Nottingham City Council LOLs

Benefit Subsidy Overclaim - NCC Repays Over £400k

2012-01-25T14:17:00.002Z

Nearly two years ago now I wrote about how NCC's Housing Benefits service were clobbered by the Audit Commission for overclaiming central government subsidy for paying benefit claims. I subsequently discovered that there had already been a heads up on the issue from NCC's own Internal Audit team who expressed alarm about 'experienced staff' shortcutting the process for classifying overpayments, one of the issues that had led to the criticism from the Audit Commission.

There was some talk about challenging the Audit Commission's original statement that £2m worth of subsidies had been overpaid but then it all went a bit quiet. It was down to the Dept for Work and Pensions to decide on the final amount and whether it should be recovered.

I've now managed to get hold of the final figure for the amount that was overpaid and it comes to £408,655, a considerable reduction on that initial estimate. Initially the DWP appeared to want £683,543 back but NCC challenged this further. You get the feeling the DWP gave in just for a quiet life.

So, NCC had to repay over £400k in Housing Benefit subsidy in circumstances that Internal Audit described as 'shortcutting' the correct procedures. To put that into context, they had found only £300k in claimant fraud over the same period of time. I wonder how much sympathy claimants would get for 'shortcutting' the claims procedures?

Still getting that down from £2m is quite an achievement, wonder why we didn't see a nice big press release about their efforts?

A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away

2012-01-25T10:31:00.000Z

Finally we hear from the Post that Cllr Grocock has been cleared by the Standards Committee over his 'grandson' getting a house, as highlighted originally in the report on the housing allocations scandal.

Not really a surprise, especially seeing as the monitoring officer appears to have been acting as an unofficial advocate on Grocock's behalf. His preliminary report urged the committee to throw the case out without a hearing. However, the committee would have none of that, possibly because on the day only the independent members and a Lib Dem were in attendance.

Oddly, when it came to appointing the members of the hearing sub-committee last July, i.e. the people who would hear the case, the committee deviated from its normal practice of appointing the members themselves and, on the recommendation of the monitoring officer, agreed to delegate responsibility for doing so to the Deputy Chief Executive 'in consultation with the Chair' who hadn't turned up that day. So apart from what's in the Post report we currently don't know who sat in judgment.

Anyway the Post does report that the independent member on the committee made it clear she thought his conduct was a breach of the Code of Conduct. However it seems that the monitoring officer swung the day saying -

"This happened because a senior housing officer [Tyron Browne] issued what could be described as an oblique instruction to the housing office and a tenancy was allocated. I remain of the view that the actual cause was the senior housing officer and the culture at the time."

Browne of course has since resigned and has never faced any sanction.

So, as you can see, a big boy really did do it and then ran away.

Where the Bodies Are Buried

2012-01-20T09:17:00.002Z

Last night I sent the following message out on Twitter

I didn't get a reply. Well not via Twitter anyway.

Today the Post reveals that Barker has taken 'voluntary redundancy'. I suspect the race is now on to FoI request how much his pay-off is.

Pugwash has, of course only been back five minutes since his 5 months unpaid leave and, according to his blog was last seen in Albania. They really don't want him talking to the press do they?

Looking at the cuts consultation list it seems that NCC are planning chopping a big chunk out of Communications, £213k next year alone, the loss of the Director post will cover about £90k of that I reckon. Presumably they'll now just be reporting directly to the Deputy Chief Exec/Corp Director of resources, meaning a layer of management is removed. I reckon that'll be popular for a number of reasons.

The Post gives a handy breakdown of the various scandals that Pugwash has found himself embroiled in (well, the ones they can print anyway) so have a look at that or click on the tag at the foot of this article for a longer history.

News just in - Pugwash claims he's only on statutory redundancy

That's almost certainly what an FoI will try and claim too. Seems kind of unlikely though really, doesn't it? How would they stop him blabbing about where the bodies are buried?

Closure of Museum of Nottingham Life

2012-01-18T18:30:00.000Z

Hearing via the BBC that one of the proposals contained in the next NCC budget is to close the Museum of Nottingham Life to the general public. It is intended to still allow visits from groups and schools.

This would be a serious mistake. The museum is an excellent resource and located in historic buildings in the Brewhouse Yard - the cottages date back to the 17th Century. It seems to be following a long term pattern of closing or restricting the opening hours of Nottingham's heritage centres, following closures of the Canal and Costume Museums, the Lace Museum and the reduction of opening hours at Newstead Abbey.

It is said that closing the museum will save £40k/yr which is chicken feed, especially when you bear in mind that Nottingham Contemporary received £313k last year and the Playhouse got £235k. Surely these organisations could stand a cut of similar size without much hurt, they could probably make it up with corporate eventing easily enough.

I use these other organisations merely as an example, you could probably find others. The issue is that heritage always seems to lose out. The more you restrict opening hours the fewer visitors you end up getting and this is often a pre-cursor to full closure. How long before we lose the Castle?

Note; pics taken by me which means I own the copyright. See 'creative commons' license terms over on the sidebar before you try and nick them.

Some Are More Equal Than Others

2012-01-15T19:33:00.001Z

It's been a while since I last wrote about Nottingham Equal. I've been chasing up a few Freedom of Info requests here and there which has shed a bit more light on the help they have received with their fundraising activities.

I have been writing about concerns with possible conflicts of interest between NCC's decision to end funding for the now closed Council for Equalities and Human Rights Nottm and Notts and the funding of Nottingham Equal for some time. These were initially based around Hassan Ahmed's involvement in the NE and jointly making the CEHRNN funding decision.

Let's have a bit of a recap. Ahmed and Cllr Chapman made the decision to stop CEHRNN's funding immediately in March 2010. In October that year a portfolio decision was published to fund Nottingham Equal to the tune of around £70k which seemed a bit of a coincidence. This funding came via One Nottingham. In April 2011, a further year of funding was allocated, the decision to do so citing 'satisfactory monitoring information' as a justification.

I was quite interested in this 'satisfactory monitoring information' so I put in a FoI for it. An interesting point this revealed is that the monitoring information concerned a period from April to December 2010 and reported on performance on a service level agreement which was only signed by representatives of Nottingham Equal (one of whom was Tyron Browne) on 19 January 2011. In other words, we have a report on outputs and outcomes before those outputs and outcomes were even agreed. Odd that.

What is also apparent is how closely that Nottingham Equal matched its targets. The target for the number of organisations supoorted was 8 and the number of organisationas actually supported was 8. The target for getting individuals involved in 'dialogue' on decision making was 30 and, you'll never guess, the number of individuals who became involved with 'dialogue' was, happily, 30. One target was exceeded, they organised two meetings against a target of just one, but of seven targets, six were met exactly. There was a week between the SLA being signed and these outputs reported. Thank the maker for happy coincidences.

In the meantime I had been trying to get hold of the tender consideration meeting minutes for this decision from One Notttingham who eventually refused. I went to the Information Commissioner who decided that, although ON weren't subject to FoI, the council should have responded instead because I had copied them into my review request. Not the result I was expecting but I have now had the minutes of the meeting, held 10 May 2010, and they make some interesting reading.

Firstly, the attendees include Hasseeb Ahmed, NCC's Head of Equalities. He was CEHRNN's project officer and wrote the damning (and seriously flawed) Equalities Impact Assessment which resulted in CEHRNN losing their funding. He was also listed as Nottingham Equal's project officer on their SLA but whether he had become involved by the time of this meeting I don't know.

Secondly, the original NCC portfolio decision confirming funding for Nottingham Equal (see link above) said that funding an alternative organisation had been considered as an option but that 'no comparable organisations existed'. The minutes contradict this somewhat because there was an alternative tender from an organisation called 'HRN'. In the remarks it was noted that their 'delivery vehicle' was CEHRNN.

Now then, due to Haseeb Ahmad's previous involvement with CEHRNN there is a strong argument that he had a massive conflict of interest being involved in this decision. He cannot possibly have come to the discussion with an open mind and assessed a bid involving CEHRNN dispassionately. Two other members of the panel expressed 'concerns about the delivery vehicle - CEHRNN' which strongly suggests that HRN never stood a chance. Nobody expressed any concerns about Nottingham Equal, despite Hassan Ahmed being a founder member and at the time of the meeting being before Standards for England accused of breaching the councillors code of conduct, nor of Tyron Browne's involvement when he had figured rather large in the housing allocations scandal.

If you've followed the story of CEHRNN, Nottingham Equal and the associated individuals it is extremely hard not to seriously wonder whether it was a king sized stitch up to take the funding from CEHRNN, pass it over to a more friendly organisation in the form of Nottingham Equal and do it via One Nottingham to make it more difficult to scrutinise what happened. This latest information in the form of the tender meeting minutes only adds to that impression.

Shameless Cover-Up Continues

2012-01-07T13:38:00.000Z

The Post is reporting that the Audit Committee yesterday voted to discuss the critical report into the administration of the Future Jobs Fund in private. An early contender for smallest surprise of the year I reckon.

One of the recommendations is apparently that former councillor Hassan Ahmed's conduct be referred to the Standards Committee. The article quotes Cllr Stuart Fox agreeing with monitoring officer Glen O'Connell's opinion that publishing the report could prejudice an investigation by the Committee -

"In the public domain it would prejudice the next step. It would undermine one of the district auditor's recommendations."

I'm sorry but how? The only way it could prejudice proceedings is if those making decisions i.e. councillors in the main, get to see information that could unduly influence them in making their decision. As it is already public knowledge that the District Auditor already believes that Ahmed breached the code of conduct that horse has already bolted. Furthermore, the councillors will have already seen the full report so any further prejudice that could be said to occur has already happened. Letting the public see the report can make no difference because we don't have a say in the matter. It's not like a trial where we could potentially be picked for jury service.

It also seems pretty pointless to bother with a Standards Committee investigation anyway. Ahmed is no longer a councillor and all the committee could do is to make a public finding against him which, hey, the District Auditor has already done. The man's reputation is soiled beyond redemption anyway so what more could they say?

Of course, pursuing a Standards Committee investigation gives them the excuse to kick the full report into the long grass. The investigation into Grocock's case has taken the best part of three years and, whatever else might be said about him, he does at least appear to have done everything he could to co-operate with them. There's not much chance of Ahmed being so compliant and, after all why should he be? He's got absolutely nothing to lose or gain. I doubt we'll hear any more before the next local elections.

It's interesting to note that the District Auditor did actually say that it was her 'preference' that the report be published. Well, grow some fucking ovaries missus, if you'd made it a public interest report they wouldn't have had a choice would they?

In the meantime Freedom of Information Act requests have been issued and no quarter will be given re time limits. I doubt very much that the Information Commissioner will have a lot of time for the weasel excuses NCC has wheeled out, he's no Nottingham City Council fan anyway.

Grocock Report Published

2012-01-06T16:41:00.002Z

The Monitoring Officer's report to NCC's Standards Committee, concerning Cllr Grocock and his 'grandson', has finally been published on the council's website, in advance of the Standards hearing Sub-Committee hearing the case next Friday.

