by Andrew Sheldon, Essex County Councillor
“We believe this is a witch-hunt against officers, we oppose it, and if this goes ahead, we all know what will happen”. Those words were uttered by the ‘leader of the opposition’ in a public council meeting that up until recently was still available to watch on Youtube. Seven months later, that same councillor, now ‘leader of the council’ was handed a damning audit report featuring the very council officers he was clearly looking to protect. Approximately £1.2 million of potentially unlawful payments had been made to senior council officials, by senior council officials, without proper authorisation and deliberate attempts had been made to conceal the truth from councillors and the taxpaying public.
Just over two years later, the coalition of the People’s Independent Party and the Canvey Island Independent Party led by that same leader, had won every single seat on the council. The council had voted against trying to recover nearly £900,000 of those potentially unlawful payments from the pockets of those council officials who shouldn’t have received them, instead choosing to try to pursue a single payment of £285,000 from the estate of a senior officer who passed away, with I understand no success. An attempt to get the council to request a ‘public interest report’ from the council’s auditors had been waved away, and to the best of public knowledge not a single senior officer had been sacked over the payments. Most astonishingly of all, the two senior officers who were responsible for making sure the council was legally compliant and financially sound at the time, and who would have had roles in the payments saga, were given redundancy and other payouts large enough to grant them spots 2 and 6 on this year’s Tax Payers Alliance Town Hall Rich List, totalling just under £900,000 between them.
Combined together, the cost of the potentially unlawful payouts Castle Point Council has chosen to write off, the amount that the council is pursuing and yet to recover, and the redundancy and other payouts to those two senior officers, is over £2 million. That’s local taxpayer money and it's truly shameful.
There are two questions here that taxpayers need answers to. Firstly, why have the coalition of independent parties in total control of the council taken the action they have? Secondly, what can be done to prevent this outrageous abuse of taxpayers money from happening again in local councils around the country. I am the former Leader of the council who first discovered the payments, who pushed the audit investigation against cries of ‘witch-hunt’ from the opposition, and since have faced off council barristers to get evidence of the truth out there, so I have a unique perspective on this.
The question of why the leadership of the People’s Independent Party and Canvey Island Party Coalition that hold 100% of the council seats, decided on this course of action is one can’t be answered right now and probably won’t be unless a lot more reaches the public domain. There were of course individual statements given by them as to why some individual votes went which way, and how much legally retrieving the payments may cost, but I don’t believe they give us the full picture. Pursuing justice is after all something that taxpayers are nearly always willing to spend money on, particularly if they themselves have been wronged. As to why their councillors all fell in line to support these actions without a single public voice of dissent, I think we can just chalk that up to the absolute power of the leadership in what is in effect a ‘one-party state’. Is a democracy where unanimous votes are guaranteed even a democracy at all?
As to how this can be prevented from happening again, that is a more complex question. councillors are not, and should not be, forensic accountants. That is not their job. I was leader of the council for one year. The previous chief executive had died a few months before I became Leader and it was only when I got in an interim chief executive, who noticed another senior officer had signed off a six figure payment marked as ‘unpaid leave’ to his predecessor’s estate a few weeks before I took over, that the alarm was raised. He went through the books and came to me with very serious concerns and I ordered a full audit investigation. Why the opposition raised cries of ‘witch-hunt’ I can only speculate.
Every council has to have by law three statutory officers. A ‘head of paid service’, who is usually the chief executive and is responsible for the operation of the council, a ‘section 151 officer, who is usually a senior finance director and who is in charge of ensuring the council is fiscally compliant, and a ‘monitoring officer’ who is broadly in charge of ensuring the council’s actions are legally compliant. The theory is that because they have statutory responsibilities, they are supposed to act as checks on the others and ensure that councillors are legally aware of everything they should be. With these three officers keeping a legally mandated check on each other, potentially unlawful payments purposefully kept from councillors and the public, should not happen. The only other party with the capacity to identify and raise the alarm on such payments were external auditors and this didn’t happen until after the first concerns were raised. Just as in central government, democracy and accountability can only work if elected officials are informed of everything they legally should be. I think external auditors should have extra powers and obligations to identify any such issues in future, but in general the whole system of local government accountability in this area needs looking at.
Once there was black and white evidence of potentially unlawful payments, sackings should have followed. Although I have just argued that extra provisions should be put in place to ensure that elected councillors are informed of everything they should be to prevent such unlawful payments being made, once such payments have been discovered in order to ensure they are dealt with properly and justly in the eyes of taxpayers, councillors’ involvement and decision making power over whether further investigations are carried out and any potential disciplinary actions taken against any level of officer should be minimal.
A system where an elected official who cried ‘witch-hunt’ in defence of council officers should not have any significant power over the process or outcomes when it turns out there is a serious case for them to answer, particularly at a council where democratic opposition and challenge does not exist!