PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES - United Kingdom Parliament

1589 Easter Adjournment
26 MARCH 2013 Easter Adjournment
1590
were for the benefit of the council taxpayers of Essex,
who were paying for his life of Riley, including 62 overseas
visits in five years.
Official documents detail every item of his expenditure,
totalling £287,000, from March 2005 to January 2010.
Records for the previous three years, according to Essex
county council, are not available. I would be surprised if
the council did not have bank statements which would
reveal the total expenditure claimed by the leader of the
council via the credit card the council issued to him
even if the details are not on file. I ended my speech by
saying:
“Only a full independent inquiry into the stewardship of the
council from 2002 to 2010 will serve to draw a line under this most
disgraceful period since Essex county council was established in
1889.”—[Official Report, 20 December 2012; Vol. 555, c. 1085.]
I regret to inform the House that Essex county council
has refused to implement an independent public inquiry.
The Tory leadership is in denial. No amount of
whitewash of county hall will prevent the stains of
financial chicanery from remaining visible for all to see.
Sadly, the situation can now be revealed to be even
worse than I told the House three months ago. Last
week it was revealed that council employees working
directly to the leader of the council were also milking
the system. County council staff, working in what it is
now obvious was a party political manner for the leader
of the council, had their own council-issued credit card
and ran up bills of their own totalling £70,000, which
would appear in every respect to have been for the
benefit of the political career and aspirations of the
council leader rather than for the people of Essex. Let
me give one example.
The leader of the council was accompanied to the
2009 Conservative party conference by council staff.
That in itself is in breach of the local government code
of conduct: council staff should not be engaged in
party political activities. They certainly should not be
attending party conferences, and they should most certainly
not expect the council taxpayers of Essex to pick up the
bill. In this case, it came to £5,080.98. A breakdown
includes not just accommodation and meals but £248 for
wine at a reception. This has so outraged the distinguished
political commentator Mr Simon Heffer that in his
column in the Daily Mail last Saturday he wrote:
“Tory-controlled Essex County Council let its former Leader
off the hook by failing to pursue him over a £286,000 credit card
bill he racked up while flying around the world with cronies and
dining in style.”
That was outrageous enough, considering that the former
council leader was jailed for fiddling his expenses, but it
turns out that the council also paid this crook’s £4,600
Westminster bar bills, and its audit committee has learnt
that his staff claimed £70,000 for trips abroad, hotels,
restaurants and hiring clothes to attend Ascot. I am an
Essex ratepayer and I want to know who sanctioned
this wicked waste of money and what steps will be taken
to reclaim it.
Mr Heffer concluded his article by saying:
“Meanwhile, no-one in Essex should vote Conservative in the
Council elections on May 2.”
As Essex county council refuses to hand over this
financial scandal to an independent investigation, I call
on the Government to do so; otherwise, trust in Essex
county council will remain at a very low level. To my
mind, it is inconceivable that the leader of the council
acted in the way he did—and for so long—without it
being known at the highest level of the council: chief
officers and those councillors closest to the leader must,
surely, have suspected something was not right. Was he
really the only rotten apple in the barrel?
What of the financial line management? Were suspicions
not aroused when details of the credit card were listed?
Where was the council’s internal audit? Did they not
notice, or were they too afraid to raise concerns? I
gather that there was a culture of bullying and intimidation
at county hall, but that, surely, would not have applied
to the external auditors?
The total sum involved tops £500,000. The Government
must step in and order a full independent inquiry into
the financial scandal at Essex county council.
7.14 pm
Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con): The excellent statement
this morning by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of
State for Health on the Government’s response to the
Francis report on the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation
Trust shows just how important that inquiry has been
and how the findings will help to change the NHS for
the better for patients. I particularly welcome the emphasis
on zero harm and quality of care, including the proposals
for the training of nurses and for a chief inspector of
hospitals.
The recent Care Quality Commission report on Stafford
hospital was encouraging too—a hospital that failed so
badly has now met the standards expected—and I thank
the retiring chief executive Lynn Hill-Tout, staff, governors
and board for all that they have done. Yet, just at the
moment when the people of Stafford should be emerging
from a decade or more of pain and uncertainty, we are
faced with another huge challenge. The report to Monitor
by the contingency planning team, published at the
beginning of this month, recommended the removal of
most emergency, acute, maternity and possibly even
elective services from the Mid Staffordshire Trust which
runs Stafford and Cannock hospitals.
This puzzles me. Emergency and acute admissions to
hospitals in the west midlands are rising sharply and
departments are at full stretch. Just last month—
February—West Midlands ambulance service reported
delays to its vehicles of more than 30 minutes on more
than 1,000 occasions at the University Hospital of
North Staffordshire. That is not a criticism of that
hospital, just a reflection of demand. The proposal,
however, is to remove a substantial amount of that
capacity, which is already stretched: 300 acute beds at
Stafford, in addition to the 250 that have already been
lost at UHNS as a result of the new, smaller PFI
hospital. In fact, at least 60 have had to be reopened at
the old site, as demand is so great.
The reason given for this is, as always, that if we move
care out of hospitals and into the community, the
demand for emergency and acute admissions will fall.
That is only half the truth. It will fall, but only from the
much higher levels it would have reached. Moving care
into the community will stop the need to provide much
more extra emergency and acute capacity, but it will not
allow for substantial reductions in that capacity. This is
the flawed assumption under which NHS leaders seem
to be working.