A private company has a remit, given by Manchester City Council, to provide fun for the Manchester public. Part of what this company does is to put on days when they provide things like, say, a bouncy castle, some face paint artists, a sports coach or two at one of the municipal parks.

As you know almost every municipal park has a bunch of Friends who are volunteers who help to make events like these, and their own, accessible to their local communities.

So it would make sense for this private company to contact the Friends of the parks they plan to hold events at to co-ordinate with them wouldn’t it?

For two reasons:

1. So they don’t have events that clash!
2. So the Friends can help them publicise the event

Well funnily enough I was speaking to a Friend who’d not been “officially” told about these events but heard about it and turned up to offer assistance. When they got there they found a number of people ready to educate and entertain the children. Unfortunately nobody had advertised the event. That meant money had been spent hiring a bouncy castle, hiring sports coaches and everyone else to sit around bored whilst children (who were on holiday) swanned around the streets unaware of the fabulous time that had been arranged for them.

The company running this event, or non-event, doesn’t lose out as the Council still pays them. The Council doesn’t lose out as they’ve allocated money to pay for the entertainment from the budget set-up to do that. There are two groups who lose out: the council tax payers and the children.

Council tax payers because money was spent to no good purpose, money that could have been used more effectively.

The children because they would have enjoyed the entertainment laid on.

The questions I have are these:

1. This was only one park, if the same happens at every park aren’t the company and the council wasting shed-loads of our money?
2. Do the council check number of attendees?
3. If the council checks numbers of attendees do they compare them to events run by each parks Friends?
4. If the attendee numbers are lower do they ask why?
5. Does the council just give money to the private company or does it tie part of the money to performance?

At the moment it sounds as though this company is running events and the taxpayer is simply subsiding the company’s employees to sit around having idle chats with the people they’ve employed.

And it may only be one way of losing our council tax money, but if that’s the way it’s looked at there could be hundreds of little ways of losing or wasting money that people don’t even consider.

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