This matter first went before the Standards Committee early 2009 so it has taken the best part of three years to reach this stage. As far as I know this is where a decision is actually made although don't bank on it.

As it's been so long let's remind ourselves that the case against Grocock is that he falsely claimed that a young man was his grandson when advocating for him and his partner to be allocated a property. The couple who had only specified Bestwood as an area where he would accept a property. In the end he was allocated a property in Bestwood Park, an extremely high demand area where applicants would normally spend years waiting for a property.

A factor that has previously seen little attention and which I hadn't really taken account of is that Grocock initially made his case via the Portfolio Holder for Housing at the time, Cllr David Trimble and it was him who made the approach to a 'senior officer' (unnamed but we might be able to hazard a guess). It is apparently only in his approaches to Trimble on the couple's behalf that Grocock described his constituent as his 'grandson' and had never done so before when previously approaching housing staff on his behalf.

Grocock says that he only approached Trimble after there being 'no progress' with his attempts to persuade housing officers direct of the merits of his constituent's case. In fact he had been sent two emails explaining why the couple were unlikely to get an allocation any time soon. Normally, a councillor's involvement should stop there.

Grocock's defence, and the conclusion of the monitoring officer, is that in using the 'grandson' term he was ensuring that he was declaring a personal interest as the man was a close family friend. He claims never to have got the emails from housing staff.

Now, this would be fine and a properly functional and honest environment, although you do wonder why he didn't just use the term 'close family friend' which would have been the truth. But at the time it wasn't a functional environment and the use of the term would be more likely to mean that officers would simply see that 'Cllr Grocock's lad' needed a house and to make sure one was provided.

To be fair the report does acknowledge the potential dual interpretations possible of the various facts (see p22) and says that a judgment call is required. Support for Grocock being essentially a 'good egg' is drawn from his 'long record of public life' (ignoring the fact that his stint as Lord Mayor was in its entirety occurring while he was under investigation by the Standards Committee, a situation that should not have been allowed to happen. More on this later) and the fact that he self-referred for investigation and helped facilitate it by allowing evidence collected for the District Auditor to be considered.

However, the alternative interpretation has a good deal of merit too. Let's imagine for example that it wasn't 'lack of progress' that frustrated Cllr Grocock but that he simply didn't like the answers he had received. It's hard to imagine that he had no idea of the way things were run in the housing department at the time but maybe he didn't have access to the people that mattered himself so he had to go and see Trimble. Perhaps he needed a stronger argument for assistance than just 'close family friend'.

There are interview notes included with the report and it is notable that Grocock spends a lot of time telling the interviewers what he doesn't know. This is the standard tactic of those in power who are caught with their trousers down (for a recent example of a high profile non-Nottingham instance of this see the Murdochs before that Parliamentary committee). It seems fairly evident that Grocock isn't the sharpest tool in the box but the idea that he had no idea of what was going on is not credible.

Another factor that reduces the surprise level of the report's conclusion is that, as I mentioned above, Grocock got himself installed in the Lord Mayor's robes while the investigation was still going on. This strongly indicates that someone was pretty sure that he would be exonerated as otherwise it is not considered wise to elevate the position of a person under investigation.

Another interesting aspect is that, despite the man concerned supposedly being a close family friend, in the interview with Monitoring Officer he says that he was never contacted by him again once the matter had been passed to Trimble. That's a bit odd don't you think? I think it's possible that knowing exactly who this chap is might be quite informative.

So, as I say, the Standards Committee meets next Friday to finally consider the case. The fact that they previously refused to simply rubber-stamp the monitoring officer's conclusion is encouraging but I wouldn't want to put any money on things going against Grocock in the end.

Pointless I know...

2012-01-05T14:11:00.001Z

I know that such attempts at engaging with our democratically elected members is a hiding to nothing but I have sent the following email to the members of the Audit Committee which is meeting tomorrow to discuss, among other things the District Auditor's 'Jobs Plan Review' report -

"I am writing to you as members of the Audit Committee to ask that you reject the recommendation to discuss the 'Jobs Plan Review' report in private and to agree to the report being made public.

From the Annual Audit Letter it is clear that the District Auditor contains some serious criticisms of the way the Future Jobs Fund was administered and it is overwhelmingly in the public interest for those criticisms to be made public.

The Leader of the Council has already quoted directly fro the report for his own political purposes and for him to be able to do this without the public knowing the full contents of the report really is an insut to the people who voted for you and to democracy itself.

If you choose to vote in favour of the report being kept private I challenge you to reply to me to give your reasons why so that the public can understand your thinking. I would be intending to make such replies public.

Lastly, can I point out that I have requested a copy of the report under the Freedom of Information Act and, even if you do vote for the report to remain private under s.100A of the LGA 1972, this will not necessarily mean that the Information Commissioner would conclude that the report is exempt from release under the FoIA. As such, in time it is likely for the report to be made public eventually."

I am under no real illusions that any of them will take the slightest bit of notice but you have to try.

Addendum - Perhaps not completely hopeless, I did get one helpful reply back.

I won't name the member involved but they did say that they hadn't yet been given detailed reasons why the matter should be discussed in closed session. But the Post has a council spokesperson saying -

"...that "open circulation" of the report might lead to defamation of those identified within it and prejudice the initial stages any standards committee hearing."

So it looks like the PR team are being briefed before councillors who are charged with making the decisions. Not good.

Check that Post article for a brilliantly comedic quote from Hassan Ahmed as well at the end.

Auditor Schmauditor

2012-01-05T07:00:00.003Z

The District Auditor for Nottingham City Council, Mrs Sue Sunderland, is not fit to be in her job. She has routinely failed to hold the council to account and in fact has repeatedly endorsed NCC's efforts to conceal massive corruption from the public. Let me explain -

Council Publicity

NCC has a history of flouting the law on council publicity. What does Mrs Sunderland do? She writes them a letter. That's it.

Housing Scandal

This is of course the biggie and should have resulted in mass resignations amongst politicians and prosecutions by the police. In the event none of this has happened. NCC has spent £100k on outside solicitors carrying out the council's normal work while the internal legal team carried out its own investigation. Not only is this inefficient (the external legal bods would have had to spend extra time learning NCC's procedures) but the internal team would clearly have been briefed where not to look.

What does Mrs Sunderland do? She says this is all ok and that £100k is a lot to spend on an investigation. It is of course approximately 25% of what she charges for her auditing 'skills' annually.

Harold Tinworth

Tinworth has been working for the council as an £870/day consultant for NCC since around 2006 but his work had never been put out to tender until, following pressure from me, Mrs Sunderland told them to. Opinions vary as to how he was ever employed in the first place.

Mrs Sunderland refused to look into the matter beyond instructing NCC to initiate a proper tender exercise for the work.

Since then the open secret that he was providing political advice on public pay blew up. Despite this Mrs Sunderland refused to re-investigate, saying -

"Following on from the articles in the newspaper to which you drew my attention I have now had an opportunity to explore this matter further. I have not found any evidence that would contradict the Council's response that the contract is for professional support and development for the Leader and other executive councillors and is not related to any political work. As a consequence and linking back to my earlier response to you dated 27 July 2010 I cannot justify any further investigation into this matter."She later claimed -

"My remit is currently limited to the financial years 2009/10 and 2010/11. From the copy invoices I have seen the expenditure during 2009/10 was <£30,000, whilst this may seem a significant sum to an individual, when seen in the context of the Council’s annual gross expenditure of £1,066 million it is negligible"

However I have since heard that this may not be true and that an 'extraordinary audit' could be carried out in these circumstances.

Future Jobs Fund

Interestingly, during my correspondence with Mrs Sunderland regarding the Tinworth affair Mrs S tried to reassure me of her determination to get to the truth as follows -

"You may be aware that I haven't given my certificate on the 2009/10 accounts because I am investigating a query raised by another elector, so I can assure you that I will investigate areas which fall within my remit where there are sufficient grounds to warrant it."

This turned out to be reference to the 'Jobs Plan Review' report.

Now we know that this report contains serious criticisms of the council so it should be public yes? Mrs Sunderland again -

"The Jobs Plan Review is not a public interest report (ie a report issued under S8 of the Audit Commission Act 1998) it is therefore for the Council (not me) to decide how to deal with it."

Oh.

It is to be noted that a District Auditor has absolute discretion as to whether a report they issue is to be a Public Interest Report.

According to JoCo it was initially planned that the investigation would result in a PIR. From the last council meeting -

"It appears that the DA originally believed that the allegation, suggesting, that as a result she may have to issue a public report on the matter."

So she changed her mind for some reason, despite the report containing serious criticisms. Now why would she do that eh?

I asked her the following questions -

"1) Why did you choose not to make the report into this matter a public interest report?

2) Are you willing to reverse this decision and make the report public? If not why not?

3) Are you or are you not willing to make any comment at NCC's Audit Committee meeting on Friday concerning the council's decision to exempt your report and insist it is included in the minutes?

4) Considering the number of times that NCC has been found to be acting illegally in reports of various status and your failure to hold them to account do you believe that it is appropriate for the Leader of NCC to continue working for the Audit Commission, bearing in mind the considerable perception of bias that this leads to, not to mention legitimate concerns about what he actually is training your clients to do?"

She refused to answer any of them, merely saying -

"I am sorry but I cannot get into a debate with you on this subject. I have investigated the allegations fully and independently and I have reported my findings, conclusions and recommendations to the Council. I will also follow up on the action taken in response to my recommendations."

So that's alright then.

The most generous conclusion we can draw from all this is that Mrs Sunderland is incompetent and prefers the quiet life, having neither the ability nor the will to robustly challenge and hold NCC to account. For this supine jobbing bureaucrat every man, woman and child in Nottingham is charged something like £1.20 per year. Good value she is not.

However incompetence as an excuse can only go so far and many of Mrs Sunderland's failures start to look somewhat wilful and a little more sinister. Is the relationship too cosy? Yes I personally think it is and I think that it stinks to high heaven.

So someone tell me; who audits the Auditors?

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T22:28:00.000Z

I have no predictions to make. No big ideas. No suggestions that I can immediately summon up.

Right now I'm enjoying a few bottle conditioned beers and they're very nice thank you.

But I do hope things are at least slightly better in 2012. Overall. I'd like to hope things will be a LOT better but I don't like to push me luck.

Happy New Year everyone.

Shameless Cover-Up

2011-12-28T14:27:00.001Z

Well, we finally have the Audit Committee meeting agenda up on the Council's website and they are indeed discussing the Annual Audit Letter which gives brief details of the crooked goings on behind the Future Jobs Fund and which I wrote about before when they mistakenly added it to their website a bit early.

They are also discussing the full report on the matter by the District Auditor but what's this? -

TO CONSIDER EXCLUDING THE PUBLIC FROM THE MEETING DURING CONSIDERATION OF THE REMAINING ITEM IN ACCORDANCE WITH SECTION 100A(4) OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT ACT 1972 ON THE BASIS THAT, HAVING REGARD TO ALL THE CIRCUMSTANCES, THE PUBLIC INTEREST IN MAINTAINING THE EXEMPTION OUTWEIGHS THE PUBLIC INTEREST IN DISCLOSING THE INFORMATION

JOBS PLAN REVIEW
Report of District Auditor, Audit Commission"

Oh look, they're covering it up. I should be surprised. I SHOULD be...

