Rules broken in Cambs transportation agreements

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Here’s how Cambridgeshire County Council was convinced to enable lucrative industrial agreements to be awarded to FACT – even though procurement guidelines were broken

PUBLISHED: 17:46 23 July 2018|UPGRADED: 18:17 23 July 2018

An independent report commissioned by Cambridgeshire County Council into the running and awarding of home to school contracts to Fenland Association for Community Transportation has revealed significant problems over procurement, membership numbers and cross subsidisation of industrial and neighborhood contracts. Photo(s): Archant

A 288 page report by forensic accounting professionals PKF Littlejohn for Cambridgeshire County Council into the March based Community Transportation triumvirate FACT, HACT and ESACT (hereafter FHE) raises the lid on the lack of scrutiny and neglect to procurement policies that went on for lots of years.The first striking feature of the report is the chronicling of the breadth and scale of FHE supervisor Joe Philpott’s negotiations that protected hundreds of countless pounds worth of grants, on the grounds that they would support the transport needs of the senior and disadvantaged in remote rural areas.In truth– while domestic services for the clingy were performed– Ms Philpott protected a vast and growing number of financially rewarding industrial transport contracts from Cambridgeshire County Council. When TRUTH took control of the running of the having a hard time Huntingdonshire based Nene and Ouse neighborhood bus group in 2013 she threatened to withdraw crucial neighborhood transport services. The new organisation was called HACT(Huntingdonshire Association for Neighborhood Council)and straightway it was granted nine industrial agreements from the county council worth ₤ 250,000 each year without needing to go to tender and with no advertising to other possible bidders. Over the last few years the Cambridgeshire Bus, Coach and Taxi Association(CBCTA) has actually repeatedly mentioned that the generous (and largely unapproved)grants and commercial contracts have primarily funded not neighborhood transportation but the rapid growth of a fleet of minibuses utilized to service commercial contracts. At the very same time demand for neighborhood transport services (FHE’s raison d’être ), has stayed more or less fixed. REALITY and HACT had 33

more automobiles at the end of 2016 than 3 years previously. These are net boosts, so taking disposals into account actual purchases will be likewise greater. A cursory appearance at the modest surpluses of earnings over expenditure make it uncertain where HACT and REALITY found the funds to make that sort of net boosts to their fleet(₤ 241,000 additions in 2016 for FACT alone). The second striking theme in the report is how funding and industrial agreements were effortlessly protected by FHE, with little or no proof of going through an official or transparent procurement procedure.

Where the authorities do not reject the procurement guidelines were bypassed, documents are unavailable and records have actually gone missing. The PKF report reveals there is no official audit trail for the set-up financing for HACT or Ely based ESACT(₤ 202,000 and ₤ 86,000 respectively). The county council was responsible for drawing up the grant application files but one is missing and the other anonymous. The ₤ 202,000 set up payment to HACT in 2013 was paid on March 26, 2013, 2 days prior to it was signed up with the Charity Commission. The ₤ 85,923 set up payment for ESACT appears nowhere in Cambridgeshire County Council’s provider spend data, nor is any proof held of authorisation for ESACT’s start-up financing by the Cambridge Future Transportation Governance Group or the council

management. There is also no grant agreement or a loan contract for the ₤ 20,000 working capital loan within the seed financing that was expected to be paid back. Quentin Baker, the county council’s former director of law(he stopped suddenly in May)is shown in the report to have cautioned county

council officers about the probability of financing remaining in breach of state aid regulations. His cautions were apparently neglected. PKF prints a copy of an e-mail in which Mr Baker set out the risks dealing with the county council in short cutting procurements and also threw into the mix the possibility of a legal obstacle and judicial review. In one part he cautions of a”risk of loss of credibility”if word got out that industrial agreements for HACT

had been automatically extended without heading out to tender. And he likewise questioned whether the county council was breaking the principles of “competition, openness and clearness”which belonged to an EU directive on procurement. PKF’s report suggests that LGSS lawyers overseeing the county council’s agreements with the FHE had little or no idea

of the state aid rules appropriate. The county council’s neighborhood transportation officer is also shown to have actually been uninformed of the auditing requirements for FHE. He told detectives he checked out the FHE yearly

accounts but admits to not being experienced in interpreting them.He also told PKF he did not understand how to check for cross subsidisation(grant cash for neighborhood transport services being diverted to support commercial activity ). PKF likewise reveal that the county council, in breach of

the annual grant agreements, stopped working to receive budget plans or action plans from REALITY or HACT, did not undertake an annual review nor have sight of the statistics required by the contracts are supplied. A number of the issues raised in the PKF report have been highlighted consistently in Cambs Times articles returning to 2012– each time councillors and officials and crucially FHE itself has actually rejected any wrong doing. There will be much now for the county council to inspect– not least the awarding of agreements to that were labelled ’em ergency ‘therefore therefore outside normal procurement guidelines whereas in fact PKF has shown they weren’t.

Senior county council officials from the top down (former president Mark Lloyd decreased to even react to an extensive report handed to him by this newspaper 4 years ago)stopped working to take any action for

years on serious abuses of the contract procedure rules.Councillors have actually know CBCTA’s project for numerous years and have received stark evidence of the alleged abnormalities on various occasions.It raises uncomfortable questions about examination and responsibility under the federal government’s localism policy. The FHE service design has actually clearly been very successful.But as PKF has validated the neighborhood transportation empire developed by Ms Philpott and her board of management– numerous of them ironically local councillors-will deal with inescapable difficulty.

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http://www.wisbechstandard.co.uk/news/cambs-how-county-council-broke-the-rules-1-5620084

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