Maude’s Tory Madrassa: The House of the Rising Spads

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Come into the garden,Maude. leafy outlook at Denny Garden - a tenant's perk

This is the second part of the Armchair Audit of Francis Maude -looking at his role as a landlord.

Not only can Mr Maude look forward to a platinum pension  from investment bankers, Morgan Stanley, (see previous blog) but he is  also making money as a  landlord in Kennington, south London by letting out rooms available only to young  ambitious Tories.

Just off the Kennington Road where he once lived lies Denny Crescent, a beautiful and leafy enclave in a somewhat grotty  area.

Here Mr Maude purchased  a home for £240,000 cash in 1999. The  three bedroomed property, one of a terrace, has more than doubled in value since then – a next door home was recently sold  for £485,000 – and boasts two special  features.

One is  a restricted covenant signed between Mr Maude and as the title-deed shows ” His Royal Highness Charles Philip Arthur George Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Rothesay,Earl of Chester, Carrick,Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Great Steward of Scotland.”  Originally it was owned by the  Duchy of Cornwall which has imposed restrictions.

Mr Maude’s  terraced home  is Grade II listed. Lambeth Council’s description describes the  terrace as built in  “1913 by J D Coleridge for Duchy of Cornwall Estate. Crescent of 2-storey red brick cottages in Dutch style. Dark tiled roofs with dividing chimney walls and moulded wood eaves cornice. Returned crowstepped gables, with Roman cement coping, at ends and flanking centre. First floor brick band. Sash windows with glazing bars in moulded wood architraves. Half glazed doors in plain wood frames have low oblong fanlight. Handsome rainwater heads with Prince of Wales’ feathers and motto. ”

The second is membership for £125 a year and use of a private garden for his tenants, Denny Garden Ltd, opposite his home. You can find out all about this at http://dennygarden.wordpress.com.

EXPENSES SCANDAL

This property featured in the Daily Telegraph’s expenses scandal. It was the family’s London home – the electoral register shows Francis, Christina, and two of his daughters  Julia and Cecily, lived there until 2006.

Then Mr Maude  and his family swapped homes to a flat in nearby Imperial Court taking out a £345,000 mortgage and began claiming  substantial Parliamentary expenses on the flat. They charged the taxpayer £387.50 for moving the furniture from Denny Crescent there.

What the title deeds reveal is that Mr Maude also took out another mortgage with the HSBC Private Bank  on Denny Crescent raising another tranche of cash.

Mr Maude’s “tax efficiency” as they call it  is clever – at the time he claimed  interest on one mortgage from the taxpayer and offset new rental income from Tory activists in his old home  by loading all the mortgage  interest costs and repairs against the rental charge. That way he pays little tax.  And he has released hundreds of thousands of pounds of capital to spend himself. No wonder he is a highly paid former investment banker.

The property unlike next door – where the tenant pays Prince Charles’s Duchy of Cornwall  £500 a month for the unfurnished house – is not registered as a  fair rent.

MAUDE’S TORY MADRASSA

Westminster gossip  among Tory Spads ( the name for political advisers to ministers) has it that the only way you can get a convenient place to lay your head at the Maude address is to be vetted by his daughters. No chance if you are not a rising Tory activist, preferably a special adviser or wannabe MP. It also ensures no indiscretions to outsiders at the dinner table. Some wag described it as “Maude’s madrassa”.

True or not Mr Maude has had both  infamous and rising stars as his tenants.

Maude's most infamous tenant: James McGrath Pic courtesy: Daily Telegraph

 Chief among them is Australian James McGrath, a  40 something strategic adviser to Boris Johnson.

 He was exposed by journalist and campaigner Marc Wadsworth for suggesting that black immigrants who were unhappy with living in a London run by Boris Johnson should go home (See Guardian comment  is free  http://bit.ly/sWjUCq). Despite being close to Lynton Crosby( now masterminding Boris’s campaign again) he was forced to quit and he ended up going home to Australia where he is campaigns director for the Liberal Party. He has threatened to return.  In an interview with Shane Greer in Total Politics,(see http://bit.ly/sN4Sgd ) he said: ” I might come back here, we’ll see what happens.

