Reed took £1,786 football tickets from water company owners

Croydon’s longest-serving MP, Steve Reed OBE, is the latest cabinet member to be named in the mounting scandal around the new Labour government’s apparent endless capacity for accepting gifts and freebies from big-money donors, industry interests and lobbyists.

Reed, now the MP for Streatham and Croydon North, has been accused of being “wined and dined by the very family of firms he must now take to task”.

Reed was Labour’s shadow environment spokesperson in December 2023 when he attended the Chelsea v Crystal Palace football match with the prawn sandwich brigade at Stamford Bridge, all paid for by Hutchison 3G UK Ltd, a subsidiary of CK Hutchison Holdings.

“CK Hutchison Holdings owns 75% of Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings, the owner of Northumbrian Water,” the Daily Torygraph reports today.

Northumbrian Water spilt sewage into England’s waterways for 280,000 hours in 2023.

Reed enjoyed tickets and hospitality valued at £1,786. All have been properly declared and recorded in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Reed attended the football match at the same time he was publicly calling for tighter controls on the water industry, to force utlity companies to clean up their acts and stop pumping millions of gallons of raw sewage into our rivers and streams, lakes and on to our coastlines.

“That Steve Reed, then the shadow secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, accepted hospitality from a water company owner is extremely disappointing,” Ed Acteson, co-founder of the anti-sewage group SOS Whitstable, was quoted as saying in the Torygraph.

“Frankly, it is the latest question mark over an industry riddled with double standards and conflicts of interest.

“Mere weeks after attending this event, he was pledging to put water bosses ‘in the dock’ for illegal releases.

“How are we supposed to believe those words carried any sincerity when, at the same time, he was receiving blatantly inappropriate hospitality of this nature?”

Reed has said he will crack down on the water industry, but not by nationalising the privatised monopoly suppliers, but by blocking director bonuses and introducing criminal charges for blocking investigations, reforms that have been criticised by campaigners as inadequate.

A spokesperson for DEFRA said that, “Steve has taken the toughest action against water companies of any minister in decades”, although that’s hardly much of a claim.

There’s a growing stench around Keir Starmer and his team’s capacity for gobbling up freebies.

It is not known whether Reed wore his new, top-of-the-range country wellies when he strolled along the King’s Road to the Premier League football match last winter – though his boots were reportedly a gift, too.

Zarah Sultana, the MP who has been suspended by Labour for voting for the removal of the two-child benefit cap, last night flagged up the increasing conflicts of interest between Starmer’s government and big business. “Google provided £10,000 of hospitality to senior Labour figures and the party ditched plans to raise the Digital Services Tax,” Sultana tweeted.

“Quadrature, a Cayman Islands hedge fund which invests in fossil fuels donated £4million and [Labour’s] climate advisory board co-chair is now climate envoy.

“It stinks.”

Scott Ainslie, the Green councillor in Lambeth who was his party’s General Election candidate against Reed in Streatham and Croydon North in July, said, “I stood against him in the election and I’m a Crystal Palace fan. I came second.

“To be honest, I can’t really afford to go to see matches. I follow them on the telly. I was offered a suit, maybe because people felt I was too unkempt as an MP candidate. I didn’t accept. Just saying.”

And Cat Hobbs, of the campaign group We Own It, who want utilities re-nationalised, reacted to the Reed news report by writing, “Government is ignoring 8-in-10 of us who want public ownership to clean up our rivers and seas.

“Government spokesperson wants you to think they’ll be tough on bosses’ bonuses.

“Don’t be fooled. This is irrelevant.”

FREE ADS: Paid-up subscribers to Inside Croydon qualify for a free ad for their business, residents’ association or community group, just one of the benefits of being part of our online community. For more information about being an iC subscriber, click here for our Patreon page

PAID ADS: To advertise your services or products to our near 10,000 weekday visitors to the site, which is featured on Google News Showcase and followed by 16,000 on Twitter/X, email us inside.croydon@btinternet.com for our unbeatable ad rates

Inside Croydon – If you want real journalism, delivering real news, from a publication that is actually based in the borough, please consider paying for it. Sign up today: click here for more details

If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com

As featured on Google News Showcase

We offer FREE ads to community groups when they have members who are paid subscribers to Inside Croydon

Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here

Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network

Inside Croydon works together with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, as well as BBC London News and ITV London