Council leader defends sharing information

The leader of Lincolnshire County Council has defended sharing confidential information about an IT contract with a senior politician.

Reform UK councillor Sean Matthews told BBC Radio Lincolnshire's Hotseat he consulted with former party chairman Zia Yusuf after being asked to sign a multimillion-pound IT contract a few weeks into his role as the authority's leader.

"My experience of signing multimillion-pound contracts was fairly limited. Zia's isn't," Matthews said.

He added he was trying to do the "very best for the people of Lincolnshire" and said he had secured a better deal with the company involved.

"I wouldn't do it again," he said, "because it might be construed as not the most sensible thing to do, but the reality is I was trying to do the best for the taxpayers of Lincolnshire."

Matthews confirmed the council was "looking into it", after reports of an internal investigation into whether he had broken the authority's rules.

Lincolnshire County Council declined to comment.

Asked about £1m cuts to dementia services at the County Council, Matthews said "they are not cuts".

"They are duplicated services, they are services we already provide elsewhere in the council."

"That sort of wheedling out the waste that we're doing and is what we're elected to do," Matthews said.

He said the services were still being provided elsewhere in the council, and his administration was going to "tidy it up".

Matthews said some roads in Lincolnshire were "dreadful."

He said many were on land that is "very porous, dries out in the summer and gets very spongy in the winter, which cracks the roads Romans built for us.

"For us to be able to fix that properly would cost billions of pounds, so we just have to maintain them as best we can."

"Just because there's an area that isn't getting roads fixed doesn't mean we're not fixing roads," he said.

"We're fixing more roads than ever before."

Matthews suggested "pausing" the reorganisation of local councils planned by the government.

Currently Lincolnshire has a county council and six district councils, but new proposals would replace them with fewer unitary authorities.

Matthews said: "What they're planning is absolutely disastrous.

"They're talking about probably five, or maybe even six councils, and we're never going to save money that way."

He said the proposals would involve too many council chief executives being paid similar salaries to the ones at the county council (£204,000).

Matthews suggested pausing the process because of a "new prime minister coming, and I think he might have different views".

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