To cap a great week for @bureaulocal & @TBIJ our latest investigation into council investments makes the front of today’s @FT and the entirety of Page 3!

Here’s a thread on the story yesterday. Our investigation with @FT revealed a council in Essex had borrowed £1 billion from other local authorities and invested most of the cash with little to no public or democratic scrutiny https://twitter.com/gareth_davies09/status/1263723073192239107?s=21 https://twitter.com/gareth_davies09/status/1263723073192239107

Please excuse that small bit of crowing. For the last month or so I’ve had a lot of anxiety and sleepless nights because I felt I hadn’t achieved anything during lockdown (when everyone else writing about the world’s biggest story). Big relief that our hard work paid off

On Weds, the Treasury indicated it will ban councils from commercial investments, a topic we’ve focused on for the last two years. On Sat we had a page lead in @thetimes on how some councils have become completely dependent on the income to fund services https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2020-05-21/treasury-bans-council-property-speculation-revealed-by-the-bureau