The lead government commissioner at Liverpool Council said the revelations uncovered by a Liverpool ECHO investigation into parking tickets was a "microcosm" of the problems that led to an intervention at the local authority.
Mike Cunningham is leading a team overseeing improvements at the council after a difficult few years. His team's latest report suggests the council is on the right road but challenges remain.
Last month the ECHO published the results of a 16 month investigation that found a number of elected Labour councillors had parking tickets cancelled by officers without going through the proper processes. Two senior Labour councillors - Ann O'Byrne and Barry Kushner - are set to leave the council after being named in our reports.
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Speaking after his team's third report of an intervention that began in June 2021, Mr Cunningham spoke about what we uncovered and what it showed about the culture of the council at the time.
He said: "I think in some ways those issues, and you might put it in contract management as something similar, are microcosms of the problems that have led to this intervention.
"What you've got are process problems around information requests coming in, and how they're prioritised and how they're handled and the process for people getting the information they need."
Speaking about the ECHO's 16 month battle for information, he added: "Nobody would be saying that the information that the ECHO was looking for was responded to in a timely way. Everybody has conceded that took far too long.
"The process issues are there. That tells us a little bit about the culture of the organization as well, that it wasn't responsive to what people were asking for. It wasn't inclined to open the books in a way that you'd expect a public organisation to do.
"I think that we got there eventually and I think that in itself is a sign of progress, where we have actually got to that position. We would hope and expect that such requests in the future would be handled by a much more efficient process and supported by people who have a different cultural outlook to say that actually. We need to be clear about what's going wrong here."
Speaking more widely about the improvement journey at the council, Mr Cunningham said: “In the second report, we were highly critical of the pace of change, the urgency, the grip.
“We said if that didn't tighten up across the board, the intervention was in a perilous position. We asked for an additional commissioner because we were concerned about financial management and financial resilience, so I'm very pleased to say in this report, we can say that we have observed a change in the pace, a change in the urgency, a change in the grip.
"When we first came in, that was firefighting, there were immediate problems to resolve and make sure that things were fixed. We always expected that to be the case, by the way.
“Then as the intervention moves on, this becomes much more about building for the future. When we move on from here, when this intervention ends, we need Liverpool Council to continue improving, so this isn't about quick fixes."
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