Shane: Who knows, maybe the Boris re-election?

James: “Maybe actually, that would be nice actually especially if Ken runs again. No worries.”

Shane: “Good to stick it to him?”

James: “Totally.”

Less controversial is Martha Varney, Maude’s tenant until 2010, but a rising star,in her late 20s / eraly 30s and now special adviser to  eccentric bin dumper Oliver Letwin, who works with Francis Maude, in the Cabinet Office.  She is paid between £40,000-£54,000 a year.

Even less well-known is Alistair Richardson, in his late 20s, another Tory wannabe who has written blogs for Platform10, urging in 2o08 that MPs  (now on £65,000) should be paid at least £100,000 a year.

There are also  people not on the public electoral register. So which rising Tory star will kip at Maude’s listed home next?

Francis Maude powers site hits to 80,000+

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Thanks to all who read my tale on Francis Maude’s gold plated pension. The number of hits is 1671  so far – most in the 48 hours after the story went up. Special thanks to Political Scrapbook who made it their main story for a couple of days, Hugh Muir at the Guardian Diary who wrote up the tale in the paper and Jonathen Ledger, general secretary at NAPO, plus the 25 or more of you who liked the tale so much that you retweeted it- fromRichard Simcox at the  Public and Commercial Services Union, Barnet bloggers,to cityalan, a professor at City University.

There is more on Maude to come soon -watch this space.

Exclusive: Francis Maude’s secret gold plated banker’s pension

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Francis Maude: The man with the gold plated pension. Pic courtesy: The Guardian

Armchair audit is  raising its sights. As well as looking as councillors like Brian Coleman, it is now turning the spotlight  on auditing the  seriously wealthy to see if they follow David Cameron’s dictum that we are in it all together.

Francis Maude is the public face for taking on the public sector trade unions and  insisting their low paid members are being offered the best possible  pension terms which anyone in the private sector will be really envious.

But is everyone in the private sector worse off than public sector workers? Not Mr Maude for a start.

He has taken one hit and is about to take another since he rejoined the Conservative led coalition.

His  Cabinet Office minister salary  is £98,740 (includes MP’s salary of £65,738). This is a reduction of £5197 on his Labour predecessor, Tessa Jowell.

It is his pension history which marks the real divide. When he reaches retirement age at 2018 he will be able – unlike his public sector colleagues –  to be able to draw FOUR pensions.

 He will get the state pension – promised by the coalition to reach £140 a week – which will go to everybody.

He will get  TWO public sector pensions – one as an MP and one as minister. Their arrangements are hideously complicated – and not as open as figures available for public sector workers.

As an MP  since 1983 of 28 years standing ( he was out of parliament between 1992-97) by 2015 he will entitled – assuming a virtual wage freeze – to a pension of around £31,000 a year because he has a private sector pension and this taken into consideration to save taxpayer’s cash. Otherwise it would be worth over £46,000.

But while workers will be paying higher pension contributions Mr Maude is able to pay less under this deal. His contribution rate drops from 7.9 per cent to 5.9 per cent.

His minister’s pension by 2015 will be worth over £10,000 a year. His contributions, to be fair, are now 11.9 per cent and will rise to 18 per cent.

This gives him a state pension in excess of £40,000 a year – TEN times the average pension of lower paid civil servants bearing the brunt of the cuts and FIVE times the average civil servant pension. For that matter it is also FIVE times the average teacher’s pension.

But this is by no means the full picture. These calculations  miss out Mr Maude’s private pension – which is a huge elephant in the negotiating room.

 During the period he was out of office Mr Maude was director of  27 companies between 1992 and 2011. Six were dissolved and three went bust.

 But standing out from the lot is a period of over two years from February 1994 to November 1996 when Mr Maude was managing director of  investment bankers,Morgan Stanley, in London and New York.

