LBWF’s commitment to being transparent again in question as campaigner finds c.£500,000 unaccounted for in audit documents signed off by the council’s senior leadership

In recent years LBWF has repeatedly failed to uphold its responsibility to be open and transparent, even where this is required by the law.

A few examples are illustrative (for further details see the links below).

In 2020, the Information Commissioner’s Office took the almost unprecedented step of issuing LBWF with a Practice Recommendation because of its widespread non-compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.

Four years later, LBWF was revealed to have blatantly ignored the mandatory requirements of the 2015 Local Government Transparency Code, legislation that was specifically designed, as accompanying blurb explained, ‘to place more power into citizens’ hands to increase democratic accountability and make it easier for local people to contribute to the local decision making process and help shape public services’.

And in the same year, though in a different register, it emerged that the minutes of a Children and Families Scrutiny Committee meeting had been published without recording comments made by Cllr. Jonathan O’Dea about the Whitefield School scandal, an ‘oversight’ that (thanks to Cllr. O’Dea’s determined challenge) resulted in the minutes having to be re-written.

In the last couple of months, local journalist and housing campaigner Michelle Edwards has uncovered a further example of this regrettable tendency to obfuscation.

As part of her campaigning, Ms. Edwards wanted to find out how much compensation the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman had ordered LBWF to pay Waltham Forest residents after it had upheld their complaints, and so she turned to LBWF Annual Governance Statements for 2023-24 and 2024-25 to find the figures.

The 2023-24 Annual Governance Statement included the following:

‘Compensation paid for the financial year 2022–23 was £30,132.00 (£21,767.00 was paid by Education & Childrens Services’ [sic].

But when Ms. Edwards turned to the Annual Governance Statement for the following year, 2024-25, she found, to her surprise, the compensation figures were exactly the same:

‘Compensation paid for the financial year 2024/2025 was £30,132.00 (£21,767.00 was paid by Education & Childrens’ Services’ [sic].

Seeking an explanation, Ms. Edwards contacted LBWF, and was advised that both Annual Governance Statements were completely wrong, and ‘the correct figures for each year’ were as follows:

‘23/24 overall compensation figure is £262,984.61 – Children’s and Education was £4,924.97

24/25 overall compensation figure is £274,850.11 – Children’s and Education was £10,800’.

Reflecting today on this surprising turn of events, it’s clear that LBWF has continued to be confused about dates: to take one example, the compensation figures for 2023-24 initially seem to have got lost in the wash, only to suddenly re-appear in the recent clarification.

But much more striking is the fact that, as far as compensation goes, the two Annual Governance Statements are not just wrong, but wrong by large margins, with the overall totals stated therein both roughly a ninth of what LBWF now admits was their true size.

All of this prompts three observations.

First, it needs to be underlined that the mistaken figures were not provisional or in some early draft, but final and published, indeed personally signed off by the LBWF Leader Cllr. Grace Williams and Chief Executive Linzi Roberts-Egan, and supposedly produced, as the Accounts and Audit Regulations of 2015 requires, ‘in accordance with proper practices in relation to accounts’.

Second, as the specific amounts show, there is no way that what happened can be blamed on what is perhaps the most common cause of error, the accidental misplacing of a decimal point. 

Third, leaving everything else aside, it is notable that the figures which were published in the Annual Governance Statements worked in LBWF’s favour. 

After all, in the court of public opinion, having to admit that the Ombudsman has ordered pay outs of £30,132.00 is unlikely to raise much comment. But if the total is in fact £274,850.11, that’s a different matter altogether.

Those are the facts; two obvious questions follow.

First, how could LBWF have lost sight of nearly £500,000 of public money (the true cost of compensation over two years minus the sums declared in the Annual Governance Statements)?

And second, if, as LBWF now admits, the Annual Governance Statements were so wrong on this matter, what guarantee is there that these supposedly definitive documents are free of further errors?