No answer to cash call

THEY mucked it up. No doubt Philip Larkin, one of Hull's best-known residents and master of the pithy one-liner, would have put it more strongly. Whatever words you choose, however, the truth is inescapable. City fathers appear to have wasted part of a £104m windfall and allowed a period of deprivation and political drift to continue. It has been a fiasco, and one which could easily have been avoided.

It beggars belief that Hull City Council cannot say precisely where the revenue from selling shares in Kingston Communications has gone, or how much of it is left. This lucrative cash-in happened only three years ago yet the authority's response, that the money had simply been "added to the capital budget", which goes on regeneration and infrastructure, is woolly indeed.

Such an attitude would be bad enough in the boom years. Given the

recent meltdown in the public finances, it seems extraordinarily slack. It also adds to the impression that some local authorities are incapable of handling taxpayers' money with anything like the appropriate rigour. Hull should be one of the wealthiest areas in northern England. Instead its council will be one of those hardest hit by George Osborne's cuts and it could be forced to cut up to 1,400 jobs, hitting vital services. This is a sorry state of affairs for an authority which, through its communications company KC, founded more than a century ago for the benefit of the people, had a cash cow of which other cities could only dream.

Never again must a council take such a laid-back approach to running a budget. The debacle at Hull does not automatically mean the money has been wasted, but creating an audit trail is a basic part of accounting, whether it is in the public or the private sector. Given such behaviour, it is no wonder Westminster politicians are making hay by lambasting local authorities' budget control and executive pay scales.

If local opposition claims have been exaggerated, as Carl Minns, the leader of Hull city council, suggests, then he must prove it. Only a thorough review can find out where the money has gone or, in future, the literature coming out of Hull will not be poetry, but high farce.