There can be no possible public interest in not releasing to the public a report by the District Auditor, especially when there is clear reference to that report's main conclusions in the Annual Audit Letter which confirm serious criticisms of the Council's conduct.

The fact that JoCo has already selectively quoted from that report for his own political purposes simply adds further insult to the outrage.

I have written to the District Auditor asking that she insist on the matter being discussed in public and for the report to be made public. If she refuses to do this it can only raise questions about her political impartiality and complicity in a cover-up.

JoCo Returns to Fantasy Island

2011-12-23T20:58:00.000Z

Fun and games at the last full Council Meeting when one of the Tories challenged JoCo over the recent Annual Audit letter which contains significant criticisms of the Future Jobs Fund. JoCo reponds with his usual mix of fantasy and lying by omission. Let's have a look at what he said.

"The District Auditor’s comments refer to a report drafted in response to allegations ... suggesting both illegality and impropriety in the way contracts were allocated for work placements within the programme. A report that, in officer time and audit fees, will have probably have cost local tax payers around £100,000."

Hmm, just like Freedom of Information costs us £500,000 no doubt. And a fraction of the cost of the botched police raid on the Iona School in an attempt to criminalise environmental activists which JoCo has repeatedly justified.

"The report also acknowledges that the Portfolio Holder, and again I quote:

“Complied with the requirements of the Code of Conduct on registration of interests and declaration of interests at formal Council committees and Executive meetings.” "

Firstly that's not in the Annual Audit Letter so JoCo is presumably quoting from the actual report which is yet to be made public. I presumably hasn't been released to the opposition either which means JoCo is deriving political advantage from privileged information. More on the issue of releasing information later.

However, what JoCo fails to mention is that the DA said -

"My investigation has led me to conclude that the relevant Portfolio Holder’s conduct may have been in breach of paragraph 3(2)(d) of the Code of Conduct (conduct which has compromised or is likely to compromise the impartiality of officers). My concerns arise from the need for transparency and good corporate governance rather than that there was any actual inappropriate allocation of contracts (in relation to which I did not find any evidence)."

Interestingly, the Annual Audit Letter was published on the council's website but, was removed when I wrote about it. It is due to be discussed at the Audit Committee meeting on 6 January 2012 but NCC is being unusually tardy in publishing the agenda for that meeting. That couldn't be to prevent the public from seeing it for as long as possible could it?

And it's still not clear whether the actual report will be published or placed before the same committee. Without that we can't see exactly what the DA found or what the reasons for her findings were. This is important because JoCo made the following remark -

"It appears that the DA originally believed that the allegation, suggesting, that as a result she may have to issue a public report on the matter. However, as she proceeded with her investigation, it became clear that they had little substance..."

The DA, Sue Sunderland has previous form of being a bit supine when criticising NCC. It would be unfortunate if political pressure had been brought to bear, resulting in her watering her conclusions.

How Much Does Freedom of Information Cost 2

2011-12-19T22:03:00.000Z

One thing that has been popping up in NCC's FoI responses is little passive aggressive notes at the end such as this one I got with the request featured in the previous post-

"You may be interested to know that responding to the questions you have raised in the enquiry has cost the Authority approximately £102.35."

I may indeed be interested to know that. Alternatively, I may not give a shiny shit. I can only assume that this is designed to make you feel bad about rattling their cage. I wonder if social workers give child abusers notes telling them their visit cost £128.50, or maybe bin men will soon be leaving a little sticker on your bin with a breakdown of the cost of carting your crap away.

I don't know if the same method is used to calculate the numbers as that used by JoCo in his occasional outbursts but, if I can help, I'd recommend that costs could be significantly reduced by reducing the number of people signing off each response, leaving aside the obsessive secrecy requiring legal services to turn ever more complex legal somersaults and stop that silly trick of ignoring requests until the Information Commissioner finally orders them to respond.

This advice is a service I provide you know. For free.

Lights, Camera, ACTION!

2011-12-19T18:44:00.000Z

Reasonably interesting response back from Information Governance today (and can I say a big hats off to them for getting it in just on the last day, even with it being the run-up to Xmas).

A few months back I wrote about the trials and tribulations of Welsh blogger Caebrwyn who was arrested for trying to film a council meeting. I thought this was a bit unreasonable so I thought I'd try and find out what NCC's attitude would be if someone tried the same trick. I have to say there's not much chance of me actually trying this but, in this time of austerity and cuts, somebody may do when face cuts to their school/leisure centre/care home etc looming.

In the meantime, the issue got a bit more local when there was a hullabaloo when somebody allegedly tried to film a meeting and the police were called. The miscreant legged it and has not been identified but interestingly the police said that as no offence had been committed they would not be taking any further action.

So, back to what Nottingham said.

I first asked whether meetings were recorded at all already, to which the answer was no but -

"...with the exception of full Council meetings where a tape recording of the meeting is taken in order to facilitate the verbatim recording within the minutes of the answers provided to Council and Public questions at the meeting."

So, presumably such recordings are available to members of the public then?

"No."

Erm, really? You haven't heard of the Freedom of Information Act then? Their justification is that the verbatim answers are provided within the minutes of the meetings which, of course, are published.

That's sort of fine except they imply that the whole meeting is recorded in which case the rest of the recording would be quite interesting to hear. However, former Cllr Alex Foster (refugee of the Lib Dem wipeout) had earlier annotated my request saying that the recording stopped after the first part of the meeting. Oh the uncertainty...

I next asked whether NCC was considering recording and/or webcasting meetings and the reply was that they are

"...currently exploring the costs and implications of webcasting council meetings."

I suspect that holding our breath on this one is not a safe option.

Lastly, I asked whether NCC would allow a member of the public to film a public meeting and whether there was any policy and/or legal justification for a refusal. The answer to this was that there was no policy and the decision to allow or not it would be down to the Chair of any meeting to make. So they are clearly of the view that the Chair has carte blanche to stop someone filming and, presumably, to eject them for doing so if they refuse to stop. Whether they would or not remains to be seen of course.

The problem with that is that the legal position is not exactly crystal on the subject. S.100A of the Local Government Act 1972 (as amended) deals with the right of the public to attend council meetings and stipulates when attendees can be excluded. Apart from the provisions for excluding the public by resolution for reasons of confidentiality there is the following -

(8)This section is without prejudice to any power of exclusion to suppress or prevent disorderly conduct or other misbehaviour at a meeting.

So to my reading, if somebody decides to film a meeting of the council and politely refuses to stop when asked, in order for the Chair to eject them it would have to be classified as 'disorderly conduct or other misbehaviour'. I reckon that's a bit of a stretch so if you fancy having a go remember to be scrupulously polite and otherwise co-operative at all times.

NCC would, I think, be on slightly stronger ground if they agreed a policy on the issue to be included in its standing orders. This would be a good idea in this era of camera phones and tiny camcorders, although a decision to ban would no doubt attract significant negative publicity. Until then (and I still wouldn't be certain), I honestly don't think it can legally stop you filming and it certainly can't require you to delete any footage you do take, like they tried to do in Ashfield.

Future Jobs Fund - NCC and a Certain Person Criticised Again

2011-12-05T17:40:00.001Z

NCC has posted its latest 'Annual Audit Letter'* (AAL) from the Audit Commission to its website. A dull and rather fusty document normally but this one contains a chunk of info the NCC will NOT be keen to draw your attention to. So I suppose I'd better.

You'll remember that former councillor Hassan Ahmed decided not to run for office at the last local election and the Post speculated it might have been due to skullduggery with the Future Jobs Fund. Well the the AAL confirms that he was in the firing line. The letter only contains brief details but does say that a full report on the matter was sent to NCC in November but they have so far chosen not to make it public. Funny that.

So, what do we know so far? Let's simply quote in full what the District Auditor says -

"The Council (acting as accountable body) has failed to comply with the requirements of its own constitution, standing orders and financial regulations in awarding Future Jobs Fund and Community Programme contracts. In particular, specific individuals failed to demonstrate appropriate accountability for the decisions taken. These failures were compounded by poor record keeping within the Council

My investigation has led me to conclude that the relevant Portfolio Holder’s conduct may have been in breach of paragraph 3(2)(d) of the Code of Conduct (conduct which has compromised or is likely to compromise the impartiality of officers). My concerns arise from the need for transparency and good corporate governance rather than that there was any actual inappropriate allocation of contracts (in relation to which I did not find any evidence).

The role of partners as set out in the original bids did not fully materialise in practice: As a consequence, some partners felt let down and had concerns around consistency and transparency. In my view the Council could have done more to allay these concerns by being more open and transparent about the need for changes and to ensure everyone was given an equal opportunity to respond to these changes."

The 'relevant Portfolio Holder' was of course our old mucker Hassan Ahmed. Note the finding that he breached the members code of conduct, which is the second time he has been found guilty of this. he has gone now as I say but the other findings, including that NCC breached its constitution, standing orders and financial regulations is as damning as it gets.

It's not clear whether NCC intends to make the full report public. There have been numerous rumours about the matter for some time involving certain usual suspects. If it is going to be made public it is likely to be alongside the AAL at the next Audit Committee meeting due on 6 January 2012. If it doesn't appear there it'll be Freedom of Info Act time again.

* Since posting this document yesterday, NCC removed it from their website, presumably hoping to scupper my article in the process. This is why the link now goes to Google Docs, where I saved a copy.

All's Well That Ends Well

2011-12-02T20:37:00.001Z

Remember the picture theft drama?

Well, NCC has been back in touch following my assurance to them that I would be taking them to the small claims court if they weren't a bit more accommodating and have agreed to make a payment for the use of my pic.

It's not a lot but then I didn't ask a lot because I didn't see any sense in taking the piss. That would have just made them dig their heels in.

So it's all cool now on the picture front although it's a lesson learned that it's worth sticking to your guns if something similar happens to you.

Overview and Scrutiny Draft Report on Fuel Poverty

2011-11-29T16:31:00.001Z

NCC's Overview and Scrutiny committee has had a panel working on fuel poverty and they have now produced a draft report to be considered at their next meeting.

Of course even considering the issue is a good thing and is more than many other councils do and NCC's record on this is quite respectable within the constraints of local government finance.

However, as usual I have found what I consider to be an ommission so I have sent the scrutiny panel the following email -

"I have just read the draft report and I was hoping to draw your attention to what I consider a major omission.

I should first give you some information about my background. I used to be the Team Manager of the Playter Court Welfare Rigghts Service at the City Council before being constructively unfairly dismissed in August 2008. Prior to thatr I was Team Manager for Leicester City Council's welfare rights team and my background in welfare rights and other advice work goes back to 1992. I was deputy Chairman of the National Association of Welfare Rights Advisers from 2006-08. I live at *** ********* ***** so am a City Council resident. You will probably know me more recently as the writer of the Nottingham City Council LOLs blog but if that tempts you to immediately stop reading I would strongly advise you that would be a mistake.

