This week it was revealed that Lancaster City Council let market traders run up rent arrears totalling £268,933.

There isn't that many stall holders in Lancaster Market so for debts of this scale to mount up one can only wonder what the hell was going on.

For an authority which rightly emphasises the need to keep a close eye on the public purse, didn't anyone at the council notice that they'd been short-changed to the tune of one quarter of a million pounds?

The market traders are a canny lot and who can blame them for not forking out cash to an indifferent landlord in times of dropping trade.

It's the cavalier manner in which the council appears to have handled our money that is less understandable.

Admittedly, once news finally got round to the powers that be that they were massively out of pocket an internal investigation was launched.

The Chief Internal Auditor produced a damning report which was seen by councillors at a meeting on Friday night (yes, Friday night?)

As a local newspaper we'd love to take a look at that report but council chiefs appear to want to keep it out of the public domain. In fact, a councillor on the service group has informed us that the first they knew about the rents fiasco was when the damning report was handed out at the meeting and collected back at the end.

Commercially sensitive information and personal details are often included in 'exempt items' discussed by council members behind closed doors, this is reasonable and understandable, but it is unprecedented for reports to be collected in again at the end of the meeting.

Maybe council chiefs felt it might fall into the wrong hands, someone like the Citizen perhaps, who would have printed what the internal auditor had to say.

Surely this matter is in the public interest and, in the spirit of New Labour, we should be put in the picture? Elected members and council officers are public servants and the increasing subterfuge over what exactly is going on at the Town Hall is worrying. Someone is responsible for a situation even the Council Leader Stanley Henig described as "totally intolerable." Who was it? Why was it allowed to go unnoticed for so long and is anyone being held accountable?

A Labour councillor recently slammed down the phone on a Citizen reporter with the unfounded accusation that we don't check our facts. We thoroughly check the details of every story but, as a concession to you Cllr Horner, we will endeavour to try our best to get the full facts behind this story.

The thing is, will the council hierarchy let us see the auditor's report? If they did, we could be sure of all the facts.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.