Rotten Boroughs

Rotten Boroughs is a feature in Private Eye magazine which reports on dubious practice in local government.

The term "rotten borough" refers to the system of government before the Great Reform Act of 1832, when the House of Commons was made up of members for small towns while the wider shires and industrial cities were often unrepresented. This section is written by a number of reporters, none of whom are credited, each covering different regional 'beats'. It is edited by Tim Minogue.

David Bluknett Award for Abuse of the Legal System

• There was a very strong field this year in one of the most rapidly expanding areas of local government - using the law to suppress free speech and intimidate opponents. Winner: Camden Council, which spend seven months preparing a case against a Defend Council Housing campaigner who had, er, put up a poster in a bus shelter. The council was seeking a £1000 fine and £460 costs but backed down three days before the case was due in court after The Eye (Private Eye) and other publications ran the story. Runner Up: Hastings Council, which took a protestor to court for "harassment" after she handed out leaflets opposing the council's botched regeneration schemes and asked the council's deputy leader "Why are you ruining Hastings?" A judge kicked the case out; happilly the taxpayer was on hand to pick up the legal bill.

Brass-necked councillor of the year

• 2002 winner Jim Speechley, former leader of Lincolnshire County Council, made an impressive bid to regain his title by turning up at a council meeting wearing an electronic tag after being released from prison. Shaming, certainly, but if he hadn't turned up he'd have missed out on his allowance! Former Bristol Liberal Democrat councillor John Astley continued to claim his £9,200 a year allowance while on remand over child-porn charges, for which he subsequently got 15 months. For sheer brass neck, however, this year's award goes to former Wear Valley district councillor Stephen Gregory, who for nearly a year claimed to be able to represent his Bishop Auckland constituents from the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, where he had been detained on business of a Uganda nature since last January. The former butcher continued to trouser the taxpayers' money until he resigned the week before Christmas.

Sh*t of the year award

• Eddie Aldridge, former leader of Moray council, former deputy lord lieutenant and holder of the OBE for "services to local government" who was jailed in June for forging an elderly neighbour's will in an attempt to get his hands on her £100,000 estate.

Spinner of the Year

• Bath tourism chief Jan Siegieda who attempted to justify the shambles of the Bath Spa project - four years late and millions over-budget - by saying "I think it is great that the Spa is shut. The longer it stays shut the better. The fact that it is shut is making more people want to find out about it. In a strange sort of way it is working in our favour." Days after this story appeared in February, Mr Siegieda became Bath's ex-tourism chief.

Vera Off-Course

• Hats off to councillors on the Isle of Wight for appointing a four-strong independent remuneration panel to report on councillors' pay. The panel of worthes, drawn from outside the council, recommended that councillors should this year accept no more than a 2 percent pay rise. After due consideration, the members awarded themselves 25 percent. Trebles all round! Except for the four members of the remuneration panel, who have resigned in disgust. While islanders were puzzlign how this squared with the Tories' election pledge to cut spending that swept them to power 18 months ago, it then emerged that the council has spent a whopping £5.2m on 140 consultants in that time. This included £200,000 on head-hunters to recruit the replacement for nine senior officials booted out with payments totalling nearly £1m. The £10,00 a month that £150,000 pa chief executive Joe "Vera" Duckworth is spending on alleged PR wizard from his former council, Westminster, seems to be slow in bearing fruit.

Tory Bigot of the Year

• Former Peterborough city council leader Neville 'f*ck the Irish' Sanders was impressive for the breadth of his bigotry - against the 'lying, cheating' disabled 'drug dealing' Big Issue sellers, 'harlot' female councillors and, of course' the 'lazy' Irish.

• West Sussex councillor Alan Phillips was commended by the judges for his subtle tribute to Smethwick '64 'if you want a traveller for a neighbour, vote Labour'. But the winner had to be Stowmarket town councillor Kieth Mayers-Hweitt whose breezy, where's your sense of humour observation on seeing some Asian men using computers in Stowmarket libary 'Have aliens landed, or is it an invasion of darkies?'

