Sorry saga rumbles on - John McLellan

Rumbling on is the sorry saga of former Edinburgh health and social care chief Judith Proctor who resigned last year after a damning Care Inspectorate report into the services for which she was responsible.

Those pesky annual accounts have revealed Edinburgh City Council gave her a £22,500 bung to quit, and as her role as chief executive of the Integration Joint Board was split with NHS Lothian, it’s presumed her goodbye deal was worth the same again.

It’s lovely work when you can be regarded as a failure, trouser 45 grand and secure another job, as she did up in Moray, which would have suited her just fine because while she ran services in Edinburgh she lived in Aberdeen.

It should surprise no-one that previous council chief executive Andrew Kerr gave no indication that a deal had been struck, and led senior councillors to believe it was a straightforward resignation with a worked notice period.

And a request for information by the Local Democracy Reporter Service was rejected on the grounds of confidentiality, and all the council leader Cammy Day could say was he knew there were “arrangements”. How incurious.

The problem, of course, is that it’s public money and the public has a right to know. Denying access to information which is going to be revealed in accounts anyway is just stifling accountability for the sake of it and doesn’t even pay lip service to the principle of open democracy. But then just lip service to openness at the council would be an improvement.