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Comment: LDA must give value for money
Evening Standard16.07.08
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.
Reader views (2)
...and to add to Dave Hill's comment, the Panel has simply confirmed the findings of a London Assembly committee enquiry into the LDA which took place before any of this became part of the election process from December 2007 to May 2008. But it has added a political spin which was purposely avoided in the Assembly investigation. It is incorrect to say there were no rules to break. There is the law and there were indeed rules - what was missing was the enforcement of proper procedure. I alone called for the LDA to be scrapped as it is unnecessary, but the Panel may have done more harm than good by casting blame while coming up with no real solutions. Is the Mayor now going to scrap the funding of projects which by their nature are high risk?
- Damian Hockney, London, UK
The five person panel contained three Conservative members - the two council leaders you mention plus its chair, Patience Wheatcroft. A fourth member chairs a Conservative business organisation. Whatever the virtues of the panel's findings, its membership can hardly be described as politically neutral.
- Dave Hill, London
