Nottingham City Council still years behind in publishing accounts amid £650k spend

Nottingham City Council’s Loxley House in the city centre

Nottingham City Council remains years behind in publishing its full accounts and has now paid over £650,000 to the company reviewing them. The council last gave an update at the end of September to say that a full version of its accounts had not been published for the last four years.

That situation remained the same at the beginning of February and the council also says that it has now increased the additional fees being paid to its auditor, Grant Thornton, by £65,000. As well as having to publish unaudited accounts by a legal deadline, councils are also expected to publish accounts once they have gone through an independent financial inspection.

The council’s latest update says draft accounts have been produced for the financial years ending in 2020 and 2021 but for the two years after, even draft versions of the accounts are not ready. The draft accounts for the financial year ending in 2022 are due to be ready by March, whilst the draft accounts for the year after are due to be finished by May.

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The update comes after the Government unveiled plans to clear a backlog in accounts at local councils across the country. The plans include a “backstop date” by which all councils need to have published all their outstanding accounts, with the date currently set at September 30.

A cross-party committee of MPs recently warned that taxpayers were being “left in the dark” due to the delays in council’s publishing their accounts. Labour’s Clive Betts, the Chair of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee which produced the report, previously said: “Local audit is in crisis and the Government must act to fix it.

“Serious delays in local audits mean that many councils are not fully sighted to problems while they make major financial and service decisions.” The job of appointing auditors to look through financial accounts was once carried out by the Audit Commission but since that body was formally closed by the Conservative Government in 2015, councils usually turn to private sector firms to carry out the work.