Robert Jenrick’s constituency was awarded funding by his department in a process that was “opaque”, “not impartial”, “inappropriate” and “politically motivated”.
The public accounts committee has published the damning verdict in a report out today.
The housing secretary and his junior minister Jake Berry nominated each others’ constituencies to received £25m each as part of the £3.6bn Towns Fund, intended for deprived communities. Civil servants had ranked them respectively the 289th and 270th on a list of most deprived towns in Britain.
Jenrick then decided to sit on a board of stakeholders for Newark, tasked with lobbying his own department for funds.
Meg Hillier, chairwoman of the PAC, said that it was “not appropriate” that Mr Jenrick had been on his own constituency’s board.