For an organisation that spends more than £2bn a year, there are times when you wonder whether KCC would be capable of arranging a celebration at a brewery. This week, the council had a scheduled meeting of its Selection and Members' Services committee. To be frank, what happened bordered on farcical. It reminded me of a children's tea party which begins with some degree of order, with the table neatly laid out, before unravelling into disorganised chaos.
The meeting had rather an inauspicious start when councillors were presented with a report which was a late item - meaning no-one had seen it until it was circulated. The report ran to 104 pages and detailed some rather important changes the council is making to the way it is run.
So new was this report that it appeared that KCC leader Paul Carter, who has been leading the re-organisation, was heard to mutter that he hadn't seen it before and was expecting something rather more succinct.
The committee chairman Peter Homewood, who had an afternoon he will probably wish to forget rather quickly, then decided councillors should get ten minutes to read it before discussing its contents. To be fair, several members piped up to say they were rather unhappy about that and the item was put on hold.
The real meat of the meeting, however, centred on two related items about an issue that is proving rather awkward for KCC: the use by members of private taxis and chauffeur-driven cars. The agenda included two separate reports, one detailing the results of an internal audit into members' expenses claims and one on KCC's policy for the use of chauffeur-driven cars.
What was NOT on the agenda, however, was the recent external auditor's report investigating claims that some county councillors, including the deputy leader Alex King, had made duplicate claims for travel in their own car when in fact they had been using a KCC chauffeur-driven car. This report has not even been formally published yet and is due to be discussed at a meeting in April - although its findings have been well publicised.
So, you might have expected members of the committee to steer clear of debating the outcome of a serious investigation which was a) not on the agenda anyway b) has not yet been formally published and c) actually involved some of the councillors sitting around the table.
It is true that there was a debate on the findings of the internal report but time and again, the discussion veered on to the report which wasn't supposed to be being discussed. At one point, Cllr King - one of the subjects of the investigation - declared the report that no-one had had made clear that nothing untoward had happened and that "nobody could read into the external report that any member had acted improperly, inappropriately or illegally...we are not on the fiddle and this report proves that."
Of course, that may well be the case but nobody on the committee was in a position to challenge this assertion because no-one had the report in front of them - including the Press. Opposition Liberal Democrat leader Trudy Dean intervened at one point to ask the council's monitoring officer Geoff Wild whether there was any need for anyone to declare an interest given the way the debate was going but was told "the subject matter does not relate to any individuals so no personal or prejudicial interest arises." He was, of course, referring to the internal auditors' report.
Mrs Dean said she felt the committee was in a rather precarious situation as both Cllr Carter and Mr King "are both sitting around the table taking part in the discussion."
However, the debate continued, with Cllr Carter pointing out that the costs of the external report by the district auditor had cost £25,000 and that would have to be borne by taxpayers.
After a while, it seems a message was communicated to the committee chairman that perhaps it was not in order for members to be discussing an item that wasn't on the agenda and related to a report involving some of those present and no-one actually had a copy of.
Belatedly, he advised the committee that it was not appropriate to be discussing the external auditor's findings but the words "horse, bolted and stable doors" sprung to mind.
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The issue of whether county councillors ought to be using KCC chauffeured cars and taxis for private purposes has already created an awkward situation for the authority. One of the questions KCC has faced as a result of the inquiry was whether its policy permitted their use in such a way and has focused on the fact that the leader has in the past occasionally stopped off at his business premises when he has been en route to and from London on official council business.
It is important to emphasise that Mr Carter set up arrangements to reimburse the authority when he did so and in fact, appears to have overpaid.
As a result of the investigation, the auditor Darren Wells noted in his report that KCC had stopped the practice - presumably because it felt there was a question mark over whether it was legitimate. However, Cllr Carter argued at the meeting that he hoped when the rules are revisited on chauffeur-driven cars that the practice is not ruled out and members are permitted to use them for private purposes in some circumstances. It would, he said, be a "retrograde step" to not permit their occasional use where it was sensible.
Watch this space. I can't help thinking that the council would be facing something of a PR disaster if it does do so but sometimes KCC does do strange things.
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Some eloquent tributes have been paid to Edwin Boorman, the President and former chairman of the KM Group, who died this week.
One of the admirable qualities was his steadfast refusal to use his position to influence editorial coverage. There were plenty of times when his political friends would ring him up to badger him about a story that I had written - sometimes stories I hadn't yet written - but he always batted them away, saying it was up to editors what went into papers and the last thing he was going to do was interfere. The editorial integrity of his papers and their freedom and independence were things he cherished. I never once was told to steer away from something because it might embarrass one of his many friends in politics.
In fact, he sometimes told me he thought that we didn't give politicians a hard enough time.
But he regarded our role in holding decision makers to account as vital. I lost track of the times he would come up to me and say firmly: "Never let them forget it is our money they're spending, Paul."
A great man.