A FORMER Waverley council worker has been summonsed to court, charged with fraudulently submitting air quality figures and siphoning off taxpayer cash with false expenses claims.

Ann-Marie Wade, 44, of Church Road, Durrington, Wiltshire, is accused of deliberately submitting false air quality figures to Waverley Borough Council between March and December 2015, and a separate charge for the same offence for all of 2016.

A third fraud charge relates to alleged fraudulently-claimed expenses during the ex-air quality officer’s time at the council.

Waverley has been duty-bound to submit an annual report to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) ever since excessive levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) were detected in Farnham in 2004.

However, Waverley’s 2016 submission to DEFRA came under intense scrutiny, after a report in the Herald led Farnham-based air quality expert David Harvey to question the council’s data – while The Farnham Society also raised concerns that Waverley was dramatically under-estimating the town’s pollution problem.

The errors were confirmed by council chiefs just a month after the report was published, in June 2017, prompting an independent audit of the borough’s air quality monitoring and reporting arrangements.

The results of this audit were then referred to Surrey Police in February 2018, with a court date and location for Ms Wade to answer the ensuing charges to be arranged in “due course”, a police spokesman told the Herald this week.

Responding to news of its former employee’s summons, Waverley said in a statement: “On discovering issues with the reporting and monitoring of the council’s air quality data, Waverley commissioned an independent audit and investigation.

“We sent the findings of this investigation to Surrey Police, asked them to investigate and have supported them throughout their investigation.

“As a result of the audit investigation we reviewed our procedures for monitoring air quality and appointed independent contractors to carry out our routine monitoring of air quality and review our network of monitoring sites.

“Diffusion tube data is now published monthly, analyser data is now published online in near real time and we are confident with the accuracy and validity of our data.

“Progress was reported to the relevant council committees and is summarised in the 2018 Annual Governance Statement at para 5.2.”