Stephen Byers

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Stephen John Byers (born April 13, 1953) is a British politician. He is the Labour Member of Parliament for Tyneside North and is a former cabinet minister.

Contents 1 Early career 2 Minister 3 Railtrack 4 Political troubles 5 Alleged misfeasance in public office 6 MG Rover 7 Footnotes 8 External links

[edit] Early career

Stephen Byers was born in Wolverhampton. He was educated at the fee paying Wymondham College, the City of Chester Grammar School and the Chester College of Further Education, gained a law degree at Liverpool Polytechnic and became a law lecturer at the Newcastle Poytechnic from 1997 until his election to parliament.

He was elected as a councillor to the North Tyneside District Council in 1980, and was its deputy leader from 1985 until he became an MP in 1992. He contested the safely Conservative seat of Hexham at the 1983 General Election where he finished in third place and some 14,000 votes behind the former Cabinet minister Geoffrey Rippon. He was first elected to Parliament at the 1992 General Election for the safe Wallsend seat following the retirement of Ted Garrett, he secured a majority of 19,470.

In 1993 he joined the influential Home Affairs Select Committee. He became an ally of Tony Blair, a fellow north-eastern Labour MP who was also a supporter of modernising the Labour Party. Blair had given him a job as soon as he became the Leader of the Opposition, and placed him in the Whips Office. He became a spokesman on Education and Employment in 1995, and he became something of an "outrider" for the New Labour project, regularly floating radical ideas on Blair's behalf to test reaction, such as when he briefed journalists in 1996 that the party might sever its links with the trade unions. Byers was swiftly appointed to Shadow ministerial posts and became the Minister for School Standards with the rank the title of Minister of State at the Department of Education and Employment following the victorious 1997 General Election. It is also worth noting that his Wallsend constituency had been abolished and he was elected for the equally safe Tyneside North and had a staggering 26,643 vote majority in 1997.

[edit] Minister

He entered the Cabinet in July 1998 as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and became a Member of the Privy Council. After the sudden resignation of Peter Mandelson, Byers was appointed as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in December 1998. After the 2001 General Election he was made Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government & the Regions, a move that was widely regarded as a demotion. His time in this job turned out to be highly controversial. Critics argued that Transport should be a job in its own right from the outset. The move to transport was to be the last of his Ministerial career.

[edit] Railtrack

The first source of controversy was the decision, taken at short notice and implemented over a weekend, to ask the High Court to put the privatised railway infrastructure company Railtrack into administration (October 7, 2001), leading to the creation of Network Rail - effectively renationalisation of Britain's railway infrastructure company. Although the UK Office for National Statistics insists that it is correct to have classified Network Rail as in the private sector, in Parliament on October 24 2005, Byers said that he made "no apology for [his decision to apply for the administration order] and for unwinding the Tory privatisation that was Railtrack".

Byers' decision angered private investors who had lost money, and under pressure from The City, the government eventually had to offer compensation terms. It also led to the largest class legal action ever seen in the British courts.

[edit] Political troubles

At almost the same time, it was revealed that Byers' political adviser Jo Moore had sent an email on September 11, 2001 suggesting that the terrorist attacks made it "a very good day to get out anything we want to bury." Moore (and Byers) survived the resulting outrage, but in February 2002 the row broke out again. A leaked email from the Department of Transport's head of news Martin Sixsmith, a former BBC news reporter, seemed to warn Moore not to "bury" any more bad news on the day of Princess Margaret's funeral, implying that she was attempting to do so. On February 15 it was announced that both Moore and Sixsmith had resigned, but Sixsmith later said he had not agreed to go, and that Byers had insisted on Sixsmith's departure as the price for losing Moore. In May it was confirmed by the Department that Byers had announced Sixsmith's resignation prematurely, though the Government said that this was due to a misunderstanding, and he had done nothing wrong.

Byers' troubles continued over the following months. The Labour-dominated House of Commons Transport Select Committee criticised the party's transport strategy, and a long-running row over Byers' decision as Trade Secretary to allow pornographic-magazine publisher Richard Desmond to buy the Daily Express newspaper returned to the limelight. The pressure on Byers was too much, and he resigned on May 28, 2002. In the reshuffle that followed his resignation the post was split up with local government and the regions becoming a part of the remit of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Transport portfolio retained by a full time Secretary of State for Transport.

