Local authority accounts are hard for public to understand

STEVE VICKERS is right (Hinckley Times, June 1), local authority accounts are hard to understand and deliberately made so to disguise the information they contain.

They use a variety of spurious concepts to make them look favourable in a way that means little to residents and does not deliver any benefit anyone can relate to on a day to day basis.

The value-for-money test is said to be ingrained in the expenditure authorisation process, but regardless of the level of cost, the supposed benefits are invariably vague, ill-thought through and very rarely measurable.

This is of course the perfect ploy to prevent any questions of accountability and allow “success” to be claimed whatever the outcome is – good or bad. The boast is usually “look what I’ve done”, when it should really be “look what I’ve spent” – far from necessarily the same thing.

The age-old joke about spending what’s left of any budgets whether the expenditure is necessary or not is far closer to the truth than most would like to imagine. Often money is spent because it is available rather than because it is necessary and any suggestion that obvious priorities in the community are not being reflected are met with the excuse that there are constraints imposed from “elsewhere”, which again allows the culprits to escape scot-free.

This I’m afraid is fact not just cynicism and will need a far louder local voice to bring about any change. David Alfred by email