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New TPA research this week uncovered a fresh scandal for local councils, as we revealed that hundreds had failed to file their accounts on time. The annual statement of accounts is the most comprehensive look at a council’s finances. Yet despite having a statutory requirement to publish audited accounts for 2022/23 by 30th September, just 31 councils (less than 10 per cent of the total) managed to. Even more extraordinary, almost 100 councils have failed to publish even a draft statement of accounts for the latest financial year.
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Our revelations certainly caught the attention of the papers with write ups in the Daily Mail, Daily Star, and Yorkshire Post. Naturally, the broadcasters wanted in on the action, so our head of campaigns, Elliot Keck, took to the GB News studio and told viewers across the country: “This is a transparency crisis… We’re seeing an increasing problem where not only are they not publishing their audited accounts, they’re not even publishing their draft accounts… It just means that council taxpayers cannot see how their money is being spent.”
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the worst offending councils have been making the headlines for rather different reasons in recent months. Bankrupt Croydon council has failed to produce any kind of accounts for the last two years. South Cambridgeshire district council who are trialling a four-day week last published audited accounts for 2019/20.
With local taxpayers being prevented from seeing how their money is being spent by their councils, it begs the question: what have they got to hide?
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Major victory in battle against the four-day week
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On Thursday, we scored a huge victory for taxpayers in our battle against the public sector four-day week. In a welcome move - following relentless TPA campaigning - the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities updated its own guidance to local authorities instructing them to cease all four-day week trials and stating “no further focus should be given by local authorities on this matter.”
As regular readers will know, we’ve been working flat out to stop taxpayers’ money being squandered on these dodgy experiments. Our work in South Cambridgeshire, the first council to trial a four-day week, has exposed failing services, town hall bosses interfering with so-called ‘independent’ reports, along with thousands of petition signatures against the part-time council. In Bassetlaw, when we got wind that the council leader planned his own trial, our team rushed north and secured a u-turn within 24 hours. And our research, cited at Prime Minister’s Questions, showed that a public sector four-day week would cost £30 billion in lost working time!
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Despite this latest development, at the time of writing, the South Cambridgeshire trial is still in place and there are risks of it spreading further.
Against it, and a wider public sector four-day week, stands the TPA team and you, our supporters. Only with your help can we hope to keep a full-time public sector. If you’ve not already done so, sign our petition and share it with your friends and family. The more voices that speak up, the better chance we have of winning.
We’ll continue producing our hard hitting research and campaigning for the efficient services taxpayers deserve. If you can back the TPA, click here to chip in today.
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TaxPayers' Alliance in the news
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The rising cost of the migrant crisis
This week, it was reported that the government is planning to end contracts with 50 hotels housing migrants by the end of the year. This may sound like progress given the long running concerns over the migrant crisis, but the devil is always in the detail, as this new arrangement would see responsibility for housing migrants passed to local authorities who may well use the same hotels!
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Our digital campaign manager, Joe Ventre, spoke to TalkTV’s Julia Hartley-Brewer about the mounting costs of illegal immigration, and pointed out that on top of the pricetag of housing and processing migrants, taxpayers are also unwittingly made to subsidise NGOs and global quangos that are hell-bent on stopping the Rwanda scheme and more cost effective solutions. "Taxpayers are not only paying for the problem” Joe said, “but are also paying for organisations that are actively trying to stop the solution."
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The Beeb caught in yet another blunder
The BBC has faced a barrage of criticism in recent weeks for its handling of the conflict in the Middle East, but followers of our Axe the Tax campaign will be well-aware of the state broadcaster’s consistent tendency to be out-of-touch with ordinary Brits. An eye-rolling example reared its head this week when the Beeb sparked controversy by hosting an article teaching white privilege to children, describing the late Queen as a “symbol of white supremacy” and comparing Winston Churchill to Adolf Hitler.
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Speaking to the Daily Mail, TPA policy analyst Tom Ryan hit the nail on the head: “teaching controversial social theories to children is one thing, but it's a whole other matter when it's being funded by hard-pressed licence fee payers.” Hear, hear!
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Giving the high street a helping hand
The launch of our research paper on reforming business rates last week served as a timely reminder of the plight of the high street. For many businesses, the current surge in inflation and squeezed household finances after punishing covid lockdowns has been akin to coming out of the frying pan and into the fire. Our favourite shops and hospitality venues are bearing a tough burden, and as our research pointed out, the business rates system is ripe for reform.
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In a piece for CapX, our chief executive, John O’Connell set out the bigger picture as to why these reforms are needed to save our hospitality and retail sectors. “Business rates reform is uniquely urgent” John explains. “If we continue to kick this can down the road, we will keep losing the businesses that jobs, wages and communities around the country rely on."
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The War on Waste Blog: September and October 2023
Bringing us his regular round up of our war on waste, Elliot has put pen to paper this week, outlining the TPA’s investigations for the last two months. But this time it has a slightly different flavour. Less focused on waste itself, in this blog Elliot looks at the huge transparency crisis in local government in particular as hundreds of accounts go unpublished, meaning we know less and less, despite them spending more and more.
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As Elliot writes, “It means that a huge chunk of the more than £100 billion of taxpayers’ money, whether from council tax, business rates or government grants, spent by local authorities is unaccounted for.”
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It’s scandal after scandal for the nationalised Scottish ferry company CalMac as it emerged that ferries scheduled to be in use by 2018 will cost £400 million, £260 million more than they’re worth.
Project boss David Tydeman, himself admitted that Scottish taxpayers face paying almost £100 million over market value per vessel!
It’s yet another public sector infrastructure project that has completely capsized.
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Benjamin Elks
Operations Manager
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