Who guards the guardians? Auditors play important role

East Devon District Council leader, Councilor Paul Arnott. Picture: Paul Arnott (Image: Archant)

By the time you read this article, thousands of you who are registered for postal votes will already have marked the box with an X for county councillors, local referenda and by-elections of various sorts, as well as for the Police and Crime Commissioner. May 6th remains the date for everyone else.

As part of this process I found myself beating the local streets in recent days putting letters to postal voters through front doors on behalf of the county candidate I support.

This is that time every few years when local representatives (I still don’t really see myself as a politician) walk the highways and byways and come across local people who might not always be visible on our radars.

It is also the time when we all wonder who designed the British letterbox, some six inches from the ground, others wide enough to allow an After Eight in and little else, and many designed like mantraps for unsuspecting fingers. You’ll know someone leafleting by the gardening gloves they are walking around in.

I am glad to report that in Colyton and Colyford in the beautiful spring sunshine those I encountered in their front gardens were very friendly. There were even a few who’d read these very articles and who shared their thoughts on subjects I have discussed as varied as Donald Trump (remember him?!) and the covert desire to own a motorhome.

Fascinatingly, they seemed mainly to have been interested in a piece I wrote about the BBC’s Line of Duty, and one pointed out to me that recent shenanigans at Liverpool City Council, where there are allegations of irregularity in procurement practices, came to the police attention solely because of the work of a council internal auditor, a sort of Steve Arnott of the accountancy world.

These auditors perform a difficult role in any council or organisation, about as popular sometimes as the officers of AC-12 in Line of Duty. They have a job to do and it can involve asking tough questions. Most employees will respond enthusiastically, but that it not always the case, and an internal auditor, at a council for example, will always need the robust and objective backing of councillors.

All of this leads to that old chestnut – who guards the guardians? Because whether we like it or not, so much of what happens in public life that should be simply a matter of law ends up as being influenced by politicians.

Former PM David Cameron’s recent difficulties over lobbying ex-colleagues for financial help for a company in which he has an interest has been described by Keir Starmer as “the return of sleaze”.

In truth, this stuff goes on all the time, and often under our very noses. All we can do to prevent it is to remain eternally vigilant and call it out when we see it.

Which brings me to the subject of the attempt by 6 greedy Premier League football clubs and their similarly globally owned European club chums to form a breakaway league.

This is the inevitable consequence of the move in the 1990s to become dependent financially on national and international television rights for the new commercial model for football, rebranding Division One as the Premier League, and the noble European Cup as the Champions’ League.

What followed was two decades of football agents making multi-millions, and formally venerable old clubs with grand traditions becoming owned by petro-dollar billionaires or oligarchs from behind the former iron curtain.

The coverage of the game on satellite and then digital TV reached saturation point years ago, as desperate presenters tried to hawk Burnley v Sheffield Utd on a wet Tuesday in February as an unmissable epic.

So far the reaction has been universally negative. Maybe it’s time for the auditors to look at the sources of some of these clubs’ wealth, and for the politicians to back them.