4 August 2003
The public inspection of the County Council's accounts normally takes place in October, but this year, for some reason, it has been brought forward to late July - early August.
Unfortunately, with the onion harvest in full swing and the tomato picking season at its height, I have not been able to spend as much time as usual trawling through the books.
I wonder if some high-up in the county council has a copy of Percy Thrower's "Garden Diary" on his bookshelf.
Notwithstanding my patchy attendance record, I have been able to get more details on Cllr Brian Hall's rental payments on the industrial unit at 75 Stockwell Road, Pembroke Dock, which he leases from the county council.
Sadly, I am unable to give you a full account, because the information so far supplied is incomplete.
What I can say for certain is that, as of last October he was seven months (£5,250) behind with his payments.
Then in November, there was a flurry of activity with the whole of the arrears being cleared in the 16-day period 4th-20th November.
Is it merely coincidental that these payments occurred at the very time I started to ask questions, or should the council be offering me a job as a rent collector?
Regrettably, this was a flash in the pan because he didn't reach for the cheque book again until the middle of March when he made three further payments to leave things looking nice and tidy on March 30 when last year's accounts were lined-off.
I will report more fully when I have all the gen.
Hidden expenses Old Grumpy has been taking another look at Professor Declan Hall's Birmingham University study on councillors' remuneration, which formed the basis of their 80% pay rise in 2001.
This followed just over a year after yet another study by Professor Boyne of Cardiff University, which was the basis for an earlier 80% rise.
Eighty percent, on eighty percent, gives a rise of some 200% which means that bog-standard councillors, who were being paid £3,600 when we last elected them in 1999, are now picking up in excess of £10,000.
However, I didn't dust down Prof Hall's study in order to reawaken about these huge pay rises but to remind myself of what he had to say about the imaginative ways councillors have devised to fiddle their expenses."For travel and subsistence claims for duties and business conducted outside the authority there is much more room for abuse of the system. the review team was quoted on more than one occasion by interviewees of members claiming for such things as first class rail travel to go to conferences etc., and then travelling second class or not at all. Another potential abuse quoted to us is a number of councillors going to a conference in a car and then each claiming first class rail costs. In addition, they might claim the maximum rates for hotels and then staying (sic) in a friend's house or less expensive B&B. There is more room to abuse these claims as the sums can mount up. In fact, we were informed that ingenious leaders and senior councillors could, and did in pre-Unitary days, manipulate these allowances to such an extent that they could effectively live off their expenses. It must be pointed out however in the experience of this review team this phenomenon is not confined to Welsh local authorities."
The use of the terms "abuse" and "manipulate" could lead the unwary to conclude that councillors who indulge in these practices are merely pulling a fast one.
In fact, what is being described is at least false accounting and most probably theft.
During my 11 years scrutinising councillors' expense claims I have come across and exposed most of the fiddles outlined above, or subtle variations thereof, yet nobody has been disciplined, never mind prosecuted.
Professor Hall's team recommend that these "abuses" should be tackled by the introduction of "a proper receipting mechanism for actual costs incurred".
This is misleading because the word used in the regulations is "reimbursement" and you can't reimburse someone unless you know how much they have spent i.e. a receipt has been produced to support the claim.
Another recommendation is that the scams involving hotel bills could be avoided if the council, itself, booked and paid for the room.
There are two difficulties with this.
Firstly, while there is a limit, laid down by Parliament, on how much a member can be reimbursed for hotel expenses paid out of his own pocket, there is no such limit when the council pays directly.
That principle was established in the case of Nottingham Evening Post v Nottinghamshire County Council when the newspaper unsuccessfully challenged the council's practice of booking members into expensive luxury hotels.
Secondly, there is a lack of transparency because, while it is a simple matter to check the cost of a member's overnight accommodation by looking at the expense claim forms, and the attached receipts, it usually requires a large slice of luck to locate a directly paid hotel bill amongst the hundreds of thousands of invoices available for inspection during the public audit.
Just as it happens, Old Grumpy has come across a perfect example of both problems during the current public inspection of the council's books.
This involves his Leadership Cllr Maurice Hughes.
According to his expense claim, Cllr Hughes spent the hours 9 am - 4 pm on 3rd December 2002 at a meeting in Pembroke Dock.
The following morning, his expense claim records, he was up with the lark (in December? Ed), and at 8 am he was in the car heading for Swansea and a seminar entitled "After Jo'burg - Sustainable Development".
All quite reasonable considering that you can make Swansea comfortably in one-and-a-half hours, in plenty of time for a 10 am start.
However, that is not the true story - there was no early morning drive to Swansea on December 4th - because an invoice, discovered quite by accident by one of my fellow trawlers, shows that the council booked and paid for Cllr Hughes to stay at the Swansea Marriott on the night of 3 December.
So he drove up the previous evening.
Why he should wish to propagate this fiction is anybody's guess.
After all he was entitled to his travelling expenses whether he went on the 3rd or the 4th.
Perhaps he felt it was inappropriate, especially as it involved sustainable development, for himself and a council officer (£105.00) to be wasting public money on an unnecessary overnight stay.
What's more, Cllr Hughes' bill came to £122.95 (including £13.95 for breakfast) which is almost £50.00 more than he would have been able to claim had he paid for the hotel room himself.
Judging by the "Today" programme's reaction to the heatwave-induced speed restrictions on the rail network, the presenters hadn't realised that metals expand when heated.
Sarah Montague could hardly conceal her glee at this latest misfortune on the railways with references to "leaves on the line" and the "wrong sort of snow".
An expert was brought on to opine that in the glory days of British Rail, when the service was run by real railwaymen, such a thing would never have happened.
But the fact is that railway lines have buckled in the heat since time immemorial and speed restrictions have always been imposed in very hot weather.
The difference today is not the quality of the engineers but the hysteria that greets every rail disaster.
Currently, there are several directors of the former Railtrack Ltd facing manslaughter charges over the Hatfield crash.
In that climate, which way would you jump if the decision whether to introduce speed restrictions fell to you?
Spending the house Once upon a time, a man with a £30,000 mortgage and a £100,000 house was thought to be a lucky fellow indeed.
Not any longer, it seems, because I read in the business sections of the Sunday papers that something called Mortgage Equity Withdrawal (MEW) has become all the rage.
MEW means, quite simply, that you use the differential between what you owe and the value of the property to secure a bigger mortgage thereby passing some of your own equity in the house to the building society or bank in exchange for cash.
Whereas, the £70,000 difference in the value of the house and the debt you owed was once regarded as a handy little nest-egg, it is now looked upon as a series of missed shopping trips and continental holidays forgone.
According to the reports in the papers, MEW now accounts for fully 50% of all mortgage lending and is widely seen as the fuel that sustains the gravity-defying boom in consumer spending that keeps the economy aloft..
Low interest rates and rising house prices appear to make this a low-risk strategy for those who find themselves rich in bricks and mortar but short of readies in their pocket.
If interest rates rise or house prices dip there will be much mewling and puking as the ghost of negative equity again stalks the land.