THE LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 10694, 8 January 1897, Page 4

THE LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL.

, THE SCANDAL OF THE WORKS . ~ . DEPARTMENT. A very grave scandal has oo'ine to light in connection with the Lonnon County Council. It has been 6iscovered thab the accounts of the "Worke department have been "cooked" with an impudence and ingenuity hardly equalled in the ann&k of fraudulent companies or of insolvent States. Except that the motive does not appoar to have been corrupt, the deseptjons practised by the officials of the department have been scandalous beyond eraggdration. There have beau "falsely sigied and bogus transfers," " transfers of materials at altogether unwarranted price?," appropriations of invoices of goods to a job where the goods were noli'used, materials -vised and not debited to the job, and de'ibftratfl alterations of the cost of a j'.'b ia order to males the job work out, not at its true cost, but at.fche cost which it. was desired Bhould appear in the accounts. To read tjj« report of the Investigating Committee is to fancy one has got hold of an inquiry into the doings of some (Imi&rtmotit of the Third Empire or of soms American municipality. To show that we are not exaggerating, let us quote cho actual words of the report made by the Investigating Committee in regard to the " cooking " of tbc accounts of the work none at the CoJney Hatch Asvlnm :—" The principal clerk made up an imaginary list of materials from the works ar, Coine.y Hatch amounting, as valued by him, to £1892, specially obtained the sii:uniure3 of two' foremen to the bogus transfer?, and paused the amount to the credit of Colney Httch and the debit of the Haath Asylum, Busley, and Lewisbam. The materials represented by this transfer never went to the job at all. Certain materials which really did i;o were •represented by sundry subsequent transfers vaiuet at £1360, bona fide transfers as to materials, but overvalued to the exteut of about £270." The Spectator says ■—" We doubt if the men who jobbed the rebuilding of Paris, ov tiiu satellites of Tammany Hall in its worst. : dajs, could have iaiproved on the mechanism ;of fraud here created. The meu who victualled [ a fortress by driving a stream of oxen into one : gite of the torcu and out of the other, and eo I round and round all day, were mere amateurs compared to these compilers of imagiDsry lists. As we hnvA s*id above, the motive does not appear to hava been a corrupt one. That is, uo one pook^tsd anything by the perpetrr.tion of I these bogus transfers. Tliey were merely i designed to deceive the Works Committee! the I Coucty Council and the public. The officials iof the department, according to the most I probable theory, were alarmeo' at the attacks I made uuon it. by the Moderate party in the I council. They feared that they would ba abolj iehed, or greatly restricted in "their operations, j unless they could show that they worked very

j closely to their estimates. Accordingly, they 1 manipulated the accounts in such a way a3 to I pub tho best possible face op. the daiugs of tee ■ department. As their defenders say iu effect. I ! 'they did nothing corrupt;, they merely deceived • their masters.' \V« mu3t csnfess to thinking this defence at bash ao extremely lame oae. It bscomea positively ridiculous when it is carried a stsp further and we are told that the people reilly responsible for the scandals, the real criminals, ssre the men who criticised the Works department and tried to show that ib was not a benefit to tun people of London. Their harsh criticism, it is alleged, drove the poor officials into committing acts ot deception. They were bo harassed Iliad they had to deceive the committee aud the couucil in self-defence Surely a more preposterous plea than this—it was seriously used in the dabats in the council and iq the press—was never heard. " The specific Gcandal in tha works department is b?.d, bat the incident discloses something worse than that—something which has not yet been sufficiently noticed. The worst tea..ur G of the whole business is the breikdowu of the system of administration pursued by the County Council. That the system' has signally t*iie;i in a crucial case cannot, we think, be denied. Ona great object of all administrative systems is to obtain a visible and individual chain of responsibility for all acts. The paople whose affurs are administered want iu every case of maladministration to have the means of tracing the responsibility from the bottom to the top, and to l« able to say to «, definite man at the top, "You are the pjwon ultimately responsible for the blunder or criuis, which ever it may be, and we call upon you to angwr for what has been done." But under the existing system ib is utterly impossible to adopt this : attitude. There is no one on whom responsibility can be fastened. To dismiss a subordinate office! is practically worthless, and to try to make a committee collectively responsible is a farce, la theory, no doubt, the members of a cpmoiittee are severally and collectively responsible for their acts; but this is mere theory In practice, you may as well try to make a jelly fish responsible. The raspoasibility in the case oE the County Council is divided and subdivided between the offisiils, the members of the committee, and the"council as a whoie, till it entirely evaporates. Instinctively the . public realises this. Though in the present | cass the Works Committee 13 responsible for ! the scandal, no one ever dreams of. trying to i hold them responsible. The pnblic does not fiveu ask their names, so little idea is thera of their feeing answerable. Wo have repeatedly pointed out the evils which must; in the end result from this want oS visible and individual responsibility in the government of London, bus we confess we were not prepared for so : speedy and bo striking a prooE of the soundi Bess of our complaints."