A minor £136 million mistake

Liverpool City Council are at it again

I watched Spotlight again last night, as it has been playing on my mind for the last couple of weeks. It’s about a team of five investigative reporters for the Boston Globe who, while ‘in between’ stories (that often took a whole year to put together), are asked to look into reports of a child abuse cover up in the Catholic Church. Through diligent paper-based research, extensive door knocking and old fashioned determination they realise they have uncovered a scandal of a scale and magnitude larger than they could ever have imagined.

Spotlight (2015)

I had a moment a bit like that a couple of weeks ago, so shocking that I was sure Rachel McAdams would also be asked to play me in the future Hollywood retelling.

Regular readers will know I set up and maintain a bunch of interactive dashboards that compile the data published by local councils, police forces and combined authorities showing how much they spend. Each body publishes - supposedly on a monthly basis, but in practice much more sporadically - tables of raw data showing every invoice paid over £500 with the supplier, date and department for each.

Keeping this updated is a quick and easy task that I do as and when I feel like it. Earlier in October I noticed that Liverpool City Council had published three new month’s worth of data (June, July and August 2025) so I downloaded, merged, and uploaded to my dashboard. During this process, a row with a blank cell where the department should be threw up an error so I went to check it, and what I saw didn’t look right in more ways than one.

The payment for £1,600,625 was to a named individual, not a business. No department, but the description was ‘Events’. This was puzzling, although the council have put on the likes of Sting at the Pier Head and paid for the Radio 1 Big Weekend, this was Saudi comedy festival levels of cash - and I already knew from perusing council invoices that even the likes of Claire from Steps and Charlotte Church only command 5 figure fees.

More alarmingly, when I asked Twitter what they thought about it, someone pointed out that this individual has the same name as the council’s previous events manager. So I submitted a Freedom of Information request about it on the 8 October.

Once the data was in my dashboard, more strange payments leapt out at me. One was a payment of £2.3 million to a company I’d not heard of, and when I looked them up saw they had only been in business since May this year. Another minor supplier had gone from being paid tens of thousands each year to suddenly receiving £9 million in two months. I crossed referenced these suppliers with the publicly available contracts register and there was nothing. Another supplier that stood out was the Royal Mail: the council had never spent more than £1m a year, but in two month’s had spent well over £2m. I wanted to know what could possibly require that many stamps.

At this point, I was unsure what I was looking at; errors, fraud or just wanton profligacy. My main suspicion was a straightforward error, but two things were still unclear: did these sums actually get paid out, and were these figures the same ones used in other council reports and decision making - the Cabinet sat and signed off the Quarter 2 finances while all this was still unresolved.

Sat on the floor in my mismatched pyjamas with my laptop on the ironing board that I hadn’t bothered to put away, I thought of Rachel McAdams’ agent asking her if she could do scouse accent and I decided to get dressed, to make the role a little more palatable.

For a change, I took the good faith but less fun path and instead of calling the police or the press I instead emailed all 11 councillors on the Finance and Resources Scrutiny Committee on Monday 13 October. I gave details accounts of over £15 million worth of payments that looked, frankly, dodgy as fuck.

The next day, I was getting a bit perturbed that no one had so much as acknowledged my email (though I did receive an automated acknowledgement to my FoI sent 6 days earlier) so I forwarded it to Liverpool’s Green councillors, as they are my current political tribe. Within an hour, their leader Tom Crone got back to me saying it looked “highly suspect” and asked to be kept informed. He chased me up again a couple of days later. But nothing from any of the (cross-party) members of the Scrutiny Committee, which was really starting to worry me. But while they procrastinated, an eagled-eyed reporter, Abi Whistance from the Liverpool Post, had noticed my tweets and slid into my DMs. Perhaps someone from the Echo would have got there first if a) they had any journalism skills and b) hadn’t all already blocked me.

Then last weekend, as I was talking to someone else about this, I went to the council’s website to send them the link, and lo and behold, the data for July and August had been removed. This meant that someone had noticed the problem, but I didn’t know if it was because I’d alerted them - I had still not received any acknowledgement from the council. On Monday, they reuploaded the correct data for July and August.