The accounts are still available at Companies House and the salaries – paid in 1990s money – were stratospheric for directors.

The highest paid director’s salary went from £786,873  in 1994 to £1,234,690 in 1995 and to £1,708, 063  in 1996 – a rise  of well in excess of 100 per cent. And that excludes pension payments.

Mr Maude’s salary is not  identified –  but as MD in two countries – it will be nearer to those  figures – plus a pension to boot.

 The Cabinet Office declined to comment on his private pensions arrangements. But a City management consultant told me:

“It would be inconceivable that Morgan Stanley would not have paid Mr Maude a high pension because it is a much more tax efficient way of paying out money. Often City firms offer pensions equivalent to say 10 years service, rather than three, as a way of giving more money to people when they leave.”

Indeed Mr Maude had a lot of spare cash in 1996. Land registry records reveal that on 1st August 1996 Mr Maude and his wife Christina, bought for cash a large farmhouse and land at  Dial Post in West Sussex.  Property around there with land goes now for sums well in excess of £1m.

Perhaps the time has come for Mr Maude to reveal his true pension status when he is lecturing people to settle for less for life. He is the Government’s Mr Transparency and has released lots of personal data on individual civil servant’s  pay and pensions.

Just this weekend, his boss at the Cabinet Office, Nick Clegg, called for more transparency on top executive pay and perks. Mr Maude could lead by example by revealing the historic facts of his secret pension deal.

 My guess is that he has a private fund worth well over £1m on top of his three other state pensions. Prove me wrong, Mr Maude.

You can of course express your own views – you might feel Francis Maude is worth a mega pension, or you may feel he doesn’t  deserve anything like it.. You can e-mail him on psfrancismaude@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk .

Does churnalism damage your wealth ( and your pension)?

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Nigel Lawson: A Euro take on dangers of churnalism.Pic courtesy Daily Telegraph

I am not a natural fan of Nigel Lawson. I didn’t agree with his slashing the higher tax rate when he was chancellor. I don’t agree with his views on climate change. I am sceptical of his Eurosceptism. (though I think there is a major democratic deficit in the EU).

Yet in an interview  I did for Exaro News (see http://bit.ly/vOq5Ap ) he makes a rather clever observation about the relationship between the current  market turbulence and the standard of reporting by journalists.

 He says the combination of  superficial reaction by the markets to the growing crisis in the Eurozone and the unquestioning nature of  journalists covering current financial events in Europe is making a bad situation incredibly worse.

What he says is that journalists  reporting the recent crisis in Greece and Italy – produce instant reports to meet a 24/7 agenda that are superficial and proved wrong within 48 hours.  The practice of this press release journalism – known as churnalism – is brilliantly dissected by my friend Guardian hack Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News.

The market traders – equally superficial also working to that  same punishing 24/7 schedule believe the press headlines and make equally wrong calls – pushing shares, currencies and debt interest rates up and down like a yo-yo.

You might say so what – it’s only a game played by a load of overpaid market gamblers and equally (sometimes) overpaid superficial hacks. But there is a very serious point.

With the demise of the final salary and public sector pension – hundreds of millions of people are relying on their future wealth and happiness on investments made by these people to fund their lifestyle in their old age.

 It does not help anybody but the most extreme speculators that these are now subject to such superficial judgements and reporting. The losers are the general public, you and me, who could have even lower returns from market madness.

 Lawson’s point suggests the need for some mature market traders. It also makes the case for the relevance of  real journalism and proper analysis. Another good reason why we need good reporters who have time to think and look beyond superficial statements and gloss  made by politicians, both in the media and the blogosphere. Otherwise it could cost us a lot of money.

Incidently he also has the opposite view  to George Osborne, the present Tory chancellor, about what  should happen to the Euro ( this article is at http://bit.ly/t79TJV )

Council Fraud up £50m Eric Pickles- so let’s relax auditing nearly 100 authorities

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Eric Pickles: Slashing audit checks as council fraud booms

Detected fraud in local councils has jumped £50m in one year – with the biggest scams involving cheating on council tax benefits, unlawfully subletting council homes and false benefit claims.

