to date. He was out of work for 16 months. In 2006 he and his family moved to the Irish Republic because of his struggle to get work. He later found he had a blacklist file. Also with a blacklist file was Darren O’Grady, from north London, who in 1990 moved to America with his family to try to secure work.
Stewart Emms from Hull was on the blacklist from when he was an activist in the 1980s but managed to escape the worst effects when he was elected as an official of UCATT. He remembers what happened when he finished working at the union: he was repeatedly turned down for employment.
‘I got bits and bobs now and then but when the building society threatened to take our house away, we knew we had to get out to survive. Bulgaria was cheap, so we moved here in January 2005. We were living in a house with an outside toilet and shower.’
Denise Emms, his wife and fellow activist, remembers the impact it had on her husband.
‘Just dreadful: his legs were cut off. The worst time of our lives – out of work for two years, we thought we would lose the house at one point. He did part-time work scrapping around doing some little joinery jobs and they took it off his dole money. We’re just managing now on our pensions.’7
Electrician Jake McCloud was blacklisted after being involved in a dispute while working for the electrical contractor Matthew Hall on the Mossmorran oil refinery in Scotland in 1982. He said:
‘It affected me very badly, because I didn’t work after that for at least three years. I maybe got a wee week here or a wee week there but I didn’t get anything concrete and I have to be honest and say it was the end of my marriage. It was very difficult and I understand looking back now, how your missus and your two young kids looked at things. A guy, three doors down from you, he’s got all the jobs in the world and you can’t get one. And she says, “How come you can’t get on that job?”
I tried to explain and it was alright for a wee while but when it goes on and on, one Christmas after another Christmas, it becomes very tiring and you begin to argue in the house. You want a pint but you’ve no money for a pint but you go for a pint anyway. All that sort of thing took place. I was only an ordinary bear but at the end of the day I fully appreciated that my missus couldn’t take any more.’8
Steve Barley, a blacklisted electrician from Cardiff, remembers the inability to find a job as a blight stretching back decades – one which devastated some families.
‘I was in the apprentice section of EETPU [the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union] in 1970 and the first real warning I had about the blacklist was in 1973 after the national builders’ strike. Cardiff branch at that time was run by a man called Billy Williams, who was chairman, and two other strong trade-union activists, Pip Jones and Alan Marsh. There were fights on different sites to get these guys jobs. Other people working already on those sites were threatened with being blacked for trying to get those men back into employment. Over the years I’ve tried to get Billy a start at St Fergus in the north of Scotland and again at BP in Barry in 1979 but it was the same situation. They actually got a start at St Fergus for a company called Control and Applications from Swansea. They were on the site for a couple of hours and were actually frogmarched off by the police – that was in 1976. Billy Williams committed suicide in the 1980s.’9
Steve Barley’s friend was not the only blacklisted worker to take his own life.
Back in Manchester, after being dismissed from the MRI building site, Bowker, Jones and Acheson protested for more than a year outside. Jones said: ‘Our principle was the main reason. We always suspected there was a blacklist but by Manchester Royal Infirmary we knew it existed.’
According to the employment tribunal, Logic Control found itself under pressure from Balfour Kilpatrick to let the three go. As part of the evidence, the tribunal heard from a former human relations manager, Alan Wainwright, that blacklisting of union members took place. The tribunal did not find Wainwright’s evidence pertinent but his submission placed on record a lot of inside detail, hitherto unheard of, about how blacklisting operated. Wainwright put in the public domain evidence that companies sent lists of new job applicants to an organization and, if a name appeared on their files, the company would refuse that person work. The Wainwright evidence added to the wealth of detail submitted by the electricians about why they had been singled out. The tribunal ruled that there was no evidence that Logic Control had used the blacklist but its written judgment records:
‘Disgraceful though it be, the Tribunal concludes that a blacklist exists in relation to certain workers in the industry in which the claimants work and that the claimants are all on that blacklist.’10
The Manchester hearing gave authority to a suspicion many construction workers had but, as with thousands of other tribunal decisions made each year, its judgment was not reported. The industry’s dirty secret was hidden in plain view.
