Jeremy Rowe

The Leader’s response 31 May, 2011

Below is the rather lengthy text of the Leader’s rebuttal message to Councillors as a result of the credit card saga which has engulfed the Tory-led administration at Cornwall Council for the last few days. Much has been said and written about this affair, so I think it only fair to allow the Leader’s response to be read on this blog.

As has been speculated from the start, much of this affair appears to be ‘cock-up rather than conspiracy’ but it still leaves basic questions unanswered. Why has it taken so long for the administration to decipher their own information? Why did they send the ‘wrong’ information to the Daily Telegraph in the first place, and how on Earth did they expect them to run with anything different? None of this reflects well on the Council’s Tory leadership, particularly in the light of their continued lecturing of everyone on the topic of keeping control of the purse strings. Perhaps they should start by having a good look at themselves.

Here is the Leader’s message:

Dear colleagues

Following the recent media coverage of the Council’s alleged spending on credit cards, I would like to clarify some of the misinformation which has been published in newspapers and on websites.

The first thing to make clear is that we have not spent £9 million on credit cards.  The Council does not use credit cards as local authorities are not allowed to have credit.  The payments were made using payment cards which work in a similar way to debit cards. 

The Council has also not spent millions of pounds on foreign travel and meals.  The figures provided in the FOI response to Daily Telegraph had not been converted from the original currencies – producing a misleadingly high figure.  The suggestion, therefore, that we spent £114,142 for hotel costs in India for an educational exchange involving teachers from Cornish schools was not true.  This amount was actually in Indian Rupees and would have been £1,645 in UK currency.   There are similar inaccuracies in the amounts highlighted for restaurant payments – with one figure of £15,640 quoted for a restaurant in Japan during another educational exchange.  This amount is in Japanese Yen and would be £118 in UK currency.  When these figures are converted from the original currencies to sterling the actual cost of foreign travel (including flights/ hotels and meals) was actually £148,000.

The travel to Malaga, China, Algeria, Goa, Mumbai etc actually relate to educational visits involving teachers from schools in Cornwall and were fully funded by the British Council.  This means that these trips were not paid for by council taxpayers in Cornwall.

These payment cards were originally introduced by the Government as they are a cheaper and more efficient way of paying for goods and services – saving an average of £33 per transaction.  The system is also popular with suppliers as it is much faster than submitting invoices to the Council.  The use of these cards is recognised as good practice and they are used by most other local authorities.  

The Council currently has 509 cards (of which 154 are allocated to schools) and there are very strict financial controls in place to regulate their use.  Individual cards have a maximum limit on them which depends on the seniority of the individual member of staff.  This is normally around £1,000.  All payments are checked and countersigned.

I would also like to provide the facts behind some of the specific items which have been highlighted over the past few days.  

• ·         Silk ties - - this payment relates to the purchase of 100 Cornwall Council ties which Councillors are now being invited to buy.  They were designed and produced by a local company in Cornwall.
• ·         £1,080 – to the One Eyed Cat restaurant – this relates to a dinner (not a lunch) to mark the formal launch of the Unicreds project.  This is a €2 million project looking at how different models of higher education can benefit regional economic development.  It is a three year project funded by the EU involving partners from Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Sweden and the UK.  The cost of the meal, which was attended by 43 people, including representatives of all the project partners, was paid for by the Unicreds project and not by Cornwall Council.  
• ·         £1,080 –to the Rick Stein Sea Food restaurant - this payment does not relate to a meal at the restaurant.  It is part of the Future Job Fund project which is a Department for Work and Pensions European funded project to provide jobs for people in Cornwall.  The Council makes payments to each partner based on the number of jobs they deliver and then reclaims 100% of these payments back from the Department for Work and Pensions.
• ·         £3,000 for phone charges – this payment is the monthly mobile phone cost for 265 mobiles for the Cornwall Fire and Rescue service.  These mobiles cover the entire Service including: the crews for 65 fire appliances, , the officers in workshops (mechanics etc), Training Dept, Emergency Management Team, All Mobile Officers, all Station Managers and Senior Managers.  This works out at approximately £11 per phone.  
• ·         Fish tank – this payment relates to a fish tank which was brought for one of our children’s centres. The use of such equipment to help engage with young children, particularly children with complex needs, is recognised as good practice and is often used in hospitals and GP surgeries.  
• ·         Computers/ hi fi and musical instruments – the items were purchased for use by schools, children’s homes and respite centres and the youth service.

I anticipate that we will receive further requests to clarify spending over the next few days.  While I am committed to the Council being open and transparent, dealing with these requests will inevitably take a huge amount of officer time which surely would be better spent on providing services to people in Cornwall.

As is made clear above, many of the comments about spending on specific items have been based on inaccurate information which then appears to have been repeated by some individuals without first checking its accuracy.  I have asked for clarity about some of the items and would like to reassure all members that any evidence of wrong doing will be dealt with severely.  At this moment I have not been presented with any such evidence.  The matter will be discussed by the Corporate Resources Overview and Scrutiny Committee on Thursday when members will be able to ask questions.

As I said in the message I sent out over the weekend I am extremely angry that such misleading and inaccurate information was published by the Daily Telegraph.  Their claim that they gave us three days to check the figures is not true.  We had an e mail from a journalist at 4.30 pm on Wednesday.  This asked a series of questions about spending on specific items all of which related to 2008.  We contacted the journalist to clarify that this was spending by the former Cornwall County Council and, therefore, it would be difficult to identify specific items at this stage.  However we did manage to find out the background to some of the items and sent this to the paper on the Thursday morning along with a general statement. 

They then sent us a further 30 plus questions at 1.30 pm on Thursday with a deadline for responses of 12 noon on Friday.  When our initial checks identified the issue about the use of original currency we contacted the paper to ask for more time to enable us to check all the information but were told that they intended to publish on the Saturday and, therefore, were not willing to extend the deadline.

I will now be writing a formal letter of complaint to the Daily Telegraph over this matter.  

With best wishes

Alec Robertson CC
Leader

Council credit cards – a question of competence and control 29 May, 2011

Cornwall Council’s beleaguered leadership lurches from crisis to self-made crisis with this week’s disaster being the Daily Telegraph’s exposé on the use of credit cards by the authority.

There’s a pretty good chance that things are perhaps not as clear-cut as they seem in many regards. The South West Water accounts, for example, look like bills which had to be paid regardless of the method chosen to pay them (although Direct Debit would probably have been cheaper and more efficient) and, as I suspected in my previous post, the £300,000 figure offered for a hotel bill in Bangkok was simply a mistranslation of local currency into Sterling.

What this affair has revealed, however, is how little control the Tories who supposedly run Cornwall Council seem to have over the finances. No one seems to know how many of these credit cards are in circulation, or who looks at the statements. What is the (hopefully perfectly reasonable) explanation for some of the more outlandish items? And why did the Council provide the Telegraph with incorrect figures simply because no one had factored in exchange rates?

The whole issue speaks of an administration which is fond of lecturing everyone else about financial restraint but which doesn’t appear to have the faintest idea what is happening on its own watch. Time and patience are running out for Tory-led Cornwall Council – they’ve even lost the confidence of many of their own Members. Many questions remain over this whole affair, but perhaps the most damaging are those fundamental ones over the Tory-led administration’s basic competence and control.