In a scathing report into the quality of public sector and local authority accounts, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said that the government’s ability to effectively monitor financial pressure within local authorities has been undermined, at a time when many councils are already in poor financial health. 

The PAC even went so far as to describe the government as ‘flying blind on struggling council finances amid unprecedented local audit crisis’.

In addition to the shocking backlog, the accounts fail to focus ‘sufficiently on long-term financial risks posed by climate change, rising health spending, and geopolitical tensions’, the MPs warned.

For the first time, the National Audit Office (NAO) was unable to sign off government’s accounts for 2022-23. This was due to the local audit crisis, which meant that only 10% of 426 English local authorities submitted reliable data for the year, with 187 failing to submit at all.