Linzi Roberts-Egan

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

February 5, 2026 Cllr. Grace Williams, Freedom of Information Act, LBWF spin, Linzi Roberts-Egan, Local Government Transparency Code, Ombudsman 0

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 Freedo... »

LBWF gets peer reviewed…but are the results credible?

January 29, 2026 Linzi Roberts-Egan 0

In 2024, LBWF volunteered itself for a Local Government Association (LGA) Corporate Peer Challenge (CPC), that is an audit by a team of ‘senior local government councillors and officers’ from outside the borough. How did this work out? It’s worth noting to start with that opinions about CPCs differ. For the LGA, a CPC is ‘a highly valued improvement and assurance tool that is delivered by the sect... »

LBWF’s new back office Oracle Fusion networking platform: management miracle or cash drain?

January 20, 2026 Cllr. Grace Williams, Cllr. Paul Douglas, LBWF spin, Linzi Roberts-Egan 0

In December 2021 LBWF decided to modernise its back office by installing a cloud based networking platform made by the leading American company Oracle (‘Big Red’). Subsequently, this innovation has been described as a management triumph, responsible for integrating ways of working across the Town Hall. However, as is often the case with LBWF, careful research reveals a more complicated picture, wi... »

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

January 7, 2026 LBWF finance, Linzi Roberts-Egan 0

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 ... »

LBWF is making 150 employees redundant, and imposing 105 separate spending cuts, but its long-term habit of appointing expensive senior staff apparently continues

February 23, 2024 Linzi Roberts-Egan, Redundancies, Senior staff pay

Some of the choices that LBWF makes about the expenditure of public money are perplexing, to say the least. Consider first some recent history. Over the years, and when speaking publicly, leading Labour councillors have repeatedly insisted that dwindling central government funding is threatening the council’s financial stability. Yet behind the scenes, as this blog has revealed, these same leading... »