My first point is to agree that fuel poverty is a combination of income, fuel prices and energy efficiency. I would modify that slightly that expenditure on and council tax other than fuel plays a major part in the equation as well. If you are spending disproportionate sums on rent and council tax you obviously have less money available for heating. It's also true to say that a person in fuel poverty probably doesn't care where an extra income actually comes from as it long as it means they have more money to spend on keeping warm.

The report makes the point that fuel poverty is 3.3 times higher for private sector tenants than the city average. You will also be aware that housing benefit for this group of people has recently been cut significantly which is likely to make the problem worse. Further cuts to benefits which are planned are likely to exacerbate the situation further.

Something you may or may not be aware of is that one of the government's 'sweeteners' (some would say band aid) is to increase the fund for Discretionary Housing Payments

http://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/CHttpHandler.ashx?id=2910&p=0

has been increased by £10m nationwide. I wrote a blog post about this recently so to save time here's a link

http://ncclols.blogspot.com/2011/11/discretionary-housing-payments-any.html

Unfortunately, NCC has a very poor record of administering DHPs with a long history of underspending while the vast majority of claims were being refused. The problem with underspending is that your following year's budget is then reduced.

http://ncclols.blogspot.com/2010/08/and-discretionary-housing-payments-and.html

2009/10 was the furst year that NCC even managed to spend the full allocation actually provided by central government, never mind spend any of its own funds that government rules allow it to spend. In 2009, I estimated that, if NCC had managed to spend just the full central government allocation for DHPs i.e. NOT spend any of its own money, then along with the knock-on effects on future allocations around £500k extra would have found its way into the Nottingham economy.

http://ncclols.blogspot.com/2009/03/discretionary-housing-payments-still.html

It therefore follows that, if DHPs had been properly managed then a very vulnerable sector may have a much reduced problem with fuel poverty because they would have had more money to spend on keeping warm. This issue is now more urgent than ever because of the increased reliance on DHPs caused by mainstream HB cuts and the increase to the DHP budget.

The big issue here is that it is one of the few situations where NCC actually has some control over what it can do. You cannot force energy companies to drop their prices, you cannot re-write the mainstream HB rules. However, you can choose to properly administer the DHP budget to help the group of people you have identified as being worst affected by fuel poverty and I would strongly recommend that this be added to the report as a viable action point.

I will be publishing this email on my blog as my aim is to widen awareness of DHPs and NCC efforts in this area as much as possible."

Uh, Been Doing This Blog Thing 3 Years Now

2011-11-29T00:05:00.001Z

Go me, eh?

Three years of the blog have now happened. On previous anniversaries I've done a retrospective of the past year but this time I'm afraid I really can't be arsed, sorry. You'll just have to look back yourself if you're interested. Short summary - Freedom of Information was involved.

Here's to another year of not letting the buggers get me down...

Was It the Astroturfers Wot Won It?

2011-11-28T00:58:00.001Z

One thing about any election is the amount of waste paper they cause to arrive through your door. At least the rest of the time you get phone numbers that will result in high calorie food being delivered to your residence.

One leaflet that was delivered to homes in at least part of Nottingham (think Nottingham South mainly, I certainly didn't see it up north) was this one -

(click for big version, fairly big file mind)

It was the second in a series of two, there was an earlier edition sent out around 18 March. The one above was sent out some weeks later.

Now electoral law states that any candidate is limited in their spending for campaigning and has to declare all expenses spent after the date that the election is declared, which is normally also the date that anybody declaring themselves as standing in the election officially becomes a candidate. For the 2011 local elections this date was 25 March, therefore, if you were standing in that election and you send out a leaflet before this date you don't have to declare it, send one after and you do and its cost counts as part of your limited election expenses allowed.

Another requirement of election law is that certain information must be included on the leaflet, including the names and addresses of the printer and the promoter of the leaflet and details of any 'person on behalf of whom the material is being published'. If you look closely you'll see our above leaflet has been promoted on behalf of the 'ConDem Campaign'.

Or has it? If you check the link to the older version you'll see that suspicions were already raised. For a start the promoter is said to be Carole McCulloch, now one of the Labour members for Aspley.

I have since had sight* of another elected Labour councillor's declared expenses which includes a payment of £43.60 for '2nd ConDem Leaflet', the supplier being listed as 'Nottingham Labour'. A note says this was calculated from an invoice for £1993 issued to 'Nottingham Labour Party'. The invoice comes from 'Digital Printing Services', who are at least properly named on the leaflet.

So, putting all that together, it looks very much like our leaflet was not prepared for the 'ConDem Campaign' at all but was in fact a Nottingham Labour Party product. Unless of course they are referring to a completely different '2nd ConDem leaflet' I suppose.

So what Nottingham Labour seems to have done is to send out a bunch of leaflets which claim to be from a fictitious** grass-roots campaign, the motivation presumably being to attract non-Labour voters who wouldn't respond to an openly partisan campaign. Nottingham South is known to be a bit woolly for the Labour Party so you can see how such an approach might make a bit of a difference. There's a phrase for this sort of thing in the trade and that phrase is 'astro-turfing' (from false 'grass-roots' see). The classic and most successful example of this technique is 'The Taxpayers' Alliance' who frequently manage to get quoted as an expert source in newspaper articles despite being an obvious Tory front.

The thing is, this isn't only dishonest and underhand it also breaches election law. The law is quite clear that any election leaflet must include an imprint naming anyone on whose behalf the leaflet is produced and, in this case, it appears pretty clear that that would be Nottingham Labour Party.

A breach of this condition is a criminal offence so what are the chances of Cllr McCulloch getting a knock at the door from the rozzers? Sadly none, it is more than six months since the offence took place and what's more, JoCo is Chairman of the Police Authority.

* Decided not to post it up as there may be privacy issues that I don't really want to deal with. Anybody involved with this leaflet can see from the figures quoted that I'm not making it up.

** At least I presume they don't exist, I couldn't find anything on them. If anybody is a genuine member please feel free to get in touch, you can invite me to a meeting.

Benefit Fraud - Because You're Worth It

2011-11-25T17:30:00.001Z

I've occasionally made the odd comment about NCC's record on pursuing benefit fraud which hasn't been super complementary. No doubt there are people within certain circles who think that means that I'm against any form of sanction against benefit fraudsters and thing there should be a free-for-all.

Not true. I accept and in many cases positively encourage the proportionate pursuit and prosecution of people who defraud the benefits system. The key word there is 'proportionate'. I also strongly object to constant government sponsored propaganda on the subject which simply serves to demonise benefit claimants and put people off making legitimate claims. It is also an outrage that nothing like the same effort is made against those who defraud the tax system.

Another issue to consider is that anti-fraud action does have a cost and it should justify itself in value for money terms like anything else. Well, I've just stumbled across a bit of information which makes me wonder whether NCC manages to do that.

In 2009 I wrote about the fact that NCC boasted in a press release that it had reclaimed around £300k from benefit fraud. presumably it will have increased since then but it's likely to be in the same ballpark. At the time this amounted to 0.24% of total benefit expenditure, about 10% of comparable rates of recovery nationally.

Here's the new bit. In an aside in a report to the Audit Committee it is said that the benefit fraud team has 10 officers, so that gives us a vague idea of the cost of the council's expenditure on anti-fraud measures. I say vague because we don't know if those 10 officers comprise the entire team including admin and management/team leaders but let's presume it does. At a very conservative estimate I reckon a team that size is going to cost approx £300k in employee costs alone. The officers concerned will be relatively senior because they must have 'authorised officer' status (see s.109A of the SSAA 1992) allowing them to investigate people, including getting info from banks, utility companies and stuff (you did know they can do that when investigating you for fraud didn't you?). You will presumably have significant travel expenses because fraud inspectors spend a lot of time sitting outside people's houses watching for illicit visitors. And of course, if a prosecution does occur this will mean shedloads more money spent on legal services.

So on this basis I think we are in a fairly strong position to question whether NCC is getting value for money from it's anti fraud measures.

JoCo's Starring Role at the Leveson Enquiry (In His Dreams)

2011-11-24T23:58:00.001Z

The Leader of Nottingham City Council, Councillor Jon 'JoCo' Collins, made a dramatic appearance at the Leveson enquiry. In the literal sense because he tends to just make shit up.

(Jon Collins, yesterday)

After being calmed down, JoCo finally managed to negotiate a couple of minutes to present his indisputable evidence of phone hacking to a minion. But the evidence he provided to the enquiry, comprising of two messages he wrote himself on his own Twitter feed, was universally agreed to be devastating. Kinda.

"Ta-Daaaaa!!!" ejaculated Collins.

"Um, you got anything else?" said Counsel to the Enquiry, Sir Herbert Buffington-Tufton QC. "Maybe, for example, something that you didn't write yourself? And with coherent grammar?"

"Yes!" giggled JoCo. Let me just check my special private FoIA proof council email account...Ah..."

"See?" That conclusively proves that I believe I've been hacked by a local newspaper" he said "What more do you need?"

There was silence.

"See...?" said little Jon, less confidently, feeling a bit small.

Some men in funny uniforms, like big red coats, medals and knickerbockers, appeared at JoCo's shoulder before leading him gently away so as not to hurt himself on biros and stuff.

"Who the jiminy was that?" said Lord Leveson, after the dust had settled. "Not another of those local politicians trying to 'be somebody' by being hacked?"

Sir Herbert imagined dragging languidly on a huge Cuban cigar (because of course you can't actually do that indoors anymore) while in fact nearly swallowing one of those electronic cigarette things.

"Yus m'lud, I do believe it was. Shall I get someone to sort his bus ticket back up North?"

Questions the 'Post' Should Have Asked NCC About Benefit Fraud

2011-11-21T18:29:00.001Z

The Nottingham Post has published an article about Housing Benefit Fraud committed against Nottingham City Council. Unfortunately it actually tells us very little and merely provides an excuse to run the 'BENEFITS FRAUD INCREASING SHOCK HORROR' meme again. It's a classic case of not asking the right questions or, if they did, not putting the answers to them in your article.

The headline is that benefit fraud prosecutions have increased by 39% and Graham Chapman says that the tough economic climate is to blame. He may well be right of course but we can't tell that from the article.

You see, as the article does explain, prosecution is not the only option open to councils when dealing with benefit fraud. There is the administrative penalty (a kind of bribe/blackmail designed to persuade you to 'fess up, pay a chunk of extra money you haven't got so you don't have to go to court), cautions and simply requiring the money to be repaid. There are arguments in favour of all these options depending on the individual situation. In short therefore, an increase in court prosecutions could simply be down to a change in prosecution policy, formal or otherwise*. In fairness the Post does say that NCC is resorting to prosecution more often but I can't tell from the article whether that was Chapman expressing NCC's declared policy or whether this is simply the Post reporter's conclusion.

Taking the article at face value then, NCC's response to increasing financial woes is to make things worse for those most affected by prosecuting more often when desperate times force poor decision making. I'm not sure that reflects too well on NCC.

