Wednesday, 12 January 2011

More on the Whitewash

The Post has an article today quoting a former senior police officer saying that he is 'baffled' that the police haven't investigated the housing allocations scandal. There are later subtle hints about the closeness of the relationship between the police and senior members and officers of the council.

More interesting to me though is the following extract -

"The city council has now decided to drop the investigation, claiming it had spent £100,000 on in-house solicitors.

The majority of this money was spent on employing other people to carry out the solicitors' normal work while they conducted the investigation."

I did question the use of in-house solicitors carrying out the investigation the other day on the basis that NCC is normally very keen to bring in external consultants so it's strange that they don't bother in one of the situations where it would be extremely appropriate to do so. Now it seems that they DID bring outside lawyers in but not to do the investigation, just to free up the internal legal teams who presumably could be relied on not to look in the 'wrong' places.

This just gets murkier by the day.
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3 comments:

  1. Anonymous12 January 2011 at 13:16

    Surely this is a case for the soon-to-be-abolished Audit Commission to investigate not the housing scandal per se but the way in which the City Council responded to it and the efficiency and veracity with which they carried out their 'internal investigations'.

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  2. Andy12 January 2011 at 15:37

    You'd think so wouldn't you? But according to the Post the District Auditor has already signed off their decision to call off the investigation.

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  3. Anonymous13 January 2011 at 15:32

    Check out the most recent comment on this on my blog. Funny how the same names keep on cropping up isn't it?

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