Council credit cards – a question of competence and control

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.