Ex-mayor of Bristol declares he's paid by company to which he gave £12 billion contract

Marvin Rees has declared he is being paid by Ameresco on his first declaration of interests at the House of Lords.

The last mayor of Bristol has been forced to add to his interests, the directorship of his company, Three and Two Ltd, which he describes as a “personal services company for the member's consultancy work and public speaking”.

Lord Rees signs the undertaking to abide by the House of Lords code of conduct – photo: Parliamentarylive.tv

The clients of Three and Two Ltd are as follows:

• Ameresco, Inc. (energy) who were given a £12 billion contract by Rees’s administration, in a consortium with Vattenfall for City Leap.

• Cambridge Management Consulting, which is the company where ex-Deputy Mayor Craig Cheney is a partner;

• Empire Fighting Chance, to which Rees gave land worth £1.35m for free for 999 years, and didn’t declare it in his register of interests, and

• Mayors Migration Council, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Overseas Development Institute.

While mayor of Bristol, Rees had the power to decide on £12 billion contracts but was not forced to disclose his interests in any meaningful way.

As a peer in the House of Lords, he has also had to declare he is a landlord of two residential properties in Bristol. As mayor, he did not declare it. In fact, the monitoring officer tried to get a dispensation for declarations of being a landlord for all members. He failed to do so but the landlords still avoided declaring (another story for a different day).

Empire Fighting Chance

In October 2022, I wrote about how the Rees Labour administration gave away council land for 999 years, at no cost, to a club the mayor was associated with. I pursued this for two years and made a complaint to the auditors. A weak recommendation came through to audit in 2024.

Now, however, outside the weak scrutiny of local government, Rees has had to declare a pecuniary interest in at least two companies that benefited from his decision-making while in power.

The City Leap involvement is worth much more than the land for EFC. In 2021, the Labour administration — headed by Rees — signed a 20 year deal worth an estimated £12 billion then.

Rees is now being paid by a company that benefited from one of the biggest deals ever made in local authority history. We don’t know how much he is paid by them. For that, he’d have to have been elected an MP.

At Westminster, declarations are even more strict than the House of Lords.

As residents, we get the weakest scrutiny even when the budget decisions are so immense.