Welcome to my blog. I am a former local journalist who now works in PR and a Conservative and community activist in Woking and Horsell. This blog will keep updated on local issues as well as my interests and quirky news stories.
Last laugh - The commission spent money countering his activities but is now being cut to size
When the Audit Commission was first envisaged and created in 1982, it fulfilled an important role in centralising and standardising the audit procedures of local and national government bodies. It is, in effect, the public spending watchdog – and as such it carries a great amount of goodwill among the public. It was the Audit Commission that uncovered the fact that between 1987 and 1989 council houses in Westminster were being sold at knock-down prices to potential Tory voters and forced Dame Shirley Porter to cough up £12million in payback to the council.
But since these days of simple auditing, the commission has been given far more wide-ranging powers to assess local authorities based on politically correct criteria that are part of the problem rather than the solution and meaningless targets that often detract from more fruitful work. The commission also requires councils to create its own silly targets – when I was at Surrey Heath Borough Council, I was forced to come up with a contrived way of measuring our media coverage for positive and negative balance in an attempt to find something to assess ourselves against. It wasn’t totally useless or harmful – but it was pretty irrelevant to most people in Surrey Heath and took time and effort away from other things.
Thankfully, Eric Pickles has announced a couple of good things about the Audit Commission in recent days – firstly that the new head of the agency won’t receive £240,000 a year. As far as I’m concerned, no-one in government should earn more than £150,000 – not because I’m a raving socialist but because very few public sector jobs are worth more than that (especially when taking into account other perks) and also because over-egged public sector salaries contribute to wage inflation in the private and public sectors, which ultimately costs the taxpayer money.
Secondly, the new Secretary of State has said that the over-engineered and painstaking Comprehensive Area Assessments will be scrapped forthwith. We don’t know what, if anything, will replace them but the hope has to be that the answer to that question will be “not much”. The Audit Commission exists to ensure that the Shirley Porters of this world aren’t allowed to get away with defrauding the taxpayer and that is a role that it should continue in earnest. But aside from that, local authorities should be entirely free to get on with running their communities in the way that they want to. If the public don’t like how they are doing it or want it done a different way, they have their say at the ballot box – that’s how democracy should work.
Under Labour it was the government, not the people, who dictated to councils how their areas should be run. No more – and that is a reason to be considerably happier today than this time last year.
PS I also ought to mention that Mr Pickles blocked the plans for Norwich’s unitary status within days of appointment. That’s fine – local people didn’t want it - but he does have to address the question of how the mish-mash of district, unitary, metropolitan and county councils in England and Wales can somehow be standardised. It simply doesn’t make sense to have so many different types of authorities.
DC has been backward about coming forward with policies and criticised for it – but that is not the same thing. While there isn’t much out there at the moment, make no mistake – the Conservatives know exactly what they are going to do in 2010 and how to pitch it.
