The local audit crisis is undermining public trust and the most urgent problem is ‘a large and growing’ backlog of accounts whose audits have not been completed, some of them up to seven years old, said MPs on the cross-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (LUHC) Committee.

The MPs called for urgent reform of the accounts, which they described as ‘overly complicated to the point of being impenetrable’. It said reforms were urgently needed to ensure the accounts contain the information needed by the public to hold local authorities to account.

The committee’s Financial Reporting and Audit in Local Authorities report said that the crisis in audit was hampering efforts to ensure that the billions of pounds per year spent by councils is properly accounted for and local authorities held accountable for their decisions and spending.