It would have been helpful if the Post had asked NCC whether detected fraud had also increased as this would at least help answer the 'changed/not changed prosecution policy' question i.e. if greater detected fraud occurred along with more prosecutions then we could conclude 'no change'. On the other hand, if you assume that any organisation would get better at finding fraud over time** (practice makes perfect and all that) then if there isn't an increase in fraud then it may not be unreasonable to conclude that NCC has merely toughened its stance. It has to be said that NCC doesn't seem to actually find much benefit fraud, managing to find fraud worth only 0.24% of total benefit expenditure in 2009, about 10% of the national rate. This means that the margin of error is larger and any claim of an increase is less significant. The fact that we're talking about an increase in prosecutions from 31 to 43 in a six month period reinforces this concern.

We know that actual Housing Benefit expenditure has increased by nearly 20% in only two years (I think that's known as 'rocketing' in the trade) and that is without doubt down to the worsening economic conditions. Would we also expect that fraud as a proportion of this expenditure would also increase? It would be worthwhile knowing if that is what is happening.

If we had been given the figures for fraud I'd also want to be sure that they really were actual fraud as opposed to 'fraud and error' which is what tends to be reported in order to amplify the alarm bells further, the 'error' of course tending to combine official and customer error and leaving the general public to assume it's all down to claimants. I've previously uncovered evidence of a perverse incentive for NCC to try and reclassify their own errors as customer error, combine this with clear evidence of the Benefits Service's standards slipping in general and you've got a bit of a mess brewing.

Ok, so I've gone further than you might expect a local newspaper to go writing an article afresh but the information for Post reporters to use has been up here for a while and all the links to sources are still fully functional. There may well be a big story here but, unfortunately somebody somewhere still has a lot of work to do to find out.

* I'm getting indications that quite a bit of high level decision-making is being done 'off-minutes' so to speak, almost certainly to evade Freedom of Information requests.

** Naive I know.

Nottingham City Council Press Releases

2011-11-21T15:15:00.001Z

I occasionally get the stereotypical complaint that I never write good news about Nottingham City Council. I'm not sure that's entirely true but there are a couple of defences I can make.

Firstly, of course, doing NCC's PR function for them without payment is not exactly what I consider to be a core function of this blog. NCC spends quite a lot of money on its Communications (the Director, Stephen Barker, gets £75,079 plus £14,131 pension contributions alone, see page 89), much of which is PR. They can clearly afford to write their good news stories themselves.

Notwithstanding that, I did set up a RSS feed of NCC's press releases in the sidebar but unfortunately that stopped being updated in May. Why, I have no idea. The only thing I can find now is the website's front page stories so I've put that up. These really are puff pieces though.

I'd much prefer to have the press release feed back and be a minor part of NCC's propaganda machine but if it's not there I can't post it.

Hate Speech On Nottingham Post Website - Off Topic Post of the Week

2011-11-12T16:58:00.001Z

The Nottingham Post website comment moderators are guilty of a serious lapse of judgment at the moment, regularly allowing disgusting hate speech comments despite them being reported. In fact, they are more likely to remove posts challenging the hate speech while leaving the original post online.

Let me give you some examples of posts that remain despite being reported -

On this article about an organisation on refugee issues -

“We spend to much money and devote too many resources to Asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, the overwhelming majority of people do not want them here and they add nothing to our society other than debt."

“Brainwash them young. I wonder if the stories will tell how they passed through several safe countries, which they are obligated under conventions to seek asylum in first, before they came to easy touch Britain.”

“Will this exhibition be in the fiction section ?”

“Guess what, Erik, the vast majority of people don't want any more ''asylum seekers'. They go on what they see in real life, not what they've read in Das Kapital.”

In addition, a commenter made justified criticisms about Israel in the comments and this was removed immediately. I also wrote a more detailed post providing details of the oppression of Palestinians by the Israelis and that was also removed within hours. However repeated posts libelling the first poster as an anti-semite have been left up. That is just not acceptable.

Now let's have a look at this one about the Market Square occupation, a demonstration that I fully support -

"These people serve no purpose what so ever...This bunch of campers are no better than a beggar apart from they get away with begging."

Nicely bringing 'beggars' in here...

"...perhaps the benefits agency should take an interest just to see who is actually not actively looking for a job, or supposedly too ill to work ???"

Ah yes, the 'benefit cheats' meme, always a winner.

"...water cannon the lot"

Absolutely, a bit of violent oppression never goes amiss after all...

"...just remember what today is" (posted on ~~Remembrance~~ Armistice Day)

BOOM! Internet smackdown. Evoking poppies/our boys/Remembrance Day ALWAYS wins the argument, no matter what you're trying to say. Mint Imperials are MUCH nicer than Werthers originals, JUST REMEMBER WHAT DAY IT IS.

This is where it got a bit nasty. I have previously admitted to having mental health problems so when this type of comment comes up -

"veggiesosage - keep taking the tablets they dont appear to be working"

I reserve the right to get a bit upset. Despite reporting it this comment is still there. I tried adding a riposte but it was immediately removed, although does now appear to have been allowed. I would much rather both the above comment and my reply were removed.

Moving on to an article about the government's work programme where your punishment for being unemployed is being made to work for free sweeping up a Tesco warehouse -

"CAN I SUGGEST THAT ANY SUCH JOBS BE IN THE WILDS OF SCOTLAND? BUILDING WALLS AND ROADS ETC? THE SUPERVISORS BEING EX-SAS GUYS!"

Nice use of capslock there. Textbook.

"To many people rely on benefits its about time they get kicked up their ****s end of"

That benefits cheat/scrounger meme combined with violence. There's a lot of that.

"The very least that the long-term unemployed should be made to do is get up in the morning and sign in at 7:30am at an unemployment centre, stay there all day and sign out at 5pm... That would, at least, keep some of them away from crime, working on the side or watching TV all day...If they don't want to do it then no benefits of any kind should be offered."

See? Often combined with "THEIR ALL CRINIMULS" logic.

"...it doesn't need trained nurses to see if frail patients need a drink or help being fed. Equally cleaning up road verges and canal tow paths isn't putting someone out of a paid job."

Ok, I accept that simple galloping inaccuracy is not the same as hate speech but the person who made that comment is a former benefits office manager. Not only should he know better but imagine being a claimant at his office eh? You'd be replacing nurses and council roadsweepers within the week.

It's too depressing to go on with this. You might think me rather sad for joining in with such conversations never mind getting upset about it and you may well have a point. But I find it very hard to stand by when blatant fascist rhetoric is encouraged and supported on a public 'news' website.

From what I've been told the 'moderators' are probably journalism interns based at the Daily Mail (the Post's owners) headquarters in London. They clearly have no proper understanding of racism, disablism or classism and will probably fit in very nicely in their future career as Mail 'journalists'. Unfortunately their actions reflect very badly on the Post, whose journalism I generally have a great deal of time for.

THIS JUST IN -

Comment allowed on refugee exhibition article by 'john_carlton'

"Now you know where the marxist Veggie and Neilant get their anti-semitism from. It is politilically driven, bigoted, racist hate - no different from the type trotted out by the old National Front. And no different to the attitudes of the those have persecuted Jews through the ages."

Addendum; This is the comment that the Nottingham Post repeatedly removes, without explanation -

"John_carlton you really need to look up what 'anti-semitism' means. The Semitic peoples includes a number of peoples not just Jewish people. For example it includes Arabs. As Israel is among the countries with the worst records of oppressing Arabs, particularly the Bedouin people who are being subject to enforced removal from their ancient lands in the Negev desert. It was even reported that Israel tried to sue the Bedouin for eviction costs.

Of course Israel's record of brutal repression of the Palestinians is well known. They are also one of the ancient semitic peoples. Again, forced removal, illegal settlement of their land by Israelis is common, as is punishment of entire communities for the (admittedly criminal) actions of a few individuals. It's a bit like when you were at school and teacher said everybody would be kept late after school if the boy who stole the pencils doesn't own up. Only with helicopter gunships.

It is therefore fair to say that the Israeli government is one of the most anti-semitic institutions on the planet.

It's also worth remembering that only a tiny number of the world's Jewish people are Israelis in the nation-state sense.

So to conflate 'criticism of Israel' with 'anti-semitism' is wildly inaccurate and I can only assume that you continue to do so for your own reasons, not for any real concern for Jewish people.

Israel's secret service, Mossad, regularly engages in planned state-sponsored assassinations of Israel's political enemies, mostly Palestinians. In a recent case, Mossad agents used stolen British passports to get near to their target.

Still want to try and argue that criticism of Israel is invalid? All of these traits mean that comparison of the world's most oppressive regimes in history, including the Godwin's Law defying one, is not inappropriate. Claiming equivalence is going too far I agree but the idea is that we are supposed to learn from the mistakes in history but Israel's treatment of those it considers its enemies questions how well they at least are doing that. Our government's support for them also questions ours.

The final irony is a group of people happily demonising refugees while accusing another of anti-semitism. Before the war certain right wing media continually denied pre-war Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews and continually argued against accepting Jewish refugees to the UK (I won't name the newspaper concerned but it rhymes with Waily Fail). You, John_carlton and your racist friends on here would have been standing shoulder to shoulder with such people and you are their equivalent today. At least the Post is presenting refugee issues in a neutral light."

Nottingham Post readers; you decide whether the above breaches their comment terms and conditions but please do check the context if you think it does.

Whoever john_carlton actually is he is clearly a disgusting fascist and it is appalling that the Post repeatedly subjects its readers to his Nazi sympathising opinions and allows him to run a sustained harassment campaign falsely accusing others of anti-semitism.

If you agree with the above and you're on Twitter ~~please have a pop at Tom Pegg~~, [Tom tells me he has made representations to Northcliffe Media which is probably all he can do] the Post's online publisher. I suspect even he isn't entirely responsible for moderating Nazi sympathising posts but he's certainly a lot nearer whoever does than the actual journos are.

It's Said That We Learn More From What They DON'T Say

2011-11-09T06:39:00.001Z

Another interesting FoI response from NCC to another requester which fits very appropriately into the 'beggars belief' file. Bit like another I discussed the other week.

In this new case the requester asked for -

"...copies of all emails, letters and memos sent to or from the leader of Nottingham City Council which mention Freedom of Information, and in particular, any correspondence about the Council's compliance with FOI requests."

The reply came thusly -

"The department advise that a thorough search of the Leader's email account has been undertaken on and in particular any correspondence relating to compliance with FOI requests and as a result find no such reference which contains material that fits the description you require has been located."

before confirming that the information could not be provided as it was not held.

First thing to note is that it only mentions a search of JoCo's emails whereas the requester asked for any memos or letters as well. Now that could just be an oversight, or could be a sin by deliberate omission. Either way it's clearly not an adequate response and I hope that the requester takes it further.

If it isn't just a case of sophistry and NCC really is claiming that no communication on FoI policy has gone through the Leader's office then that sounds a little bit fantastical. JoCo has been very vocal about the costs of FoI to the council and, unless he just made a figure up off the top of his head, people would have been assigned the task of coming up with a figure for him. Where are those communications?

