Tag Archive for: Local government

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Sheffield Container Park Failure – Classic Bad Buying

Sheffield Council has been dysfunctional for some time, and will always be remembered as the council that decided thousands of mature trees would be destroyed in order to make pavements safer, or something like that.

There has been considerable “churn” at both elected councillor and senior officer level in recent years too, which doesn’t help, and the council is now in an “no overall control” state in terms of political leadership. But the Sheffield Fargate container park failure is not really “political” – it appears to be simply an example of what was very bad buying and probably even worse project management.

The controversial complex which was supposed to include shops, bars and entertainment failed due to poor decision making and a lack of governance, an internal audit report has found. The container park was intended as a pop-up space for stalls and shops but was beset by delays and criticism.  The £500,000 project opened in October 2022, but closed just three months later after a host of issues and lack of interest from traders and locals.

The “Head of Service” appears to be the individual who should carry most of the blame here, being responsible for the project. They “did not have dedicated specialist skills, support and resource. The Council’s specialist project management teams were not fully or formally involved, but only called upon using an ‘ad-hoc’ approach”.  It is not clear why specialist project managers weren’t involved but one cause seems to have been a rush to “get it done” to take advantage of various time-limited post-covid grants.

But I have to say, procurement does not seem to have covered itself in glory either.  There was no formal procurement manual in place explaining the desired process to users, for a start. Then the function carried out research on other container parks to try and identify potential suppliers who might be interested in developing the Sheffield park. A list was provided to the project owner as a potential tender list.

“However, when the suppliers on this list were approached it was found that they were management companies for the container parks, not the initial developers. No response came from those who were approached”. So not the best piece of market and supplier research I’ve ever come across…

This left just one supplier in the running, a firm that was already speaking to the Head of Service. They duly won the contract without any competitive tendering.  Lack of competition is of course a fundamental driver and predictor of poor performance and bad buying. “Though procurement was signed off at the correct level, there was no evidence to demonstrate that it was robust or complete to result in an informed decision-making process”.  

Then there seems to have been a lack of control in terms of payments to this supplier. There was no implementation plan so milestones were unclear, and the main contractor was not monitored in a structured or regular manner through the installation process.   Some of the report is redacted so we don’t get to see everything but comments such as this don’t fill you with confidence.  “…more worryingly formal financial and contractor monitoring throughout the work was poor or non-existent, furthermore, no risk management was in place”.  Indeed, the auditors were unable to test whether everything procured and paid for was actually received, which is pretty shocking and a very basic failure.

Invoices appeared to have been paid without proper authorisation, and whilst there is no evidence of anything criminal here, the lack of competition and then controls does mean that the risk of fraud or corruption was not at all managed. The budget of some £300K ended up as an actual spend £500K and certainly, the Head of Service should never be allowed near a budget again. 

Anyway, there were problems with the installation including safety issues and only the ground floor could be opened – and that was ten months late, opening in October 2022 rather than the Jan/February plan. And just three months later, the development was closed.

So, various points to note and learn from here. Procurement must make sure budget holders know what the rules are. Procurement also needs to make sure they understand what they are buying when they conduct market and supplier research. Competition is always a Good Thing. Project management is a skill – use professionals. Controls on payments and clear deliverables for suppliers are fundamental and must not be neglected no matter how “urgent” the work is.   

Sorry to Sheffield taxpayers (including my sister…) but the only good news here is that this is yet another interesting case study for my Bad Buying module when I lecture at Skema Business School next year…

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Bad Buying in Birmingham?

Increasing numbers of local authorities (county, city and town councils) in the UK are facing financial crisis. The latest is Birmingham, England’s second largest city, which has issued a Section 114 notice – in effect declaring itself bankrupt. Commissioners will be sent in from central government to take over the running of the authority.

The core reason is an equal pay claim going back years. Women employed by the council weren’t paid as much as men doing similar jobs. But it seemed for some years that financial provisions had been made to pay those affected and all was well. But there appear to be more claims now, which suggests the original problems weren’t sorted out when they should have been. There should have been a serious job evaluation programme but somehow that hasn’t happened. Infighting amongst the ruling Labour Party has not helped either, some observers claim.

However, there also seem to be other reasons for the crisis. Birmingham spent over £100 million hosting the Commonwealth Games last year – good for motivating the locals perhaps, and maybe it brought cash into the city, but a lot of many to spend when you’re in a bad financial position.

Now we are moving into “bad buying” territory too, with  accusations of money being wasted in the procurement area. A report in the Daily Mail says, “calls for police probe into bankrupt Birmingham Council’s £11M payments to tiny taxi firm charging £200 a day to take one pupil to school”.  This firm, Green Destinations Ltd, (GDL) has grown rapidly in recent years to become the main beneficiary of  school transport contracts, and there is a suggestion that it might have been “close” in some way to executives who had influence on the contracts.

