The government will not immediately back a key recommendation of the Redmond review that a single body should be created to manage and regulate local authority audit, it announced this afternoon.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government said the recommendation of Sir Tony Redmond in his review of council audit clashed with its intention not to create new arms-length bodies and that it did not with to “recreate” the Audit Commission. It will examine whether an existing body working in the field can take on a system leadership role.
However extra money to support local authority audit was announced in communities secretary Robert Jenrick s government’s response to Sir Tony’s review of the effectiveness of local authority audit published in September.
By Nicholas Dobson14 December 2020
Nicholas Dobson
The struggle to make ends meet was neatly summarised by Dickens’ optimistically hapless Mr Micawber: ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery… in short you are for ever floored. As I am!’
But while individuals like Micawber are generally responsible only to themselves for balancing the budget, local authorities have an obligation to use public resources prudently. This fiduciary (trustee) duty was classically summarised by Lord Diplock in Bromley LBC v Greater London Council and another [1982] 1 All ER 129: ‘It is well established by the authorities… that a local authority owes a fiduciary duty to the ratepayers from whom it obtains moneys needed to carry out its statutory functions, and that this includes a duty not to expend those moneys thriftlessly but to deploy the full financial