The Town Hall Tapes – thecumbriachronic.co.uk

CRUMBRIA: 12.03.2026

SIDE A: This week, a committee signed off Cumberland Council’s Year Two accounts — months late, long past legal deadlines, and with Auditors unable to properly vouch for what’s in the books!

SIDE B: And why did our local rags overlook what the Council is spending money on? The accounts reveal debt went up by £29M and one lucky member of staff was paid up to £600,000 to go!

SIDE A

LABOUR-daft Cumberland Council signed off its accounts for 2024/25 this week.

The draft accounts should have been out by 30 June 2025. Instead, Cumberland published them on 19 January 2026.

That makes them six and a half months late. Don’t blame the officers – blame the directors and the politicians.

And the delay means external auditors couldn’t give the Year Two books of the new authority an entirely clean bill of health.

Because of the Council’s somewhat ‘continental’ attitude towards legal deadlines, the independent auditors were unable to do enough work in time to say whether the 240-pages of accounts were free of serious mistakes.

Nice to know that your Council Tax is going to the right home!

Alleged local newspaper, the News & Shrug, attended this meeting but by the looks of its report, it didn’t grasp the seriousness of what was going on.

It attempted to conceal its ignorance by simply regurgitating a fog of bureaucratic Council-speak.

Attending a meeting, as we keep saying, is not the same thing as reporting it.

Yet it even forgot to tell its readers how LATE the accounts were or reveal what secrets were contained IN them.

But we can – exclusively!

SIDE B

Here are just some of the things buried in the accounts that your local paper did not see fit to mention:

The Council employed 4,302 people.
That’s an increase of 44 members of staff on the previous year.
567 members of staff, including schools staff, are on £50,000 or more.
The Chief Executive Andrew Seekings, received a total package of £214,359.
That figure includes pension contributions.
Most Council directors were paid between £144,000-£169,000.
The Council shelled out £2.1 million ushering people out of the building.
A total of 46 different “Exit Packages” were paid out.
The year before, the Council paid out a mere £574,148 in 27 “Exit Packages”
One employee waved goodbye with a package between £550,001 and £600,000
The cost of Councillors (not Council officers), was less than £1 million.
Debt rose £29 million for a total of £285 million.
The Council repaid £15 million of debt.
The Council took out £45 million in new loans!
The Auditors, presumably on first name terms now with the Council, charged a cool £844,000 for all of their invaluable services.

Yet NONE of this information above was deemed news-worthy enough for the News & Shrug which had access to all the documents we did, as they’re publicly available here.

Instead, the paper seems more interested in writing up easy court cases about desperate shoplifters instead of using its journalistic resources to examine where your Council Tax is going.

You can read the tanking tabloid’s version of the accounts story below, which superbly skips past what’s actually been going on.