Beckett: 'The scandal the nationals won't touch'

Francis Beckett has a tantalising post on his blog, headlined : "The scandal the nationals won't touch".

Beckett, who is a spokesman for the Fire Brigades Union, claims the national press is "hardly touching" the financial problems and controversies surrounding AssetCo, a company with multi million pound contracts to own and maintain all London's and Lincolshire's fire engines.

Beckett says: "If it [AssetCo] goes under, we could lose all our fire engines to the company's creditors. The London Fire Brigade says there's a clause in the contract which protects the fire engines - but it won't show us the clause. When it eventually, unwillingly, released the contract, the relevant clause was 'redacted'."

He argues the story is getting little national publicity because the demise of labour and industrial correspondents means the story is ending up on city desks.

Beckett says: "City journalists are terrified of writing anything which might bring down a company's share price. They are also instinctively unwilling to take anything from a trade union, and it's the Fire Brigades Union which helped expose this story. When there were industrial corrs, they'd say: 'It comes from the union - but it's a good story.' Now city desks say: 'It's a good story - but it comes from the unions'."