 You would think Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, and Grant Shapps. the local government minister, would only be too delighted that someone is collecting this, advising councils how to tackle the problem, and saving the taxpayer up to £185m.

But soon you won’t know because the Audit Commission, the body that collects  all this information,  is to be abolished. And to save more money the government is raising the ceiling on councils that needed to be fully audited from £1m to £6.5m next year.

 Perhaps you might think these councils – mainly town and city councils, museums and drainage boards, are paragons of virtue and nobody working so close to the parish pump would dream of defrauding them.

But read the Audit Commission report,Protecting the Public Purse 2011, (summary and download here http://bit.ly/sSfVJG ) and you will find that one parish clerk managed to defraud four councils  out of £63,000 and get an 18 month prison sentence. As the report reveals: “The clerk forged signatures, altered cheques, and made unauthorised payments to herself and her family. ”

The chair of one of the parish councils said, “We have had to take out a £30,000 loan as a result of her leaving us practically bankrupt.”

In another reported case a parish council clerk set up an internet banking account for the council without its knowledge. He used this account to pay himself. The clerk told councillors the council did not require an audit. Councillors believed him and failed to ensure their responsibilities for protecting public money were undertaken properly.

So perhaps it is a bit stupid of ministers to decide that 96 authorities each spending between £1m and £6.5m a year WILL no longer require a full audit – the perfect excuse for the fraudster who conned his local councillors.

Not only is  this an opportunity for fraud but incompetence as well. An investigation I did for Exaro News revealed that among the 96 – a number had recently had their accounts qualified because they were full of mistakes or just plain wrong. One authority, Swanage Town Council, was  qualified twice in successive years. Another council, Tavistock, was told by its auditors to  resubmit its accounts to the council because they had approved completely inaccurate documents.

 You will find the full story and the  list of authorities on the Exaro News website ( http://bit.ly/vWuRFK ). In the meantime you could always ask Mr Pickles to justify what he is doing – his work e-mail is eric.pickles@communities.gsi.gov.uk . Bet you he won’t want to know.

Barnet blogger row takes website hits to over 75,000:Twitter following tops 2000

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Interest in Barnet council’s appalling attempt to criminalise and censor Mr Mustard, a local blogger, took the total number of hits on this website to over 75,000 – they are now over 76,500.

 The blog attracted over 3150 hits last week – making it the second all time most popular blog. The only blog that has been more popular is one exposing how Tony Blair’s millionaire donors are now charging 6.5 per cent on their loans to the Labour Party – which has had 4258 hits. Thanks to local Barnet bloggers,Guido Fawkes, the Guardian, Liberal Conspiracy and the Taxpayers Alliance for highlighting the Barnet blogging scandal.

 The Barnet row even surpassed interest in the ever popular audit of Brian Coleman, Barnet councillor and chair of the London Fire Brigade, whose  greedy expense claims,   £100,000 plus council allowance payments and use of cheap subsidised housing has now attracted 2738 hits.

And  thanks to some 27 kind souls are now regularly subscribing free to the blog – so they can follow every word if they want to.

 Armchair audit is about to be revived – so watch for some new analysis of  the wealth of top people leading the charge to cut pay, jobs and services.  Meanwhile Twitter following has jumped over the 2000 mark – so thanks for that!

Barnet’s mad and bad plan to censor and criminalise the nation’s bloggers

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Barnet Council: Attempt to criminalize blogger Pic courtesy:http;// telegraph.co.uk

You couldn’t make this up. Barnet Council already facing trouble for illegally filming residents and bloggers coming to hear a council meeting on cuts, is now  seeking to censor and criminalize bloggers across the nation.

 The council has put in the most ludicrous complaint against a local blogger, Mr Mustard ( real name  Derek Dishman)  to the Information Commissioner claiming he has committed a criminal offence  under the Data Protection Act by not registering as a data controller  because he has made critical comments  about whether some of its officials have real jobs.

