Health grant of £1.8m misused by council

Barking and Dagenham Council misused almost £2m of government grant funding, councillors have been told.

The grant from the Department of Health and Social Care was supposed to be spent on improving public health, such as stop smoking schemes. But the east London council discovered that a number of its departments had used the money for other purposes.

Labour councillor Maureen Worby, the council's cabinet member for health, said the discovery was made during a review of public health spending and had come as a "shock".

Instead of being required to repay the grant, the council has said it will be required to find the equivalent money within its budget to go to health spending.

Worby said: "The initial evidence that came to light was that some departments within the council were using the allocation for purposes that it hadn't been given for.

"It came as a shock that actually what we found in the end was that there was £1.8m of potential ineligible spend."

She said the government was reassured that none of the misspending had been deliberate and that the council had put stricter measures in place over the use of the money.

The government gives councils a public health grant to spend on work to improve the health of local residents.

This can include stop smoking schemes, enforcement action targeting illegal vapes, and diet and exercise programmes in schools, which might be run by different council departments.

However, the money is ringfenced which means spending should only be on areas specified in the National Health Service Act 2006.

The council said its independent review, which it commissioned in 2024, found some council departments had used the grant money for areas outside the ringfence.

Speaking to councillors at an overview and scrutiny committee meeting earlier this week, the council's director of health Matthew Cole said he distributed the grant among other departments.

Cole said: "Because I couldn't see other departments' budgets and how it was spent, I had no oversight.

"I don't think people understood the ringfence. They basically felt they were given the money and it was theirs."

However, Cole also said that no council officer had faced disciplinary action over the misuse, and that the town hall treated its investigation as a "learning point".

Worby said Cole now has direct oversight over how other departments spend the public health grant.

She said those departments also now have to sign agreements for its use, committing to "key deliverables".

The council was not the only local authority to have fallen foul of the spending rules, Worby said, but while the government had told other councils to return the misspent grant, it had allowed Barking and Dagenham to keep the £1.8m.

She said this was because the government was "assured that what we have put in place is robust" and "that there was not a deliberate misspending of our grant".

Instead, the government has said the council must put £1.8m back into public health from its general fund budgets.

Worby added that the town hall would then reinvest that money into addressing public health inequalities in the borough.

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