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Vehicles are the tip of the iceberg, have local councils learnt their lesson from Westminster?

We all remember the MP expenses scandal that blew up a couple of years ago. Since then the behaviour of MPs has changed considerably; they now know that their claims are in the public spotlight. However you still see a lot of controversy surrounding the behaviour of local councillors and council spending in general.

The question this short piece will ask is why local councils have not learnt a lesson from the mistakes of their political cousins in Westminster?

At Intelligent Car Leasing we recently conducted a study which looked into the spending levels of the 50 biggest councils across the UK on cars. It revealed some pretty shocking finding including two councils who owned a Bentley Flying Spur (a car that is worth over £140,000). That’s not to say that all councils were corrupt and wasting their residents’ money on luxury vehicles. There were some examples of very noble frugality from councils such as the London borough of Hillingdon and Doncaster who didn’t have anything that wasn’t necessary in their fleet.

On an anecdotal basis we would say that around 1/4 of councils who we gathered vehicle information for had some purchases that could not be justified. That is expensive cars that are worth over £50,000 each.

However waste is not just contained to the vehicles from our study; there are many other case studies out there that show misuse of council tax payers’ money. Look at this study from Channel 4 revealing that councils had treated employees to trips to France on champagne tours, volleyball tournaments in Barcelona and mini-trampolining in Quebec. The list could go on as there have been so many revelations in recent times which show the level of bad money management going on in the public sector.

The question we have to ask ourselves is when is this going to change? It’s not as easy to shake up the council spending system as a centralised system like parliament. Therefore it may be a long time before full accountability for councils across the country comes to the forefront. There have been calls for councils to publicise any spending over £500 which should make them more accountable; but getting that integrated across the UK will be a hard task.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Intelligent Car Leasing .