Some of the detail on what happened at MRI can be gleaned thanks to the raid by David Clancy and the ICO. The seized files were now in the possession of the government’s data-protection watchdog and workers who suspected they were on the secret blacklist could apply to be sent a copy of their own file. In 2009, two years after he was sacked from the MRI project, Tony Jones gained access to his file. The Manchester electrician said:
‘My family is riddled with debt and suffering. We had to do without food and clothing at times, no holidays. We were unable to ever apply for a mortgage and never knew why. We do now.’
Acheson, Trousdale and Winstanley would also get their hands on their own blacklisting files. Winstanley, from Liverpool, found his file had been opened in 1975 by an organization called the Economic League and ended in 2002. It has details on his heart bypass surgery. One entry describes him as an ‘old-style communist’.
The Guardian article was published on 28 June 2008 and Chamberlain moved on to the next job. A few days later he got a call from David Clancy at the Information Commissioner’s Office. The ICO is an independent authority set up by the government ‘to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals’.11 It has the power to investigate data breaches and take to court those found to be breaking the law. At the time Clancy was part of a small group of investigators, all with police, military or Customs and Excise background. There was a sign on their office door saying: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’. The Monday after the Guardian article was published, a member of the ICO staff dropped a copy on Clancy’s desk as something his team might be interested in looking at. Clancy spoke with Chamberlain and took details of the evidence he had collated. He then went to see Steve Acheson. The electrician recalled:
‘The day he turned up I had just received a letter turning me down for work. I told him he couldn’t have come at a better time. To be honest I didn’t think he would find much. I told him this but he said: “Once I get my teeth into something, I don’t let go”.’
Clancy then spoke to Alan Wainwright, now working in the music business and unable to get a job in human resources or construction. Wainwright had started as an electrician, then ran a recruitment agency before getting a job with Tarmac. In 1997, while National Labour Manager at Crown House, a division of Tarmac (later to be rebranded as Carillion) he had been introduced to Ian Kerr at the company’s Wolverhampton headquarters. Wainwright claims that the meeting was set up by HR manager Kevin Gorman, under instruction from the Group Personnel Director, Frank Duggan12. It transpired that Kerr was employed to carry out checks on staff to identify undesirable employees. Wainwright met Kerr twice and was told that many construction companies supplied him with information. Wainwright worked for Crown House, Drake and Scull and Haden Young and told Clancy he found the same system operating with Kerr at all three companies. And all three were subsequently found to have subscribed to The Consulting Association.
After raising concerns about fraud, but disillusioned with the company’s response, which denied the allegations, Wainwright left Haden Young in 2006. Before he did so, he wrote to its head office in 2005, saying: ‘The company operates a blacklisting procedure for new recruits and hired temporary agency workers to check for any previous history of union militancy, troublemaking.’13 He launched and lost an employment tribunal and became convinced that he too had been blacklisted. Wainwright’s suspicions were later proved to be correct and his blacklist file includes the evidence he gave to the Logic employment tribunal. He started a blog and posted the names of electricians supposedly blacklisted after working on the Jubilee Line Extension, which had been the scene of industrial unrest. But no-one seemed interested in his story.
Unknown to Clancy, Wainwright’s detailed evidence had actually been given to the government a whole 12 months earlier. The Department for Trade and Industry (DTI) had been contacted by Wainwright. Documents released to the authors under the Freedom of Information Act show that Wainwright met civil servant Bernard Carter from the DTI on 12 January 2007 at The Queens Hotel in Chester. The official note says:
‘Mr Wainwright explained that the lists of people to be refused employment were kept by third parties. In 1997, whilst working at Carillion, he [Wainwright] had met the person involved, Mr Iain [sic] Kerr. Mr Kerr was self-employed, but Mr Wainwright did not know his business’s name or its location. For a few months, he [Wainwright] was the main contact point between his part of Carillion and Mr Kerr, though that function was transferred after a few months to a senior person at Carillion’s head office.’
The memo records that Wainwright passed to the civil servants a list of names of Balfour Kilpatrick workers on three projects from the late 1990s and a set of internal memos within Haden Young ‘asking for a check to be carried out on individuals who had been identified by agencies for work as electricians and plumbers’.
