The Chief Executive                                                                                                                                         50, Adelaide Road

Cornwall County Council                                                                                                                                  Redruth

County Hall                                                                                                                                                     TR15 2HQ

Truro

                                                                                                                                                                       11 July 2003

Dear Mr Stethridge                          

Thank you for your letter dated 15 May, which was ostensibly a reply to my letter of 13 April. I trust you will understand if, due to pressure of work, my initial response to your letter is brief.  However, in addition to amplifying a number of the points made in this letter, I will reply at length to your specific comments in the immediate future.

I have to say, with the greatest of respect that, having been confronted by an impenetrable wall of evasion and obfuscation by your officers for some 18 months, I find your reply singularly unconvincing, when account is taken of the following considerations:

• For a number of years, there has been, as you know, the most appalling lapses in the implementation of three significant council policies appertaining to highways' matters. These lapses which have been, prejudicial to the interests of residents and taxpayers alike, have made a mockery of the council's reputation for excellence and brought the council into disrepute by exposing it to a serious charge of maladministration.

• The cause of this failure has, without a doubt, been a lack of compliance with the very procedures which were designed to ensure that council policies were carried out.

Inspection files, at Scorrier have been in the most appalling state and that such a condition applies to the whole of the inspection process may be inferred from the comment, on Page 52 of the Audit Report, that, "We have deep reservations about both the timing and quality of inspection routines".

Enforcement would appear to have been at best a purely theoretical construct since, despite wholesale breaches of Section 219 [1] of the Highways Act 1980, the Audit report [Page 39] was unable to discover a single case where enforcement proceedings against developers had been initiated!

• It has been impossible to obtain any meaningful explanation for the failures in highways' matters. Invariably I have been confronted by persistent prevarication and a dialogue of evasion, half-truths, and possibly of even untruths, which must raise fundamental questions about openness and transparency, integrity and responsibility as well as culpability and accountability at County Hall.

• A "thorough and independent" review has been set up, but its credibility has hardly been enhanced by its having had no control over its terms of reference, the production and conclusions of its report or even officers or Members selected for interview. The failure to provide either any answers to the questions posed or any rationale for its recommendations and, as you will know, the misrepresentation of my position [vide a) and b) on Pages 5 and 6 of the Audit report] as the member whose representations led to the investigation, in claiming that I was perturbed by two rather than by a  greater number of concerns, inevitably will have a detrimental impact on its reputation.  One must hope that the Head of Audit Services has complied with protocol 13 of the Internal Audit Protocol by reporting any contravention "any enactment or rule of law or maladministration to the Monitoring Officer or the County Treasurer", if its credibility is not to suffer a further damaging blow.

• If  the failure to carry out council policies is attributable, as it certainly is, to a lack of compliance with the established procedures, which were designed to ensure the implementation of those policies, Internal Audit's recommendations for procedural amendment, rather than for salutary disciplinary action,  cannot be other than seriously flawed.

• The importance which senior officers attach to members having approved Internal Audit's recommendations must be seen, and evaluated, against the pressure placed on the Community Life Scrutiny Committee, which was not allowed either the opportunity to question certain senior officers or the time for critical appraisal and reflection  and which was thereby prevented from carrying out an effective scrutiny role, especially when considerable sums of public money were involved. [and not just in the  £20,000, which has roughly been expended on the Internal Audit review, but also in the £300,000 which will probably be spent on the "implementation" of its recommendations.]

• No substantive evidence has been adduced to show that the "action plan", in which you seem to place so much confidence and which is based on the dubious relevance of Internal Audit's recommendations, will actually address the problems relating to the implementation of council policy or to the Council's modus operandi, in so far as openness and transparency, integrity and responsibility and culpability and accountability are concerned.

Frankly, if I may so, this action plan, which seems to be rooted in illusion rather than reality, may be seen as being more concerned with getting management off the hook than with tackling our underlying problems. It appears to give rise to a most fundamental question about the duty of officers to offer balanced information to assist members in exercising sound judgement in the decision-making process.

• Finally matters even of impropriety could be raised by i] the apparent lack of uniformity in the application of the Advanced Payment Code procedures and ii] the greater importance which seems to be attached to easing the cash flow problems of developers than fulfilling the requirements of the Highway's Act 1980. This act stipulates that householders on new residential estates must be protected against the possibility of street works' charges, should a developer default on his responsibilities, by the highway authority securing a cash deposit before building works can commence.  Yet a very senior officer conceded in a letter on the 3 July, 2002 that, "In practice  because of cash flow problems and because the bond usually attracts significant interest charges, a developer often delays signing his Section 38 Agreement until such times as sales are taking place”!

If such considerations neither pose any questions to which answers are required nor cause you the slightest concern, it would be difficult to imagine any which conceivably could.

Yours sincerely

Graeme Hicks

cc All members of the Executive and Community Life Scrutiny Committees and the Party Leaders.

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