Ian Harvey reveals just how easy it was to borrow 100 times his austerity-hit borough’s budget to invest in property
Ian Harvey cannot help but chuckle when recalling how easy it was to borrow £385m from the Public Works Loans Board to buy BP’s vast Sunbury-on-Thames research centre soon after he became Conservative leader of Spelthorne borough council, Surrey, in 2016. “I found it laughably easy, to be honest with you,” he said. “There was no real control over it. I’m told it was pretty much a phone call. It took about three days.”
Harvey, who was ousted as leader of the council in the summer, went on to borrow millions more from the PWLB, a Treasury agency, to purchase seven other commercial buildings, including £170m on an office in west London and £285m on three offices in the Thames valley. By the end of his four-year reign, the council had borrowed £1.1bn – about 100 times Spelthorne’s core spending power of £11m. “There were other local authorities that did small-scale things before us, but BP broke the mould because it was so much bigger than anything else,” he said.
