Warrington

Warrington is a town - or perhaps a city - of 200,000 million people or so - sitting on top of both the River Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal, roughly half way between Liverpool to the west and Manchester to the east. A borough with 22 wards, councillors and a borough council. I dare say there is a mayor with mayoral regalia. You can read all about it at reference 1.

And no doubt the council busies itself with parks, dustbins, street lighting, strategic plans and all the other good stuff that successive central governments have thought local government are up to.

So interested to read in the FT this morning that they have lent £151m (so far) to an investment company called Icon 3 Holdco, which is indirectly controlled by an entrepreneurial type called Matt Moulding. The core of the operation seems to be a company called THG, aka The Hut Group, to be found at reference 2. Which as far as one can tell in sixty seconds, is some kind of glossy, web-enabled marketing operation. They can turn your new lipstick - or whatever - into a money spinning phenomenon. There is also mention of places like Jersey. No doubt the Virgin Islands if one looked a bit harder. Various wheezes to make inspection, regulation and taxation difficult. Is there a whiff of something unpleasant about all this? I associate to another entrepreneurial type, now deceased, from the other side of the great divide, called John Poulson.

Now, on the one hand, I believe the central government has taken far too much power into its own hands (and into those of its cronies), power which would be better with local government. In particular, central government should not be micro-managing the banking arrangements of local government. They should be left to manage their own affairs.

On the other, given that council are funded on a annual cash basis from the public purse, not at all clear to me that they should be involved in lending money, let alone on this scale, to companies of this sort. I dare say Warrington needs to have some cash reserves so that it can deal with the unexpected - like floods and plagues - but I am not all sure that it should be using those reserves in this way. And Warrington is not the only council at this sort of thing. And some of which might be funded by the Public Works Loan Board, possibly now part of the Debt Management Office of reference 3.

Puzzled of Epsom.

References

Reference 1: https://www.warrington.gov.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.thg.com/.

Reference 3: https://pwlb.gov.uk/.