A sense of perspective is always a good thing in politics but it is, sadly, a rare quality in this country’s tribal political scene. And it is precisely that sense of perspective that the political party in government has been sorely lacking in its attacks against Nationalist MP Chris Said this week.

These attacks result from a National Audit Office (NAO) report published this week (An Investigation of Local Councils Funding Schemes launched between 2008 and 2013). But there was another NAO report that was also published this week (An Investigation of the 2015 Local Councils’ Capital Projects Fund), of which we have heard far less.

Both reports highlight a number of irregularities in the ways in which local councils were granted funds for projects, and how those projects were selected. Both assessments were requested of the NAO in March 2015, from different sides of the House.

But, strangely enough, it is only the former, dealing with years in which Dr Said had served as a parliamentary secretary for local councils, which has made the headlines practically every day this week – and for the sole reason that the Labour Party has been incessantly rattling its sabres since its publication.

It is clear from a perusal of the 2008-2013 report that Dr Said bent the rules and approved budget overruns in many cases. It is also amply clear that he did so to facilitate local council’s funding applications, and that, although irregular and was not strictly by the book, there was nothing illegal or corrupt in his actions.

It is not our intention to cast Dr Said as a paragon of virtue, but a spade must be called a spade. For instance, it is perfectly evident that Dr Said’s interventions were not politically-biased, unless of course he was trying to get brownie points from Labour-leaning councils during his time in charge of the sector. 

In fact, as he pointed out earlier this week, in that timeframe 52 per cent of the government funds available went to Labour local councils while 48 per cent went to Nationalist local councils. He also compared and contrasted those figures with his own workings that under the current Labour government 86 per cent of funds so far have gone to Labour local councils and 14 per cent went to Nationalist local councils.

Yes, there were administrative shortcomings in Dr Said’s time that should have been tightened up, and deadlines to apply for funding, for example, should not have been extended so as to allow more councils to apply – that is what rules to create a level playing field are all about. Yes, he allowed budgets to be exceeded and other such anomalies, but from our analysis of that report it is difficult to see why the Opposition leader should buckle to calls from the government to take action against Dr Said.

This has, however, all been well-documented this week.  What hasn’t been that well documented was the second report, which was perhaps more critical of one year, 2015, of funding and one programme in particular. And this is where a sense of perspective, for self-preservation if nothing else, comes into play.

Here too, there was a significant amount of meddling – no less, and perhaps more, than what the Labour Party is accusing Dr Said of. 

In its report on 2015 funding, for example, the NAO highlighted inconsistencies in the reliability of the scoring system employed by the Evaluation and Adjudication Committee (EAC) when it adjudicated funding – in that projects bearing similar characteristics were rated differently for some reason.

The NAO also highlighted how some councils were allowed to submit extra documentation to their applications after the deadline had expired, after being “encouraged by the EAC to make improvements to their proposals”.

The NAO found that, “Changes effected at this stage were integrated in the submissions as if they were part of the original application, consequently bearing an impact on the evaluation and ranking of projects. In this Office’s opinion, post-submission changes, lack of documentation of meetings held and the discretion afforded to the EAC detracted from the fairness of the process.”

Moreover, in 2015 some councils were penalised during adjudication processes for not submitting supplementary documentation, the NAO found, while others were awarded funds despite the fact that similar documents had not been made available.

Furthermore, the NAO found that the very construction of the 2015 LCs Capital Projects Fund was flawed from the outset in that its parameters were too broad. That meant that eligible projects varied widely in terms of their characteristics, aims, scope, financing mechanism and scale, but that they were to be comparatively assessed by the EAC for funding. According to the NAO, this context rendered inevitable the eventual discretion exercised by the EAC in the adjudication of highly divergent projects. It adds, “Although certain shortcomings were inevitable owing to the Fund’s broad scope, the discretion exercised was further compounded by the EAC’s poor management of the process.”

It may be perceived as ironic that the party in government has chosen this battle in Dr Said’s context when a similar report found shortcomings of its own. But then again, considering the number of scandals that have plagued the government, many of which are simply being ignored by the powers that be, as the accompanying cartoon to this piece shows, maybe it is not all that ironic after all. The government is in dire need of Opposition scandals, but it should not seek to create them by shooting itself in the foot.

This is no indictment of either party with respect to either report.  There are holes in the system that clearly need to be addressed, and political involvement, well-intended or otherwise, needs to be kept to a minimum.  But with the Labour Party calling for Dr Said’s head over the report which concerned him while in the same breath conveniently ignoring an at least equally critical assessment of its own modus operandi, a phrase about glass houses and stone throwing comes to mind.