(part 2) to think that Camila Batmanghelidgh must be lying when she says she has done nothing wrong in her spending of Kids' Company Funding?

[LuluJakey1]

She is like Jimmy Saville in that what she has been doing has been under all of all our noses and we have refused to speak up about it or believe it.

It is not just the luvvies who have been up close and personal with her- involved with the charity and CB at a very close level, some even Trustees. It is also the employees and the parents of children, the children themselves, the volunteers. We are not talking about a hidden mis-use of funding. We are talking aout a whole culture of open waste and self-indulgence.

I know it is from The Daily Mail but it is actually an interview with het.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3199527/My-heart-clear-says-Kids-Company-boss-Batmanghelidjh-admits-charity-paid-school-fees-employees-children-denies-wrongdoing.html

£5000 a month rent on an Art Deco House with private swimming pool - which houses a member of staff, and the swimming pool is used by CB but hot by any children- they are 'not allowed' (her words)

£40,000 chauffeur- now a specialist worker (according to CB). also has private school and therapist funding for his 2 children.

Staff( how many?) have their children sent to private schools because the job is stressful and it is part of a 'staff well-being package'

The Chauffeur's sister is also employed - now as a 'brilliant accountant', last summer as 'the woman who does my sewing' (mind you that would be a full-time job in itself, but it does imply the charity pays for those vile outfits much as I suspected)

25 young people given £769,000 a year funding - £31,000 a year each, to do nothing. They are CB's specially selected young people- many of whom have received funding for many years. She describes them as 'like a family, hanging round the house'. She deals with their funding herself.

Yet STILL CB complains staff should not have spoken up about any of this and implies those who have will suffer for it.

In my view this woman and her behaviours are corrupt, dishonest and immoral.

Are my views unreasonable? I feel this could be jus the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is yet to emerge and prosecutions will be very likely.

I think there should be a down- to the -bone, in-depth investigation of every aspect of the work of this charity and of CB. Not simply any concerns that have now been raised but a complete trawl of the spending, the practices and the behaviours of CB herself.

Werkzallhourz, I think you are on to something there. When I found out Gove had blown £8b on things like legal, accountancy and surveyors' fees for his free schools and academies project I churned the figures and established for that money we could have halved class sizes, taught every child in Britain to ski or introduced UFSM for everyone for some years. Instead we changed what schools are called and who gives them their funding with no evidence of educational impact (indeed adverse evidence from Sweden). I think politicians etc have no sense of scale at all when it comes to public finance.

IMHO as an accountant who deals with charities, the Charity Commission provides absolutely no oversight at all
and charities are free to hire and fire their auditors till they get a compliant one.

There are far, far too many charities : lots of the teeny tiny ones should be merged or closed (especially the thousands with no transactions)
so that the Charity Commission can actually check what it is sent.

apps.charitycommission.gov.uk/showcharity/registerofcharities/SectorData/CharitiesByIncomeBand.aspx

apps.charitycommission.gov.uk/showcharity/registerofcharities/SectorData/SectorOverview.aspx

boffinMum Did Gove really blow £8billion on his free schools/academy project? I read yr post to DH and he was shocked. He wanted me to check it wasn't a typo. Where has the money gone & over what time span? The mind boggles.

Gove also made sure that every school had a copy of the King James Bible.

Free school DfE professional fees alone have been around £8m

Add in the costs of paying the provders fees, and building schools, and then closing the schools, and then having to open other school places up that people actually want
I can easily believe £1bn but £8bn feels a tad high

Is that including the costs wasted on the later stages of Building Schools for the Future that were cancelled?

Does it include the PFI drain?

Boffinmum ... the problem is all through the system.

Both my DM and MIL worked for the NHS for the majority of their working life, both retired about five years ago. Some of the stories of sheer financial idiocy beggar belief.

Your post reminded me of one: changing the name of the PCT. It sounds so innocuous, doesn't it? But, in reality, changing the name of the PCT cost nearly a million quid. It meant new stationary, new signage, new information leaflets, new logos, website redesigns, new stamps, new stickers and it all mounts up.

And for what? A name change? You can reorganise a structure without changing its name. A name change doesn't deliver better health outcomes. It's just some different letters in a new fancy arrangement.

Both my DM and my DH are local government councillors. Some of the financial decisions made in local government are frightening -- and it occurs at all levels from small grants to non-evidenced payments out of a key budget. For some strange reason, people can't seem to connect a £4000 grant with the annual council tax payment from four average-income homes. When my DM raised the point that an average family might have a problem with the idea that their annual council tax payment for four years was going to pay for new china for a local exclusive institution with significant financial assets, they looked at her blankly and said "It's only four grand. Why are you so stingy?" And they voted her down.

