There’s a line in the new SIBA scrutiny report that we’ve read four times now because we keep not believing it. The council’s own governance statement, on the same page, in the same breath, says the arrangements are “fit for purpose” and lists two “significant governance issues.” The external auditor found four significant weaknesses in the same year. Someone, presumably, was paid to write that page. We’d love to know how the meeting went.
The report is twenty-one sections long and reads like a man counting his own pulse and grading himself “healthy.” A cabinet member signs the disposal. The officer who wrote the report recommending it sits on the board of the company getting it. The committee meant to catch that has, for most of two years, had a vice chair who was also a director of the thing it was checking. Nobody broke a rule. There wasn’t a rule in the way.
But the bit worth your time is the waivers, because it’s the only part of this that’s actually funny rather than just depressing.
A waiver is what happens when the council decides it doesn’t need to compete a contract. Sefton has published five quarterly waiver reports to the Audit and Governance Committee since September 2025. Every single one of the five keeps the actual list of waivers in an appendix marked not for publication. The public part of each report contains, and we are not simplifying this for effect, no number. Not a count. Not a total. The council’s own summary sentence, verbatim, is: “Overall, the report highlights the number of Waivers that are authorised.”
Read that sentence again. It highlights that there is a number. It does not tell you the number. That is not a governance process. That is a magic trick, and not even a good one, because you can see exactly where the number’s hidden. It’s behind the curtain marked “Schedule 12A.” Everyone in the room knows it’s there. Nobody asks to look.
While we’re on the subject of numbers the council would rather you didn’t add up: £648.8 million left Sefton Council in payments over 2022 and 2023 alone. Eight contracts hold 61 per cent of everything on the public contracts register. Savills got £350,000 in June 2025 for something recorded as “Regeneration Scheme 1,” which is either the name of a project or the name of a Bond villain’s lair, and the council hasn’t said which.
Thirteen of the first fifteen freedom of information requests about one officer’s own roles were signed by that same officer. That’s not a conflict of interest so much as a man marking his own exam and then filing the appeal himself when he disagrees with the grade.
The good news, if you can call it that: nobody is accused of taking a backhander. The bad news is worse than a backhander, because a backhander is at least illegal and this isn’t. This is just how the building works. A meeting that isn’t public, a declaration that isn’t made, an appendix that stays closed, a sentence that tells you a number exists without telling you the number. Nobody raises their voice. Nobody needs to.
We have written before about one room in this building, the Botanic Gardens aviary. This report is the building the room sits in. Read it. It’s long. That’s rather the point.
The full scrutiny report is published at siba.digital/reports/sefton-council-scrutiny. Every claim is sourced to a public document. See also our own coverage of the Botanic Gardens aviary.