In 1993 Scargill tried to buy a £1,500,000 flat in London under the governments help to buy scheme meant for council tenants, but failed on the grounds that it would have been a second home.In any event the £30,000 a year rent for the flat was paid by the NUM until 2011. Using the same help to buy scheme Scargill bought the £2,000,000 flat for £1,050,000 in 2014 and in 2016 became the subject of an investigation. Scargills current Yorkshire home is still supported by the NUM to the tune of around £3500 per year
The mineworker’s pension fund had ten trustees, five from the NCB and five from the NUM, including Arthur Scargill.
More than anything Arthur Scargill or any NUM executive may or may not have done with the Mineworkers Pension, the scandal really lies with British Coal and subesquent governments since 1984. It’s estimated in some quarters that £9billion has been skimmed off the total pension fund. Using a cunning wheeze British Coal managed to fund not only the miners redundancy bill, but also the cost of closing pits from the miiners own pension fund. On top of this it seems that investments surpluses the pension earned have been used to fund miners compensation claims for pneumoconiosis and white finger. And on top of this, in exchange for underwriting the pension scheme John Major struck a deal for his and successive governments to have a 50% stake in any pension surpluses. The pension has never been in deficit, costing the government precisley nothing, but allowing them to use miners pensions to to bail out the banks and any number of other seemingly generous gestures. I very much doubt this practice will end any time soon.