Auditors KPMG slam LBWF’s failure to achieve value for money and realise ‘targeted savings’

KPMG is currently working on LBWF’s accounts for the year to 31 March 2025, and in that connection recently issued an interim report.

Much of this is uncontroversial, but there is one set of findings that stand out like a sore thumb:

‘At this stage of our work, we have identified significant risk of weakness in the financial sustainability arrangement put in place for Council to achieve Value for money [sic]. We have noted that the Council is facing significant pressures due to increases in cost of living, lack of funding and pressures on the SEND budget resulting in significant cost overruns.

The Council has experienced significant overspends in the year and have failed to achieved the targeted savings’.

Clearly, as the person with her hands on the purse strings, LBWF Chief Executive Linzi Roberts-Egan has questions to answer.

There is no doubt that, as KPMG recognises, she has had to deal with some difficult external circumstances.

On the other hand, it’s by no means certain that the policies she has championed have been well chosen. 

Was it really necessary, in times of financial hardship, to suddenly drop the onetime overarching LBWF priority, Ten Minute Neighbourhoods, and substitute a wholly new mission led approach to services, with all the PR and organisational costs which that entailed; or force through a controversial equality, diversity and inclusion programme which has eaten up enormous amounts of senior and junior staff time? 

More pertinently still, why has she thought it necessary to increase staff numbers in the Town Hall from 2,748 in 2022-23 to 2,874 in 2024-25, and thereby increase LBWF’s annual salary and wage bill from £130m. to £153m., that is by an extraordinary 18 per cent?

In summary, it appears that Ms. Roberts-Egan’s ongoing response to financial pressures has been inexplicably uneven, and it is this that has contributed to the failures which KPMG identify.

Given that Ms. Roberts-Egan currently earns an astounding £225,000 per annum, 30 per cent more than the Prime Minister, many will judge her unsympathetically.

She, no doubt, is thanking her lucky stars that she doesn’t work at an equivalently sized private company, because if that was the case, she already might well have been shown the door.