The Yorkshire Electricity Scandal The facts disclosed during the hearing
of the case against the Yorkshire Electricity Board at Leeds Assizes last week will no doubt be the subject of an early statement in the House of Commons, and almost certainly of a searching official enquiry. Charged with securing a licence for an expenditure of £32,000 on its headquarters at Scarforth, near Leeds, and then exceeding -that limit by over £41,000, i.e., by close on 130 per cent., the Board pleaded guilty. For that specific offence the Board was fined £20,000; and it remains to be seen on whom the penalty will fall ; nothing could be more inequitable than that the sum should be embodied in the Board's general expenses, and have therefore to be paid by consumers of electricity, who have in any case, presumably, to meet the £41,217 which the Board has actually spent on its headquarters over and above what was originally considered adequate. The Lord Chief Justice's comments on the complete irresponsibility manifested in the_matter of finance, on the inaccuracy of a Parliamentary answer bearing on the Scarforth affair and on the scale of luxury deemed necessary for the Board's habitation were sufficiently scathing, but no one will consider them in any degree excessive. Administrators of public money may properly be required to handle it with the same vigilance as they do their private incomes. The question of how best the expenditure of the Boards of nationalised industries can be checked very definitely arises. Meanwhile public gratitude is due to Mr. Donald Kaberry, M.P. for North-West Leeds, for the pertinacity with which he has forced this particular scandal into the open.
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