TOWN Hall bosses spent years using taxpayers money to run toilets which were not council-owned.
Council Four public toilets were closed by Lancaster City Council on April 1 in a bid to save cash.
But it has emerged that the authority had been paying to clean and maintain those on the canal at Hest Bank - even though it does not own them.
Cabinet member for the environment, Coun Jon Barry, admitted at a council meeting the facility was 'not owned by the council and so we don't know why we ran it in the first place'.
The council does not have a record of when it began looking after the toilets and the amount of cash spent on them is also unclear.
A council spokesman said: "We do not have a record of why the council decided to clean the toilets at Hest Bank as it was a number of years ago.
"Their cleaning was part of the overall public convenience budget.
"The toilets do not belong to the council or the parish council. They were cleaned by the city council and British Waterways contributed towards the costs of providing the service."
Ownership of the toilets remains a mystery. A British Waterways spokeswoman said it did not own them, adding that the company believed they belonged to the city council.
The council initially earmarked nine toilets for closure in a bid to save £65,000 in 2010/11.
But councillors then offered parish councils and residents' groups which wished to keep their local conveniences open a 50 per cent contribution towards running costs.
Toilets in Warton, Silverdale, Heysham Village and Sunderland Point were saved, while those at the Victoria Institute in Caton and Morecambe's Stone Jetty also remained open after agreement was reached with their owners.
But those at Hest Bank canalside, Hest Bank Shore, Bolton-le-Sands, Cockerham and Red Bank were closed.
Morecambe's Festival Market toilets will be refurbished as a pay-as-you-go facility later this financial year.
