A political donor who has made donations to Rachel Reeves, Labour’s new chancellor, has been made a director in the Treasury, prompting questions about the party’s stated commitment to high standards of public life.
Former financial services executive Ian Corfield has donated more than £20,000 to senior Labour figures in the past decade, including a £5,000 contribution to Reeves last summer, according to Electoral Commission data.
He became a director in the Treasury last month — the same month Labour won a seismic landslide in the general election — following a spell as a full-time senior business adviser to the party between January and July, according to his LinkedIn page.
Prior to that Corfield held senior positions at financial services firms.
Donors and figures with party political connections are not barred from becoming senior officials in Whitehall.
However, Sir Alistair Graham, former chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, warned: “You need to be particularly careful if somebody has been a donor that they’ve gone through a competitive process [to become a senior official].”
Jack Worlidge, senior researcher at the Institute for Government think-tank, said that while fair and open competition was fundamental to the principle of civil servants being hired on merit, there was a procedure to deal with exceptions.
He agreed with Graham that “when the successful candidate has a clear and recent political affiliation, it’s important that an open and fair competition has taken place — and is seen to have taken place”.
The Treasury declined to release details on Corfield’s recruitment process. “We do not comment on individual staffing appointments. Any appointments are made in line with the civil service rules on recruitment,” a government spokesperson said.
Graham added: “It throws into question the commitment of the new government to high standards of public life . . . At an early stage, you don’t want questions to be raised in the public’s mind about whether donors are being given priority for key positions.”
A vow to strengthen the ethics regime at the heart of government was a central pillar of Sir Keir Starmer’s pitch to the public ahead of the election, following a string of sleaze scandals in recent years under successive Tory administrations.
Starmer signalled his commitment to the cause after entering office, by publicly confirming that he had met Sir Laurie Magnus, his independent standards adviser, on his first day as prime minister.
Corfield’s appointment, first reported by Politico, has also stoked criticism from some Tory figures.
Andrew Griffith, the Conservative shadow technology secretary, said his hiring was “alarming” and accused the new Labour administration of dispensing with a “normal, open, transparent and fair civil service appointment process in favour of a Labour supporter”.
The former City minister also claimed the appointment risked harming the independence of the civil service.
Tory peer Lord Francis Maude, who previously served as Cabinet Office minister overseeing the civil service, took a different view.
“We should be much more relaxed about people with a political background being appointed as mainstream civil servants. The key is that they behave impartially,” he said.
However, he argued that “if the Conservatives had done what Labour have just done, the outrage from the Whitehall establishment would’ve been off the scale”.
The Financial Times has approached Corfield for comment.
The Labour party declined to comment.