The Yorkshire tourism body that has appointed independent investigators to examine its chief executive’s lavish expenses accepted £14.89m in public money over the past five years, the Guardian has learned.
More than half of Welcome to Yorkshire’s (WTY) income derived from the taxpayer between 2013 and 2018 but the organisation will not answer detailed questions about how that money was spent by its boss, Sir Gary Verity, who resigned last Friday.
The WTY board insists a criminal investigation is unnecessary despite Verity having paid back a five-figure sum on his abrupt departure. But one Yorkshire council leader is demanding evidence of why the organisation’s board was so sure no laws had been broken.
“I want to know what the context is [for the false claims]. Our council has prosecuted staff for making false expense claims for much smaller sums than we are dealing with here,” said Tim Swift, the leader of Calderdale council. He said he had been shocked to learn Verity was paid a £243,000 salary. Asked if it was too high, Swift said: “Yes. That’s more than any council chief executive in Yorkshire gets.”
Swift chairs the Leeds city region business rates joint committee, which since 2015 has given £5.79m to WTY and its associate ventures. He accepts there should have been more scrutiny of how the money was spent. “The focus was on what they were doing rather than the operation of the organisation,” he said.
Swift, along with the leaders of Bradford, Harrogate, Kirklees, York and Wakefield councils, signed off the money year after year despite little transparency of how the money was spent. On Friday afternoon the leaders met to agree to demand an “urgent” meeting with the WTY chair “to outline the defined and distinct conditions that will need to be in place for medium-term funding from the business rates pool to be committed”.
But one attendee of that committee said they had often heard rumours of Verity’s lavish expense account but that it was never examined because he generated a good financial return for Yorkshire.
“You could argue that despite his spending he brought hundreds of millions of pounds to Yorkshire with the Tour de France and the Tour de Yorkshire,” they said. “Gary’s spending was for the Welcome to Yorkshire board to examine. The business rates committee just looked at whether giving them money was a good investment.”
Verity, who enjoyed a chauffeur service in addition to his £243,000 salary, was knighted in 2015 after bringing the Tour de France cycling race to Yorkshire the previous year.
Shortly afterwards the chancellor at the time, George Osborne, appointed him to chair the Great Exhibition of the North (GEOTN), a cultural jamboree celebrating northern English heritage and innovation, which took place in Newcastle and Gateshead last summer. For that part-time job, WTY was paid £445,000 over two years: almost 10% of the total government funding for the event.
“This funding was for Sir Gary Verity’s time in his role as chair of GEOTN and for associated support services, including logistical and communications support, from Welcome to Yorkshire,” said a spokeswoman for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. WTY said Verity did not receive any of this money directly.
In January, Verity was linked with the top job at the Football Association (FA), and had often been tipped as the first possible mayor of Yorkshire.
On Tuesday WTY said it would commission an independent review to examine its expense-claiming procedures but that the board had decided a criminal investigation was not warranted. “Should that review highlight any irregularities which require further investigation, we will inform the appropriate authorities,” said Ron McMillan, a former partner at accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, who chairs the board.
WTY said in a statement earlier this week: “Although not directly linked to Sir Gary’s resignation, concerns have been raised in relation to ... his expenses.” It added: “The board has investigated these and concluded that Sir Gary made errors of judgment regarding his expenses at a very difficult time for him and his family. Sir Gary has agreed to voluntarily reimburse Welcome to Yorkshire for monies owed.”
The Guardian has learned that Verity used WTY employees to staff his sister’s funeral after she died earlier this year, helping with the car park and serving food and drink. A spokeswoman for the organisation confirmed that “the staffing regarding Sir Gary Verity’s sister’s funeral will form part of the review into Sir Gary’s departure”.
Since his sudden resignation on Friday, Verity has instructed a lawyer specialising in reputation management from the London law firm Farrer & Co.
The Guardian asked Farrer & Co how much Verity had charged WTY for his chauffeur service, whether he expensed shoots he went on in the countryside (including gun cartridges), and whether he had billed WTY for the military uniform he wore in his role as deputy lord lieutenant of West Yorkshire, the Queen’s representative in the county.
It did not respond by the Guardian’s deadline but in a statement after his resignation Verity said: “Over the last 10-and-a-half years I have always tried to set the highest standards of personal performance and leadership. Where this has been achieved, I am grateful and when, on occasions, I have fallen short, I apologise.”
The government also invested £10m in the 2014 Tour de France grand départ, which took place in Yorkshire after Verity and colleagues persuaded the organisers to come to what Verity inevitably referred to as “God’s own county”. WTY received £1,022,000 of that money, a spokeswoman said. The organisation reported losses of more than £1m the following year, after writing off £750,000 invested in unsold merchandise.
WTY said it had received £14.89m in public funds since 2013, more than half of its turnover. In 2015-16 and 2016-17, 70% of its income came from the public purse.
Last year the business rates joint committee pledged Verity’s ventures £1.97m – which includes £673,000 for the UCI road world championships, which will be held in Yorkshire in September, as well as £421,000 for the Tour de Yorkshire, which WTY co-organises.
North Yorkshire county council has given WTY £595,000 in subscription fees and for costs relating to bike races since 2013. Each year it also contributes a further £250,000 in a business rates pool with Scarborough, Craven, Hambleton, Richmondshire and Ryedale councils.
David Bowe, North Yorkshire’s corporate director for business and environmental services, said: “As a council we are an advocate of transparency and would therefore expect Welcome to Yorkshire to have sound and robust practices in place for day-to-day budget management, which includes authorisation of expenses. We therefore regard this as an internal matter.”