Whichever way you try to cut the mustard the numbers do not reconcile, but given this is Folkestone & Hythe District Council we are talking about, you really shouldn’t be surprised.
While the 2022/23 accounts were open for public inspection, our public face requested the payments to companies who offered the Council self contained nightly lets. Families are placed in self-contained accommodation, and it is usually a flat and on a temporary basis.
According to the data released by the Council the sum spent on Self contained nightly lets in 2022/23 was £208,446. If perchance this is without VAT, add in the VAT and one has £250,135. If the £208,446 is with VAT then minus the VAT is ££173,705.
Yet the Council’s Payment to Supplier data which has VAT added totaled £233,562 – without VAT £194,635. Either way there is an irregularity of around £20,000. As such the numbers do not reconcile. What the public are informed via the publicly available data does not tally with what is on the Council’s financial ledgers, yet those Cllrs who sit on the Audit & Governance Committee are not proactively checking that what the Council say is anything close to the truth.
But it doesn’t stop there. In the paperwork going to the Committee on the 6 Decemeber is the Quarterly Internal Audit Update Report from the Head of East Kent Audit Partnership
At page 15 of the document it states:
Findings
The requirement to keep the Contract Register up to date was included in the Procurement training provided in March 2023.
Testing was undertaken on a sample of 40 suppliers with spend in excess of £5,000 in the period April to September 2023 meaning that there should be an entry on the contract register with the supplier.
From the 40 suppliers tested, only 21 were included on the Contract Register which means that despite training having been provided to officers which included a requirement to add contracts above £5,000 to the Contracts Register, officers are continuing to not do so which means that the Council needs to take additional steps to ensure better compliance with the requirement under CSOs to publish all contracts above £5,000.
So 19 Companies were not included on the Contracts register as is required by the Transparency Code 2015 between April 2023 and Sept 2023. The value of these 19 contracts is not known as the data hasn’t been published, neither has the names, so they cannot be checked against the amount paid to them on the Council’s payment to suppliers data.
Of course, not publishing the contract is a breach of the Council’s own Contract Standing Orders as well as the transparency code. Back in Dec 2022, the Chief Executive of Folkestone & Hythe District Council, Dr Susan Priest (pictured) made it clear that training would begin in Jan 2023 and there would be no excuse for no compliance regarding contract being published and other matters.
The matters were given the “highest priority.. to making the required changes” and the then s151 Officer Charlotte Spendley went onto say the Governance Update report was an “unhappy paper to bring forward and the highest level of priority has been given to implement the recommendations and actions necessary in the report”.
Now given we found nine contracts not on the Council’s contract register recently; which had a value of £750,000, the very fact a further 19 are not on the register, gives us cause for significant concern. Little of what Dr Priest has said, has filtered down to the troops as is made clear by the latest internal audit update. Fish rot from the head down
This is taxpayers money. Each resident of the district should be allowed to see all the contracts the Council agree to, above £5,000, not just the ones they deem appropriate for us to see.
Will it improve given a year has passed since we were promised these issues would be eradicated?
Will the Chief Exec, Dr Susan Priest fall on her sword and resign?
As always we’ll leave you to think about that.
The Shepway Vox Team
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