A clue as to what the DTI did with Wainwright’s evidence can be gleaned from correspondence in 2009 obtained by the authors between his MP, David Hanson, and Pat McFadden, then the minister for employment relations. It discusses why the evidence was not acted upon. Dated 27 April 2009 – so more than a month after the ICO raid – McFadden reassured Hanson that Wainwright’s evidence ‘was considered carefully with the Department’ and indeed ‘was valuable and indicated that a vetting procedure of some kind had been operated’. However, and there is an almost audible sigh of Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey proportions, the letter then says that there were ‘important gaps’ in Wainwright’s knowledge, including the criteria used in the vetting process.
‘The Department possesses no investigatory powers to uncover fresh evidence in such situations and, in consequence, the Department could not take the matter forward at that time.’
It seemed that naming companies and individuals, as well as providing case studies, was not enough to warrant further action. Wainwright’s subsequent experience mirrors that of many whistleblowers and, indeed, of the blacklisted construction workers – lack of income, stress and demoralization. ‘It affects your relationship with your children, who are the most important thing in my life,’ said Wainwright.14
However, it wasn’t just the DTI that had been passed evidence of blacklisting. In 2007, Tony Jones, one of the claimants in the Logic Control tribunal, went to see his MP, Graham Brady, about the blacklisting he had suffered. It was the second time Jones had seen his MP about the issue. The first time had been around five years previously but, as Jones admitted, his evidence had then been limited. This time he had something more substantial. He had the tribunal’s findings and Wainwright’s statement. Subsequently the MP wrote to Harriet Harman, then minister of state in the Department for Constitutional Affairs, passing on the evidence and asking what response he could give to his constituent. Once again, Pat McFadden responded. Once again, the minister sympathized with the difficulties Jones had encountered. This time McFadden noted that the electrician had made use of an employment tribunal and so suggested the system of protection for workers was appropriate.
While one government department had not felt able to make use of the leads provided by the Logic Control case, Clancy saw that there were several firms worthy of further investigation. Following information from Wainwright, the ICO investigators turned their attention towards Haden Young. Using powers contained in the Data Protection Act, Clancy applied to the Crown Court for a warrant to effect an immediate search as he believed that giving a warning would mean evidence being spirited away. This power had never been used before in a case of this kind but a judge granted the search warrant and in September 2008 Haden Young’s offices were raided.
The warrant documentation specifically mentions the Wainwright evidence as being prima facie evidence of blacklisting. Since this legal action was breaking new ground for the ICO, it would not have included this information unless it was absolutely sure. Yet it remains substantially the same as that given to the government a year previously. In that time tens of thousands of names would have been checked against the blacklist by subscriber companies.
On entering Haden Young’s offices in Watford, the investigators quickly secured the fax number 01923 295109, which was the hub of the operation. They now needed to know where that led. After threatening British Telecom with a court order, the phone company disclosed to the ICO the name and address of Kerr and The Consulting Association. Now it was back to Manchester Crown Court for another search warrant and the Droitwich raid was on.
At this point Kerr knew nothing about the impending knock at his door, yet all the signs were there. One of the tasks he pursued assiduously was checking the radical press. He provided a clippings service for subscriber companies – described as ‘very useful’ by one former TCA chair. Mary Kerr recalled that her husband would spend a lot of his time reading the newspapers and magazines that TCA subscribed to. ‘He had a tremendous knowledge of current affairs. Everyone wanted him on their pub quiz team,’ she said.15
When Kerr read Chamberlain’s initial Guardian article, alarm bells rang, prompting the ever-cautious Kerr to take the precaution of temporarily removing all the documentation from TCA’s offices. The construction companies’ own media-monitoring services flagged up a concern but this did not lead to a decision to abort the operation. This is understandable since the blacklisting operation was compartmentalized within each company on a need-to-know basis. When Chamberlain contacted one firm, Skanska, after the raid for a comment there was genuine disbelief in the press office that it could be involved. It felt inimical to an organization with a headquarters in Sweden, a strong corporatist structure and so many public-sector contracts. It subsequently turned out, though, that Skanska was one of the largest users of The Consulting Association.
