Do Cllr Christina Muspratt’s election expenses add up (a councillor who is on Wirral Council’s Audit and Risk Management Committee overseeing £billions of public money)?
I’ve decided to publish the election expenses by ward alphabetically. However these are only for candidates who got over a quarter of the vote.
There was a small delay in inspecting these returns due to the pressures on the election side at Wirral Council due to the EU Referendum.
The first one is for Bebington ward and that of Christina Muspratt (the Labour candidate) who was elected as a councillor.
Cllr Christina Muspratt sits on Wirral Council’s Audit and Risk Management Committee overseeing hundreds of millions of pounds of public expenditure and also (as Wirral Council is the Administering Authority) the multi-billion pound Merseyside Pension Fund Wirral Council runs (although the Pensions Committee also have oversight of the Merseyside Pension Fund)).
However her donations and spending don’t match in the pages below.
Her campaign lists £243.06 of spending (although some notional spending should’ve also been declared but mysteriously wasn’t as the printing of leaflets at Alison McGovern‘s office (the Labour MP for Wirral South) was done at below commercial rates)).
Indeed the use of taxpayer-funded resources at Wirral Council and at Alison McGovern’s office (the Labour MP for Wirral South) is odd as generally there is a bar on taxpayer-funded elements to party political activity during elections and indeed if people would like to leave comments explaining this it would be welcome.
As a general rule having the taxpayer fund elements of an election campaign (a party political matter) is seen as wrong.
There are however only £150 in donations to cover this spending though. I hope Labour aren’t applying this kind of voodoo economics to Wirral Council too!
The declarations signed by herself and her agent are also included. As she was well under the spending limit (even if you include what the notional expenditure should’ve been) of £1,456.16 it’s unlikely anything that this will result other than mild embarrassment as in future (hopefully) she will read things before signing them!
I’ve included the originals as a zipped file below, thumbnails of the return (which as a lot of it’s handwritten may be hard to read) are below that.
I’ve linked each thumbnail to a higher resolution image which should show if you click on the thumbnail.
