Obituary: James Dargie OBE - Scotland’s first Controller of Audit

Obituary: James Dargie OBE - Scotland’s first Controller of Audit

James Dargie

James Dargie, who served as Scotland’s first Controller of Audit having built the Accounts Commission from scratch in just three months, has died aged 101.

Mr Dargie worked for Scottish Gas before becoming chief financial officer of the Glenrothes Development Corporation after holding several local government posts.

The Herald newspaper reported his appointment as the first controller of audit for Scotland in December 1974 on a salary of £10,500 a year.



The following year Mr Dargie beghan the project to create the Accounts Commission as one man in a small old Scottish Tourist Board office alongside his secretary, both on loan from the civil service.

The inception of the Commission saw around 250 burgh, town and county councils -some dating back to medieval times - swept away to be replaced by 65 regional and district councils and 20 joint boards.

Mr Dargie went on to develop the mixed system which is still in operation today – where around half the audits are carried out by staff working directly for the Commission and the other half by private accountancy firms on its behalf.

The aim was to have public sector audit keeping up with professional expertise in the private sector and also retain flexibility and efficiency using outside firms at times of peak audit activity.

A new body to represent councils, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA), was also set up in 1975 from four previous organisations.

As well as recruit auditors, another challenge for the Commission was to allay fears of council leaders, themselves having get to grips with new structures, and also wary of this new audit organisation to keep tabs on them.

Some wanted the new watchdog to be kept firmly in its kennel under a tight muzzle and they’d hold the key.

In theory the new system worked. In practice, it was to prove problematic largely because of political differences between Conservative Scottish Secretaries and Labour-run councils. This tension was evident even before Commission members were appointed when Labour MP Hugh Brown told Parliament he feared they may be the Scottish Secretary’s “hatchet men” in the middle…

However, the political connections provided by first chair of the Commission, Tom Fraser, MP for Hamilton and former UK Transport Minister, gave Mr Dargie vital assistance in visits the pair made around the country.

Mr Dargie recalled in 2014: “Tom Fraser was a great charmer – a very nice man. He’d been a miner before he took up politics. There was nothing objectionable about Tom at all. I had great admiration for him. There is no doubt that audit generally had been very superficial beforehand. The key thing for me was my independence as Controller of Audit but there was one clause in the 1973 act which said I would immune from court action unless they could prove the opinions I made reports were not my own opinions.”

The Commission survived its early trials. The new system attracted outside interest not only from the district audit service in England but also among visitors from Australia and Canada keen to learn how it was managing.

More auditors were hired and offices set up across the country and larger private firms developed resources and expertise to carry out the required audits which smaller firms could not do.

Core business remained in annual financial audits – looking in detail at every council’s books. But there was a growing trend towards developing performance audits of how they were doing in specific areas.  The idea of securing best value in their work was there from the start.

Over the years, the Commission’s key role in providing assurance that councils were spending public money correctly went largely unnoticed.

But it made headlines in the 1980s as an intermediary in sometimes highly politicised disputes between the Scottish Secretary and councils. It sought to use powers under the 1973 Act to require local authorities not to act outwith their powers such as in making payments to single miners during the 1983/84 strike or in Edinburgh District Council using public money for “political” publicity in its Improving Services, Creating Jobs campaign.

The Commission’s stance was undermined by the Scottish Office not seeking to recover “surcharges” and rulings against it by the Court of Session such as when Grampian Regional Council won a case in 1994 over contributions it had made to the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly.

The 1990s were characterised by more reorganisation (abolition of the regional councils), additional powers for the Commission (such as auditing the NHS in Scotland) and finally the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and a new body, Audit Scotland, to provide services both to the Commission and the new post of Auditor General.

From 2000 its work broadened, not simply in financial reporting but also from 2003 to ensure councils were meeting their statutory duty to secure Best Value and seek continuous improvement.  This replaced the previous and controversial obligation on public bodies to contract out services to the private sector.

In recent years, it has come into public focus through national reports on local government responsibilities such as school education in 2014 and monitoring the impact of community planning partnerships

At a local level, it has invoked its rarely-used sanction of holding public hearings to get to the heart of serious failings in particular councils such as West Dunbartonshire (2006), Aberdeen (2008) and Shetland (2011).  The usual result has been councils getting back to delivering much improved and more efficient key services to their communities and a return of public confidence in local government.

The move to create the Accounts Commission was ahead of its time – the equivalent body in England, the Audit Commission (abolished by the UK Government in 2015) took a further seven years, launching in 1982.

In recognition of his services to public finance, Mr Dargie was awarded an OBE in 1982.

Born in Dundee, James Dargie – Jim, as he was known, he lived in Scotland for almost all his life, apart from serving in the Middle East during the war.

He enjoyed travelling the world until well into his 90s.

Jim was married to his late wife Greta for 47 years and is survived by his two children, Graeme and Morag, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

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