By Andrew Rowson
Dear Cllr Nethsingha,
Shooting and silencing the messenger
In a recent response to a Subject Access Request (SAR) submitted
to Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC), I learned that in the space of eleven months between May 2023 and April 2024, your Chief Executive Officer, Dr
Stephen Moir, wrote to elected Members on no fewer than six occasions,
instructing them not to have any communications with me “either formally or
informally”. The first email was to you alone. Three were sent
to all Members in a group named “Members 365”. The final two were addressed
to my own County Councillor, Ros Hathorn and one other Member on each
occasion. Here is the email Dr Moir
wrote to you on 22nd May 2023:
Dr Moir’s other emails were sprinkled
with demonstrably false, and possibly defamatory statements about me that he presumably
thought I would never see. That is perhaps
why Cllr Hathorn lied to me the other day when she denied that the CEO had written
any such emails. The SAR response shows
that Cllr Hathorn received five out of the six instructions - all bar the one
above.
Back in May 2023, I expected you to reply to the letter Dr Moir referred to in his email. It was
about CCC’s and BDO’s ongoing cover-up of the alleged false accounting of City
Deal government grants, that overstated the council’s usable reserves by
£217.8m in the aggregate over the five years to 2019-20, and by £97.8m in 2015-16
alone. That £97.8m overstatement in the
restated 2015-16 accounts was 13 times the materiality threshold set by the
auditor, BDO, and artificially embellished the usable reserves balance by 87%. BDO audit partner Lisa Blake (née Clampin)
did not flag up the false accounting, as any competent or honest auditor would
have done, for the simple reason that she was complicit with CCC’s then CFO,
Chris Malyon, in falsifying those and subsequent years’ accounts. All the facts and supporting evidence are in
the letter you failed to respond to. You
will remember that you and I discussed City Deal false accounting at some
length when we met in Histon in November 2021. On that occasion I left you with a detailed dossier
on it, so you cannot claim not to know the details. So, the fact that the current CEO, Dr Moir,
went out of his way to recommend that you not reply to my letter I believe says
something about him too. You may be
interested to know that the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) rates BDO as the worst
of the big audit providers for audit quality, and that last November it
fined BDO £6 million for creating
false audit evidence and falsifying audit partners' signatures. You may also
be interested to know that BDO’s two statements of reasons in January 2024 to
former County Councillor Mike Mason for his 2017 and 2018 objections to the
accounts were both unsigned. Lisa Blake retired from BDO two days later, on 31st January 2024. The BDO partner whose name appears in those
statements of reasons, Ciaran McLaughlin, joined BDO just six weeks
earlier.
In addition, in whitewashing the City Deal false accounting, BDO wrote in the statement of reasons:
“the Council formulated its
own view on the accounting treatment, after obtaining independent financial
advice from CIPFA in 2016/17, which was presented to and considered by the
audit team. The audit team reviewed and agreed with the Council’s proposed treatment
in 2016/17...”
That is the first time in seven years that advice from CIPFA (the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy) has been mentioned in this context. It absolutely contradicts all previous narratives in both BDO’s and CCC’s reports and statements, including this telling response from Mr Malyon to a public question from Mr Mason at the GCP Joint Assembly on 2nd November 2017:
“In relation to the £60
million [2016-17 debtor adjustment], actually I agree with Cllr Mason…. It was actually at the auditor’s request, not
ours, that that sum was recognised in our balance sheet…. So, Mr Mason, I agree
with you. But unfortunately I’m dealing
with what the auditors require. If you want to challenge that with the
auditors, then…[inaudible] you have my full support.”
Why didn’t Mr Malyon say “It was CIPFA who made me do it”? The simple answer is because BDO claiming
that CIPFA gave that advice in that unsigned report is in all probability a
bare-faced lie, and an attempt to get itself off the hook for BDO’s key role in
the false accounting. In any event, why
would CIPFA give advice that contradicts CIPFA’s own Code of Practice, in
particular paragraph 2.3.2.8 on Government Grants:
“Grants and contributions
relating to capital and revenue shall be
accounted for on an accruals basis,” ?
In addition, each year, CCC’s CFO sets out the key
accounting policies adopted in the annual Financial Statements. In the latest draft accounts, as every year,
The CFO writes:
“Revenue accounts are
maintained on an accruals’ basis.
Expenditure is charged to the revenue accounts in the year in which goods and
services are received and, similarly, income is
credited in the year to which it relates, regardless of the timing
of cash payments or receipts.”