Using his right as a citizen he puts in regular FOI’requests to the council.  The row appears to have begun over critical comments questioning the council appointing a £50,000 change and innovation manager, Jonathan Tunde-Wright with  a remarkably verbose and tediously worded job description – for a job that seems to involve privatising everything. Phrases like ” delivery of  system thinking interventions” gives a  flavour ( see http://bit.ly/sQUmyA for full offending blog)

Now  Mr Tunde-Wright has his  personal website which contains his own creed for his work and  a commitment to “transparency and engagement “, ” community and accountability” and also a strong Christian belief :”  My quest to unravel the mystery of the cross of  Jesus Christ. That is a lifetime mission.” Nothing wrong with this ( Tim Montgomerie when at Conservative Home believed both in Jesus Christ and David Cameron). His website – with some interesting comments on council cuts following the recent BBC film is (  http://jonathan.uk.com/)

Now look at what Barnet Council did. On the day the Mr Mustard’s blog appeared they complained to the Information Commissioner seeking he had broken the law – and could face a £5000 fine- because he had ” processed personal data unfairly” and had no protection under the Data Protection Act.

 The council claims wrongly that ” the individuals involved do not refer to their employment with the council on their personal websites “( in fact Jonathan’s contains a link direct to Barnet Council) and ” views on the merits of their personal websites and blogs is not in the public interest.”

Initially rebuffed the council then came up with an extraordinary description of what Mr Dishman was allowed to blog without being forced to register or be prosecuted for unfairly processing data.

According to Barnet the only things bloggers can write about is their own personal data, their own family defined as people related by blood or marriage and their own household, anybody living in their house or flat.

Everything else requires registration and can be subject to legal challenge. The council even found an obscure Swedish case, involving a European Court judgement, against a member of the Swedish church  who released details of a number of local people waiting to be confirmed as why this must be done.

Luckily there has been an extremely robust response from the Information Commissioner.  They have dismissed Barnet’s second attempt with these words: ” If the ICO were to take the approach of requiring all individuals running a blog to notify as a data controller … it would lead to a situation where the ICO is expected to rule on what is acceptable for one individual to say about another.”

“Requiring all bloggers to register with this office and comply with the parts of the DPA exempted under Section 36 (of the Act) would, in our view, have a hugely disproportionate impact on freedom of expression.”

Thank God for some sanity. But what Barnet was really up to – to suppress freedom of expression, local comment  and intimidate someone who was using his right to ask them difficult Freedom of Information requests. By threatening to criminalize someone who in the ICO’s words writes a blog as a hobby, the authority is out-of-order.

If Barnet had succeeded it would have had enormous implications and costs for bloggers across the country. As Conservatives who are committed to transparency, the council should know better. They need to put up and shut up!

Barnet did not answer my questions about this. But I did contact both bloggers.

Mr Dishman said: “The likely response of the ICO if I needed to register would have been to invite me to register. I would have paid the £35 p.a. which is the only criteria to enable registration. If the council had succeeded in getting me fined £5,000 I would have paid it and then the blog would have become hyper critical and my work rate would have increased. What where they thinking? ”

He said he had no quarral with Jonathan Tunde-Wright or any of the officials named on his website.

Mr Tunde-Wright seems a bit bemused. “Speaking as a private individual it has felt like being caught in a crossfire somewhat.

” I think it is ironic that people like myself (and there are many of us in the public sector) who are truly passionate about public service and community empowerment appear to have been the targets of certain bloggers – talk of picking the wrong targets!

” I also do feel that by going beyond the Post to naming the Post Holder, referencing my personal blog and making particular comments, the said blogger may have crossed the line and placed myself and my family in this uncomfortable place of feeling harassed online.”

Barnet finally issued a statement to the Guardian today(tuesday):

“The council was concerned that an individual had used information gathered by the FOI process and linked this with other information to ridicule and abuse individual members of staff. The council consulted with the ICO as to whether this constituted a possible breach of the Data Protection Act.