I take it NCC and JoCo know it's illegal to delete stuff to avoid it being released under FoI? Like the claim that no internal correspondence was held about plans to deal with NCC's dog poor FoI performance, you really have to wonder what is going on here. Is NCC really defying its FoI obligations by just pretending that internal communications just don't happen?

Not Just Me Then...

2011-11-07T00:24:00.000Z

Here we have another decision by the Information Commissioner Nottingham City Council completely fails to provide a response to a FoIA request and for once it isn't one of mine!

This case concerns a request for a service agreement between NCC and a student housing organisation. That's it, nothing more. To provide it, all NCC needs to do is find its lowest paid clerk, ask him/her to go to the relevant filing cabinet, scan or photocopy the agreement requested and post it off. I reckon that's half an hour's work at best.

Instead the request, made on 16 April 2011, had still not merited a response by the time of the decision notice which was issued on 6 October.

The Commissioner had this to say by way of comment -

"The Commissioner considers that this complaint demonstrates that there are a number of deficiencies in the procedures carried out by the council which were previously evidenced in Practice Recommendations issued by the Commissioner on 23 October 2007. The council is currently being monitored for its compliance with the Act."

Do you think this is the sort of stellar practice NCC refers to in its action plan as follows?

"To market NCC as best practice model and take on others workload for fee."

Good luck with that.

I have no idea what would be in this service agreement nor why the requester wants it. However, my guess is that the delay is caused NCC's obsessive secrecy because they seem to assume that any document requested under FoI MUST have something that they'd prefer to be kept quiet.

So they spend about six months going through the documents with a fine tooth comb to check. Then of course they spend another six months trying to think up an argument for keeping it secret. It takes so long because it gets passed to the legal dept for this task and they are utterly shit. Imagine a well stocked graveyard for crap lawyers who can't get a job anywhere else (including the shop floor at Asda) and you'll get the idea.

If they can't think of anything it goes off to the Communications team who '...assess the impact of disclosure from a reputational standpoint...' What they do if the disclosure looks like it will have what I'm sure they'd refer to as a 'negative reputational impactisation' I don't know. But whatever it is would probably take another six months or so if they're quick.

No doubt along the way various officers will get visits from JoCo shouting and screaming and generally meddling, because that's apparently what he does.

Meanwhile the Information Commissioner has died of old age and the rest of us have lost the will to live.

Discretionary Housing Payments - Any Change?

2011-11-03T23:31:00.001Z

So then, back to my favourite obsession. Where had we got to?

Ah yes, last we heard was that in the 2009/10 year NCC got £59,639 from the government towards DHPs and, joy of joys, the total actually paid out went up for the first time in years to £66,677 from the previous year's £51,882.

Strange then that the 2010/11 central government grant dropped to £55,863. You see, normally, the amount allocated should be half way between the previous year's grant and actual expenditure so an increase in DHP payouts should pull the grant up. So I'm not sure what that was about.

Anyway that was the last year that the old rules applied because since then the lovely Tories have cut mainstream Housing Benefit even more and part of the 'sweetener' for the deal was an extra nationwide £10m DHP allocation (making £30m in total) to allow councils to apply a scrap of band aid. This extra £10m is not allocated via the normal formula mentioned above it is weighted in favour of councils who would lose the most from the cuts which, as I've posted before, kinda means Nottingham.

Now I have been ranting about this for a while because it means that tenants on benefits will be even more reliant on DHPs to keep a roof over their heads. One Nottingham failed to even mention DHPs in it's recent 'concern' about benefit cuts. So I was interested to find out how much Nottingham had actually got for the 2011/12 financial year i.e. the current one. Turns out it's £119,316 which is more than double that of last year. This implies that a big chunk of that is from this extra £10m. Councils are also allowed to spend a certain amount of their own money on DHPs and if NCC spent the maximum it is allowed to that would be a potential total fund of over £298k.

So, we know that Nottingham is expected to do disproportionally badly out of mainstream HB cuts. We know that Nottingham's share of the band-aid is bigger than most. What we don't have is any evidence that NCC has anything approaching a plan for ensuring this extra money is used most effectively.

The result of this is that any mitigation of the worst effects of the HB cuts that would have been possible from this extra funding probably won't happen and we will see a big increase in rent arrears and evictions as a result. How many of these could be prevented by a decent DHP strategy is impossible for me to say but if only one person loses their home when there's money there to stop it I think that's criminal.

Note; if you are currently suffering a shortfall between your housing benefit and your rent I would strongly recommend that you apply for DHPs, even if you've been turned down before because of the increased budget.

The forms are available here. Note that the DHP leaflet there was prepared in 2005 and the contact address is for a building that doesn't exist anymore. That probably tells you all you need to know about the amount of effort NCC puts in and how much they give a shit about you becoming homeless.

Addendum; I've just found that One Nottingham have had further discussions on welfare issues at their May Meeting. A policy document is available but ON seem to have got bored of publishing their minutes. Obviously there was no mention of DHPs in that paper. It seems to be all about blaming the government which in itself is fine but it's more productive to discuss the things that you do actually have some control over.

Picture Theft - The Latest Latest

2011-11-03T20:12:00.000Z

Had a response from NCC, here it is...

"Please accept our apologies in relation to the use of your image on the Council’s website. We have investigated the matter but have not been able to find out how the photo came to be used. The image has now been removed from the site. We are not aware that it has been used by the Council elsewhere.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can appeal.Further details are included in the attached leaflet."

If I'm not satisfied with the response? What is this 'if' that you mention?

You're gonna get fuckin sued.

Picture Theft - the Latest

2011-11-01T18:04:00.000Z

Remember NCC stole one of my pics for their website? Well I sent them a nice email about it asking them to pay the going rate for a stock photo plus an extra amount to reflect their use without attribution etc.

Well compare and contrast the 'Freezepage' capture of the Market Square gallery on 20th October here with the actual gallery page as it is now.

Notice something has gone? Took them over a week to do that.

Of course what hasn't happened is any form of response, explanation, apology or of course payment. We'll see whether that situation changes but I doubt it will some official or court induced prompting.

Do They Mean Me?

2011-10-25T03:16:00.000+01:00

Being very sad, with nothing else to do in life*, I had a look at the latest full council minutes for a bit of knockabout fun. When you're poor you've got to take your laughs where you can get 'em, know what I mean.

In the manner of such things, one of the Tories asked JoCo if he would apologise for wasting money on a big Christmas tree at Loxley House then lying about it being paid for by outside sponsorship.

JoCo gave it both baubles. Sorry barrels -

"It is actually, frankly, the kind of question that I would only expect to have been asked by a Conservative Councillor that knows the cost of everything, but the value of nothing..."

Yeah, you tell 'em, go Jonny Boy, I like it when you give 'em what for

"...a sad blogger who has nothing better to do in life than sit in front of a computer screen criticising others who try and do something more useful with their time..."

Eh, what?

"...or indeed a newspaper that seems long ago to have forgotten what serious journalism is all about."

Blimey. I wonder which newspaper he means? And I bet whichever blogger he's talking about will be very upset at that.

JoCo is prone to these outbursts it seems, although if he wants to start accusing newspapers of forgetting what proper journalism is he'd better have a good set of examples ready for when somebody calls him out on that. Or maybe he'll blame it on inadequate briefing from an officer, or his secretary maybe.

It's also probably bad form to start ranting about bloggers being 'sad' and having 'nothing better to do in life' because that gives the impression that you read them and you're a bit worried what they write, whereas the correct approach is to feign untouchable indifference.

A more serious concern is that it demonstrates politicians' dislike of anyone who has the wrong level of political interest. They are very happy to pay lip service to encouraging the hoi polloi to vote in elections (safe, in the case of local authority members, that few will bother) but anything else is strictly frowned upon. Unless it's on behalf of the party of course. Heaven knows, you might find something out and tell other people and then where would we be?

Anyway, as JoCo seems to have got his knickers in a twist about local media, lets cheer him up with a reconstruction of the day he decisively dealt with the Post's piffling enquiries.

*Actually I do quite like photography, like writing it's good therapy. But then NCC just goes and nicks it. I dunno, some sad little employee, nothing better to do in life than scour the internet, nicking other people's stuff...

Fire Station Fuck-Ups

2011-10-22T04:25:00.000+01:00

I have to confess that I don't really take much notice of what Notts Fire Authority do, even though their committee minutes are all posted up on NCC's website. Perhaps I should as there may be worthwhile lols to be picked up.

However, I'm not sure checking minutes would have helped me find this stuff that the 'Post' is reporting on regarding NFA and NCC being hit for big out-of-court settlements of £2.7m. This followed a stalled legal action against a private development company, Gladman Commercial Properties, who had pulled out of an agreement to buy the old Dunkirk Fire Station site and surrounding land.

Briefly the allegations are as follows. NCC had land around the fire station it didn't need so it teamed up with NFA to sell the lot together for added value purposes. Gladman claimed that they were told the site could accommodate 600 student flats and, when they worked out it couldn't, pulled out. NCC and NFA went to m'learneds to try and get them back into line. It didn't go well it seems, hence the hefty out-of-court settlements.

Fact is, the whole business seemed pretty bejiggered from the start. The point of selling Dunkirk FS was that, combined with the sale of another station in Beeston, they could build a whole new big spangly station.

Simple enough you'd think but have a look at this report to NFA's Finance and Resources Committee in September 2007. One thing that alarms is the number of times the phrase 'it became clear that...' features at the start of paragraphs, almost as if nobody had actually tried to spot problems before they arose.

One problem that caused a significant deviation from the original budget was the realisation that the plot for the new station, assumed to be industrial land and thus worth about £300k, turned out to be residential land worth £2m. Whoops. That's an extra £1.7m please.

Moving on a few years to the actual court case, this was handled with the usual finesse and expertise that we have come to expect from NCC's legal department. First of all, here's a quick summary of the issues from the Property Litigation Association which is what I'd advise you to read if you're a vaguely normal person. If you want the full fat court decision it's here.

It seems that what NFA and NCC were claiming depended rather heavily on what was said in conversations between the selling agents and Adrian Jones, NCC's Director of Planning and Transport at the time. However, in a stroke of pure genius, they hadn't listed him as a witness, hadn't secured a witness statement from him and he wasn't there to do his stuff at the hearing. When asked why by the Judge the reason given was that he was no longer working for NCC. It's quite likely that, at around this point, Gladman's lawyer took the piss somewhat mercilessly because the big golden rule of court action is that you set out your case from the beginning.

Anyway, NCC requested an adjournment in order to get Mr Jones to appear. After some considerable opposition from Gladman the Judge agreed BUT, and here's the rub, he said that 'there will be heavy costs consequences' for NCC due to the delay and the extra work this would cause Gladman and their legal team.

And that's the point of this post really. Because the substantial issue was settled out of court we have no way of knowing who was actually right. It's not even clear whether Jones ever did appear on the stand or what he (would have) said if he did. But one thing we can be sure that the final settlement, and thus the cost to taxpayers, was inflated by NCC's legal team screwing up the case from the beginning.

