BY PAUL T HORGAN
What seems to surprise many about the fall from office of Louise Haigh is, if her own account is to be respected, how quickly the police got on her case after she discovered that she hadn’t lost her company-supplied smartphone in a street robbery, and then switched it on after she found it in her dwelling.
There may be a very simple explanation for this.
The company that employed Haigh was Aviva. Aviva is an insurance company. Their business model involves making a profit by ensuring that the payouts when customers make a claim for a loss insured by the company do not exceed the premiums that customers pay for the insurance policies.
I think you can see where this is all heading.
Rather than needing to call in external professionals, Aviva would already have on hand detailed industry knowledge about how to manage the loss by employees of company property. Part of the company would very likely include a team of investigators who would surely be extremely well-versed in the techniques of determining when there was a risk of insurance fraud and how to detect it.
Some reports suggest that the lost phone wasn’t the first company device Haigh had claimed had gone missing, and that her motivation was so that she would get the latest model of the phone as a replacement. Smartphones are regularly updated, and owning the latest version of smartphone is for some reason seen as a social cachet, if the advertising is to be uncritically accepted. However Haigh’s form on this matter has yet to be confirmed by Aviva, and probably never will be. It is reasonable to give her the benefit of the doubt in the absence of further verifiable information.
It would, however, look rather bad for a major insurance company to somehow allow the the loss of its own expensive electronic devices without applying its native industry expertise to reduce or explain the rate at which items were lost. If the employees of a major insurance company were getting away willy-nilly with dodgy claims of loss of company property, this could suggest to outside observers that the firm was a soft touch, and the shareholders may start to wonder if their investment money would obtain better returns elsewhere. Financial services companies do trade on reputations of robustness, and losing this could be expensive.
So the Haigh Case had some of the hallmarks of insurance fraud. Aviva knew exactly what to do about that. So it should be no surprise that, when she was found out, Aviva came down on Haigh like a ton of bricks.
There’s also the interesting question over the legal advice on which Haigh relied on to say “no comment” to any question posed by the police. If, as she asserts, she made a simple mistake and had just forgotten where in her dwelling she had left her company-supplied phone that she used every single working day up to the moment she claimed she had lost it, then it does not seem logical to refuse to answer police questions. Her assertion is that it was all a simple misunderstanding; she is making a plea of incompetence. It was not, she states, avarice that motivated her to claim she had lost the phone, but simple human error. During the trauma of being mugged on the streets of London, she had forgotten that she had placed her work phone in or on a piece of furniture that she apparently otherwise rarely used or looked at. She failed to provide what seems to be this reasonable explanation when she should have done so.
So her real mistake may have been to not report her discovery of a phone she declared lost at the earliest possible opportunity. But that does not seem to be a criminal offence. Refusing to answer when questioned by police seems to have harmed her defence in court when she presented evidence on which she was relying. So her second mistake seems to have been her choice of solicitor.
If, as she states, she just switched the phone on, sending out a locatable signal that the phone had not been shipped overseas, broken down for parts, or had its unique (International Mobile Equipment Identity, or IMEI) device number altered, then not telling anyone about it does not seem serious enough to get Regan and Carter into the Cortina. It may be serious enough for an insurance company that is mounting an investigation to initiate disciplinary action against a rogue employee and then to refer the matter to the police, but the issue here is not any disciplinary action undertaken by Aviva against Haigh, but the police putting her in front of a magistrate, and this seems to have happened, by her version of events, because she refused to cooperate with the police, which seems odd as she did used to be a special constable in the Metropolitan Police. There seems no suggestion that Aviva mounted a private prosecution.
So perhaps this all boils down to an insurance company taking a reasonably quite dim view of what seems to have been certainly from their perspective a case of pilfering by a previously-trusted employee who worked in a relatively senior position (public policy manager, responsible for corporate governance and responsible investment policy, if Wikipedia is to be believed), compounded by some really poor legal advice, leading a former police officer to refuse to cooperate with a police investigation, resulting quite naturally in the matter being escalated to court.
A related issue is how much was known by Sir Keir before he started giving her front bench jobs, but this may not be as important as whether Haigh should have told the people in charge of the Labour Party’s candidate selection processes at a national and local level when Ed Miliband was party leader.
This does rather sound like something that she would have been required to advise, as, at the time she was seeking to become a Labour candidate, her conviction for fraud may have been unspent (unless advised in court, her sentence is regarded as spent after 2 years, and she was convicted in 2014). It seems unlikely that Labour’s selectors, assuming they were rational and reasonable people, would have chosen a recently-convicted fraudster to stand as a candidate unless the competition were absolute stinkers (although the thoroughly unsuitable Jared O’Mara was selected to stand against Nick Clegg in nearby Sheffield Hallam in 2017 and won, suggesting there is something rotten in Labour in Sheffield, if not elsewhere). She was seeking selection in the extremely safe Labour seat of Sheffield Heeley and thus was in effect applying to Labour selectors for a guaranteed job that paid over £80,000 a year.
The people who lost that selection contest seem to have every reason to believe they may have been cheated.
So, while her spent conviction may not preclude her from returning to the front benches, her conduct in an internal party selection process still remains highly questionable. And unless she is able to say that Labour’s selection committees knew when she applied to be the Prospective Parliamentary Candidate that she had a serious criminal record (her crime seems to have been a felony rather than a misdemeanour, it was not a trivia offence), then perhaps she should remain on the back benches and not seek re-election after Parliament is dissolved.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.