Kent County Council Reform UK Led Audit Committee ‘Not Effective’ as Camilla Black May Resign

Kent County Council’s only independent audit committee member says the body isn’t working, serious questions aren’t being answered and the people responsible for red-rated failures frequently aren’t in the room.

Camilla Black (pictured) had listened for almost four hours.

She’d heard councillors question financial risks, weak controls, missed audit actions and a multimillion-pound Oracle programme whose accounting treatment couldn’t be explained at the meeting. Again and again, members were told that somebody would check, prepare a note or come back another day.

Then Black stopped beating about the bush.

“In my opinion, this committee is not working. It is not effective.”

She described proceedings as confrontational, unacceptable and unprofessional before delivering the sentence Kent County Council can’t sensibly shrug off: “I am on the border of resigning.”

An independent audit committee member is a non-political, usually non-voting specialist appointed to provide objective scrutiny of a council’s finances, risks, governance and internal controls. They don’t run services or follow a party whip; they challenge the assurances supplied by councillors and officers and help prevent the authority from simply marking its own homework. Black confirmed that she has no voting rights at KCC.

That makes her warning especially serious.

Black isn’t an opposition politician hunting for a row, nor an administration councillor trying to keep the show on the road. She is the person deliberately placed outside those political camps to look under the bonnet and say whether the machinery is working.

Her verdict was that it wasn’t.

KCC says its Governance and Audit Committee, controlled by Reform UK, exists to provide an “independent and high-level focus” on governance, risk, finance and control. It should ensure there’s sufficient assurance, effective internal challenge and public accountability, and it should report concerns where the council’s arrangements aren’t effective. Those are weighty promises. The meeting of 23 July showed how far the practice may have drifted from the glossy description.

Black’s intervention came during the annual review of the committee’s effectiveness. She said she hadn’t been asked directly for her views, although she accepted that she might have missed a request. The former independent member had received an exit interview; the serving independent member said nobody had tapped her on the shoulder.

She also told chairman Michael Brown that they’d never had a one-to-one discussion, despite her previously reaching out.

“I am the independent member, the sole one at the moment,” she said. “I didn’t have an opportunity to comment.”

That’s quite an omission in a review examining whether the committee is effective.

The trouble wasn’t confined to the survey. Black had watched the same weaknesses play out in real time.

An internal audit report showed that only 13 per cent of 474 cost-centre managers had completed the relevant budget-management course. None of the five corporate directors had submitted a resource-accountability statement at the point examined by audit. KCC’s reserves were also reported below its five per cent benchmark, meaning its financial resilience couldn’t yet be considered fully restored.

Oliver Bradshaw asked why.

Nobody present could properly tell him.

KCC’s Section 151 Officer accepted that the questions required answers but said they would have to be taken away. Bradshaw responded that the report itself had marked matters yellow and red, yet contained virtually nothing explaining why the failures had happened or what management intended to do about them.

Then came adult social care.

The audit had identified inconsistent assessments of the risk that care providers might fail. Only two of five sampled contracts maintained a risk matrix. Monitoring had been limited in practice, the early-warning arrangements were inadequate and KCC had only minimal insight into some non-regulated providers.

Adult social care is KCC’s biggest spending area. Provider failure isn’t an abstract accounting exercise: it can mean frail, elderly or disabled residents suddenly needing emergency support because the company caring for them has gone to the wall.

Yet nobody from the directorate was there to answer.

Internal auditors were left trying to explain the shortcomings they’d uncovered and the action plan negotiated with management. That’s the wrong way round. The auditor is the smoke alarm, not the firefighter—and certainly not the person who left the chip pan burning.

Councillors recognised the absurdity. Alister Brady said questions about adult social care should be answered by the relevant cabinet member and senior director, not by auditors who had already done their job. Bradshaw agreed, explaining that he wasn’t attacking the audit team; they were simply the only people available to question.

By the end, Bradshaw had kept his own tally.

“I asked about 26 questions this meeting,” he said. “I got an answer to four of them.”

Black knew what good preparation ought to look like because she’d sat on the other side of the table. She told the committee she’d been a very senior public officer and said there was “no way” she would’ve attended a meeting without understanding a red-rated finding in her area.

She acknowledged that officers were busy and served numerous committees. That wasn’t the point.

“We are here for a purpose,” she said.

Black also criticised the sheer bulk and presentation of KCC’s papers. She said they could be streamlined and made clearer, adding that she had time to read them closely but didn’t know how elected members managed alongside their other council duties. Dense papers don’t automatically produce rigorous scrutiny; sometimes they bury the important nugget beneath a mountain of bumf.

And too many councillors, in her view, weren’t digging.

She said only a small group regularly asked questions, leaving her and several persistent members to fill the gaps. Her role wasn’t to perform elected members’ scrutiny for them. As an independent adviser, she was there to guide, challenge and help the committee operate effectively—not carry the piano while others admired the wallpaper.

Brady reached the same conclusion from a different direction.

He said he’d sat on KCC’s committee for five years and had served on effective audit committees at other authorities. In his experience, KCC’s current committee wasn’t effective. Without the handful of members who kept asking awkward questions, he believed items might sail through with little discussion at all.

The morning’s sharpest example concerned the Dedicated Schools Grant deficit.

Members discussed a potential deficit approaching £190 million, largely connected to the cost of supporting children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities. Grant Thornton’s representative said she needed to check the precise projected figure but confirmed that a sum on that scale would be material to KCC’s accounts. She also said auditors were using their formal reporting powers elsewhere where similar deficits were causing significant problems.

