Letter: Major Corruption Is Rare in Local Government But…

Published on: 1 Nov, 2026
Updated on: 1 Nov, 2026

Surrey will soon be divided into two unitary authorities East and West Surrey.

From Bernard Quoroll

In response to: Where Will Be the Benefits of the Local Government Reorganisation?

Corruption on the grand scale is quite rare in local government and tends to explode visibly when it happens.

There have been three major scandals in my working lifetime: Poulson, a private architect in Newcastle who corrupted a whole community (with bribes and gifts); Porter, a political Leader in Westminster (who gerrymandered social housing) and Rahman, a political leader in Tower Hamlets. (Rahman was found guilty of guilty of vote-rigging, electoral bribery and religious intimidation in 2014 but was re-elected earlier this year.) This is over a period of nearly 50 years.

The most vulnerable areas are less visible and lie in procurement, most obviously housing and town planning, where there is a continuing need for vigilance. But corruption remains a rare event, more often associated with a lack of commercial acumen, inadequate systems or weak managerial scrutiny.

There are however many opportunities for bad behaviour in local government which fall short of being corruption. I wrote my dissertation about them. Devolution per se is not the driving factor.

The real driving factors in my opinion are:

The removal of meaningful personal consequences for politicians who misbehave, after surcharge was abolished, other than reputational.
The creation of ‘strong’ mayors and portfolio holders along US lines at every level in local government able to make decisions alone, less transparently and without effective scrutiny.
The weakening of the role and tenure of integrity-trained heads of service, in favour of generalist managers and overtly political leadership. (The appointment of Monitoring Officers to police standards, has proved wholly inadequate to the task.)
A growing polarisation of local political life in which local government is being reinvented along national political lines.