Monday 18 May 2009

Clive Medlam: Pack your bags and get out of town.


For those of you who don’t know, Clive Medlam is Barnet Council’s Acting Director of Resources and Chief Financial Officer. He is the unelected officer who authorised the expenditure of £31,000 on a room booking system exclusively revealed on this blog yesterday.

He is also the officer who escaped with nothing more than a mild warning when it was discovered that he had buried £60,000 of legal indemnity expenses in a report to the Cabinet Resources Committee in 2005.

I have been contacted today by a pensioner reader of this blog who followed up the suggestion left by former Councillor Daniel Hope that the council should have simply Googled “room booking software” to see what came up.

My reader did precisely that and immediately found a product called Room Booking System. You can’t make this up - that’s how simple it was! This product would cost the council £210 a year with an initial set up fee of £420. Better still, it is available for a free 30 day trial with no obligation to purchase.

My reader wrote: “As a pensioner, I am on a fixed budget and every penny counts. If I want to buy something out of the ordinary, I always check on-line to find the best deal. It took me less than a minute to find this product using Google. Did the council even bother looking?”

Personally I doubt it, because their mentality is not to worry about such trivialities. It is not their money and they simply don’t care.

As a result, Clive Medlam has cost taxpayers another £30,000 which could have been avoided. How much more of this do we have to put up with before he is shown the door?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Don’t forget that Medlam was the officer who borrowed all the money which ended up in Iceland (which Mike Freer knew nothing about of course)