Brentwood Council finances statement

Written by Cllr David Kendall on Wed 9th Dec 2009

Lib Dem Leader Cllr David Kendall makes a statement on the financial mess at Tory-controlled Brentwood Council

The Leader is trying to defend the indefensible and put a brave face on the situation but even she cannot escape the fact that this Council's finances are in a serious mess and her administration has to accept the lion's share of the blame.

At the Audit meeting on 24th November the Auditor said:

"The Council has suffered from departure of key staff, loss of knowledge and lack of information and evidence". Not my words but the words of the Independent Auditor.

This has led to a situation under this Conservative administration where we:

• Cannot get our accounts signed off.

• Have misplaced £633K of taxpayers money

• Have a lack of robust planning as a contributory cause to the financial challenges facing the Council.

• Had unrealistic income projections in the 2008/9 budget

• Failed to review the council's three year medium term strategy

• Have a "1" rating which is the lowest you can get for our use of resources.

Now, the Leader and her colleagues will tell us many of these problems are historical, they have been happening for years, it's the previous Lib Dem administration's fault. It seems it's everyone's fault apart from this administration. No one ever holds their hands up and actually says "We're sorry we got it wrong".

Before you start blaming everyone else let's look at a few facts.

• You took control of the Council back in May 2004. Five and a half years ago. If things were so bad with our finances why didn't you make changes then?

• You had an opportunity to reverse the decision on making the Brentwood Centre a Leisure Trust but you chose not to do so.

• You could have appointed an experienced Head of Finance but you chose not to do so.

• You could have set up an Audit Panel. Tory run Chelmsford has had one for a few years, but you chose not to do so.

Let's look at what you have done.

• You employed two senior finance officers on temporary contracts at a combined cost of £275,000 which is the equivalent of a 5.5% Council tax increase to our residents. One of these officers was paid £140,000 for 13 months work. Nice work if you can get it.

• Back in September 2009, the Leader defended the recruitment of one of those officers in the paper by saying: "This was a temporary position and it required someone with specialist qualifications". But in the same paper a spokesman for the Tax Payers Alliance probably summed up many residents' feelings with the following quote:" It is a new culture of excessive remuneration without proper scrutiny that has grown up in our Town Halls"

Looking back you have to ask the question who was managing and scrutinising these two officers and the rest of our finance dept to make sure they were doing the job they were paid to do? In this new age of transparency our residents quite rightly expect someone to step up to the plate and take some responsibility and accountability for the situation. I look forward to hearing the answer.

When the Audit Commissions report was published why was it left to Mr McKenzie, an officer who'd only been with the Council a short time, to make a statement on the finances. Surely we should have had a statement from our Chief Executive on the matter, particularly as she and her officers had been overseeing and managing the structural changes.

Turning to some of the specifics in this report:

If you look at Appendix 2a "Analysis of budget monitoring", you will see some very worrying trends. Yes, some of these trends are down to the economic downturn but others, I believe, are self inflicted by this administration.

The Audit Commission was definitely right to state that we had unrealistic income projections in the 2008/9 budget - take Car Parking. As we can see our revenue from car parking charges has been badly hit.

The Lib Dems called for a freeze on all car parking charges at last year's budget setting meeting and were accused of being irresponsible. But look at the facts:

• When the budget was set we were told that demand for business season tickets was falling but what did this administration do? You put them up and have now made the situation even worse. We now have a £60,000 shortfall.

• Other car parking income is also well down, which again wasn't helped by increasing the charges just prior to the High Street refurbishment starting. Didn't that cross anyone's mind when the charges were set?

Having spoken at length to Peter McKenzie, our new Head of Finance, I believe that if he is given the right support he can use his experience and expertise to start turning our finances round but he has a very tough job on his hands. We wish him well.

Finally Mr Mayor. let me leave you with this thought. When the Liberal Democrats ran the Council:

• We never had a situation where the accounts were not signed off.

• We were regularly placed first as the best Council in Essex

• We were recorded as the fifth best Council in the UK.

The Leader can play "the blame game" but after almost SIX years of the Tories running this council I will leave it to our residents to see through her empty rhetoric and decide for themselves who is responsible for this sorry state of affairs.