Friday brief - Commissioners have their final word

This week’s brief includes a withering assessment of Northamptonshire’s now defunct county council and a new project to tackle inequalities in Wellingborough

Tony McArdle (left) and Brian Roberts

The final report of the two government commissioners charged with rescuing Northamptonshire county council has come out this week.

As with all other reports Tony McArdle and Brian Roberts have not pulled any punches in their assessment of Northamptonshire county council, which was published this month.

‘Failure was expected and aspiration for improvement was weak,’ say the commissioners in their report back to the secretary of state for local government.

They point to group think, hubris and ’dangerous over confidence’ in their overview of the dysfunctional authority they found back in Spring 2018.

The authority, which had been led for many years by leader Jim Harker before he handed on the broken baton to Heather Smith, was the first authority in two decades to effectively go bankrupt. Its collapse led government to order two new unitary councils to replace the borough and county system of local government that had been in place since 1974. The new au…