Peter Bryant

Peter Bryant served as Woking Borough Council's Monitoring Officer and Director of Legal Services for 33 years. In this statutory role, he was responsible for ensuring the legality of the council's decisions and actions.

As Monitoring Officer, Bryant had a legal duty to report to the council if he believed any proposal, decision, or omission would give rise to unlawfulness. The Grant Thornton Public Interest Report later found that the council's practices were 'potentially unlawful,' raising serious questions about why Bryant did not raise formal concerns.

Grant Thornton concluded that the 'failures' of Bryant and the former s151 Officer to fulfil their roles 'enabled the former CEO to push through poor investment decisions largely unchallenged.' There is consistent evidence — including from Bryant himself — that he did not, in either his Monitoring Officer or Head of Legal Services roles, challenge the wisdom of the decisions to borrow such large sums of money with no credible plan for repayment.

Bryant was simultaneously a director of Kingston Community Sports Centre Limited (KCSC), which ran Woking Football Club. The council offered a £250m revolving loan to GolDev to build housing on KCSC-owned land. Bryant refused to accept this was a conflict of interest, but Grant Thornton disagreed, finding that officers were 'providing false assurance that they had understood and mitigated the risks arising from those conflicts of interest when they had not meaningfully done so.'

During key meetings involving Thameswey companies and other council ventures, it was unclear what role officers who were also company directors were playing. The council's legal services team was found to be under-resourced given the scale of commercial activities, yet Bryant did not escalate this concern.

In 2018, Bryant conducted the internal investigation into complaints about CEO Ray Morgan made by opposition councillors. The investigation concluded Morgan had not acted improperly, and its findings were initially kept confidential. This raised questions about whether the Monitoring Officer was truly independent from the CEO he was supposed to oversee.

He was part of the senior management team, alongside Ray Morgan and Douglas Spinks, that oversaw the council during the period when debt grew from modest levels to nearly £2 billion.

Bryant retired in March 2021 at the same time as Morgan and Spinks. The simultaneous departure of all three senior officers who had been in place throughout the borrowing period meant that institutional knowledge about the full extent of commitments was lost.