IN order to ensure that decision-making is done in public with transparency and cross-party input a revised governance system will be put in place.

These words are taken from the joint administration agreement for City of York Council dated May 21 2015.

But they don't sit well with a recent Freedom of Information request which has revealed two council directors have been paid an extra £9,000 between them for jobs that would appear to be neither agreed cross party nor subject to the transparency of government.

The right for the public to know how decisions are made was introduced by the Government's Openness of Local Government Bodies guidelines published in August 2014. But in private meetings last October and January, these additional payments by City of York Trading (CYT), the council’s money-making arm, were approved.

The guidelines tell us transparency and openness should be the fundamental principle behind everything councils and other local government bodies do, but clearly the opposite happened here.

And who knows how long the payments would have continued if Cllr Stuart Rawlings, the new chairman of the board for CYT, hadn't told the authority's ruling executive that the extra payments were wrong and had to stop. He also said the company needed a governance overhaul to make it more transparent.

Surely, in these days of financial strictures, this goes without saying. Worse still, they were performance related payments and could have produced a conflict of interest.

It's hard to believe after the MPs expenses scandal such closed door practices could still continue. Harder still in the wake of the Openness of Local Government Bodies guidelines that assured us such practices would stop.