On the backbenches Byers has kept up pressure for the Labour Party to keep to the right. In August 2006, for example, he controversially suggested that Labour heir-apparent Gordon Brown should scrap inheritance tax in order to prove his "New Labour" credentials to Middle England. This suggestion was widely criticised by many MPs, who claimed that the publicity surrounding Byers' plan would "frighten constituents in the high-priced south into believing they would have to pay death duties, when most won't". In reality only 37,000 estates were liable for the tax out of 600,000 deaths in 2005, and Labour had already announced plans to increase the lower threshold for paying the tax from £285,000 to £325,000 in 2007.^[1]

[edit] Alleged misfeasance in public office

The legality of the decision to put Railtrack into administration was challenged by the individual shareholders who launched legal action alleging that Byers had committed the common law offence of misfeasance in public office. This was the largest class action ever conducted in the English courts, brought by 49,500 small shareholders in Railtrack. Keith Rowley, QC, the barrister for the shareholders, alleged Byers had "devised a scheme by which he intended to injure the shareholders of Railtrack Group by impairing the value of their interests in that company without paying compensation and without the approval of Parliament". The case was heard in the High Court in July 2005; some embarrassment was caused to Byers when he admitted that an answer he had given to a House of Commons Select Committee was inaccurate.

However the Judge found on October 14, 2005 that there was no evidence that Byers had committed the tort of misfeasance in public office. This would have required the shareholders to establish that Byers had been motivated by a deliberate desire to injure them, and the Judge found that his motive was to improve railway organisation. Byers asserted that he had been entirely vindicated by the judgment, but the reality was that the judge had only found that there was no evidence of malice on Byers' part.

The case had also led to the public disclosure of thousands of documents and communications from within government - including confidential minutes of meetings with the prime minister and the chancellor of the exchequer - which would not otherwise have seen the light of day. The public and City criticism which their disclosure generated was highly damaging to the reputation of the British government for fair and honest dealings with its citizens.

The circumstances in which Railtrack had been put into administration were highly controversial, with allegations in Parliament on October 24, 2005 that the company had not been insolvent at the time and so the administration order had been wrongly obtained. This was because of the jurisdiction of the independent rail regulator to provide additional money to maintain the company's financial position. Alan Duncan MP, then the shadow transport secretary, said in Parliament that this aspect of the affair - which was not dealt with in the shareholders' case in the High Court - was "perhaps the most shameful scar on the Government's honesty" and "an absolute scandal". In November 2006, the business section of the Sunday Express reported that Geoffrey Weir, the lead shareholder in the misfeasance case, had asked the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration to investigate whether there was maladministration on the part of civil servants at the Department for Transport when the administration order was sought. The basis of his complaint appears to be an alleged failure on the part of officials at the Department for Transport to disclose all relevant facts to the judge who was asked to make the order. The newspaper reported that the Parliamentary Commissioner had opened a file and the investigation was getting under way. How far this new line of challenge will get remains to be seen.

Byers apologised in the House of Commons on October 17, 2005 for having given a "factually inaccurate" reply to the Select Committee but said that he had not intended to mislead them. This personal statement to Parliament was not accepted by the MP who had asked the original question, and the matter was remitted to the House of Commons Standards and Privileges Committee for investigation. As a result of that committee's report, Mr Byers made another statement of apology to Parliament.

[edit] MG Rover

Byers has also been heavily criticised for his part in the collapse of the MG Rover Group. Byers, as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, advocated the 2000 deal^[2] with the Phoenix Consortium which formed the group. Although this deal ensured the survival of the group for five years it ultimately collapsed at extensive cost to the UK tax payer and with large profits to the Phoenix Consortium.^[3] Byers answered this criticism in his submission to the Trade and Industry committee,^[4] stating that his actions had largely been in line with government policy and that the long slow collapse of MG Rover Group had been preferable to a short sudden collapse.

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] External links

• ePolitix - Stephen Byers official site
• Guardian Unlimited Politics - Ask Aristotle: Stephen Byers MP
• BBC News report on Stephen Byer's sacking from the UK Government by Tony Blair
• TheyWorkForYou.com - Stephen Byers MP
• Byers admits lying over Railtrack - BBC, 14 July 2005

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Ted Garrett	Member of Parliament for Wallsend 1992–1997	Succeeded by (constituency abolished)
Preceded by (new constituency)	Member of Parliament for Tyneside North 1997 – present	Incumbent
Political offices
Preceded by Alistair Darling	Chief Secretary to the Treasury 1998	Succeeded by Alan Milburn
Preceded by Peter Mandelson	Secretary of State for Trade and Industry 1998–2001	Succeeded by Patricia Hewitt
Preceded by: The Lord Macdonald of Tradeston Min. State Transport	Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions 2001–2002	Succeeded by: John Prescott Deputy Prime Minister
		Succeeded by: Alistair Darling Sec. State Transport