Key ministerial meeting data for Labour cabinet member Steve Reed is currently missing from the government’s transparency register. The missing information concerns three month’s worth of meetings between January and March 2025, that the Streatham and Croydon North MP held with external organisations and individuals while acting Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
The department has now been aware of the missing data for two months. To date however, it has failed to publish the details of these meetings. Of course, in the context of revelations over Reed’s shenanigans as previous director of shady think tank Labour Together – it also raises some potentially troubling questions as well.
Steve Reed’s mysterious missing ministerial meetings
The Canary first noticed that Defra was lacking any ministerial meeting entries for the environment secretary towards the end of July. We originally contacted the department to query the missing data on discovering this. However, after the department failed to respond for over four weeks, we followed this up again at the end of August. At this point, Defra told us it had purportedly never received our original email. This was alongside two Freedom of Information (FOI) requests the Canary submitted to the department within a day of this query – both of which Defra claimed it had also never received.
The delay meant that the Canary only heard back from the department on 23 September. This was within 20 working days of reissuing the query, that Defra interpreted as a FOI request.
In this, the Canary pointed Defra to at least two departmental press releases detailing meetings Reed had attended with external organisations during the reporting period. The email highlighting this also questioned why this information was absent from Defra’s register.
In its response to the Canary’s query on 23 September, the department put the missing entries down to an “administrative error”.
Defra did not disclose the data to the Canary because it explained that it would be updating the register “imminently”. Evidently, the Canary has a very different perception of the word “imminently”. Because, at the time of writing, almost three months later, this information is still not available to the public.
Curious omission…
But of course, it’s one of those conveniently ambiguous “how long is a piece of string” terms. Defra could easily claim in data transparency time-scales, four weeks is in fact rather ‘imminent’. Nevertheless, the point is still that we’re nearly at the end of October and the department has failed to publish the transparency data. Notably, this was originally due for publication at the end of June. In short, the information is nearly four months late. Moreover, it has (verifiably) known about its absence for nearly two of those months.
The Canary contacted Defra, but the department refused to comment.
The ministerial data’s curious and continued omission is enough to make you wonder if there just might be something among those entries the former environment secretary and now housing sec may not want the rest of us to see.
Of course, while the Canary (currently) has no evidence to prove any impropriety on the part of the former Secretary of State in this instance, it’s hard not to note the parallels with a certain organisation Reed was also front and centre of, namely, the controversial Labour Together.
‘Admin error’: now where have we heard that before?
The think tank knows a thing or two about purported ‘admin errors’. Just ask Reed’s fellow former Labour Together director and current chief of staff to the prime minister, Morgan McSweeney. In 2021, the Electoral Commission fined the think tank over £14k in undeclared donations. Naturally, the think tank had put this breach down to an “admin error”.
Dogged investigation by journalist Paul Holden has cast extreme doubt on this. In his new book The Fraud, Holden lays out a swathe of evidence that points to the genuine possibility that the “admin error” was nothing of the sort. In a detailed timeline of events, Holden shows how with precedent – specifically, the think tanks “appetite for misdirection and subterfuge” – the evidence could:
just as plausibly give rise to the suspicion that McSweeney’s failure to report donations was intentional.
And let’s not forget Reed was co-director at the time of this electoral law breach.
Missing data, hacked data: not Reed’s first rodeo
As it happens, we also know, once again thanks to Holden, that Reed has previous for potential data criminality. Reed had the editor of independent local news site, Inside Croydon, in his sights for holding his political allies in local government to account. As Holden’s book noted, Inside Croydon revealed how the council had become “so dysfunctional” under its Labour Party leadership that it had required a:
£120m bailout to remain afloat after declaring bankruptcy in 2020.
It was amid this context that an anonymous individual hacked Inside Croydon’s news site to identify informants. As the outlet has since reported on Holden’s revelations:
This stolen information was then used to launch Labour Party disciplinary proceedings against the site’s sources. All of this was known to some of the most powerful people in the Labour Party bureaucracy — General Secretary David Evans and Alex Barros-Curtis [the party’s executive director of legal affairs; since 2024, a Labour MP] most notably — who were copied in, allegedly with the approval of Steve Reed.
So, Reed certainly has form on rule-breaking to eschew public scrutiny.
Something to hide?
What could the Croydon MP possibly have to hide?
Meetings with fishing lobby figures to mothball a full bottom trawling ban in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs)? Kicking back with water company cronies to discuss their united front against water renationalisation?
If the Canary had to hazard a guess, it seems very likely it could have something to do with Labour’s weak response to the profiteering water suppliers. That would be the privatised water racket ripping off the public, spewing sewage into waterways, and operating an all-round shoddy service. Labour’s flagship ‘bonus ban’ hasn’t stopped companies dishing out eye-watering pay packets to its fat cat executives. Who’d have guessed?
Incidentally, Inside Croydon has continued holding the unscrupulous cabinet secretary to account in his government roles. Because funnily enough, the outlet found in November 2024 that Reed hadn’t been taking minutes at a number of his meetings with the water industry. Go figure. In other words, the public has no way of knowing what Reed and water company lobbyists were talking about. This is the same Reed who last year enjoyed £1,786 football tickets courtesy of the parent company of Northumbrian Water. We’re sure this has nothing to do with any of this.
Obviously, we can only really speculate about reasons for this transparency data “admin error”. However, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that there are meetings this government would rather the public didn’t know about. Once the data goes live, it certainly does warrant extra scrutiny. And that’s not least because – this is accountability-dodging Labour right miscreant Steve Reed we’re talking about after all.
If we’re wrong, then let’s see the information on the missing meetings. Otherwise, what can we do but speculate?
The Canary contacted Steve Reed for comment, but his office had not responded by the time of publication.
Featured image via the Canary.
This post was originally published on Canary.