Apparently Shropshire Council already knew what was wrong. That may not be quite as reassuring as it sounds.
There are occasions when a single sentence tells you rather more than the author probably intended.
Shropshire Council Chief Executive Tanya Miles supplied one this week.
Tanya Miles, Chief Executive – official photograph: Shropshire Council, 30 April 2026.
Writing to staff about the newly published CIPFA external assurance review, she noted that the report contained 22 recommendations covering financial management, sustainability, service delivery, transformation, organisational culture and leadership.
Then came the interesting bit:
| “None of these recommendations come as a surprise to us.” |
That sentence deserves to be read twice.
Because there are really only two possibilities. Either an independent external review has discovered serious weaknesses that Shropshire Council did not know existed, or Shropshire Council already knew about them.
According to the Chief Executive, it is the latter.
Well, that clears that up.
Unfortunately, it also creates a rather larger problem.
Twenty-two recommendations. Apparently, none of them surprising.
If the weaknesses were already known, then the obvious question is no longer “How did this happen?” It becomes: “How long did you know, and what exactly did you do about it?”
That is where the comforting corporate phrase “none of this came as a surprise” begins to develop teeth.
Knowing is not the same as fixing
The CIPFA review was not some friendly health check commissioned because the Council fancied a second opinion. It arose against the background of Exceptional Financial Support, continuing financial instability and government concern about whether Shropshire Council was meeting its Best Value obligations. The Government’s external assurance review confirms that the review was a condition of that support.
The Government has also issued Shropshire Council with a formal Best Value Notice, stating that ministers remain concerned about the Council’s capacity to comply with its Best Value Duty. The notice refers to concerns surrounding financial management, leadership capacity, governance and culture. Read the Best Value Notice.
Against that background, being told that 22 further recommendations came as no surprise is hardly the administrative equivalent of good news.
It is rather more like a doctor handing you a lengthy diagnosis and you replying: “Yes, I knew about all that.”
At which point the doctor might reasonably ask why you had spent the previous few years pretending to be well.
To be fair to Tanya Miles, the CIPFA report does recognise that progress is now being made. It notes improvements in direction and acknowledges that the present leadership is attempting to rebuild capacity and strengthen the organisation. Shropshire Council’s own summary highlights those positive passages.
That should be recognised. But recognising recent improvement does not require us to develop collective amnesia about what came before it.
Shropshire Council remains the same public body. Its debts have not vanished because somebody changed offices. Its previous decisions have not evaporated. Its failed savings have not become somebody else’s problem. Its governance history did not reset itself when the nameplate on the Chief Executive’s door changed. And its taxpayers are still paying the bill.
“Historic problems” have an awkward habit of producing current-day consequences.
The magic words: “historic problems”
This is where the phrase “historic problems” becomes wonderfully useful.
Local government loves historic problems. Historic problems are extremely convenient because, apparently, nobody currently employed by the organisation owns them. They simply happened. Somewhere. At some point. Possibly during the reign of Queen Victoria.
Unfortunately, Shropshire Council’s financial consequences appear rather stubbornly present-day. The borrowing is current. The service pressures are current. The recovery programme is current. The government oversight is current. And the people paying for it are current.
Which brings us back to those 22 unsurprising recommendations.
The questions are not complicated. The answers may be.
If Shropshire Council really did know these weaknesses already existed, then perhaps we might finally be allowed to ask a very old-fashioned question: who knew what, and when?
Not as part of another improvement workshop. Not buried in another strategy. Not delegated to another board. Just answered.
Because if problems were known internally before external reviewers arrived, the public is entitled to understand how long they were known, whether councillors were told, what corrective action was ordered and why those actions were either insufficient or unsuccessful.
That is not unreasonable. It is what accountability looks like before somebody hires a consultant to explain accountability.
And then there is “We so don’t need this!!!!”
There is another delicious irony here.
Only days ago, The Alternative Council submitted a detailed evidential dossier to Shropshire Council concerning scrutiny, transparency and accountability.
The response from Section 151 Officer Duncan Whitfield was memorable: “We so don’t need this!!!!”
And now, only a few days later, the Chief Executive tells staff that CIPFA’s 22 recommendations contain nothing surprising.
So, apparently, scrutiny is something the Council “so doesn’t need”, while the problems identified through scrutiny are things it already knows about.
One begins to see the difficulty.
Perhaps what Shropshire Council actually does not need is somebody asking questions before another external body arrives and asks exactly the same ones.
The improvement journey: still packing, apparently.
Everything is always an improvement journey
There is a remarkable ability within public administration to transform serious institutional criticism into the language of gentle personal development.
A council can require Exceptional Financial Support, receive external intervention and attract 22 recommendations, yet somehow emerge in its own communications as an organisation making “positive progress” on an “improvement journey”.
Everything is always a journey. Nobody ever appears to arrive anywhere.
If the Titanic had employed a local-authority communications team, the iceberg might have been described as “an unexpected navigational learning opportunity”, followed by a reassurance that significant progress was already being made on flotation. The passengers would then have been thanked for their resilience.
Perhaps that is unfair. But only slightly.
No surprises. So let us have some answers.
Because the real issue is no longer whether Shropshire Council understands that it has serious problems. Apparently it does. Tanya Miles has told us so. None of the 22 recommendations came as a surprise.
In that case, we can dispense with surprise and move directly to accountability.
How long were these problems known? Who knew about them? What was done? What failed? And why did it take external financial support, government attention and another independent review before the public received such a clear picture of the scale of the problem?
Those questions should not come as a surprise either.
| SCRUTINY. TRANSPARENCY. ACCOUNTABILITY. Apparently none of this should come as a surprise. |
Shropshire Council apparently already knows why those three principles are necessary. Which may explain why somebody recently wrote: “We so don’t need this!!!!”
Unfortunately, that is precisely why they do.
Sources and further reading
Shropshire Council: External assurance review, 2026-27 (GOV.UK)
Shropshire Council: Best Value Notice, July 2026 (GOV.UK)
Tanya Miles, Chief Executive – official photograph (Shropshire Council, 30 April 2026)
Primary quotation from Tanya Miles: Staff Weekly Update, Friday 21 August 2026, copy held by The Alternative Council.
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If the response from the Shropshire Council’s s.151officer Duncan Whitfield to receipt of the detailed evidential dossier submitted by TAC was ‘We So Don’t Need This!!!!’, the response from Shropshire taxpayers would have been a resounding ‘We So Do Need This!!!!!!!!’
TAC investigations into Cornovii, Shirehall and Whitchurch housing planning has thrown up a lot of unpalatable skeletons being kept in Council offices wherever they are located.
Many of the TAC conclusions are mirrored in both the ‘Shropshire Council Best Value Notice’ which was issued by the MHCLG on 15 July which used, as part of its contribution, the report and recommendations in the CIPFA May 2026 report ‘Shropshire Council External Assurance Review’.
While the NWRR, Cornovii developments and the Shirehall’s future in the two reports are given in detail, other major capital schemes such as the Council’s purchase of the Shrewsbury shopping centres, using a financial organisation based in Jersey, are not mentioned.
It would have been helpful for CIPFA to have canvassed views from the public when researching its report and also to have seen what the effects of the established uniparty promotion of net zero are in the financial mess that Shropshire (and more importantly, its taxpayers) find themselves in now and for many years to come.