Now we have to be careful with headline reports. £200 a day might be for a special educational needs pupil who needed accompanying in the taxi and so on. But competitors also claimed that council officials told their drivers they might be better off working for the favoured firm in question. And the table of fares quoted by the Mail does seem to show very high fees compared to standard taxi rates. No doubt more will emerge on this.

However, there hasn’t been any suggestion that procurement in Birmingham is generally useless or corrupt. But I did feature the authority a couple of times in my Bad Buying book. The first was a call-centre contract with Capita, which an enquiry into the service pointed out did not incentivise Capita very sensibly. They were paid on a per call basis, so had no incentive to sort out problems first time or take the required time to do that.  (However, it was the council itself that wasn’t very good at sorting out the underlying problems, to be fair to Capita).

The other mention in the book was the disastrous road maintenance contract with Amey, which ended up with the firm paying £215 million to get out of a 25-year PFI deal. The relationship between the two parties had broken down completely, with a famous report that the council tried to charge Amey penalties of £48.5 million because the firm didn’t repair two bollards quickly enough. All of that was not necessarily the council’s fault, but you have to wonder why you would get into a 25 year contract for any service really. (Maybe it would have some logic for a large construction PFI, but not for roads maintenance). Put those two together and you might perhaps draw conclusions about naivety and a lack of commercial nous in Birmingham.

Anyway, the city may now need to sell art galleries, housing and land to try and balance the budgets, which is very sad for what is a great city. Of course, the national Conservative government is loving this, claiming it is an example of “Labour failure”. But in fact, it is just the latest in a long line of local government waste, corruption, bad buying and financial problems, a line that runs through Liverpool, Northamptonshire, Somerset, Thurrock, Slough, Surrey Heath, Woking, Croydon and more – both Tory and Labour authorities.  Reduced funding from central government is one reason; but there are also too many incompetent or corrupt people in our local government system, it seems.

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Waste in Woking – Taxpayers will Pick up the Bill

The trivialisation and celebritisation of British politics continues apace.  The headlines are dominated by why Nadine Dorries didn’t get her peerage (and why Charlotte Owens did – anybody got any ideas)? It is all about personalities and in particular our own Trump wannebee, Boris Johnson, the man who had damaged the UK more than anyone I can think of since 1945.

Meanwhile, stories that should be causing debate, analysis, and angry mobs with flaming torches marching in the streets, get limited coverage and little real analysis other than by a few dedicated journalists. For instance, we’ve mentioned before the billions wasted by a number of local authorities (councils) in the UK, including Thurrock, Liverpool, Slough, Croydon, and my own council, Surrey Heath.

But Woking – only 10 miles from my home – might turn out to be as big a scandal as any. The “bad buying” in this case is firmly in the property sector, as the Tory-led council “invested” in major developments both in their own town and more widely. Apparently, the idea was to make Woking the “Singapore of Surrey”, an idea so far-fetched you have to wonder what the council executives and elected representatives were smoking. (as the Guardian asked!)  The council is now bankrupt, and I would be furious if I lived 10 miles down the road.  

Woking has core revenues of around £16 million a year, and debts of around £1.8 BILLION currently. That debt to income ratio is the biggest we’ve seen so far in failed councils.  It is likely that something around £600 million, maybe more, will need to be written off in terms of current asset valuations. A review into how this happened found that within the overall figure, the council borrowed £160m for purposes outside regulations and had “sub-optimal record keeping.”  A huge amount was borrowed from the central government controlled Public Works Loans Body (PWLB) and total debts may end up at over £2 billion. A Section 114 notice has halted all spending on non-essential services.

As the Guardian said: “In Woking’s case, the 114 notice shows the council had advanced the colossal sum of £1.3bn – money borrowed from the PWLB – to joint venture companies, notably Victoria Square Woking Ltd, in which the council held a 48% stake and a Northern Irish developer, Moyallen Holdings, held the majority. Then the value of the assets fell”.

There are also questions about why Woking partnered with Moyallen, a relatively small property company, for the Victoria Square development. That venture still operates, but the Bank of Ireland placed four of Moyallen’s other operating units into administration – including two entities used to control the Peacocks Centre at Woking.  The council’s former chief executive was allowed to operate far too independently, it seems. An “acquisition opportunity fund” allowed him to spend up to £3m on regeneration projects without formally approval from the council or executive, and that led to purchases including farmland for £1.5m, and £2.3m on two pubs, one of which burnt down!

Primary responsibility must fall with characters who have all moved on now – previous Tory Leader of the Council, David Bittleston, Chief Executive Terry Morgan, and Finance Director Leigh Clarke.  It would be good to see those three in court charged with malfeasance in public office. However, all the councillors who failed to raise the alarm also share some blame. One councillor tried to sound the alarm about the dealings but was shouted down in council meetings.

