Does anyone believe that privatised auditors would have held Shirley Porter to account for the homes for votes scandal?
The Audit Commission may have drawn a big target on its back with its decisions to pay its prospective chief executive £240,000 and spend £55,000 to lobby its own government and £8,000 at Newmarket racecourse, but its abolition will leave serious questions to be answered about the future accountability of local government.
This at a time when localism will give councils more freedom from central control and austerity will make value for money more important than ever. There were plenty of warning signals from Eric Pickles, who attacked the lobbying in opposition and blocked the appointment of a new chief exec in government.
The Commission had also been given a big role in ensuring local compliance with government targets that the coalition is busily dismantling. But even so the announcement that was leaked on Friday came as a shock to staff.
The quango published a statement that highlights its role not just in Westminster but in the surcharging of councillors in Lambeth and Liverpool and in uncovering the scale of the crisis at Doncaster council.
And it argued that it was its own success in improving the performance of local government that had enabled the coalition to give it more autonomy. But that seems not to have counted for much as the government pressed ahead with the abolition of targets and comprehensive area assessment and with the publication of the all spending over £500 by government departments and agencies and by local authorities.
Who needs the Audit Commission when making that information publicly available will empower an army of armchair auditors who will hold the bureaucrats to account? Pickles said that the Commission’s in-house audit practice - the fifth largest in the country - would be transferred out of public ownership and sold or otherwise transferred to the private sector.
The Commission already contracts out some of its work. But anyone who followed the long homes for votes saga will question whether private auditors would have shown a fraction of the tenacity of district auditor John Magill in surcharging Porter and other Westminster councillors and then fighting to uphold his decision through the High Court, the Court of Appeal, the House of Lords and the European Court of Human Rights.
On a more routine level, consider the role that district auditors played in housing issues at Hull, Brentwood, West Wiltshire, North East Somerset….the list goes on. Would private auditors from the same multinational giants that failed to spot problems at Royal Bank of Scotland, Northern Rock, Lehman Brothers and Enron be interested in much more than pocketing their fees and moving on to the next client?
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Readers' comments (9)
Anonymous | 16/08/2010 2:18 pm
Has the Tory darling of the 80's, Porter, paid the fines and court cousts owed to the people of Britain yet, or gone so far as to apologise to the tenants of Westminster?
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arsene w | 16/08/2010 3:08 pm
Surely the problem was that they had a full inspection which they gave you a years notice for; or a short notice (SNI) one which they gave you a week to prepare for. The full one just meant that housing bodies got in consultants and the whole organisation would take its eye off the ball whilst "preparing for inspection"; with lucrative fees going to HQN, or they had one week which only focused on a couple of areas.
If they had given maybe three months, or even a month they might have had more credibiliy.
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Anonymous | 16/08/2010 4:04 pm
Well, the AC was nowhere to be seen in Hackney when the housing revenue account was being looted. And it hasn't been much help in Islington which was being awarded 3 stars at about the same time that PWC was pulled into to examine leaseholder mischarging.
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Tumultuous Lurker | 16/08/2010 7:45 pm
We are of course considering the major notorious events in Local Government. Am I not correct in thinking that OFSTED have been using small teams of private inspector consultancies to carry-out school inspections for years.
I guess it must be possible to offer Housing, Local Government and Health Trust inspections to small consultancies on the same basis - they will cut their own throats on price, to win the work. Standard Inspection models / timescales have been used for some years, so tendering should be relatively easy.
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michael barratt | 17/08/2010 9:12 am
Although I have considered the Audit Commission to be somewhat timid at times at least the organisation provided a ‘fit for purpose’ mechanism for inspection and audit of public finances. I have great reservation concerning high priced accountancy firms inspiring the same level of confidence in their ability to provide a cost effective independent scrutiny and who will guard the guards?
Similarly, who if anyone will assess the quality of services provided by local authorities, especially in regards to retained housing stocks and the cost effective of their expedition of repairs and future major works - those working in partnership deals with them?
If it had not been for the Audit Commission’s, District Auditor’s letter in December 2005, would Savills have reviewed their May 2006 assessment of £60million to meet Decent Homes Standard in Crawley West Sussex and subsequently in March 2007 reduced the amount to £ 25.3 million as applied to the local authority’s housing stock. A sum Crawley Borough Council were further obliged to reduce to £2.7million in a strict interpretation of Decent Homes Guidance?
SEE: www.indoubt.co.uk
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Anonymous | 17/08/2010 9:46 am
There are two aspects to the Audit Commission auditing (or following the money) and inspection.
The Auditing bit is there to make sure that money is not spent illegally as for example Westminster Homes for Votes.
The second is the Audit Commission inspection regime that has so wrecked public services over the last decade. That inspection role has to go. It has driven poor performance and poor service in to housing organisations. It has driven costs into these bodies leading to teams of people 'servicing the commission'.
Be gone and be gone now.
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Dave Hollins | 17/08/2010 10:12 am
I think anon 9.46 is wrong about inspection. Sure, the regime was inconsistent and produced rogue results, and inspectors were often very poor, but the system challenged the complacency of housing associations who talked a good job but were mainly found to be providing 0 or 1 star services. There have been a lot of improvements as a result and getting rid of the TSA and the AC will mean that HAs slip back into their bad old ways, with no accountability and no pressure to improve.
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Anonymous | 17/08/2010 10:52 am
It didn't challenge the complacency of squat. Where is the evidence for improvement? Improvement is something different from being compliant with a specification. Housing organisations got better at compliance. Not improvement from the resident's perspective.
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Anonymous | 18/08/2010 6:06 pm
Ah, the case of Dame Shirley Porter. She was originally surcharged £42 million with interest and costs.
But such were the heights of discrimination in the UK parliamentary system in the 1990's - the rules were changed afterwards to allow gerrymandering to take place free of financial penalties. Incidentally flouting the UN Charter carries no penalty for any politician.
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