Wolverhampton council spent nearly £30,000 correcting blunder

The authority sent out 110,000 letters to residents last week featuring incorrect information about the status of personal details held on the electoral role.

Now, it has been forced to spend £29,264 of public funds on another letter apologising for the gaffe.

The expense has been described as 'disgraceful' by opposition leaders, while the TaxPayers Alliance accused the authority of 'wasteful spending' in a time of austerity.

It comes just 12 months after a similar mistake where the authority sent letters to 39,000 people wrongly informing them that their details were on the 'open' register.

Tory leader Councillor Wendy Thompson said: "This is a complete waste of taxpayers' money.

"Residents are extremely angry about this and rightly so. It is disgraceful, £30,000 could have paid the wages of neighbourhood wardens, helped towards funding libraries, keeping the tips open for longer, or any of the multitude of services they are cutting back on.

"The attitude within the council now seems to be one of 'we can do what we like and we don't care'."

Jonathan Isaby, chief executive of the TaxPayers Alliance, said: "Taxpayers will be furious at this expensive deja vu.

"The council should have learned its lesson after last year's error - to do it again is careless, to be charitable.

"When we're trying to make proper savings across the board, this kind of wasteful spending has to become a thing of the past."

Wolverhampton council managing director Keith Ireland has launched an investigation into the latest blunder, in which people were told they had been placed on the wrong version of the electoral role.

It has also emerged that following last year's oversight, a new checking system was brought in to ensure the same mistake did not happen again.

In a letter to councillors, Martyn Sargeant, the council's group manager for corporate administration, said 'proof-reading arrangements' had been put in place and noted that 'further checks will need to be made in future'.

Mrs Thompson added: "The proof-reading clearly didn't work. The fact that the letters were supposedly checked, yet they still managed to get them wrong really shows the levels of incompetence we are dealing with here.

"Either the checks weren't good enough or they simply weren't done at all."

The authority's customer services line has received hundreds of complaints and queries over the inaccurate letters, while councillors across the city have spent the week fielding calls from concerned residents.