Report claims 'one-party councils' could be missing out on procurement savings

Weak electoral accountability in ‘one-party councils’ may lead to substantially higher corruption risks and lower price savings from procurement, a report for the Electoral Reform Society has claimed.

According to the report, The Cost of One-Party Councils, such authorities – those dominated by a single party or with a significant number of uncontested seats – are roughly 50% higher corruption risk than their competitive counterparts.

This also coincides with foregone savings of 1-4% of contract value, the study suggests. This amounts to a “very rough” estimate of £2.6bn in missed savings, the report's author, Cambridge University academic Mihály Fazekas, adds.

Fazekas used ‘big data’ to look at 132,000 public procurement contracts between 2009 and 2013 to identify ‘red flags’ for corruption, such as where only a single bid is submitted or there is a shortened length of time between advertising the bid and the submission deadline.

The report acknowledges that the results are “only suggestive of the potential detrimental effects of weak electoral accountability on the control of corruption”, and that establishing the causal effect of local electoral competition on public procurement corruption would require much more data.

It also accepts that a range of non-electoral factors may also influence corruption outcomes “such as the quality and integrity of local bureaucracies, democratic accountability mechanisms other than elections (e.g. local referenda), and the wider institutional context such as the courts and audit institutions”.

The Electoral Reform Society called for the Scottish system of a single transferable vote to be adopted in England and Wales instead of ‘First Past the Post’.

Josiah Mortimer, Communications Officer of the ERS, said: “These findings make sense really. When single parties have almost complete control of councils, scrutiny and accountability tend to suffer.  

“The £2.6bn potential wastage is a damning indictment of an electoral system that gives huge artificial majorities to parties and undermines scrutiny. This kind of waste would be unjustifiable at the best of times. But during a period of austerity it is simply astonishing.”