But other stakeholders who deserve a lot more criticism than they are getting are those in central government. The majority of the loans came from the PWLB – a central government body within the Treasury that lends money to local councils. Concerned observers had contacted Treasury and the Department responsible for local government – currently called the Department for Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities (DLUHC) – about Woking but were ignored. In 2017, the Times  “raised the alarm about reckless council spending” but were told by central government that “ that there were “strong checks and balances” in place to protect taxpayers’ cash”. 

Well that was clearly total nonsense, so Treasury and DLUHC must share some of the blame for this fiasco. Partly because of that, government will have to bail out the council. There is no way local taxpayers can cover the debt (without bankrupting them personally) so this will effectively end up as a wider taxpayer debt write-off.

In recent years, we’ve seen both Labour and Tory councils getting into trouble around bad investments, bad buying and criminality at times too. This is about personal and systemic failures, not really party politics, although central government has failed to monitor the gross incompetence of these councils.  So given the outlook for the next general election, and if Labour are serious about giving more power to local councils, we really need some new parallel measures put in place. We have to make sure more power does not simply lead to more huge failures, with more crooks and incompetents wasting or stealing huge amounts of our money.  

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Thurrock Council Comes Up with a New Type of Bad Buying

Having spent several years researching, writing and now promoting the Bad Buying book, I thought I’d heard pretty much everything in terms of public sector organisations finding ways of wasting taxpayers money through incompetent or corrupt procurement, investment and spending.

But there is always something new, and the case of Conservative-run Thurrock Council in Essex and their investments in bonds linked to solar power is unique and astonishing. You can read the full story here – it is great work by Gareth Davies of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, supported on this story by the Daily Mail.

Thurrock has invested in solar farm businesses owned by an individual called Liam Kavanagh. Now I suspect most procurement professionals are inherently suspicious of people who haven’t been around for long, or whose businesses are only recently established, but who buy multiple fancy cars / fancy homes. In the case of Kavanagh, “his jetset lifestyle included the use of a private jet, a fleet of super-cars and a Hampshire farmhouse with a swimming pool, wine cellar, home cinema and steam and hot tub room”.

As the Mail reported; “Cash-strapped Thurrock Council in Essex borrowed £655million of public money – the equivalent of triple what it spends on services each year – to invest in 53 solar farms across the UK. It agreed a series of deals with globe-trotting businessman Liam Kavanagh, whose integrity was later questioned by a High Court judge over £5million his company banked in ‘commission’.”

And now there appears to be some £130 million of Thurrock’s money that has “disappeared”, with questions over even larger sums owed to the council. Kavanagh has liquidated companies that took money from Thurrock and has re-arranged his financial affairs, leaving the council with concerns over up to £200 million that it is owed. Incredibly, much of the investment was made by borrowing from other local authorities, who could be in trouble if Thurrock then default!

Davies reports this.  “In an interview at the time, Clark (Thurrock’s CFO) described a bizarre arrangement, involving dozens if not hundreds of short-term loans, many as short as a month in length, with the effect that the council was in a perpetual state of borrowing from one local authority to repay another. Piecing together data in obscure spreadsheets revealed Thurrock had borrowed from at least 150 other councils”.  Thurrock also borrowed some £350 million from a Treasury-run lending body.

Local authorities seem to be a hotbed for financial waste, incompetence and fraud. There are many questions still being asked about Croydon’s property “business” – that council went bust and Whitehall had to send in “commissioners” to run it. The same has happened in Slough – dodgy property investment there too.

Nottingham Council decided to get into the energy business and its “Robin Hood Energy” firm stole from the taxpayer to give to … well, tens of millions in losses disappeared anyway. Gloucester tried something similar and failed.  My own local council, Surrey Heath, invested some £120 million in buying commercial property just before the bottom dropped out of that market. The valuation is now more like £50 million.

So the problems cover councils run by Labour (Slough, Liverpool) and the Conservatives (Surrey Heath, Thurrock). It does often seem to be council officials who are the driving force behind reckless investments and spending, while the councillors are not informed or don’t have the intellect or power to intervene. In the case of Thurrock, Davies reported that officials kept elected councillors in the dark for months and have not given full access to the details (as well as blocking FOI requests and questions).

Whilst Davies has to be careful in his reporting – “While there is no suggestion that any rules were breached….” he says, we must wonder whether in some of these examples, corruption was involved, although it is hard to prove. Do external parties (suppliers, property developers etc.) say to their inside-the-council enabler “look, I can’t give you anything now, but in five years’ time when the heat has died down, there’s a million for you”.  

Anyway, if it is not corruption, then we are seeing far too many examples of gross incompetence from our councils. And it is costing taxpayers many, many millions.

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