What is harder to fathom is why Kerr remained in the dark after the raid on Haden Young in September 2008. At any time a discreet phone call could have been made to him. It is quite clear that, had he known, Kerr would have immediately shut down his operation. This was a man who had his files taken off premises while he was on holiday, as well as after the initial Guardian story, so as to maintain security. Yet no word was passed to him, despite the fact that Haden Young was a regular contact. No-one has explained this lapse. Mary Kerr says that, when she later inquired why no-one warned Kerr, she received a solicitor’s letter asking her to desist in her questioning. Failing to act on the warning signs was to prove catastrophic from Kerr’s perspective.
In March 2009, the ICO issued a press release announcing it had seized the covert database of construction industry workers. Deputy information commissioner David Smith was quoted saying: ‘Not only was personal information held on individuals without their knowledge or consent but the very existence of the database was repeatedly denied.’ As we have seen, those denials extended to the government but the raid led by Clancy had blown the covert operation wide open. The Guardian had been tipped off several days previously by the ICO as an exclusive and Chamberlain and experienced investigative journalist Rob Evans began piecing together the background. Kerr was tracked down but would only say that it was legitimate for companies to check on who they employed. ‘There was nothing sinister about it. It was bona fide,’ he said.
The files, though, said differently. The ICO revealed only a small selection and each had a name, date of birth and National Insurance number. They included phrases such as ‘will cause trouble, strong TU [trade union]’. Another was referred to as ‘UCATT... very bad news’. A TGWU member was described as ‘a sleeper and should be watched’. Other descriptions were ‘ex-shop steward, definite problems’ and ‘Irish ex-Army, bad egg’. While it was claimed that the system was meant to identify people who could threaten companies because they stole items or had poor workmanship, the files suggested that being a union activist was the overwhelming criterion for inclusion. If there was nothing underhand about the way it operated then why was there a regular exhortation in the files that the source of information not be disclosed? Those sources were hidden behind a series of code numbers as well as by the initials of people. Kerr readily co-operated with the ICO in explaining that each number referred to a particular company. He also handed over the financial records to show who subscribed and how much they were invoiced for the checking of names.
The ICO identified 43 companies which, throughout the TCA’s lifetime, had paid a subscription fee to become a member (£3,000 a year in 2009). Each name check cost £2.20. As one example, between October 1999 and April 2004 Carillion paid TCA £32,393 + VAT for its vetting service. That equates to checks on an estimated 14,724 people. The 43 companies are listed in an annex at the end of the book. This was a roll call of the biggest (and not so big) names in the business. The accounts showed that £478,000 passed through the small office between 2004 and March 2009.
Deputy Information Commissioner David Smith toured the media from morning until evening on the day the story broke. In an interview for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he added an important detail, saying: ‘There are some indications that those who raised genuine safety concerns may have been prejudiced by this database.’16 In an industry where an average of one person a week was dying because of an accident, this caused particular outrage. UCATT general secretary Alan Ritchie told the Today programme:
‘UCATT members have been working to reduce deaths and injuries on sites and trying to work with companies to achieve these aims. We now know that those same companies have connived to dismiss them and block their future employment.’
He didn’t know it at the time, but Ritchie also had a blacklist file from his time working in the Upper Clyde Shipyards that also included information about his campaigning work for the Anti-Apartheid Movement. So far the media was working only from the select information released by the ICO on what the files contained. The organization then announced that it would operate an enquiry system so those who believed they might be on the list could find out and, if so, get hold of their files. From then on the information couldn’t be parcelled out by the ICO but could make its way into the public domain. Few realized at the time that this move would blow the scandal wide open and start to suck in all sorts of organizations and individuals.
Some of those who did realize the implications were the people closest to the blacklisting operation. Mary Kerr recalls her husband going down to the paper shop on the day the story broke to buy all the newspapers, aware that it was coming out. He took notes on the media coverage and hunted for a solicitor while outside his house journalists waited. David Cochrane and Alan Audley, respectively the chair and vice-chair of TCA, called him to discuss the situation. That evening the Kerrs left to spend the next few weeks at a relative’s house and avoid media attention.
