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Nairn Common Good Fund is refunded after accounting error in Highland Council’s finance department – had been charged around £25,000 for council services provided towards the Team Hamish Splashpad Project





The Team Hamish Splashpad Project.
The Team Hamish Splashpad Project.

Thousands of pounds are to be reimbursed to the Nairn Common Good Fund after an error in Highland Council’s finance department.

Investigations in to Common Good expenditure by a community councillor revealed the fund had been charged around £25,000 for Highland Council services provided towards the Team Hamish Splashpad Project.

The council’s Nairn area committee had promised these would be paid for from general council funds.

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Associate member of Nairn West and Suburban Community Council, Joan Noble, is investigating the finances of the town’s Common Good Fund with a view to protect the town’s assets.

Submitting a freedom of information (FOI) request to Highland Council as part of that work she received a Common Good invoice list covering the period 2018-20.

“I was surprised to see a very large number of invoices from various Highland Council departments in connection with the Links Project to build the Team Hamish splashpad,” she said.

“These invoices totalled many thousands of pounds.

“This intrigued me, as I knew that the Highland Council contribution to the splashpad was to be £25,000 in the form of internal project costs.

“I had already found it difficult to decipher from the Nairn Common Good annual budget sheets whether the £25,000 had ever been actually paid into the Common Good Fund, and so put in an FOI to clarify what had happened.”

“The answer was that the £25,000 was never meant to be a cash donation, but for project services in kind up to the limit of £25,000, and had not been paid into the Common Good Fund. The invoices were therefore erroneous and the result of a ‘miscoding’.”

Dr Noble said a list of invoices totalling well over £20,000 was included in the FOI as Highland Council’s record of the project invoices.

She reported at the January meeting of the community council that the local authority had agreed the money would be refunded to the Common Good Fund.

“We are now contacting the council to confirm this cash, which belongs to the Nairn Common Good, has been refunded,” she said.

“We acknowledge the Nairn area committee agreed to play its part to pay for these services to a project otherwise wholly funded by Team Hamish and the Common Good.

“But it’s concerning that it is very unlikely this mismanagement of Common Good funds would have been picked up and the money would have been lost to Nairn had we not carried out these investigations.

“It just confirms the need for these funds to be brought back under local control.

“Had we not sent this FOI it’s doubtful this error would ever have surfaced and it would have been more money lost to the Common Good.”

As the Courier reported last week Michael Green, a former Highland councillor planning to stand again in local authority elections this May, wants a local committee of the Common Good Fund which would have regular meetings with elected Highland Council members to decide together on how funds should be disbursed.

He envisages a membership drawn from a range of community groups including sports clubs and local churches as well as Nairn’s community councils which he said would give more local control over how the Common Good fund is administered.

A spokesperson for Highland Council said: “A commitment was made at Nairnshire Area Committee on November 27, 2019, for £25,000 of internal project management costs in respect of the Splashpad to be met by the Council. Unfortunately there was a miscoding of the expenditure in relation to that which has been noted and sums will be transferred to correct the position.”


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