Cleveland Police Authority under fire over payouts
Sandy McKenzie, Evening Gazette
Dec 22 2011
CLEVELAND Police Authority has been strongly criticised over redundancy payments made to senior officers.
A hard-hitting report from Government spending watchdog the Audit Commission says significant weaknesses have been identified in internal control.
The authority, which is currently also the subject of a separate major criminal investigation, today admitted the lapses were “unacceptable”.
While no specific deals were highlighted, the report comes after the Gazette’s revelations of a £361,950 payout to former CPA chief executive Joe McCarthy and a £213,379 payment to Caroline Llewellyn, the ex-solicitor to Cleveland’s Chief Constable.
CPA said significant changes have been made to prevent any reoccurrence.
The Audit Commission report raises a number of issues relating to employment practices at CPA including:
The inappropriate use of delegated powers to approve redundancy payments for senior officers;
Inaccurate calculations, made to support a redundancy proposal, which grossly overstated potential savings;
Potential overpayments on redundancy packages amounting to £35,000;
Practices relating to untaken annual leave, which potentially represent poor value for money. They were used in awarding discretionary weeks during the calculation of redundancy payments, a retention package arrangement and reimbursements, and
Actual savings arising from a redundancy being much lower than those reported in plans to approve that redundancy.
The report also states concerns have been raised over:
:: The competitiveness of hourly rates on some long-running consultancy arrangements;
:: The legal power available to the authority to reimburse legal fees incurred by an individual, and
:: The failure to appoint a monitoring officer for a limited period from June 2010.
The CPA told the Gazette legal advice was being sought about trying to reclaim the £35,000 in overpayments.
A spokesman said: “These events took place more than a year ago and the authority has since introduced new procedures that will avoid these types of issues in the future.”
“These lapses in internal control were unacceptable and significant changes have been made that will ensure that this sort of thing does not happen again,” he added.
CPA is currently the subject of criminal probe Operation Sacristry, which has led to the arrest of Chief Constable Sean Price, his deputy Derek Bonnard, former CPA chairman Dave McLuckie and Ms Llewellyn. All have denied wrongdoing.
The criticism of redundancy payments comes at a time when the authority is battling to save millions of pounds because of Government cuts to its grant funding.
Separately, the appointment of Hartlepool Mayor Stuart Drummond as new CPA chairman has been criticised.
Hartlepool councillor Ray Wells said he did not believe Mr Drummond could dedicate sufficient time to each role.
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