One last thing. The Post reports that the following statement was issued by Gladman on conclusion of hostilities -

"GCP wish to make it absolutely clear that they accept that no member (councillor) of either Notts Fire Authority or Nottingham City Council played any part in the misrepresentations alleged by Gladman in the High Court claim."

This seems to have been designed to get any politicians caught up in this off the hook and has already been used as the excuse for the Chair of the Fire Authority, Darrell Pulk, not having to resign. Makes you wonder how much extra that statement cost just to save a few political asses.

PS. If you fancy further reading about another fuck-up by NCC's property and legal wings, not to mention the efforts made by the politicians to extricate themselves from a quagmire, you might like to have a look at the saga of the Radford Unity Complex.

Looks Familiar, What Do You Think?

2011-10-20T02:04:00.000+01:00

Here's a pic I took a few years ago the first year that big wheel turned up in the Market Square.

Now here's a pic on the NCC website, in a page labelled as a gallery of Market Square pics

What do you reckon?

It's clearly been cropped and the remains of a green border disturbingly suggests they've used it elsewhere as well.

Not good is it? I may take action.

Addendum - Here's a FreezePage capture of the gallery page in case the original gets changed at some point.

Speak No Evil

2011-10-18T16:16:00.001+01:00

Looking at another's FoI request to NCC today. It's a request about what NCC is planning to do about its woeful FoI performance.

One of the things requested was as follows -

"1. Any internal correspondence it has setting out why the Council has not been meeting its statutory obligations"

to which the answer beggars belief. Here's the first bit -

"In accordance with section 1 of this act this information cannot be provided as it is not held by this authority."

What the heckins? There has been no internal discussion about FoI failures? Even when they were being formally monitored for non-compliance by the Information Commissioner? Even though they've had 12 decisions (at least partially) against them by the Commissioner?

Or, indeed, even though they've somehow managed to produce an 'action plan' (pdf) which is encouraging. I can only presume that this appeared out of thin air, or perhaps was produced by a single person kept in a box, prevented from consulting with anybody else at NCC, in writing at least.

By the way, this action plan contains the following 'medium term' objective -

"To market NCC as best practice model and take on others workload for fee."

That gap was where I couldn't stop laughing.

Another suspicious bit is this -

"Further, we have received a similar request for ‘information and communications relating to FOI procedures’ and I can confirm that that information was exempted from release under Section 36 of the Act and it is likely that if we had held any information specifically relating to this question, we would have sought to apply the section 36
exemption to that material."

S.36 is the one where they can refuse to tell you stuff if it would inhibit the free and frank provision of advice and exchange of views or prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs.

Now, why would they need to mention s.36 if they are saying that they don't hold the info?

I'm beginning to suspect that NCC is going to pull the s.36 line in any case where internal memos, minutes etc are requested, they certainly did on my 'exemptions bingo' case. It is subject to the public interest test but as I've frequently remarked, NCC equates the 'public interest' to 'not being embarrassing to JoCo and his favoured ones'.

JoCo to Have a Word With Himself

2011-10-08T14:02:00.000+01:00

No, really. Cllr Jon Collins is going to have a meeting. With himself.

I can only presume it's all to do with the new 'strong leader' form of executive governance we've got along with the new constitution for the council. This allows Collins, as the aforementioned 'strong leader' to decide key decisions by himself if he feels like it whereas before they would always be made by the Executive Board.

Because as you can imagine, Executive Board was totally a hotbed of unpredictability and rebellion before and you could never get anything done.

Let's hope he makes it on time...

Newstead Abbey Placed on 'Watch' By Heritage Group

2011-10-07T19:27:00.000+01:00

Newstead Abbey features in the 2012 'Watch' list of threatened heritage sites compiled by the World Monuments Fund.

Despite its location in NottinghamSHIRE, Newstead Abbey is owned and run by the City Council after having been covenanted to it's forerunner the Corporation of Nottingham by the previous owner Sir Julian Cahn in 1931. Its stewardship was recently criticised following a major cut in opening hours due to budget cuts, which also resulted in the loss of a number of jobs.

WMF say -

"Newstead Abbey has suffered significant deterioration, and a strategy for its conservation and long-term maintenance is greatly needed. Restoration and renewed interpretation would benefit the local community and other visitors and could reinforce the historical connections to one of the world’s greatest poets."

Newstead has also been on the English Heritage 'Buildings at Risk' register since 1998 and there is a £1.35m restoration plan in place which appears to be making slow progress, especially considering how long concerns have been raised for.

The reduced opening hours will surely mean loss of interest in the Abbey by the public which will hardly increase the chances of success in the appeal for funds. I doubt it's what Sir Julian intended when he gave the abbey to the city either.

Hat tip - Nottstalgia forums

NCC Plays FoI Exemption Bingo

2011-10-04T15:30:00.001+01:00

Back to my FoI request on the housing allocations scandal which I briefly discussed here.

You may remember that NCC initially claimed my request was vexatious, calling me obsessive and other unpleasant things. I challenged that and they came up with an entirely new set of reasons why I could only have a little bit of information. That was about as far as I got round to writing last time, citing laziness and a desire to get my next challenge in before blogging about it.

Well, the Information Commissioner kindly said I didn't need to send a completely new application in but obviously I needed to provide revised grounds to challenge the revised reasons why I can't be told anything. It took me about four days but these grounds are here and I have sent them winging their way to the ICO. Have a read of them if you like but be prepared for long-winded dreariness. It had to be like that for reasons I will now explain.

Basically, NCC appears to have attempted to cram in as many exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act as possible. Let me list them for you now;

Section 12 where the costs of gathering the information exceed a statutory limit

Section 30(1)(a) concerning investigations by public authorities

Section 31(1)(a), (b) and (h), all concerning law enforcement

Section 36(2)(b)(i) exempting information that could 'inhibit the free and frank provision of advice'. They had to get a 'qualified person' to decide that one you know

and finally, section 42, that exempts information that is covered by legal professional privilege, basically confidential lawyers' advice.

Remember, all that is AFTER they had originally relied on section 14, vexatious requests, which they then abandoned without any explanation after I had spent a significant amount of time preparing a challenge against it.

Now let's have a look at some of the stuff that they did tell me. Here's an interesting admission -

"For information, I can confirm that a meeting was requested with Councillor Collins however Nottinghamshire Police did not indicate the purpose of the meeting. Once it was established that the meeting related to housing allocations it was passed to Glen O’Connell to progress and Councillor Collins had no further involvement with
Nottinghamshire Police over the issue."

They don't give any date for this but it would be interesting to know if it was around the time that JoCo took over the Chair of Notts Police Authority.

Another suspicious looking snippet came from Chief Constable Julia Hodson in an email to Jane Todd -

"As a result I think that our communications people need to get together to mitigate the risks around the publication of the outcome."

NCCLols Translation Service; "We'd better get our story straight before the shit hits the fan".

Also, check out the significant redactions of that email. No explanation was given for that which is a breach of the duty to provide a proper refusal notice.

That's about it really. There are a couple more emails about meetings but nothing with any substance in them and one of them containing further unexplained redactions. In other words they told me nothing.

Still, the substantial issues are now before the ICO and NCC cannot be assured of their exemptions being supported. Whatever happens I suspect this case will go on to the Information Tribunal because I very much doubt that NCC would agree to release the info if the ICO supports any part of my case.

Not 'Vexatious' After All (But We Can't Bring Ourselves to Say It Out Loud)

2011-09-25T22:57:00.000+01:00

Remember a little while back I had a couple of FoI requests refused on the grounds that they were vexatious? I got round one of them by getting the information elsewhere but the other ended up going to the Information Commissioner because NCC failed to deal with my request for a review. Which is so unlike them.

However, they have now responded (about 3 months late mind). It's quite interesting.

First thing to notice is that, despite the fact that my original request was clearly refused on the grounds of being vexatious, they seem to have forgotten about it by the time of the latest response. All they say is that they have failed in their duty under s.10(3) of the Act which, as far as I can tell is the provision that allows them to go beyond the normal 20 days for a full response if they are considering public interest arguments under a possible exemption.

This wasn't the situation at all. They refused on the grounds that my request was vexatious (although their reasons clearly showed that in fact, what they meant was that it was ME that is vexatious rather than the request which isn't allowed). This is an absolute exemption so there would be no need to consider the public interest.

It seems that NCC couldn't bring themselves to actually admit in writing that my request was not vexatious and that they were wrong to say that it was. Which is pretty pathetic really. Almost as pathetic as their rather obvious tactic of delaying responses by not dealing with requests properly until the Information Commissioner gets involved.

I'll be writing a separate post about the actual content of the response because a) I can't be arsed to deal with it right now and b) I need to consider how I'm going to challenge it first.

NCC Brings in ATOS Style 'Independent' Assessment for Disability Bus Passes (And Sneaks In Some Cuts to Eligibility)

2011-09-23T19:11:00.001+01:00

People with certain disabilities are entitled to a Mobility Citycard which gives you free travel on buses and trams. This is part of the national scheme plus local discretion to include travel at peak times. If you get the higher rate of the Mobility Component of Disability Living Allowance you can apply without getting your GP to sign a declaration, if not you have to bother your doctor.

NCC has decided to change this though and has now decided to commission 'independent' assessment of disability by a private company. This is expected to cost the Council £480k over three years.

Such a tactic has echoes of national policy in that examinations for Employment Support Allowance are carried out by ATOS, a private company who has come up against considerable criticism.

The rhetoric involved is not too dissimilar as well. The Portfolio Holder decision (in the name of Jon Collins so don't expect him to have had any input into it or to know anything about it) justifies the cost on the basis that the move is likely to result in drop in eligibility of 15%, meaning a saving of £710k over the time of the contract. In other words, disabled people are swinging the lead and only the free market can save us. Sound familiar?

Another similarity is that there is a reduction in the eligibility rules being snuck in as part of the new arrangements. Disabled users will no longer get free travel in peak times, i.e. before 9.30am or after 11pm so those who have a job and/or a social life can obviously go and whistle. In addition, some disabled people will lose their right to have a companion travel with them. This is justified on the basis that the Mobility Component for DLA includes a payment for this. Except of course it doesn't really.

It's quite likely that it is these reductions in eligibility that will result in the expected savings rather than the use of the 'independent' assessor so why not ditch that and keep some of the eligibility?

Oh and the final comedy moment - Cllr 'Calamity' Jane Urquhart has disclosed that her own GP works for the appointed company, called 'Fit4Work' (can't find any definite info on these, mainly because 'Fit4work' is such an unimaginative name for a company involved in medical assessments that there's loads with that name). As such, to avoid any possibility of a conflict of interest she avoided taking the decision herself and gave it to JoCo, a well known safe pair of hands. Apparently they already do the Blue Badge stuff.

Baubles to You!

2011-09-21T19:12:00.002+01:00

You might remember that last Christmas Nottingham City Council rented a big tree for Loxley House.

This was criticised by some due to the cost when people were losing their jobs. According to the Post's story at the time the tree cost £5k but this was offset by "...just over £1,000" in sponsorship with NCC aiming to cover the whole cost from sponsorship.