The first thing I did was a side by side comparison of the new and old sheets and wasn’t expecting what I found. I knew that it was unlikely I’d identified every error (though I’d since found another £3 million worth of red flags), but I was anticipating the new data to have the wildly incorrect invoices removed and so the overall monthly totals would be lower. My pet theory so far was that these may have been dummy invoices used in a training exercise that had somehow been included with the real data.

Instead, both files contained the exact same number of rows (over 13,000 each), and the overall total for each month, was exactly the same, to the penny: £67,215,706.94 for August and £69,336,883.01 for July. There were still the same number of entries for each vendor, and each department. And there were the same amount of invoice totals (e.g. both versions had 35 payments of exactly £805.84, just to completely different people). The £1,600,625 had not gone to an ex-employee of the council, but to a subsidiary of Peel Holdings. It seems the column with the invoice amounts had somehow got massively and illogically jumbled up, twice.

So while this looked like a mistake rather than fraud, it was a BIG mistake. £136,552,589.95 worth of mistakes, spread over more than 26,000 individual mistakes.

I wonder if I’ll get to meet Mark Ruffalo, I thought.

Though to be honest, as I got in touch with Abi to tell her my findings, I was convinced this story had lost its legs. This was an honest, though hard to explain, mistake (and I have spent the last 20 years scratching my head figuring out why Excel is being weird). Abi had other ideas.

“No, this is outrageous”, she said (I think, I never did learn shorthand).

“I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who looks at that data, though” I suggested. Apparently I couldn’t be more wrong, Abi and her colleagues in the wider Mill Media organisation rely on it all the time, and she said it was instrumental in her staggering investigation into the Big Help Project, where millions of pounds were transferred from a failing charity to businesses run by Labour councillors (Collette Goulding still hasn’t resigned, incredibly). I’m not sure how long the incorrect data was up for, or how many people downloaded it. It had been a full week since I had emailed eleven councillors and I’d still not heard a word back. Abi was ready to confront the council.

And so the next day, Tuesday, I received an email from the council’s finance director:

“Upon receiving your email, dated 13 October 2025, we immediately investigated the concerns raised. It was discovered that the transparency report data, highlighting council expenditure above £500, was indeed incorrect due to a file corrupting during the transfer between departments. Our priority was therefore to remove the incorrect data and republish the correct dataset as quickly as possible. I recognise that at the same time as doing that we should have included a note explaining what we had done.”

This confirmed a few quite disappointing suspicions. They hadn’t noticed the error themselves, they had received my email and acted upon it, but I’m still convinced they would never have acknowledged this error, to me or the wider public, had Abi not got involved. That admission: “I recognise that at the same time as doing that we should have included a note explaining what we had done”. That’s not something I requested or suggested. That came from Abi.

And so on Thursday, Abi published her story, and it seems from the comments most people agreed with her that it was something of a big deal. As someone who’s job it is to get sums right, I feel sympathetic towards whoever made the error because mistakes can happen, and we’re only human. But, similarly to how I feel whenever an Echo reporter spells West Kirby with two Ks, in a big organisation there should be procedures in place to catch mistakes before they’re signed off.

Additionally, it shows how little independent scrutiny of public finances takes place, especially at a local level. While the Post has the talent, they’re under-resourced, having a staff of just two. And while the Echo and Reach plc have the resources, well… you should already know my feelings about the dearth of talent in that newsroom. But it’s not only lack of talent, it’s lack of will: the only actual journalism at the Echo - that doesn’t come from press releases or members of the public offering up stories - is done by a team based in their newsroom but paid for by BBC licence payers, the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

In Spotlight, there’s a scene where the new editor of the Boston Globe tells Michael Keaton’s character that he wants to make the paper “essential to its readers”. It’s possible the Echo thinks it’s achieving this, but only if it thinks its readers care more about trash television, bargain consumer goods and general vacuous clickbait than the ongoing corruption and mismanagement in the city where they live.