LBWF finance

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

January 7, 2026 LBWF finance, Linzi Roberts-Egan

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.... »

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LBWF CEO Linzi Roberts-Egan’s message to council staff: we are in a much more challenging financial position than we hoped we would be, so save money or else!

October 10, 2024 LBWF finance, LBWF spin, Senior staff pay

LBWF CEO Linzi Roberts-Egan has just circulated the following message to staff: ‘We are facing a significant budget deficit this year, with a £17million forecasted overspend. This is a much more challenging financial position than we hoped we would be in at this point in the year, and together we must all take immediate action to address it. This will mean making difficult decisions over the coming months and will require a step-change from us all to reduce costs and think about how every pound is spent. All teams across the Council are being asked to develop action plans to achieve addi... »

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EXCLUSIVE From 2015 to 2022 the number of senior staff in the Town Hall grew nearly fourfold, the cost of employing them did too, but service levels remained average

January 9, 2024 Cllr. Grace Williams, LBWF finance, LBWF spin, Senior staff pay

What follows looks in greater detail at an earlier post’s revelation (see links) that in the past few years, despite repeatedly complaining about government imposed cuts, LBWF in fact has spent millions more from the public purse appointing expensive senior staff.  To get a better handle on this surprising development, I have analysed the annual series which LBWF publishes about its senior staff (here defined as everyone from the chief executive, paid £217,762 p.a., through the different directors and heads, down to grade PO8, paid £50-55,000 p.a.), focusing particularly on the period 201... »

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LBWF Leaders rattle the begging bowl, but splash £100,000 on ‘a conversation’ between seven floodlit buildings

January 25, 2022 Cllr. Clare Coghill, Cllr. Grace Williams, LBWF finance

Since the start of the pandemic, the respective Labour Leaders, first Cllr. Clare Coghill and later her successor, Cllr. Grace Williams, have returned to versions of the long-standing Labour complaint that LBWF is not getting a fair funding deal from the Tory government. Cllr. Coghill early on set the tone, stating in a press release of April 2020 that “‘If lockdown measures continue for 12 weeks the full impact on our finances could be up to £40 million, roughly 10 per cent of our planned budget for this year’, and then telling the Waltham Forest Echo that while ministers had init... »

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LBWF moves closer to completing its long overdue 2018-19 accounts, but in the process, receives a strong warning about the governance of its commercial ventures, both old and new UPDATED

March 15, 2021 LBWF finance

As previous posts have reported (see links below), like all other local authorities, LBWF was due to complete its 2018-19 accounts by the last day of July 2019, but missed both this deadline and several others that followed over the next year and a half. The successive delays were caused by a combination of adverse external factors, most obviously the pandemic, plus a series of problems with LBWF’s past working practices and records that emerged as the audit work progressed, many ‘complex’, and ‘some going back a number of years’.  The good news is that an end to this saga may b... »

LBWF’s Internal Audit and Anti-Fraud Team investigates Town Hall procurement of goods and services, and finds disturbing ‘non-compliance with existing Rules’

October 12, 2020 LBWF finance, LBWF spin

In late 2019, LBWF’s Internal Audit and Anti-Fraud Team (hereafter IAAFT) completed a report on Town Hall procurement, and surprisingly, given the fact that each year this involves many millions of pounds’ worth of goods and services, concluded that it was only deserving of ‘limited assurance’, with two of the five component findings about risk rated ‘high’ (‘Key targets missed, some services compromised…Service budgets exceeded…Significant breach in laws and regulations resulting in significant…consequences’). The IAAFT investigation was based upon a forensic examination of five procure... »

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London Borough of Waltham Forest: the local authority that can’t even finalise its annual accounts (3)

October 1, 2020 LBWF finance

The saga of LBWF’s failure to complete its 2018-19 accounts – originally due, as for all other local authorities, on the last day of July 2019 – continues, and indeed seems to have no very clear end in sight. What’s gone wrong? Recent papers to the LBWF Audit and Governance Committee provide some elucidation. Initially, it appears, LBWF could legitimately claim that it was being thwarted by external circumstances, and long before those caused by COVID-19. First, following statutory guidance, LBWF recently had changed auditors, with the incumbent, EY (Ernst & Young), adopting a somewhat dif... »

London Borough of Waltham Forest: the local authority that can’t even finalise its annual accounts (2)

April 7, 2020 LBWF finance, LBWF spin

Mystery continues about the fate of LBWF’s 2018-19 externally audited annual accounts. As a previous post outlined, these were due on 31 July 2019, so that they could be signed off by the Audit and Governance Committee, but the auditor, Ernst and Young LLP, was tardy in starting work; then became entangled in ‘historical audit issues‘, possibly dating to as far back as 2007; and in the end was forced to move the completion date forward to September, with the delay and extra work estimated to cost an extra £140,000. However, when the Audit and Governance Committee met on 26 September 2019, ther... »

London Borough of Waltham Forest: the local authority that can’t even finalise its annual accounts (1)

December 9, 2019 Cllr. Clare Coghill, LBWF finance, LBWF spin

Every year, like other local authorities, LBWF is bound by law to produce its annual accounts, using an external auditor and a timetable specified by the Accounts and Audit Regulations of 2015. But this year, the procedure has gone wrong, indeed very wrong, and now there is a lively post mortem in progress about who is to blame, and what are the likely consequences. As regards the 2018-19 audit, LBWF knew the specified time frame well beforehand. Unaudited accounts were due by 31 May 2019, and audited accounts by 31 July 2019, so that the latter then could be signed off by the Audit and Govern... »

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