 The ICO asked the council to make a formal submission, stating this was a currently a grey area.

It should be stressed that the individuals about which the council were concerned were not part of the council’s senior management team. The council does not tolerate the abuse or bullying of any of its staff.”

Why the Tories have only themselves to blame for not reining in BBC excesses

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Jeremy Hunt : Playing a blinder in making sure the public don't know too much. Pic Courtesy: The Guardian

Remember the great fuss from the Conservatives on how they were going to hold the BBC to account, expose those mega salaries paid to Graham Norton and Jeremy Paxman and make sure the taxpayer got the best value for their money from the BBC.

Well if you beleive  culture secretary Jeremy Hunt and Lib Dem culture spokesman Don Foster, it will be all happening from next year in the new cash frozen agreement to fund the BBC. He has spent the last year telling us about his success in allowing Parliament’s National Audit Office the right to launch any inquiry it likes into whether the BBC is value for money.

To quote him directly: “It is right that licence-fee payers have confidence that the BBC is spending money wisely, so I am pleased that the NAO now has the right to full access to BBC information. Its new power to decide which areas of activity to scrutinise will increase transparency while maintaining the BBC’s independence.”

In fact this statement is the worst kind of spin and churnalism. The hilarious fact is that the national papers that were critical of the BBC, the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph plus for that matter the Huffington Post website  ( see it here http://huff.to/vDq6y5 ) fell for the whole thing, hook line and sinker.

How do we know this to be true? Well reluctantly after both the NAO and culture ministry had refused to reveal it,  all the correspondence between the remarkably named Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, Jeremy Hunt and the Chris Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust and his predecessor Sir  Michael Lyons, were released under a  Freedom of Information request to Exaro News, the new investigative website I work for. You can see  the two detailed factual articles at http://www.exaronews.com/ .

What they reveal is that Amyas – the nearest person we have in Britain to ” Mr Taxpayer” was engaged in a bloody war of attrition with the BBC and Mr Hunt on behalf of you, the licence fee payer, to get proper unfettered access to the BBC and that he lost.

At one stage he was extremely fed up.  In Whitehall language he wrote, ” “I am concerned that audit access that depends on continuing agreement between the government and the BBC rather than on statute leaves important matters unresolved and may mean that, in practice, the coalition’s proposals may not take things much further forward in terms of independent scrutiny of the BBC.”

In even more stark language he said:”“I am disappointed that it remains your view that my reports should reach Parliament via the BBC Trust and secretary of state.” “It raises the possibility that the BBC Trust or the secretary of state could redact material or, indeed, not publish the report.” You can  download all the letters at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport website See http://bit.ly/ujwp60 if you want to trawl through them.

The reason why this public official is so cross is plain to see. Why he might have the right to investigate what he likes, he is shackled by what he can find out. For a start all those BBC stars can protect their deals from public scrutiny because he has no statutory right of access and cannot override the Data Protection Act.  Even the Royal Household is not so well protected from this and the mega salaries, also paid by the taxpayer, and  the rest of Whitehall can be  scrutinised.

Also no other organisation  examined by the NAO can delay the publication of a critical report by running off to the secretary of state.

Hunt also rejected giving the right of the NAO to audit the BBC accounts – something I am told auditors find extremely useful because  throws up very quickly information when money is misspent.

  He told Morse: “I do not intend to give the NAO statutory access. “I am not persuaded that I should require the BBC to appoint the NAO as its external auditor. I do not consider this is a necessary step in ensuring that the government commitment on NAO access is achieved.”

 Finally he put a gun to his head: ” “If we do not reach agreement, the NAO will not have access to the BBC at least until there is another chance to review the agreement in 2016.”

Hunt has played a blinder over this. He convinced the media that he is Mr Good Guy when actually he is a baddie. The trouble is that  it is you, the licence payer, who have been conned. You could tell  him if you want to. His e-mail is jeremy.hunt@culture.gsi.gov.uk.