It gets to the point where The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists reads like a modern expose. To my mind, KC is another example of how serious the problem is.

Incidentally, I have been going through some of our local financial archives, and there's been more than one KC-style outfit that has got local money for woo-style activities with youngsters. Unsurprisingly, I had never heard of some of these entities nor seen any evidence of solid outcomes, despite them supposedly working in my local ward -- and we are very plugged in the community.

And £8bn is insane.

The annual budget for the police service is only £3.5bn.

No, unless I have lost the plot completely the £8b is absolutely not a typo but needs breaking down so when I am not on my phone I'll try to do that as far as I can. It was in the news in about 2013 as Gove asked for an extra £1b from Cameron as he had overspent, if you want to Google in the meantime.

It was a staggering sum of money.

This is the story BoffinMum is alluding to. Her summary is right.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20434319

It's a staggering amount of money, to which your first reaction is disbelief. It's an average of about £4m per school up to that point.

So that's the whole NHS funding gap pissed up the wall on education ideology

Ah, Academies : not free schools
in that case, £8bn is a LOW estimate of the money wasted

and YYY to renaming PCTs and HAs and god knows what else

the same top bods take the multiple redundancies and then waltz into their job at the new body with a new holiday house in spain to carry on fucking it up as they did before

and the public sector auditors will not say a thing because the NAO is one of the worst offenders for dodgy expenses and back scratching nepotism

the abolition of the Audit Commission has been an expensive failure under whatever criteria you pick

Department for Education overspent by £1 billion on the academies programme, with a total cost of £8.35 billion being spent between 2010-2012.

Number of school aged children in the UK – 9,500,000

Amount spent in total since election on academies programme – £8,350,000,000

Amount spent per school aged child on academies programme – £840

DfE budget for 2010-2011 was around £56 billion.

By the way, that only covered two years of the Tory academies programme. It has been running for five years now.

Gove basically blew 15-20% of the schools budget just on this pet project.

This is how much your children's school places currently get in funding.

www.sec-ed.co.uk/news/how-much-per-pupil-funding-will-your-school-get

As the article says:

London authorities dominate the list of highest per-pupil funding, with the City of London getting the most at £8,595 ahead of Tower Hamlets (£7,014) and Hackney (£6,680.05).

Nottingham is the highest outside of the capital, receiving £5,309, while Birmingham gets £5,218 and Manchester £5,088.

At the other end of the scale, Cambridgeshire is the worst funded per-pupil at £3,950, followed by South Gloucestershire (£3,969) and Leicestershire (£3,995).

The average for all authorities across England is £4,550.54 per-pupil.

Gove £7000 expenses scandal

Article says:

Shortly after being elected MP for Surrey Heath in 2005, Mr Gove furnished his house in north Kensington in a five month period between December 2005 and April 2006.
Around a third of the £7,000 was spent at Oka, an upmarket interior design company established by Lady Annabel Astor, Mr Cameron’s mother-in-law.
Mr Gove, the shadow Schools secretary, bought a £331 Chinon armchair from there, as well as a Manchu cabinet for £493 and a pair of elephant lamps for £134,50.
He also claimed for a £750 Loire table – although the Commons’ authorities only allowed him to claim £600 – a birch Camargue chair worth £432 and a birdcage coffee table for £238.50.
Yesterday Mr Cameron said Mr Gove would repay the £7,000 cost of the furnishings to the Commons’ authorities.
Mr Gove described the sum “which I hope will reassure people that I’m serious”. He added: "We 'get it’. We are going to change the rules and we are going to make sure that past mistakes are atoned for.
“David will be taking radical action and it’s only by taking radical action that we will get this place (parliament) back to where it needs to be.”
Mr Gove is not repaying a £13,259 bill for when he moved house in his constituency in Surrey in Autumn 2006, although the sum could be examined by the party’s new scrutiny committee.

Free schools costs

£240m spent on building 42 schools in areas where there are already surplus spaces.

No applications to run free schools in areas where there is a shortage of places.

In the article it says:

--

The cross-party committee highlighted the increasing expense of housing the new schools – as £700m out of the £1.1bn total spent on free schools went on temporary accommodation and new buildings – and said that cost overruns could imperil the entire project.

--

I happen to know one of the surveyors who has to value the free school sites and he is of the impression that they are paying 2x, 3x, 4x normal rents or more in many cases and are over a barrel as commercial property owners and developers know full well the free schools have no choice and the Government will always find the money. Seller's market, basically.

Witoldkula/Gen it's a pleasure to link to your brave blog. You're the reason I contacted the press you gave me that bit of strength I needed!

