Tower Hamlets and a ‘grant funding shambles’: echoes of Waltham Forest

Mark Baynes at Love Wapping has just posted a very interesting piece on a Tower Hamlets council audit report which ‘paints a grim picture of an almost total lack of control in relation to the awarding and monitoring of grants across the borough’.

As he observes, the report, which covers the period September 2014 to November 2014, ‘describes a culture within Tower Hamlets council that seems to have little or no interest in accounting for public funds. Issues identified included not verifying that grant money was actually being spent for the purpose the grant had been awarded, no monitoring visits to organisations, expense claims not supported by receipts and two Lunch Clubs not being certified as food premises’.

Mark concludes: ‘To summarise this would seem to indicate that grants were handed out like sweeties, the only monitoring was dependent on the honesty of the organisations that got the grants but if these people decided to spend the grant money on whatever else they fancied and claim anything on expenses no one in Tower Hamlets council would ever know’.

Of course, as readers of this blog will realise, this kind of thing also has been happening in Waltham Forest, and for years, with the single difference that here, Labour is the perpetrator.

For the full story, see

http://lovewapping.org/2015/02/tower-hamlets-audit-report-reveals-grants-funding-shambles/

while the Tower Hamlets council report itself is here:

http://moderngov.towerhamlets.gov.uk/

documents/s66152/Audit%20Committee%20Quarterly%20Assurance%20Report.pdf