JEREMY CORBYN’S frontbench spokesman on trade unions has been criticised for accepting almost £1.6m from sick and injured miners to fund the declining union branch he ran.
Ian Lavery, shadow minister for trade unions, was the general secretary of the Northumberland area of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) before entering parliament.
During his tenure it received donations from miners who had been compensated for industrial injuries.
These included more than £1m from payouts for vibration white finger and more than £600,000 from compensation for chronic bronchitis and emphysema, according to its annual returns lodged with the certification officer who regulates unions.
This weekend Lavery, 53, said he did not “recognise” the £1.6m figure in the returns, which show it was donated between 1996 and 2010.
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Over the same period, the returns show that Northumberland NUM officials and staff received more than £1m in remuneration and expenses.
Lavery himself received almost £750,000 in wages, pension contributions and other perks. Most of this came either directly from the union or from a mineworkers “provident and benevolent” fund it had set up and financed.
It included more than £550,000 in pay, another £45,000 in car allowances and more than £140,000 for Lavery’s retirement pot, including a £48,000 pension contribution in one year alone.
His decision to accept donations from sick miners to fund the union was criticised yesterday by his fellow Labour MP, John Mann, who said: “There is no justification in any circumstances for a single penny being diverted from the compensation of sick coal miners.”
Mann, who successfully campaigned to make solicitors return money they wrongly charged for handling compensation claims, said: “The solicitors have made hundreds of millions of pounds from these schemes and they should be paying, if anybody should be — not the miners.”
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A Conservative MP, Luke Hall, urged the certification officer to investigate the Northumberland NUM’s returns in the light of a dramatic fall in its official membership.
This stood at 240 for a decade before plunging to 10 in 2013, three years after Lavery left to enter parliament for the local constituency, Wansbeck.
“It’s hard to believe that a union branch would keep exactly the same number of members for a decade then suddenly lose 95% of them in a matter of months,” said Hall.
“Trade unions have a legal duty to keep an accurate register of members and this raises questions about whether the NUM has properly complied with the law.”
Denis Murphy, Wansbeck’s former MP, who ran the Northumberland NUM when Lavery went to Westminster, insisted the figures were correct.
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According to the Northumberland NUM’s annual returns, it paid a total of £6,451 in direct benefits, such as legal advice, to its members between 1996 and 2010. Members also received £144,593 in “travel and subsistence” during that time, while about £20,000 was spent on “education activities”, separate accounts show.
This weekend, Lavery insisted that much more had been spent on members than the figures quoted. The returns did not include the value of representation and other services provided by the Northumberland NUM, he said.
Lavery also stressed that he did not set his own pay, which followed national guidelines and reflected the fact that, from 2002, he was president of the NUM as a whole, as well as general secretary of the regional union.
The NUM national office started contributing to his salary in 2007, giving the regional union a total of £80,099 during his last three full years there.
The £48,000 pension payment had been demanded by regulators to “ensure the scheme was not going to go bust”, and was not “of any benefit to me personally”, Lavery added.
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The last pit in Northumberland closed in 2005 but the local NUM remained in operation. It is now in the red and will wind up at the end of this year.
Murphy, who was paid £52,945 to run the union in 2014, insisted it was right to keep the union going after the pits closed, saying it provided vital services for former miners, retired miners and their widows.
“We represent the interests of many, many thousands of people to this day. That is where the money goes, it is to represent people,” he said.