Image: Islington Labour
A series of embarrassing blunders has seen the council waste nearly ten thousand pounds on unnecessary broadband bills, Islington Now can reveal.
Breaking their own rules on the amount of money that can be spent getting councillors online, officials have frittered away an average of £1,000 a year on needlessly pricey contracts.
Council financiers did not know about the official policy, that representatives cannot have home broadband which costs more than £25 a month, for up to eight years and continued to implement an expensive and antiquated system.
As a result, the IT department have blindly spent up to £650 a year on one councillor, more than double the allocated amount.
Phil Kay, chair of the Audit Committee charged with keeping an eye on council spending, said the losses were not substantial enough to warrant his attention.
“In the course of that period the council must have spent upwards of £15bn. What is £10,000 compared to £15bn?,” he said.
“If one or two people have claimed 50 quid here or there it’s not right but it’s a very small sum. We do much bigger things than that, we deal in millions not hundreds.”
Revealing further mismanagement, Mr Kay said he was totally unaware that the upward cap on broadband allowances even existed.
“I wasn’t even aware that there was a limit on people claiming expenses on broadband,” the former mayor admitted.
“People don’t do it for the money. If one or two people have claimed 50 quid here or there its not right but it’s a very small sum. I’m much more worried about getting value for money from much larger contracts.”
But the council admitted that a sustained period of poor communication wasted thousands of pounds of taxpayers money for no justifiable reason.
In just one year in 2006, the council spent 20 per cent more than the £10,500 budget permitted by their own rules to pay for high-end, internally-run broadband.
Last year Rhodri Jamieson-Ball, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, inadvertently spent £404.88 on his home internet, equivalent to a top-end business-wide connection.
A council spokesperson explained: “The broadband used by this councillor is supplied on the wider council contract for historic reasons and the cost reflects the contract price, rather than a cost related to an individual councillor. The contract is currently being renegotiated and this arrangement will not continue in the new contract.
“The £25 monthly limit applies to councillors who claim money back towards the cost of broadband, not to the old arrangements where broadband was supplied under the council contract.”
