On 11th November 2020, Croydon LBC’s s 151 officer wrote a report to the authority under s 114(3) of the LGFA 1988, which can be found here. For the purposes of this series of posts, the interesting point is that the Council obtained clarification from CIPFA of the meaning of its guidance of June 2020, which I discussed in my earlier post today.
The s 151 officer’s report explains that in early September she issued a draft s 114 report to the Leader and others in the Council, and also sent it to the MHCLG, the LGA and the Council’s external auditors. She explains that she did not issue a formal s 114 notice “as the conversations with MHCLG were ongoing”. As we have seen, this was in accordance with the CIPFA guidance of June.
She reports that, on 6th November:-
“the Chief Executive of CIPFA clarified in a letter to Croydon Council that the modified guidance regarding the issue of S114 notices was as a direct result of costs incurred by the Covid19 pandemic. Croydon’s financial pressures are not all related to the pandemic.”
Stopping there, this clarifies the purpose of the CIPFA guidance of June 2020: that it was directed to pressures arising as a result of Covid. It was not meant to apply to situations where the financial crisis arose for other reasons, or other reasons as well.
The S 151 officer went on to explain that the financial pressures in Croydon also arose because of a misidentification of in-year savings as “new” savings; a greater risk of a group company, Brick by Brick, not making interest and dividend payments; a failure to identify medium term budget savings; and the continued incurring of non-essential costs. She also referred to the October report in the public interest under the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014 from the Council’s auditors (s 24, Sched 7), which had detailed its deteriorating financial resilience. She said:-
“I am not seeing the necessary level of pace, urgency or radical options to be presented to members to take decisions upon to give me confidence that the Council can make the level of savings required to deliver a balance budget in year, without external support in the form of a capitalisation direction.”
Peter Oldham QC