Every year, a legal requirement on Wirral Council means that they have to publish for each councillor how much was spent on travelling and subsistence allowances for each councillor.
Last year I made a Freedom of Information Act request for a breakdown of payments made to three taxi firms (A.P. Contract Hire Ltd, Wallasey Cars Limited and Wirral Satellite Cars Limited) for taxi journeys made by councillors paid for by Wirral Council.
Here is the breakdown for each councillor, taxi firm and total amount for that financial year.
AP Contract Hire
Cllr Irene Williams £11.20
Cllr Phil Davies (Plus 3 Staff) £54.00
Cllr Steve Niblock £51.00
AP Contract Hire Total £116.20
Wallasey Cars
Cllr Bill Davies £25.00
former Cllr Brian Kenny £5.00
Cllr Christina Muspratt £10.10
Cllr Irene Williams £46.20
Cllr Joe Walsh £50.60
Cllr Moira McLaughlin £197.10
Cllr Pat Hackett £700.00
Cllr Steve Niblock £442.90
Cllr Tony Norbury £13.00
Wallasey Cars Total £1,489.90
Wirral Satellite Cars
Cllr Bill Davies £106.65
Cllr Chris Meaden £6.70
Cllr Christina Muspratt £159.40
Cllr Denise Realey £20.10
Cllr Harry Smith £25.20
Cllr Irene Williams £117.70
Cllr Joe Walsh £184.55
Cllr Moira McLaughlin £558.20
Cllr Phil Brightmore £7.30
Cllr Steve Foulkes £17.50
Cllr Steve Niblock £16.00
Cllr Tony Norbury £51.95
Wirral Satellite Cars Total £1,271.25
Grand Total £2,877.35
An amount of £10.20 for an Anne Davis for Wallasey Cars was also included in the response to my request, but as there is no councillor called Anne Davis, I have not included this amount in the figures above.
One thing to be noted is that all the councillors in this list are from the same party (Labour Party). Let’s take one councillor’s taxi expenses at random and compare them to the published list for 2013/14.
Cllr Moira McLaughlin’s taxi rides came to £197.10 with Wallasey Cars and £558.20 with Wirral Satellite Cars (total £755.30).
Taking another councillor from the list above, £700 was spent on taxi rides for Cllr Pat Hackett with Wallasey Cars. Yet when you read the published list for 2013/14 his expenses are down as £0 and travel expenses £0.
I would suspect that if I went through the list of councillors above I’d find that none of these taxi rides appear on the list that’s published each year. The response to my FOI request contains the line “The use of taxis’, and the associated costs, has been in connection with legitimate Council business.”
This all reminds me of that quote from Wirral Council’s former Chief Executive Graham Burgess of “We need to spend less on ourselves and more on services” and I wonder what the £2,877.35 spent on taxi journeys for councillors could have been spent on instead.
If you click on any of the buttons below, you’ll be doing me a favour by sharing this article with other people.
Expense claim forms for Councillor Brian Kenny (Wirral Council) 2013 to 2014
Expense claim forms for Councillor Brian Kenny (Wirral Council) 2013 to 2014
Writing this, I had better declare that many years ago in Liverpool Councillor Brian Kenny gave us both a gift of a red plastic post box in I think in 2010 (it’s only a few inches high) as part of the lobbying that the Communication Workers Union were doing at the time of people like myself and Leonora. Although this falls into the trivial category, journalism ethics means I’d better state that at the start as I don’t want people thinking I’m being too kind or not objective enough to former Councillor Brian Kenny because of something he gave us four years ago. I will point out that gift was completely unconnected to my work as a journalist. However this is probably more openness and accountability than you will get from most politicians (who were recently told at a Planning Committee meeting about Tranmere Rovers that they only had to declare gifts received in the last twelve months)!
When I picked up the expenses claim forms to scan in for former Councillor Brian Kenny, at first I thought I must have picked up a batch which was for more than one councillor as compared to other councillors there seemed a lot of it. I know he was the Cabinet Member for the Environment, but his expenses claim forms go on and on and on and on and on like the waves crashing against the shore on the Wirral coastline.
As probably readers of this blog are already aware, former Councillor Brian Kenny lost his seat in Birkenhead and Tranmere in the May 2014 elections to the Green Party’s Councillor Pat Cleary.
I have only seen Brian Kenny twice since the elections. Once was at the meeting where Councillor Steve Foulkes became Mayor of Wirral in June, the other time was when I was at the Birkenhead County Court offices when I was requesting copies of court records on Wirral Council’s possession order (granted in February 2014 effective from February 2015) for Fernbank Farm. Before I start getting diverted into interesting anecdotes about a former councillor I had better show you first the expenses forms.
Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 1Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 2Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 3Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 4Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 5Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 6Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 7Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 8Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 9Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 10Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 11Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 12Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 13Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 14Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 15Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 16Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 17Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 18Cllr Brian Kenny expenses claim 2013 2014 page 19
If you click on any of these buttons below, you’ll be doing me a favour by sharing this article with other people. Thanks:
