The Debate: Are our city's councillors letting Liverpool down?

Feb 26 2008 by Ben Schofield, Liverpool Daily Post

The statue of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, watches over Liverpool from the top of the Town Hall dome. Picture Howard Davies _240

LIVERPOOL City  Council has been in  the news for all the  wrong reasons  recently, as Can our public servants be as bad as has been made out? Ben  Schofield reports

FROM the sublime to the  ridiculous. Riding high in  April, shot down in May, as  the old song goes.  Liverpool City Council has  suffered a rollercoaster of fortunes  over recent years and months.

The public servants who brought  us Capital of Culture, World  Heritage status and who now want  Liverpool to be a "Premier  European City" have also carved a  £60m black hole in our finances,  watched the Culture Company  supremo walk away with a huge  pay-off and been named and shamed  as the worst performing authority  in the land.

The district auditor in his report  into the council's balance sheet  expressed concern about the "weak" state of the city's finances and said  it would only get worse without  major intervention.

Just two councils in England were  embarrassed with a one-star rating  from the Audit Commission -  Liverpool and Rutland.

But Liverpool was even pipped by  the East Midlands minnows because  Britain's smallest county was  deemed to be improving better.

Lib-Dem council leader Warren  Bradley is the subject of two Standards Board inquiries, particularly into whether he sought to oust former Culture Company chief executive Jason Harborow from his job.

And last week he personally withdrew from a flagship conference on the continent saying he was under too much "political pressure" to attend the event.

The Audit Commission pulled no  punches in its report, saying it went  much further than the leader's  office.

During their first account of their  visit, inspectors described the  standard of councillors' behaviour  as worse than in a "fledgling  Eastern European democracy." though the damning phrase did not appear in their final report.

So, this week we ask: Are Liverpool's councillors letting the city down?

benschofield@dailypost.co.uk

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