Peeling the onion

First of all my thanks to Cornwall Council leader Alec Robertson and the Corporate Director for Resources, Michael Crich, for coming on BBC Radio Cornwall at 7am this morning. Some fascinating detail about the Daily Telegraph's credit card story is now starting to emerge.

Michael told us that there are about 1,000 of these cards in circulation and none has a spending limit of less than £1,000. For an organisation with a total headcount of around 19,000, the next question is about how the cards are distributed.

Clearly the council itself is still struggling to find out what's been going on - Alec said he is among those who wants answers about apparently extravagant restaurant bills and luxury hotels. At least the question of the £1,000 on silk ties appears to have been sorted. Alec said these were council ties, purchased with a view to selling them on to members. If this answer had been supplied to the Daily Telegraph on Friday, then that's one part of the media firestorm which would never have started.

Alec's assertion that no money at all had been spent on "credit" cards - because these are government-backed "spending cards" - is perhaps a bit flimsy. Goods and services were still supplied on credit, but there was no risk of interest charges. But again, councillors will want to know why this informaton had not been available to the Telegraph by Friday.

This story will run for as long as there is detail that needs explanation. For example, on 24th August 2010 the council spent £1,269 at the One Eyed Cat restaurant in Truro. Who was there, and why? What did they eat? And even more importantly, what did they drink? The charge is coded to the council's legal department.

I was interested to hear Michael defend the council's finance department in relation to last week's story about spending on consultants. He said no-one had made any mistakes. Perhaps he hasn't read the council's statement, issued on Thursday:

"it appears that some of the payments made to contractors for large capital projects such as new school buildings and roads have been wrongly allocated to the consultants budget."

So which is right - last week's statement or this morning's? If there were no coding errors, does that mean that spending on consultants and agency staff really was £10m in just three months?

Rarely will there have been as much interest as there's likely to be in Thursday's gathering of the Corporate Resources Oversight & Scrutiny Committee.