Councillor expresses concern that £20,000 may be spent on 'box ticking exercise'

By Alan Healy

Concerns have been raised that £20,000 of ratepayers’ money is going to be spent on what has been described as an unnecessary ‘box-ticking exercise’.

The concerns came at Thursday afternoon’s meeting of Derry City and Strabane District Council’s Audit, Assurance and Risk committee, during a discussion on an ‘improvement information and planning audit’.

The meeting was told that the work would involve an audit being carried to determine whether council had met its statutory performance improvement responsibilities for the year.

The audit would be carried out by the Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO).

Speaking at Thursday’s meeting, a representative of the NIAO told councillors that there would be a fee involved to council, based on the ‘time spent and on the levels of skill and responsibility involved’.

The meeting was told that the for the 2017-18 period, the fee ‘will be in the region of £20,000’, which was an increase on last year’s amount.

The NIAO representative added that the increase was due ‘the additional work relating to the retrospective audit and assessment of the council’s self-assessment of its performance for the 2016-17 financial year’.

Commenting, the independent councillor Paul Gallagher said that he had ‘concerns that this performance management programme is going to cost us £20,000’.

“So we are £20,000 away from an ideal performance?” he said.

“So if we pay this £20,000 is there any guarantee that it will improve?”

The representative of the NIAO responded that the council could measure its performance against other councils in the north.

Commenting, the chair of the committee, Sinn Fein’s Eric McGinley, asked Cllr Gallagher: “Happy enough?”

Responding, Cllr Gallagher said: “Not really, because we’re going to be coughing up £20,000 for a box ticking exercise.”

“Should we really be spending this £20,000?”

A report on the matter will come before a future meeting of the committee.