From Rother Valley to Missouri: A Minister’s £34,230 Freebie
Justice Minister Jake Richards spent £34,230 of public money on a four-day US trip that bracketed England’s World Cup semi-final. He posted a photo of himself with a pint at half-time. The Ministry of Justice won’t publish the itinerary. That’s not discretion; it’s a decision that the public doesn’t need to know.
There is a photograph, now circulating widely on social media, of Jake Richards raising a pint glass and giving the camera a thumbs up. Half time, he wrote beneath it. “Nervous, not sure about this ref!!” The date was 15 July. The occasion was England against Argentina in the World Cup semi-final. And the junior justice minister was not in a pub in Rother Valley. He was in the United States, in the middle of a trip funded from the public purse that ran from Sunday 12 July to Thursday 16 July, a window that opens three days before that semi-final and closes the day after it. Whatever else is disputed about this trip, that is not: it placed a British minister on American soil for the single biggest match of the tournament, and he made sure everyone knew it.
The bill for the week, according to figures first published by the Guido Fawkes blog and confirmed by the Ministry of Justice, came to £34,230. Flights alone accounted for £24,257.77. Accommodation added £3,287.99, ground transport £3,800, subsistence and hospitality £2,688.34, and a final £195.90 in miscellaneous costs made up the round number. Richards visited Missouri and Chicago. He travelled with his private secretary, the Ministry of Justice’s head of youth sentencing and remand policy, a videographer, and an official titled “International Engagement Adviser”. The Ministry has refused to release the itinerary.
The Ministry’s position, in effect, is that the football was incidental, a happy accident of timing that a minister on serious government business simply chose to enjoy in a spare hour. That may be true. The honest answer is that nobody outside the department knows, because the one document that would settle it, the itinerary, has been withheld. The engagements Richards wanted the public to see, the courthouse visits, the meeting with the Governor, are on the record in exhaustive, photographed detail, because he put them there himself. Not one hour of the remaining time is, because the department that employs him decided the public did not need to see it. That is not a footnote to this story. Once you strip away the language about reform and root causes, it is the story: a government spent £34,230 of public money and then made it structurally impossible to check its own explanation for how the time was used.
THE MISSOURI MODEL
To be fair to Richards, and fairness matters even when the target deserves little of it, the underlying policy interest is real. Missouri has spent three decades building a youth justice system that has become a genuine international reference point: small, therapeutic residential units instead of prison-style detention, a heavy emphasis on diverting children away from formal charges altogether, and reoffending rates that compare favourably with almost anywhere else in America. British reformers, including people well to the left of this government, have cited the Missouri Model for years. A minister going to look at it is not, on its face, an act of frivolity.
Richards described the visit on LinkedIn as a chance to examine how the justice system’s different parts could work together to support “rehabilitation, opportunity and long-term positive change”. He met the Governor of Missouri, Mike Kehoe. He walked the route a child takes through the juvenile courts of St Louis County and into the custody of the Missouri Division of Youth Services. He also became, by his own account, the first British minister to set foot inside the newly opened Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, a stop with no obvious bearing on sentencing policy but every bearing on a minister’s photo album.
That is where the steelman starts to buckle. A policy trip does not require a videographer. It does not require an itinerary so sensitive that officials refuse to publish it under freedom of information rules that exist, in theory, to stop exactly this kind of concealment. And it does not, whatever the Ministry’s spokesperson says about “once-in-a-generation reforms we are making”, require £24,257.77 in flights for a party of five. Divide that figure by the five travellers named in the Guido Fawkes disclosure and you arrive at close to £4,850 a head, for a transatlantic return that a private citizen booking the same week could have secured for a small fraction of the cost. Nobody has confirmed what class of travel that sum bought. Nobody has been allowed to ask, because nobody has seen the itinerary.
THE FACT-FINDING TRADITION
Dennis Skinner made this same point to Neil Kinnock forty five years before Jake Richards boarded his flight, and it was aimed at exactly this kind of self-regard. At the 1981 Tribune conference fringe, days after Kinnock refused to back Tony Benn for the deputy leadership, Kinnock cast himself as the brave man carrying on despite being, in his telling, on a left-wing “hit list”. Skinner was not having it, as this site has recorded before.
Politicians who understood what was actually at stake, he said, life and death for millions, did not fret about the wrath of people to their left. And in the same exchange he turned to the other tell of a political class losing touch with the people it claims to represent. All party trips abroad, he said. “There’s one for every country in the world.” He catalogued the pattern without mercy: the fact-finding missions clustered, year after year, in the belt between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, always somewhere warm, and never, in Skinner’s recollection, to Greenland in the depths of winter.
The joke worked because everybody in that hall recognised it as true, and it still is. Nobody needed four days in St Louis to learn that early intervention reduces reoffending. That evidence has sat in academic journals for years, available to any minister with a library card. What a delegation like Richards’s buys is somewhere to be photographed, a line for the diary, and a flight timed to have everybody back in Westminster exactly when they were needed and not a day before.
A government that will not publish a minister’s schedule is not being discreet.
The Ministry of Justice’s response to that same instinct has been to withhold the paperwork that would let the public check the joke against the facts. A government that will not publish a minister’s schedule is not being discreet. It is deciding, on the public’s behalf, that the public does not need to know what its money bought.
This is not a one-off eccentricity confined to a backbench minister nobody had heard of six months ago. It sits inside a pattern that stretches to the very top of the last government. Keir Starmer, while he was still Prime Minister, spent more than £60,000 flying to Zurich and back for a single night to watch the Lionesses win the Women’s Euros final, official Cabinet Office travel data later confirmed. Downing Street defended that trip in almost identical language to the Ministry of Justice’s defence of Richards: a moment of national significance, an inspiration to young people, a duty to be present. The costume changes. The instinct underneath it does not.
Rother Valley is not a constituency built for that instinct. It was coalfield country once, and the closures that followed the miners’ strike left scars that four decades of promised regeneration have never fully closed. Richards holds the seat by 998 votes, a majority of 2.4 per cent, which ought to concentrate a minister’s mind on the gap between the world he flies through and the one his constituents live in. Thirty four thousand pounds is not an abstraction there. It is close to a working man’s annual wage, spent in four days, on a trip whose full itinerary the minister’s own department will not put on paper.
None of this means the underlying question, how Britain diverts children away from crime, stops mattering. It matters a great deal, and Missouri may well have something to teach us. But a government that wants to be trusted with that question does not send a minister across an ocean with a photographer and a £24,000 flight bill and then refuse to show the workings. It publishes the itinerary. It flies economy. It answers the question of who benefits from the trip before the public has to drag the answer out of it through a gossip blog and a freedom of information refusal.
Andy Burnham took office promising, in his own words, to be a “circuit breaker” for a political class that had lost the country’s trust. Richards remains a minister in his government. If that government wants its promise to mean anything, it could start with something as small as an itinerary. The old guard fell partly because it never understood that the distance between Westminster and Rother Valley is measured in more than miles. Burnham says he understands it. His ministers, so far, are still booking the same flights.
Public money bought the flight, the hire car, the hotel, and the pint. Of those four, only one has ever been photographed.
