In each of the 438 quangos described in Part 2, someone decides who sits on the boards, who chairs the committees, and who approves the contracts. Look closely at who those people are and a pattern becomes visible. The same names rotate between the bodies that spend public money and the companies that receive it.
Beth West was HS2’s commercial director from 2012 to 2017, overseeing the procurement framework that determined which contractors received billions in public money. After leaving, she joined Balfour Beatty, one of the contractors that had won under her framework, as Managing Director of its southern construction division. Eight weeks after she arrived, the contract value approximately doubled to £5 billion. Later, she became chief executive of East West Railway Company, another Department for Transport-sponsored body with authority over billions in future rail procurement. No regulator reviewed any of these moves. She has never been named in Parliament.
Cathryn Ross was chief executive of Ofwat, the regulator that sets water company prices and oversees their financial performance. Under its watch, companies paid out billions in dividends while sewage infrastructure went unimproved, and between 2019 and 2023 discharged 12.7 million monitored hours of untreated sewage into English waterways. Ross left in 2018 and joined Thames Water, the company she had been regulating, eventually becoming its interim co-chief executive. At least 27 former Ofwat directors, managers, and consultants have been identified working in the water industry they helped regulate. Fewer than one-third of 63 regulatory bodies surveyed by the Committee on Standards in Public Life had a policy on staff movement into the sector they regulate. Fewer still had a policy on hiring from it. The body supposed to police this, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) vetted job moves by former ministers and senior civil servants and advised whether they posed a conflict of interest. It could not block anything. It had no legal powers and no sanctions. It has been abolished. Its replacements have inherited no new powers and no sanctions either. The revolving door has been spinning for decades. No government that has held the power to change this has used it. The cases above are sequential. Someone leaves one role, waits, and joins another. The more structural version does not require movement at all.
Lord Allen of Kensington chairs Balfour Beatty, recipient of approximately £5 billion in HS2 contracts, while simultaneously sitting in the House of Lords voting on transport legislation.
Anne Baldock serves as a non-executive director of Kier Group, which earns over ninety per cent of its revenue from public sector clients and holds around £2.4 billion in HS2 receipts, while simultaneously serving as Senior Independent Director of East West Railway Company, a Department for Transport arm’s-length body delivering publicly funded rail infrastructure.
These individuals do not rotate between the two sides. They occupy both simultaneously, and there is no register of those overlaps, no conflict-of-interest requirement that would prevent them, and no mechanism by which Parliament can see how many such arrangements exist. This is not a handful of isolated coincidences. It is a structural blind spot. Across Britain’s quango state, hundreds of individuals hold multiple public appointments at once, and there is no central register showing how many also sit in firms that bid for, advise on, or benefit from public contracts. Parliament does not see the full map because no official map exists. That matters, because without one you cannot tell whether conflicts of interest are exceptional failures or a routine feature of how the system is staffed. The system that was supposed to govern this covered ministers and senior civil servants. It did not cover the executives of arm’s-length bodies. Mark Thurston faced no ACOBA scrutiny when he moved to Anglian Water. Beth West appears in no ACOBA record. The watchdog that was supposed to stop the revolving door could not see the people actually going through it.
To be continued —————————–
© DJM 2026
