One of the unimpressive council officers has quit. Anyhere but Walthamstow we would all be wondering what this has to do with us. We would get on with our lives while a few sad colleagues in suits gathered round the beechwood-effect office furniture to say goodbye to him over some Morroccan red wine and peanuts. Some senior manager would make a valedictory and then the hard core of the guy's friends end up in some skuzzy pub after a suitable soujourn in a local restaurant. The departing functionary would last be seen getting into a mincab with a bunch of wilting flowers and a present bought by whip-round. Within weeks, no-one would mention him.

So why the interest in the departure of Robin Tuddenham, head of 'community safety' at Waltham Forest Council? Why the comments about 'rats leaving ships' in the local paper and insincere guff about "a new challenge and career progression" from the council's spin doctors?

Well, he is only one of a group of officers (Iain O'Donnell (head of finance), Rachel Tiffen (head of audit) and Tony Jain (head of corporate procurement)), who have left recently.

All four ran departments which were involved in the administration and spending of funds intended to help the poorest parts of Waltham Forest under the Better Neighbourhoods Initiative (BNI).

What is BNI? I hope I shall not be in trouble with his publishers at The Star Magazine. I think though I should let the expert on the subject, Professor Nick Tiratsoo (my Unsung Hero of 2008 and the best local candidate for a knighthood I can think of), explain:

"...from 2003 onwards the local Council has received substantial amounts of government money in order to level the playing field, the idea being to improve key aspects of education, employment and health in the poorest wards, and thus help them close the gap with their richer neighbours.

So far, this programme – at first called Neighbourhood Renewal Fund and more recently the Better Neighbourhoods Initiative or BNI - has involved no less than £15.2 million of expenditure. Such a sum could have made a lasting difference. But the sad truth is that it has not. For, as recent stories in the Waltham Forest Guardian have graphically revealed, money that should have benefited the poorest people in the Borough has all too often evaporated in a fiasco of mismanagement and waste.

The sheer scale of what has gone wrong is quite staggering. One of the Council’s basic strategies was to use third parties to deliver on the ground, based upon the assumption that they had the specialist knowledge and capabilities. It is natural to assume that such arrangements would have been closely supervised - after all, this was a substantial amount of public money. However, in fact, supervision was the one thing that was almost completely lacking. Contracts with the third parties were awarded minus the required paperwork, and in ways that completely ignored the basic anti-fraud tendering rules that are specified in the Council’s constitution. Perhaps even worse, there was little or no effective monitoring and auditing, so that no one could be sure what any of the money was actually achieving.

Lest this be thought an exaggeration, it is worth looking in a little detail at a couple of examples. Predictably, the Council earmarked a good deal of the available cash each year to help vulnerable youth. That in itself was sensible. But when it came to actually spending the money, all common sense seems to have gone out of the window. The Council used its education provider, EduAction, to deliver, yet failed to build in normal safeguards. The result was chaos. Thus, one of these contracts, worth £340,000, apparently contained ‘terms detrimental to the Council’s position without adequate explanation’; allegedly was signed off by a single Council officer acting on behalf of both parties; and when later assessed, involved outputs that could not be verified.

Other parallel projects aimed at strengthening community cohesion suffered a similar fate. Of the nine that were commissioned in 2006-07, for instance, none were procured according to the rules, monitored, or audited, and several seemed decidedly peculiar – for example, the 66,011 paid to a man on the Isle of Wight, which the Council later claimed was a misprint, and the £24-26,000 spent on a one day conference for perhaps 50 local teachers, fair enough if the venue had been in the Seychelles, but puzzling to say the least given that it was in fact at Leyton Orient! To be fair, some of those concerned have now held their hands up and admitted that, yes, this was, indeed, a highly unsavoury episode. And it is to his credit that the new chief executive has set up a high-powered inquiry to make sure there is no repeat. Yet few believe that the full truth has emerged.

How could a local authority have lost its way so thoroughly and completely? What were the Council’s auditors up to? Given that several prominent Councillors appear to have known about some of the problems from a pretty early stage, why did they wait until 2008 before doing anything effective about them? Ultimately, it was the Cabinet that oversaw these programmes, and it is the Cabinet that should now do some explaining. The MPs’ expenses scandal provides a piquant warning."

ISSUE 10 2009 THE STAR 25

As with the MPs scandal, there are a number unresolved issues about heads of these departments leaving the council without the money which is missing or has been mis-spent being fully recovered. We have not yet been given all the facts of course. No doubt a report will shed light on the entire scandal when its findings and evidence is published and a copy put through every voter's door.

In the absence of any arrests or trials, of course, all the quitters concerned are innocent of any crime. Until proven guilty. And they have not been charged with any. But one has to wonder why no charges at all have been brought against anyone in all these years (and I am not suggesting that these four were anything other than incompetant), and no-one has ever been sued to recover the missing funds. On the assumption that whereever it is they have gone to is not run by crooks or idiots who would ignore a timely warning, I have to also wonder why senior ex-council officers were given references adequate for their future employment in positions of responsibility anywhere else?