Bit more on Sarah Vine's shopping habits. I hope she got a MN discount on some of this stuff. Absolutely no awareness at all of how most of the country lives and the fact that this is at the taxpayers' expense.

For the record he moved 33.2 miles from Kensington to Surrey Heath and it's a 58 minute drive from one home to the other. Surrey Heath to the House of Commons is a 53 minute drive.

By comparison my daily commute is 54 miles and 1 hour 16 minutes by car using the same method of calculation, but the idea of a second home allowance with Egyptian sheets and £30 doormats would be utterly scoffed at, i think, especially if the taxpayer was forking out for it.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5305434/Michael-Gove-flipped-homes-MPs-expenses.html

---

Shortly after being elected MP for Surrey Heath in 2005, Mr Gove furnished a house in north Kensington, west London, for which he claimed the Additional Costs Allowance.

Over a five-month period between December 2005, and April 2006, he spent more than £7,000 on the semi-detached house, which Mr Gove, 41, and his wife Sarah Vine, a journalist, bought for £430,000 in 2002. Around a third of the money was spent at Oka, an upmarket interior design company established by Lady Annabel Astor, Mr Cameron’s mother-in-law.
Mr Gove bought a £331 Chinon armchair from there, as well as a Manchu cabinet for £493 and a pair of elephant lamps for £134,50.
He also claimed for a £750 Loire table – although the Commons’ authorities only allowed him to claim £600 – a birch Camargue chair worth £432 and a birdcage coffee table for £238.50. Other claims in the five-month period included Egyptian cotton sheets from the White Company, a £454 dishwasher, a £639 range cooker, a £702 fridge freezer and a £19.99 Kenwood toaster.
Mr Gove even claimed for a £34.99 foam cot mattress in Feb 2006 from Toys 'R’ Us – despite children’s equipment being banned under Commons rules. He also charged the taxpayer for eight coffee spoons and cake forks, worth £5.95 each, four breakfast knives and a woven door mat worth £30. A claim for new patio furniture worth £219, including a four-seater bistro dining set, was turned down by Commons officials.

Some months later, Mr Gove moved house and transferred his second home allowance from the west London home to a £395,000 new property near Guildford.
In October 2006 he submitted a £13,259 bill for the cost of the move, including his local authority searches, fees and stamp duty. In between the house moves, he stayed for a night at the Pennyhill Park Hotel and Spa, charging the taxpayer more than £500 for a single night’s stay.
In 2007-08 and 2006-07 Mr Gove claimed the maximum amount of money permitted under the additional costs allowance: £23,083 and £22,110 respectively.
Mr Gove said last night that he would repay the cost of the cot mattress. The other items bought for his London home “were all, with one exception, below the acceptable threshold costs for furniture”.
“The items were bought from a mainstream retailer and when I was informed that they fell outside the range of allowable items I accepted that ruling without complaint,” he added.
The £13,259 moving costs were necessary, he said, so that he could have a home in the constituency “to effectively discharge my parliamentary duties”.
Michael Gove
Job: Shadow education secretary
Salary: £64,766
Total second home claims
2004-05: N/A
2005-06 £21,634
2006-07 £22,110
2007-08 £23,083

This is Mumsnet, so I thought I should share pictures of the Sarah Vine purchases for everyone to give due consideration to.

51 Barlby Road

"DfE budget for 2010-2011 was around £56 billion."

I have a rough total educational spend of £91bn for this period, made from £56bn at local level and £35bn at central level, of which £16bn is tertiary education. So which pot did Gove's money come from? Central? Because that slightly changes the picture a bit.

But, at the end of the day, when you are looking at an £8bn spend, well, the entire education budget for London is about £13.8bn this year.

I don't know about what the academies programme entails, but I can't see how you can spend £8bn without funding some sort of provision: ie. actually paying for children's education, so paying teacher and admin staff salaries, paying for materials, maintenance on buildings, insurance, everything about running a school.

I am wondering whether it is some sort of transfer cost from moving provision from one entity to another. That BBC article suggests there has been a period of double funding places, which would make sense.

There is no way £8bn is purely fees of some description. The Bloody Sunday Enquiry came in at £400 million, and that went on for 12 years.

That's a good question. Let's go digging. Meet you back here.

Boffinmum
Source document
www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/010013-001-Academies-programme_with-correction-slip.pdf

www.gov.uk/guidance/academies-funding-allocations Any use?

Summary
www.nao.org.uk/report/managing-the-expansion-of-the-academies-programme/

and follow up
www.nao.org.uk/report/academies-and-maintained-schools-oversight-and-intervention/