Enterprising Contractor of the Year

• The traffic warden employed by Lambeth council's parking enforcement contractor Control Plus who slapped a ticket on a damaged moped lying on a yellow line while its rider was being treated for a broken leg by paramedics.

Blue-Sky Thinking Award

• Colin Prithard, 'head of performance management' at Cumbria county council social services, who attempted to address the department's abysmal record by issuing all staff with a plastic drinks coaster carrying a logo of a cross in a circle, so they would be inspired to stay 'On Target' every time they had a cup of tea.

Sensitive Communicator of the Year

Southwark council's housing department, which wrote to an elderly couple accusing them of having spent their rent money on a holiday and demanding £524 arrears sharpish. Apart from the fact that the couple had never been behind with their rent, that they hadn't had a holiday for years and that the wife was grieving for her husband, who had died of cancer two months previously, the letter was spot on.

Political Correctness Award

• Runner-up: The Fire Brigades Union's black and ethnic minority executive council, which criticised Isles of Scilly council for not employing any black fire-fighters, even though hardly any black people live on the Scilly Isles and none applied to work for the fire service.

Appointment of the Year

• Sunderland Labour councillor Tommy Wright, who was made vice-chair of the children's services review committee months after more than 4000 adult hard core images were found on his council laptop - put there, he assured the council, by his grandchildren

Tory Bigot of the Year

• Hillingdon council leader Ray Puddifoot, who vetoed calling a new sports centre "The Queen's Athletics Centre" because it might "associate the centre with the gay community". Runner-up: former Brighton and Hove councillor Peter Willows, 75, who got drunk and suggested in front of gay activists at a council reception that most gay men were paedophiles.

Junketeer of the Year

• Shetland councillors, who clocked up £100,000 expenses (and loads of CO2 emissions) on foreign trips to, er, environmental conferences in the Caribbean, Madeira, Crete, Paris, Madrid, New York, etc.

Blue-Sky Thinking Award

• Isle of Wight chief executive Joe "Vera" Duckworth. In the hope that council senior officers would come up with better ideas, he made them wear baseball caps with the word "Thinking" on the front. "Thinking caps" - geddit?

Litigant of the Year

• Peter Walls, chief executive of the Sunderland Housing Group (SHG), who spent tens of thousands of pounds of tenants' money attempting to silence a website on which locals criticised the SHG's poor performance.

Housebuilder of the Year

• Peter Walls, chief executive of the Sunderland Housing Group (q.v), which in five years has demolished some 2500 homes but built fewer than 300, of which oly just over half are registered social housing.

Antisocial Behaviour Initiative of the Year

• Bath council cracked down on binge drinking by ordering hairdressers to stop giving ladies a glass of wine while waiting for their perms.

Arse and Elbow Award

• The British National Party's 11 dimwitted councillors in Barking and Dagenham, all but one of whom failed to back a measure they themselves had proposed because they had lost interest in the debate and weren't listening when the vote was called.

Cock and Bull Award

• Former Harlow Liberal Democrat councillor Matthew Shepherd, discovered with scores of pictures of penises on his council laptop, claimed they were to help him with serious research into the size of the male member. He said he was concerned, as holder of his party's health portfolio, that EU-approved condoms might not fit the men of Essex. He then sued the council over its "covert surveillance", claiming £35000 under the Human Rights Act. He lost.

Contract of the Year

• Isle of Wight council gave the lead on a £13m contract for shoring up a crumbling coast road to engineering consultants High-Point Rendel without going through a proper tendering process. This was the same firm that featured in last year's Rotten Boroughs Awards over a similarly dodgy arrangement with Scarborough council. By a spooky coincidence, the man in charge of the Scarborough debacle, Derek Rowell, is now sea defences supremo at the Isle of Wight.