Weeks earlier, on the day of the raid, Mary had been at home laid up with a broken leg following a skiing accident. Ian had only taken the files back into the office three days before Clancy came calling. Kerr called David Cochrane who was the head of human resources at Sir Robert McAlpine as well as TCA chairman. The construction firm’s legal advisors confirmed the ICO raid was legal. Discussions started on how to minimize the fall-out for the prestigious building firm with its network of political and financial links. The authors have seen Kerr’s notes of phone conversations he had with Cochrane from this period. These suggest that Cochrane’s principal aim was to keep the name of the firm’s director, Cullum McAlpine, out of any publicity and it was suggested that Kerr could benefit if discretion was maintained.
After the ICO had returned copies of the documents they had seized, Ian Kerr arranged for his brother-in-law to bring his large horsebox up to the TCA premises at night. Any unseized material from the office was loaded into it. The photocopier and some of the furniture was donated to a charity shop. The files were taken to his brother-in-law’s property and a large bonfire was built. Afterwards they had to search around for all the paperclips to ensure the horses didn’t eat them.
Now it was a case of waiting for the judicial process to work its way through. Kerr pleaded guilty through his solicitor before magistrates in Macclesfield to breaking data-protection laws. Magistrates were unimpressed by Kerr’s absence at the court hearing and the limited information they were offered on how The Consulting Association was organized. Kerr had not wanted to reveal any more unless he was forced to. His solicitor tried to ring him to get that detail but he was showing his son around a prospective university and had his phone switched off. The magistrates described their sentencing powers as ‘wholly inadequate’ and referred the case to the Crown Court.
Weeks later, when Kerr appeared before Knutsford Crown Court, there was anticipation that he would be hit with a fine running into the tens of thousands. In court, sitting quietly in the public seats, was a representative from McAlpine. Nearby were Kerr’s daughters and wife. The gallery was filled with angry protesters. When they asked Kerr’s daughters what they were doing there, they said they were law students. They sat and listened while protesters and journalists took bets on the size of Kerr’s sentence. To the surprise of all, and the disgust of many, Kerr was fined £5,000 with £1,187.20 in costs. Kerr told the court that although he had earned an annual salary of £47,500, he was now unemployed and had minimal savings. He didn’t say that he had been advised not to start taking his generous pension package and therefore, as far as the court was concerned, it could only fine him on the basis of his disclosed income.
After 30 years working covertly to build a picture of perceived troublemakers in industry, Kerr was desperate not to have his picture taken. He came out of the court from a side exit and put up an umbrella to hide his face from a photographer who had climbed on to a wall. With one of his daughters driving, a second daughter and his wife in the back, he kept his head hidden under a newspaper. Outside, dozens of blacklisted workers had been waiting all morning. For so long, they had been unable to point the finger at one person and say that it was him who had stopped them from working and Kerr was suddenly thrust into that role. His daughter edged their car out, her hand permanently on the horn. The car collided with blacklisted scaffolder Mick Abbott. The banging on the vehicle caused Kerr to look up momentarily and he was snapped by a photographer. It was clear that he would not be able to stay in the shadows.
Following this case the ICO issued enforcement notices against 14 companies which had subscribed to The Consulting Association. The companies were: Balfour Beatty Civil Engineering, Balfour Beatty Construction Northern Ireland, Balfour Beatty Construction Scottish & Southern Ltd, Balfour Beatty Engineering Services (HY) Ltd, Balfour Beatty Engineering Services Ltd, Balfour Beatty Infrastructure Services Ltd, CB&I UK Ltd, Emcor Engineering Services Ltd, Emcor Rail Ltd, Kier Ltd, NG Bailey Ltd, Shepherd Engineering Services Ltd, SIAS Building Services Ltd and Whessoe Oil & Gas Ltd.17 Essentially these are warnings against their future handling of personal data. Deputy information commissioner David Smith said:
‘We have used the maximum powers available to us and this enforcement action sends a strong signal that organizations must take the Data Protection Act seriously.’18
In private there was a feeling within the ICO that the case demonstrated that the regulations lacked teeth. The companies named responded with some shows of contrition but generally also with a steadfast refusal to admit any significant wrongdoing. In public, an employment law professor commissioned by UCATT to write a report on the issue questioned the small number of enforcement notices adding: “the list does not include some of the heaviest users, including McAlpine and Skanska, for reasons that are not revealed… this does not seem an adequate response.”19
Meanwhile a pattern began to emerge of official resistance to releasing information which might implicate anyone with links to TCA. Responding to Freedom of Information requests from the authors, various police forces refused to confirm or deny that they held any information on either The Consulting Association or Ian Kerr. Quickly all those people and organizations which might have knowledge of Ian Kerr began to row back from any association.
