Tales from the Tribunal 5...To Stupidity - and Beyond!

We are curently broadcasting to you from Nottingham Central Library which has a certain irony...

Anyway. You may remember I posted back in November about a little mystery regarding whether a certain solicitor had neglected to ask a certain manager for information that the Employment Tribunal had ordered him to provide? Well it's been solved, the solicitor has coughed.

You might have guessed that the manager concerned was Lisa Black and the solicitor was my old mate John Ludford-Thomas, now reduced to making pointless threats at bloggers.

When I wrote back to him about his silly threat I added an extra bit which I didn't post to the blog as follows -

"PS While I've got your attention please can you confirm whether you did in fact ask Lisa Black for her notes of the Karen ******* and Fizz ***** step 2 meetings as you were required to do by the disclosure order issued by Employment Judge MacMillan on 3 September 2009.

You will be aware that Lisa Black stated on oath that you did not approach her despite your clear knowledge that she was the deciding officer in these cases and that this was the reason why her notes were not provided, causing Nottingham City Council to be in breach of that order."

Well he's replied and here it is -

"With regard to the manuscript notes of the evidence given by Dave Miles to the step 2 meetings in the grievances raised by Karen ******* and Fizz *****, I can confirm that I did not ask Lisa Black for any such notes because I believed I had the notes of these meetings amongst paperwork already obtained. As you know, the notes I had were disclosed to you as part of the bundle of documents for the Employment Tribunal Full Hearing in your case."

What a silly senior solicitor he is. He'd been in charge of the case for over 9 months by this stage so he damn well knew about the full extent of Lisa Black's involvement.

It reminds me of a pivotal issue in one of the internal disputes that Lisa decided when I was still working at NCC.

When there are two sides to a dispute, which there usually is, a drunken amoeba would be capable of realising that all evidence should be provided to both sides.

Not Lisa Black. She commissioned a whole raft of statements from other team members (seriously compromising my privacy in the process but that's by the by) without telling me but passing it all over to the other side. I didn't find out until after she had made her decision.

Her explanation of this was that it "didn't occur" to her to give me the information as well. She wasn't even embarrassed. Remember this is a Head of Service here.

It's this rush to own up to complete stupidity that makes me a little but suspicious that some people see doing so as better than admitting that they did something deliberately in bad faith. I have to say I ran into it quite a lot during my disputes with NCC.

Thing is, I've always assumed that they were full of BS. However, I'm now honestly beginning to think that maybe they are all really that stupid.