Comment: LDA must give value for money

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At the outset of his mayoralty, Boris Johnson commissioned a review of the way that City Hall - above all the Greater London Authority and the London Development Agency - does its work. There were grave concerns about how the LDA administered its grants after revelations in this paper about it funding some grassroots organisations with little apparent scrutiny of the way the money was spent. The LDA has spent £2.6 billion of public money since 2000. The Forensic Audit Panel, under Patience Wheatcroft, a former financial journalist, has duly delivered its report, and it makes sobering reading.

It suggests that Ken Livingstone's administration was extraordinarily careless in its use of public money and grandiose in its ambitions. Lee Jasper, Mr Livingstone's former race adviser, has crowed today that the panel has cleared him of corruption. Yet this paper never said that he was corrupt - although he is still under investigation by the police. What we did say was that he was cavalier in the way he spent large amounts of public money on grants to bodies run by friends, without any mechanism for ensuring that the money was properly accounted for. Indeed, Ms Wheatcroft makes clear that Mr Jasper did not break any rules because there were none to break. The spending culture at City Hall was simply extraordinarily and culpably lax.

Today's report found unnecessary funds spent on overseas offices. It also describes how Mr Livingstone established his own London project to research weather trends - work already undertaken by the Met Office. There were few or no checks on organisations in receipt of cash from the LDA - including organisations like the European Federation of Black Women Business Owners, which was actually dormant at the time. There were contracts allocated for important public works which were not put out to competition. There was sheer ineptitude among board members.

This catalogue of errors should not, as Boris Johnson promises today, be grounds for a witchhunt. What it should be is a warning that in the new City Hall, taxpayers' money must be spent far more carefully. The new governance of London should be accountable and transparent.