Council accused of cooking books

Waltham Forest Council in East London is being accused of massaging figures so that it can close its in-house building department to cut costs before setting up a new arm to compete for schools' construction work.

Construction union Ucatt, which is making the allegations, says the council is both withholding payments and starving the unit of work.

It believes the council plans to take advantage of the Government's Fair Funding proposals, which come into operation in April, allowing individual schools to tender their own construction contracts. Under the present arrangements the Local Education Authorities are responsible for construction work in schools.

Ron McKay, the Ucatt official for Chingford and Leyton, believes that the council is trying to quietly shut down the existing building department by March 1999 and then cut costs by restructuring the workforce: "The council will offload the staff of the direct labour organisation onto a private contractor and then start it up again, taking on a fresh workforce ready to bid for the schools' contracts."

"An unsuspecting contractor may take on the workforce in the belief that he will win the schools contracts only to find there is no work available and he has inherited £300,000 of redundancy costs for the 30 workers concerned," said McKay.

McKay claims the DLO has been prevented work from beginning on two contracts that it secured under Compulsory Competitive Tendering regulations.

The union has called for a best- value review of the procurement methods used in the division and is being backed by Labour MP for Leyton and Wanstead, Harry Cohen.

In response Waltham Forest Council accused the union of "scaremongering" and making "wild accusations."

A spokeswoman for Waltham Forest Council said: "These are ludicrous allegations and have no basis in fact. This Council believes in value-for-money and quality services. One of our priorities is to provide strong backing for our DLOs and DSOs.

"In fact most of our contract services are in surplus. We have done all we can to support the building DLO over a long period of time. However, we cannot sustain losses of the magnitude they are making," she added.