Update: Danes and British firms entertain Coleman to eye up AssetCo mess

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The new foreign shareholders of AssetCo could well be soon approached by British and Danish companies keen to take over  their business in London and take on new private fire contracts in the capital.

 The gift and hospitality logs of  Tory fire chairman Brian Coleman, and Boris Johnson’s fire adviser , David Cartwright, show they have recently been entertained by the top people from both firms.

David Cartwright had lunch with Richard Bond, development director of Serco, at the East India Club, the private schoolboy’s favourite haunt in St James’s Square, where he is chairman. While Brian Coleman was entertained by Jeroen Weimar – managing director of Serco at Livebait – a slight bit of a restuarant climb-down for Coleman.

The Danes not to be outdone sent their chief executive ,Allan Larsen, of Falck Danmark A/S. who met the £150 bill for both Coleman and Cartwright for dinner at Butler’s Wharf, Chop House.

 Both companies are known to see the fire service as a new target for privatisations once the new Localism Bill becomes law later this year.I also know that Boris Johnson, the mayor, is well aware of Serco’s interest.

 Meanwhile in the run up to the election Brian Coleman shows he has no intention in slacking on  his expenses claims – he has already notched up £1621 on taxis, mileage, accommodation and we are only just half way through the financial year. It looks as though he will  match his £3500 plus claim  last year without too much sweat. I have updated my armchair audit of Coleman on this site to take account of these new developments.

Grant Shapps: The man killing the public right to expose another Dame Shirley Porter

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Grant Shapps: Abolishing the public's right to object

Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, and Grant Shapps, the housing minister, will shortly be publishing the government’s response to their consultation on the rather boring subject of holding councils to account after they have closed down the Audit Commission.

Hidden in this rather dense document is a rather nasty proposal which seems to go against everything they stand for in opening up councils to scrutiny. The ministers are on record in wanting to encourage armchair auditors, more localism, more public rights, openness, you name it.

Eric Pickles is even a  fan of my friend Mrs Angry- a thorny red rose in the side of true blue Barnet Council- much to chagrin of Brian Coleman and his friends.

 So it rather bizarre that top Tory politicians should include a measure to abolish a 150 year old right that brought to light one of the worst scandals in local government.

Dame Shirley: Would have been saved by Grant Shapps. Pic courtesy:busheywood.com

 The exposure of Dame Shirley Porter in the 1990s for the infamous ” homes for votes ” scandal that included ” gerrymandering ” votes by selling council homes in Tory marginal seats was only possible because of a public right to force an auditor to investigate.

As the report says: “Members of the public currently have rights to question the auditor of an audited body about its accounts and raise objections… in respect of unlawful items of account or matters on which the auditor can make a report in the public interest..

“Auditors have only limited discretion to refuse to investigate objections, but the costs of investigating objections, which are recovered from the local public body and, therefore, funded by council taxpayers, can be disproportionate to the sums involved in the complaint, or to the normal audit costs of the local public body.”

This rarely used power is now being scrapped because  as the paper says: “we consider that the rights for local government electors to object to the accounts are both outdated and over-burdensome on auditors, local public bodies and council tax payers.”

So  effectively Pickles and Shapps are saying it is too burdensome  for auditors to expose corruption and certainly not in the interest of local people to have the power to force the auditor to do it. One wonders why ministers are so keen to do this. Are they expecting more corruption? Do they not want the most forensic skilled person – the auditor – to examine accounts but rather as they propose go to lay people like the Information Commissioner and the local government ombudsman to do it? Or is Mr Shapps repealing this measure as a gift to a  secret fellow Tory heroine of his, Dame Shirley?

 I think we deserve to be told. You could try to get answers. Grant Shapps is a great user of Twitter, so you may send a tweet to @grantshapps. Eric Pickles is more old twentieth century and not very techy but he does have an email address, eric.pickles@communities.gsi.gov.uk.

 In the meantime I have written a full piece – one of five – on life after the Audit Commission – on the new Exaro News website. The link is  http://bit.ly/n8vRpc .