It now seems that the county council wasted even more money on the LGA (Local Government Association) conference than I was first told. The Hotel bill for 5 councillors for a 3-day conference each staying in a double/twin room was £3700. It seems each councillor was booked for 4 days but each only stayed 2 or 3. This shocking price did not include parking, lunch (which was in the £519 per person conference fee) of dinner (for which councillors made separate claims.

Looking at the LGA Hotel booking from they could have just stared 2 nights at the cheapest 3 star  hotel for £450 for all five of them!  see booking form

and look how it should be expenses form for london fire service

June 13th, 2011

My 3rd audit of county councillors expenses has just started.

The big shock was Barry Lobbet claims

My audit of Councillor Lobbets expenses forms from Warwickshire County council has found out that Cllr Barry Lobbett has claimed around 400 miles of election related travel expenses from the taxpayer. These claims should have never been allowed by the county. They relate to the period of the local and general election in May 2010. He stood for the ward of Bedworth North for the Tories and was helping with the general election. The Tories won the North Warwickshire parliamentary seat by just a few votes.

It is not permitted to make such claims. He also claimed for attending borough council meeting from the county council.

see councillor Lobbett’s claim forms

Other councillors have made a few small errors but seem generally ok (unless you spot something). Most claims are around the levels of last year or down a bit.

I asked for all the forms for councillor who claimes over £1500. Please have a good look as I will have missed a lot in 160 pages.

The other shock is the expenses of the 5 councillors going to the LGA confernce. They seem to have run up a £3,330 hotel bill by staying at one of the best hotels on the south coast in top of £2.950 price for attending.

Norfolk Royal Hotel

Did you know that 7 Tory county councillors each get a £2,000 spokesperson allowance from the tax-payer to speak on behalf of their party?

Did you know councillors have a wine stock?

Did you know that councillors sometime skive off when attending expensive conferences in London?

Did you know a councillor has been getting extra allowance for being on the cabinet but has been off “work” for over 6 months?

Did you know councillors who sit on both district and county council gets two sets of allowances in full and two sets of IT equipment?

Councillors are to make savage cuts to public services but seem to be keeping their full set of perks.

Please sign the E-petition on the county council website to get them to cut the money spent on councillors.

link to petition

Over the last 2 years green campaigner Keith Kondakor has been fighting excess travel expenses at local councils. A freedom of information request has show that travel and subsistence claims by the 62 county councillors dropped from £106,458 in 2008/9 to £67,861 in 2009/10.

The drop has been across most councillors and type of travel. Gone are first class train travel, air travel and excessive use of taxis in London. A big part was the drop in the mileage rate for county councillors from 56p/mile to 40p/mile.

Sadly council almost never use buses or cycle.

In December Warwickshire county council Martin Heatley was censured for his expenses. His claims included using first class travel when it was not permitted by the rules and making inaccurate claims. His expenses dropped from £8,672 in 2008/9 to £3,374 in 2009/10. This is a 61% drop!

Keith Kondakor said “The drop in councillors travel expenses should just be a start. We could save over half a million a year if council’s staff mileage rates were reduced to a 40p/mile. We should compensate those who need to travel but must stop it a wasteful system where staff travel is at a profit to the individual. I am also determined to end the extraordinary mileage rate of 82p/mile for staff at Nuneaton and Bedworth council.”

Keith continued “I am angry that Councillor Heatley has just been re-appointed to the cabinet of Warwickshire county council after his abuse of the councils expenses system. He even had the nerve to charge the council taxpayer for is mileage to his hearing about his abusing the expenses system. ”

Notes
1- 2008/9 and 2009/10 expenses were obtained under the freedom of information act requests in April 09 and April 10.
2- Details of expenses abuse have been put on line at www.wex.org.uk
3- NBBC has set a mileage rate pegged to a new £16,000 diesel car that is only driven 5,000 miles per year and replaced every 4 years from AA tables.
4- http://www.theaa.com/allaboutcars/advice/advice_rcosts_diesel_table.jsp
5- A more typical £12000 car driven an average 10,000 miles a year costs 40p/mile.

I will soon be putting in a freedom of information request about the county councillors expenses for 2009/10.  If we find a big drop in the amount claimed then we have a good result. I will be most interested in mileage claimed. One thing to be sure of is that I will make any excessive claims very public. I would also like to state that many councillors claim very little. In fact I would like them to claim more for cycling and taking the bus! I think maybe a league table would be good!

I am still waiting for the EU to tell me how much Cllr Heatley makes from his EU trips.

Keith Kondakor
Nuneaton green party

Today Cllr Heatley was due to be on BBC Coventry & Warwickshire local radio at 7AM but did not respond to calls from BBC.

They ran the story about breaking expenses rules this morning and tried for 40 minutes to get Cllr Heatley on air. They instead had me on for 4 minutes to outline the case.

I have posted it as a video on facebook, which should be clickable below.

Warwickshire County council have at last released the “summary Minutes of the standards sub-committee hearing into excessive expenses claims made by Cllr Heatley. What has not been released on the Internet is the officer’s report, which shows what the complaint was about and what the investigation found out.

I have put both documents on this website, see tabs above.

Also release was minutes of secret pre-meetings.

I am very concerned that what the panel looked at was determined at a pre-meeting of which I was not told. Clearly details of Cllr Heatley’s excessive mileage claims have not been discuses in open secession.

Having Freemasons on the County Council may not worry many people and it did not worry me until I tried to investigate the councillors travel expenses. As always it is hard to prove what effect this organisation has on the running of the council, the recruitment of key staff or the awarding of contracts.

get out of jail badge

I would not even have brought it up as an issue if it was not for the massive mason badge that councillor Heatley wore at the standards sub-committee hearing. There are only 3 councillors who I know have register membership of the Freemasons “Grand Charity” in there members interests. These are Cllr Heatley, Cllr Fowler and Cllr Vereker. It was Cllr John Vereker CBE who was selected to be the Tory member of the 3 man panel who heard the case. Strangely Cllr Vereker did not declare that he and Cllr Heatley were fellow masons at the start of the meeting. What Cllr Vereker did do was to imply that Cllr Heatley might have needed to travel first class to help some unspecified disabled councillor who needed to travel first class! I know Cllr Heatley travelled first class without a disabled person needing help as I have seen him at the station.

I cannot tell if the freemasons connections had any effect on the outcome of the panel. I do find it remarkable that a councillor can have someone with so many connections judging how many of the rules were broken.

Cllr Vereker entry

Cllr Heatley entry

(note the Grand charity is code name for freemasons, Cllr Heatley had originally just recorded the charity number on his entry but the digits were wrong. I did ask why he was in Icelands foods pension charity)

Now the Country Councils standards sub-committee has meet, I can legally share full details of my investigation into abuse of the travel expenses system.

We obviously need a follow up the investigation as the standards sub-committee ignored the audit officers view that Cllr Heatley secured advantage by claiming excessive mileage.

Over the next week I will add key documents and links to press coverage.

This is just the start of the campaign to clean up the county council and get action taken against those who have taken more from the tax-payer than is justified.