'Influence' alleged over contract

A critical report by District Auditor Mark Kirkham found East Riding Council breached its own procurement rules by failing to obtain three quotes before awarding the post of interim communications manager to Mercury Design and Marketing Ltd, whose managing director, Simon Taylor, is a former head of communications at the council.

The report revealed council chief executive Nigel Pearson and Steve Button, its director of policy, partnerships and improvement, met Mr Taylor on May 1 last year, two days after the post was first advertised and 22 days before the closing date for applications.

Although Mr Kirkham was told there was no record of what was said at the meeting, he found a series of subsequent emails between Mr Button and Mr Taylor, some of which were copied to Mr Pearson, which he said showed Mr Button was seeking "at the very least, a contingency plan with Mercury".

Liberal Democrat councillor Phil Davison told a meeting of the council's Audit Committee yesterday: "I think personally the chief executive was involved in the process before the interviews even started and that there was influence, let's put it that way, from the chief executive in the decision-making process as to who was going to get the contract.

"There are a lot of questions about the actual timing of how Mercury got involved in the process, and I do think the chief executive had influence, and also that the director of policy, partnerships and improvement had, not deliberately, made an error of judgment on this. But I think he was pressured in that by the chief executive."

Mathew Buckley, the council's monitoring officer, said the contract had been investigated by Timothy Straker QC and the District Auditor and "neither of them found that the chief executive was involved in the process".

Following further questions from Coun Davison, he added: "Coun Davison should be wary of reading too much into things and making suppositions of things he has no knowledge of."

The post was advertised at the pay grade "Pt 46", which is 38,961 a year, or almost 3,250 per month. Mercury was paid 5,333 a month.

Mr Pearson, Mr Button, and Lisa Mansell, the Press manager, whose maternity leave triggered the vacancy, interviewed a shortlist of five candidates on June 10.

The three unanimously decided not to appoint any of them "due to lack of local government experience".

The Yorkshire Post has discovered two of the candidates had previously been offered the job on a full-time basis by Mr Pearson's predecessor as chief executive, Darryl Stephenson, while a third spent five years working as the head of PR at Humberside Airport when it was owned by the four Humber councils.

The council could not prove it had sought three quotes for four

separate invoices totalling 12,226 in respect of work by TAS Communications Ltd, Mr Taylor's previous company, which went into voluntary liquidation in February 2009.

The council was among the list of creditors owed money by TAS after the company failed to pay rates of about 1,000.

Coun Felicity Temple, Conservative, suggested at the meeting that adverse Press coverage of the Mercury contract may have been because two of the unsuccessful candidates had been freelance journalists, and "they may go away and make up a story".

A woman in the public gallery called her comments "absolutely disgraceful".

The meeting also revealed that Mr Straker's report, which was commissioned by the council, had cost the taxpayer 10,435.70.