You, CIPFA, BDO, EY, KPMG, Mr Hudson and the CFOs before him
all know that recognising annual grant revenue up to four years into the future, before the conditional
grants are receivable or have been received is not accruals-based accounting. That is why Mr Malyon was so keen to put the
blame on the auditors in 2017, even though he alone was responsible for preparing
and certifying the accounts as giving a “true and fair view” of the council’s
financial position. During those five
years, CCC’s accounts were neither true, nor fair. Instead, they contained material overstatements of usable reserves at the very time CCC was embarking on a nine-figure borrowing campaign from the Public Works Loan Board (PWLB) to fund its failed housing development company, This Land Ltd, only to have to write off more than half the total value of outstanding loans and investment equity (£67 million) a few years later.
CCC’s response to these and other inconvenient questions of
mine has been the time-honoured one of shooting the messenger, with officers
such as Dr Moir and the Monitoring Officer fabricating lies in their endless
attempts to discredit and silence me.
That strategy will not work.
Also, rather than actually addressing the concrete,
scrupulously-referenced documentary evidence I present in every communication
to CCC, the authority ducks and dives and responds with evasive, fact-free nonsense
like this from you in an earlier letter, that I suspect was drafted by an
officer:
“To be clear, there are
several misrepresentations in your letter of 14 February 2023 which it is not
productive to address by further correspondence with you currently.”
That is not all clear.
What misrepresentations? You
won’t say. What sort of accountability
is that? For years, the council, and
elected senior Members like you have stubbornly failed to answer the important
questions I ask, before making ridiculous assertions that it is I who is making unfounded
allegations. Which unfounded
allegations? Again, no specifics.
Returning to the letter Dr Moir refers to in his email, alleging
nine-figure false accounting and a universal cover-up, and backing it up with
solid evidence is a matter that demands a substantive response from a council
leader. But my records show that you
never responded to that letter. Apparently you did exactly what the CEO told you to do.
That seems to be your “leadership style”.
Half a sentence in the above email has been redacted. I cannot believe the redaction could have
been to conceal legally privileged information.
From the context it also seems extremely unlikely that those few concealed
words contained anyone else’s personal data, or information that did not relate
to me. Yet those
are the unconvincing excuses CCC has given me for blocking out that and other
passages in Dr Moir’s emails (plus in one email from Cllr Boden, Chair of the
Audit & Accounts Committee). It
seems rather more likely that several, if not all those redacted passages may
have been to conceal unguarded opinions about me from the CEO (and Cllr Boden),
which I understand would make them my personal data.
I have asked CCC to send me the unredacted versions of Dr
Moir’s emails, or else provide me with a solid legitimate exemption, properly
explained, for each and every redaction in its emails. That could take some time, and I have little
doubt CCC will put up resistance all the way, as it invariably does.
However, you are a data controller in your own right, and
you received the email unredacted. As
Leader, you should be setting an example and leading from the front. Since the authority lists “accountability”, “respect”
and “integrity” as the first three of its core values in Chapter
A1 of its Constitution, I think it appropriate for you now to show some
accountability, and send me a copy of that email, unredacted, or else explain
to me the legitimate reason(s) for any redacted words. If you do not send it, or I am not satisfied
with the redaction(s), then I shall challenge it with the Local Government Ombudsman
and/or the Information Commissioner, who I believe are entitled to see the
unredacted email.
As a consequence of your past conduct, I am publishing this
letter on my blog (publicinterestreport.blogspot.com) in the hope that it will
nudge you into demonstrating some accountability and respect towards this local
taxpayer. Whether or not you respond, and whether or not you provide me with the unredacted
email, readers will be informed. For the
avoidance of doubt, this is a subject access request. The fact that I already have the email (or
most of it) is not a lawful basis for refusing to disclose it. Under the UK General Data Protection
Regulation, the right of access is a right to obtain confirmation of whether my
personal data is being processed and, if so, to receive a copy of that personal
data held by the controller. I have
discussed this with the Information Commissioner’s Office, which recommended that
I send you this SAR.
One final question. I
would like you to tell me whether Dr Moir emailed you proactively on May 22nd
2023, or whether you had contacted him first by phone or email. From the way the email begins, it seems that
Dr Moir is responding to an earlier request for advice about my letter to you. Can you please confirm the nature of any
prior communication, and if you emailed Dr Moir, please send me a copy of that
email, since it too must contain my personal data.
The statutory deadline for responding to subject access
requests is one calendar month. I would
be most grateful if you could respond sooner, since the
request is so straightforward.
Yours sincerely,
Andrew Rowson
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