Mark Hood proposed a dedicated committee agenda item—a proper deep dive into the overspend, the government’s conditional financial assistance, KCC’s continuing spending pressures and what might be inherited by the new councils created through local government reorganisation.

Five voted for it.

Six voted against.

One abstained.

“I hope that the auditors are witnessing this and are taking notes,” Hood said when the proposal fell.

Brady later pointed to that vote as evidence of the committee’s failure. An external auditor had recognised a material financial risk, yet a majority declined to make it a dedicated item for examination. That sits uneasily with KCC’s claim that the committee exists to identify ineffective arrangements and provide public accountability.

So who is Camilla Black?

KCC doesn’t make the answer easy to find. Its public committee page lists her as a member but provides no professional biography, appointment history or explanation of her qualifications. Its contact page simply says: “Address not supplied.”

The wider public record shows that she isn’t a well-meaning amateur parachuted into a technical role.

A professional profile describes Black as an ACMA-qualified accountant and board-level executive with extensive cross-sector experience delivering organisational transformation. Jersey’s government records show that she became its Group Director of Finance Transformation in 2019, responsible for finance reform, longer-term planning and business performance.

Before that, Jersey appointed her as a Strategic Finance Review Consultant to a specialist team supporting the transformation of the island’s public services. The government announcement said the appointments had been made through public-appointment procedures and approved by the Jersey Appointments Commission.

Her earlier career included director-level government and commercial work. Contemporary reporting on the Jersey appointment described her as a former Cabinet Office Director of Commercial Relationships, said she’d held director roles in other government departments and noted a career of more than 30 years, including service as Finance Director with BOC Group. It also recorded interim roles at Hammersmith and Fulham Council, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime and HM Land Registry.

London City Hall independently confirms that Black served as Interim Director of Police Resources and Performance at the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. HM Land Registry’s annual accounts record that she was appointed its interim finance director through an executive interim agency in August 2013 and remained finance director until May 2014.

That background helps explain why she was so forceful over KCC’s Oracle programme.

Jersey’s Integrated Technology Solution used SAP to bring government finance, suppliers, assets, health and safety and people-management functions onto a modern platform. It was the sort of complicated, organisation-wide technology transformation in which costs, controls, procurement, staff training and accounting treatment all become intertwined. Jersey’s own later reporting recorded that the programme had implemented finance and supplier functions in January 2023, asset-management capabilities in May and people management in November.

At KCC, Black asked why the original assumptions behind Oracle (cost risen from £15m to £43m and rising) hadn’t been challenged earlier and whether the external auditor’s value-for-money work would begin with the original business case and trace the programme’s journey from there.

Then she asked a basic accounting question: was the expenditure being capitalised and placed on KCC’s balance sheet, or wasn’t it?

The Section 151 Officer initially offered to produce a note explaining the treatment. Black pressed him: “It’s a simple question: Is this going on the balance sheet, or is it not?”

He replied that he didn’t want to mislead the committee and needed to check the technical accounting. He could confirm that the source of funding wasn’t capital funding, but couldn’t give a direct answer on the balance-sheet treatment.

That doesn’t establish an accounting error.

It does explain the frustration.

An experienced finance and transformation executive had asked the statutory finance officer how a programme costing tens of millions of pounds was being treated in the accounts. At the council’s principal audit committee, the answer was: we’ll check and come back.

There is an awkward episode in Black’s own career that should be reported accurately rather than turned into a cheap gotcha. In 2014, the Treasury imposed a £1,030,176 penalty on HM Land Registry after its interim finance director remained engaged off-payroll beyond the six-month period permitted under Treasury rules. Land Registry identified that interim director as Black.

The fine was imposed on Land Registry, not personally on Black. The available records don’t show that she evaded tax, was individually sanctioned or was found guilty of misconduct. Land Registry said the breach wasn’t intentional and arose because replacing a critical finance post took longer than expected.

That distinction matters.

Back in Maidstone, the discussion became increasingly tetchy. Cabinet Member Brian Collins told committee members that, if they weren’t getting results, they ought to examine themselves and the way they asked questions.

“Maybe you need to mark your own homework,” he said.

It was an unfortunate pearl to hand his critics.

Earlier, members had discovered that anti-fraud, anti-bribery and anti-money-laundering policies previously considered by Governance and Audit had instead been approved by KCC’s Corporate Management Team. Members hadn’t been clearly told when or why the route had changed, while the counter-fraud officer presenting the item couldn’t provide the formal rationale because it wasn’t his decision.

Councillors complained that officers were being allowed to mark their own homework.

This time, the committee acted. By ten votes to one, with one abstention, it agreed to ask the administration to consider changing the committee’s terms of reference so that member oversight of the policies could continue.

That vote showed the watchdog still has teeth.

The question is whether it chooses to use them consistently.

KCC is also seeking a second independent member. In May, members were told that recruitment had produced a strong set of applications and had moved to shortlisting. Bringing in another specialist could strengthen the committee, but adding another independent voice won’t cure the deeper problem if responsible officers remain absent, answers arrive months late and administration members treat robust scrutiny as an inconvenient drag on productivity.

Black’s threat to resign wasn’t the whole story.

It was the fire alarm.

KCC can treat it as an awkward outburst, tidy the minutes, arrange another training session and carry on serving jam tomorrow. Or it can make sure red-rated reports arrive with the people responsible for them, produce papers that reveal rather than smother the key facts, track promised answers and expect every committee member to do more than warm a chair.

Otherwise, the next time Camilla Black says the committee isn’t working, she may no longer be sitting on it.

The Shepway Vox Team

Dissent is NOT a Crime