Close watch by the citizens of last resort

The Advertiser recently revealed how residents may be liable for up to £20m losses from the Magnet/Braywick Leisure Centre deals.

So I duly registered to attend last week’s audit committee in order to ask the auditor (Jonathan Gooding of Deloitte) why he had chosen not to investigate this deal.

I got no response whatsoever.

It was as if I was invisible. As if vast amounts of public money had not been put at risk.

As if the act of asking a question had now become worthless.

A few years ago the Government introduced the seven ‘Nolan Principles’, which are a fundamental basis of every council constitution.

Two of these Nolan principles are to respect ‘openness and accountability’.

Ignoring public questioners is neither.

But the monitoring officer sat passively by as Cllr Sharpe sailed smoothly on to his vote to sign-off the 2019 accounts.

The truth is that I had written to the auditor in 2020, 2021 and 2022 warning him that it was vital that he used his powers to investigate the Magnet/Braywick deal.

Auditors can compel the production of any document on pain of criminal sanction, and are effectively the public’s last line of defence.

Sadly, Mr Gooding has (so far) declined to accept the matter for investigation.

When I wrote to the auditor in 2020, it wasn’t based on a whim, or a mere hunch.

In fact a government appointed body known as CIPFA (the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy) had already savaged the leisure centre deal in their 2020 governance report.

At that time readers may recall another classic Advertiser front page about the CIPFA report with the headline ‘Cultural failure of epic proportions’.

This was a quote from Cllr Johnson, who

had fairly decried his Conservative predecessors’ many mistakes.

This fine act of honesty promised a future in which past deals would be re-examined.

But the CEO, Duncan Sharkey, publicly refused my request that RBWM conduct a ‘forensic audit’.

Ultimately, this omission has left Cllr Johnson and his cabinet exposed to a series of domino-challenges that we now see unfolding bleakly before us.

In fact, I wasn’t only ignored at the meeting itself. Earlier in the day Cllr Sharpe had rejected my repeated request that I be allowed to speak on other items on the agenda.

The auditor has the duty to examine the governance practices of the council.

But he was late with his report and submitted it only a day before the meeting.

The auditor and his team must therefore think that high quality scrutiny can occur where elected councillors have had just a few hours to read a report that Deloitte had been preparing for two years.

RBWM were only too happy to follow this example, and the monitoring officer endorsed this practice in writing when I protested that everyone was entitled to ‘five clear days’ to read papers and make ‘intelligent representations’.

Fortunately, the borough has a small army of fact-checking social media veterans, and a strong and vital local press who fill the void when we are apparently unable to freely speak in our supposed democratic chambers.

The auditors of last resort may be satisfied, but the citizens of last resort are not so easily fooled. ANDREW HILL Rutland Gate

Maidenhead