The Knutsford hearing did confirm several details about Kerr and The Consulting Association. His solicitor admitted that Kerr had worked for a previous blacklisting organization called the Economic League and that, when that folded, The Consulting Association had been set up by construction firms to continue its secret vetting work. Kerr was paid to run the organization, which was not registered as a company but was described by his solicitor as an ‘unincorporated trade association’ – a meaningless term. So, although much remained a mystery, the process of breaking apart the conspiracy was under way.
By November 2009 some 230 files had been disclosed by the ICO and that started to produce a body of evidence for campaigners to look into. An analysis by the ICO estimated that over three-quarters of the files concerned trade unionists and activities associated with trade unions. Professor Keith Ewing, from the Institute of Employment Rights, studied a number of files after he was commissioned by the building union UCATT to write a report on the issue. ‘I was deeply offended at the amount of intimate and personal detail so meticulously gathered,’ he said. ‘At the same time some of the files were hopelessly inconsistent.’
Inconsistent they may have been, but the effect they had had on individuals was clear. Vic Heath, former union convenor at the Barbican, was one of those with a file. He said:
‘I couldn’t get a job anywhere in the London area. I’d phoned a number of companies that were advertising for scaffolders in different parts of the country and on every single occasion they’d take my name, hang on a minute or something like that, come back and say no. Several jobs I’d be on for maybe a day and I’d be paid off, and they’d never give you a reason. That went on for a long time.’
The wife of bricklayer John Jones told the authors:
‘Things were really bad for us, around the Eighties. It was impossible for him to get a job, absolutely impossible. Soul destroying. Difficult for me with the three kids, I ended up having to go back to work.’
Vic Williams’ marriage didn’t survive the blacklist which had affected him for decades.
‘At the time, in 1985, it was commonplace for people to be able to buy their own homes but I was never in a position to be able to do that. It affected the old marriage. Eventually that ended in divorce. Obviously when you can’t earn any dough that has an impact and the missus don’t like that sometimes. I’ve had a bit of heart trouble. There has never been any heart trouble in my family. My old man and all the family are all in their eighties and nineties but I’ve got the cholesterol thing and that can be built up by stress – I had to have a stent put in, I’m on statins. All my brothers and sisters didn’t have any heart trouble. You ain’t never gonna prove that in a court of law but they are factors. I’m not going to cry in my soup, but it’s worth a mention.’
Some of the files contained information that was bordering on the ridiculous; one file describes how a union activist organized a petition against homelessness, while others uncover equally serious malpractice:
very bad news – Buddhist
talks like a young Alf Garnett
wears Anti Nazi League badges and insignia and is suspected of being a supporter
For decades, blacklisted workers had been fighting to expose the conspiracy. Union conferences had debated the issue, while rank-and-file activists had campaigned outside building sites. Following the discovery of the files, the workers felt vindicated but also frustrated that, after the initial media splash, the story had vanished from public view. Many of them contacted their MP and on 21 July 2009, John McDonnell MP chaired a meeting for workers who had received copies of their blacklist files in the House of Commons. They established the Blacklist Support Group (BSG) for workers on The Consulting Association blacklist in order to disseminate useful information and ensure that the voice of those actually blacklisted was heard. Immediately Hazards magazine, which was respected for its coverage of health-and-safety issues, agreed to run an online blog and lawyers came forward to provide legal assistance.
McDonnell told an early Blacklist Support Group meeting that he wanted to see a public inquiry into what he described as ‘one of the worst cases of organized human rights abuses in the UK ever’. Over the next five years, BSG campaigning would drag the blacklisting conspiracy centre stage. Blacklisted workers linked up with investigative journalists, trade unions, lawyers, academics, politicians and human rights activists. Far from going away, the scandal would lead to debates in parliament, a Select Committee investigation, prime-time TV documentaries, ground-breaking legal actions and historic industrial disputes. That was in the future – first the campaigners needed to delve back into the past to work out how they ended up with such an iniquitous yet widespread system.