The Audit Commission is still holding back in responding to the consultation on its own demise. Criticising the government’s plans could be tantamount to attacking localism and the Big Society
We all love a good scrap, so what’s not to welcome about the Audit Commission’s savaging of the government over its back-of-the-envelope arrangements for what should happen when (if?) the watchdog dies.
True, it has taken the commission ten months to state the blindingly obvious in its response to the consultation – audit is more complicated than Eric Pickles or his special advisers dreamt.
True, also, that the commission has left its fang baring till late in the consultation. Still nervous of the wrath of Pickles, it has barely publicised its response, despite such newsworthy potential headlines as ‘Pickles plan will increase costs for many councils’. (The response says there will be ‘significant increases for smaller bodies, ie district councils, and geographically remote councils – Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly for example – will have to pay and audit premium.)
The response barely conceals its contempt for the shoddiness of the government’s arguments.
If the point of the exercise is to allow councils to choose their auditors, why encumber them with vastly expensive audit committees with the government insisting ‘independent’ people are appointed to them. And, by the way, says the commission, such eminent independents are in short supply and councils will struggle to recruit them, and they will cost more than present arrangements.
Yet the commission is still pulling its punches. What it cannot bring itself to say are two things, both politically inconvenient for the Cameron government.
The first is that district audit was invented as a way of stopping local bodies (historically poor law authorities) overspending. Because, let’s face it, central government does not trust them, the commission was invented as a kind of police officer for councils.
But this function now falls foul of ‘localism’, and the idea that councils should, on the basis of their local democratic mandate, be free to do their own thing, including appointing their own auditors. The government’s logic is plain: localism means the end of the Audit Commission. The commission’s beef is with localism, but can’t bring itself to make the case against.
The second is even more sensitive. Pickles abolished the commission saying ‘armchair auditors’ equipped with new and fuller information about council spending would scrutinise and oversee what local government did. Professional audit was therefore less important.
To argue against this would be to take on a central contention of the Cameron government, which is that out there, the public is eager and willing to get involved – hence Pickles’ idea that forcing councils to release spending data guarantees accountability. To challenge that would get close to saying the Big Society won’t work. The Commission’s courage doesn’t quite extend that far.
Students of the way we govern ourselves in England (the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish do things differently) will pore over this paper. Why, they will ask, does the principal body responsible for sound spending, the National Audit Office, get so little mention? What was the point of all those meetings between commission officials and Communities and Local Government civil servants over recent months when the commission now feels obliged to fire such a broadside?
The answer can only be the commission’s despair that CLG still doesn’t understand either the point or practice of local audit.
David Walker is the former managing director for communications at the Audit Commission