Unfortunately it a recent FoI response confirmed, as many suspected, that it didn't quite turn out that way.

Yes the tree cost £5k but the sponsorship raised turned out to be, well, only £550, rather than the above claim of just over £1000. It also turns out -

"...that in all cases, sponsorship/ donations were for the purposes of providing Christmas presents for needy children."

So. In fact NO sponsorship was raised to pay for the tree at all, it all went to the kiddies. Maybe the Post misunderstood?*

Addendum - Oh and look what JoCo said on Twitter when challenged back in July -

Maybe his tweet was "prepared by professional officers" like with his portfolio decisions...

*Probably not

(Hat tip - Sam Dixon)

NCC Finally Completes the Full Circle in Social Work Leadership

2011-09-11T19:05:00.000+01:00

Back in the day most councils had a 'Director of Social Service' in charge of a 'social services' department.

This department would be responsible for services to both adults and children, so adoptions, child protection, adult mental health, meals on wheels and all those myriad services were under one roof, with one Director in charge of them all.

Then the tragedy of Victoria Climbie's murder happened.

This resulted in a number of changes to the structure of social services including the separation of services for adults and children as part of the 'Every Child Matters' initiative, as it was felt that children were getting a poorer service by being lumped in with adults. As a result most councils ended up with an Adult Services and a Children's Services department with a Director atop each (Or 'Corporate Director' as they are called at NCC). Education was absorbed into Children's Services departments, as was always intended to ensure integration of the most important services for children and generally, following the hiving off of housing provision to ALMOs or sold off together, the rump of housing services tended to be absorbed into the Adults Services departments. As a result there generally wasn't an increase in the number of senior managers which of course is expensive and generally politically unpopular.

That's the sort of potted general background, now back to the more specific issues at NCC.

Anyway, as you know NCC has made quite a lot of cuts in recent years and fair enough, they reached as high as the Directors as well as the foot soldiers. As I wrote about at the time, Adult Services was absorbed into the Communities department and the Corporate Director for Adult Services took voluntary redundancy. This caused a problem because Michael Williams, the Corporate Director for Communities at the time, did not have any background in social work. A second tier Director post reporting to him was cobbled together to do the actual work but a further issue that this didn't deal with was that there is a statutory requirement to have a (Corporate) Director of Adult Services of the same seniority as the chief officer for Children's Services and, nominally at least, this was Williams.

This was allegedly fine until Williams retired and his temporary replacement wasn't able or willing to take the adult services role on. The solution was to appoint another Adults Services Chief Officer, at least temporarily, less than a year after the post was deleted. Good planning this was not.

Anyway, now things have moved on again because the Appointments and Conditions of Services Committee has considered a report recommending that the Adult Services chief officer role be passed to the Corporate Director for Children's Services. This apparently ticks all the boxes legally and organisationally.

Except, of course for the fact that NCC now has a combined Chief Officer for both adults and children which was apparently a bad idea eight years ago. He also looks after education too which wasn't a responsibility of the old Social Services director.

So we've come full circle. Deja Vu. Something will presumably have to give, it remains to be seen what.

Now Nottingham City Homes Gets It in the Freedom of Info Neck

2011-08-27T02:03:00.001+01:00

A rather encouraging decision from the Information Rights Tribunal (the body to which you appeal if you are unhappy with a decision by the Information Commissioner) has come to my notice. It concerns Nottingham City Homes who, as I'm sure you all know, serves as the housing wing of Nottm City Council.

There are a couple of interesting aspects to this case. The applicant had asked for information about repair and improvement spend on two other properties in his block because he apparently suspected that was being denied repairs when others were being provided with them. It was initially claimed by NCH that such information was personal data because it concerned personal details of tenants. However, this was dismissed on the basis that there had been a number of different tenants at the property and so the information, if provided, wouldn't be necessarily linked to any one tenant.

The second interesting point was that the Information Commissioner found that the original request was 'vexatious', a fate that has befallen one of my own requests.

One of the reasons for this that was accepted by the Information Commissioner was that the applicant had used 'threatening and intimidating' language in his correspondence. The Tribunal prefers to describe it as 'intemperate' and says that -

"...experienced members of staff receiving such a letter would be unlikely to significantly concerned by its contents..."

In other words, get a bleedin' grip. It is quite offensive how large public authorities turn into fragile drama queens alleging 'harassment' when people understandably get upset and complain. It's encouraging that the Tribunal have a sense of proportion on this.

But perhaps the most important issue here is the Tribunal's disapproval of the way that the background to the dispute was taken into account when deciding the 'vexatious' issue.

Some background. It is an accepted principle that it must be the request for information itself that is vexatious, not the requester. On the other hand, caselaw has long accepted that the context of a request can and should be taken into account when deciding the vexatious issue.

Now there is clearly a very fine line between the two and you might argue that the two are contradictory. It can and does mean that campaigners can easily get caught up in the 'vexatious' quagmire.

Happily, this particular Tribunal has moved things a bit more favour of requesters (prior to this no appeals on vexatious requests had been accepted by the Information Tribunal) and said -

"The Tribunal is satisfied that in its response to the request for disclosure of information [NCH] has focused too much on the history of its relations with the Appellant and has not considered the request on its merits.'

Quite right too.

Community Protection Officers Up to No Good (Allegedly - In Part Anyway)

2011-08-21T02:32:00.000+01:00

I saw a report in the Telegraph about Met officers and staff being caught illegally accessing the Police National Computer for their own ends. It reminded me of something similar locally.

There have been two incidents reported locally (here and here) concerning Community Protection Officers being accused of rape. In one case the CPO was found guilty of using the PNC to find out if the woman had reported the attack, although he was found not guilty of the rape itself*. In the other case, it is reported that the CPO is accused of three rapes, two sexual assaults and 'misuse of computer systems'. I personally wonder whether this was again checking up for victims' reports. This second case has yet to be tried.

Notts Police has been in trouble for computer security before so you'd think that everything would be done to minimise risk. I can't for one minute see why CPOs would ever need access to the PNC so surely it would make sense to simply not give it to them?

As I say the second case has yet to go to full trial but if he is also found guilty questions need to be asked, and answered. As the Gunn case demonstrated, crooks who manage to get hold of police info find it easier to stay lucky. With rape cases having such low conviction rates anyway that's the last thing women need.

*Campaigners concerned with the low rate of convictions in rape trials, not to mention the woman concerned herself, might see this result as a bit of a kick in the teeth. Clearly I don't know all the facts etc but you have to wonder how a jury can see the accused man's denial of rape carrying greater credibility than the victim's accusation when they clearly found him dishonest enough to hack the PNC and then lie about it.

Riots # 4 - The NCH Tenancy Agreement and Eviction

2011-08-15T04:03:00.001+01:00

There has been a lot of political bluster by local politicians threatening fire and brimstone, in particular the threat of eviction for any council tenants found to be involved in the riots. Oh, and their parents, even though they may have had no idea what their kids were doing at the time and no reason to suspect they would be up to no good.

Some people have wondered whether this could actually happen so I've dug out what seems to be the latest NCH tenancy agreement. In addition I'm looking at this basic advice page* from Shelter.

The first stop is that if you are an introductory tenant, which the vast majority of council tenants will be for the first 12 months of their tenancy, you have pretty much diddley squat in terms of rights because you can be evicted without NCH having to demonstrate any grounds to do so.

Once you are a full secure tenant then the landlord does have to show grounds, although in many cases eviction isn't a foregone conclusion, a judge has to decide whether it is reasonable to evict you.

A key and often wide ranging ground is a breach of any term of the tenancy agreement. With the antisocial behaviour political juggarnaut having been steaming along for over a decade, tenancy agreements tend to have lots of things in them that could be applied to alleged rioters and their families. Scroll to para 3.12 (page 10) of the tenancy agreement for a read.

Para 1 makes it clear that NCH holds you responsible for anyone living at your home, any friends, visitors etc. So if the gas meter guy pops up and starts screaming racial abuse at the neighbours then theoretically...

In all seriousness, para 2 gets to the nitty gritty and forbids the tenant, others at the property etc causing a nuisance (ok, we expect that) or annoyance (what?) to anyone in Nottingham (whaaat!!!???).

There is more but as you can see there is enough there to catch anybody who is proven to have had any part in the riots.

As I say, proving a ground does not automatically mean you are evicted, the judge has to agree that it is reasonable. The key thing here then is to get advice and assistance asap if you find yourself in the middle of this shitstorm.

My own opinion is that dealing with crimes should normally be left for the criminal justice system and people should only lose their homes if they receive a prison sentence long enough to mean that their tenancy is no longer sustainable. Unfortunately, politicians are always looking for ways to look tough and they have an opportunity on a plate here. I suspect however that too much tough action against otherwise innocent family members will lead to a backlash, especially in Nottingham where the fairness of council house allocations has little credibility anyway.

*Note, don't take this article as legal advice, I've glossed over details and allsorts, my point is to demonstrate how the legal framework is well and truly in place for evictions of rioters and their families, although it isn't inevitable. If this happens to you, just make sure you get advice as soon as you can. You might want to try Notts Housing Advice as a first port of call or you can search for a solicitor here.

Notts Police Authority See No Evil etc

2011-08-14T16:53:00.000+01:00

Sorry to upset the current lovefest and hero worship for our wonderful police force following their apparently effective handling of the local riots and I suppose I should also apologise for again reviving the festering pustule that is the housing allocations scandal.

I thought I'd try a bit of a curveball in my attempts at getting hold of information about how aa bunch of NCC and NCH employees got away with nicking a load of council houses. So I sent a FoI request to Notts Police Authority (as opposed to Notts Police themselves, more on that in a bit) asking about any communications, meetings etc they'd had where the subject had come up.

After all, NPA's job is to monitor Notts Police's performance so if there were any doubts about their failure to look into the misappropriation of council houses you'd think that they'd have reason to discuss it wouldn't you? And that would pop up all sorts of difficult 'conflict of interest' questions for any NCC councillors also serving on NPA including, of course, its Chair.

Strangely, the Whatdotheyknow site got its wires crossed and initially sent my request to Notts Police itself. What could have been a slight irritation turned out to be quite interesting as their response confirmed that they held such information but refused it on the grounds of an exemption under s.30 FoIA, investigations into crime. They said the information had been previously requested and refused and the matter was currently before the Information Commissioner.

The thing is, I understood that the justification for Notts Police letting NCC investigate the matter themselves was that there was, in their opinion, no evidence of a crime. Furthermore, this is a 'qualified' exemption i.e. the public interest must be considered. This is one to watch therefore.

Anyway, back to Notts Police Authority.

Their response was that they did NOT hold any information related to the housing allocations scandal. In other words, NPA has never discussed Notts Police's decision not to investigate the matter itself, no meetings have been held to discuss it and, most amusingly, no NPA members have had any contact with police or council officers to discuss it.

I find that one a bit difficult to believe meself. Might have to follow it up.

So we have Nottingham City Council and Notts Police doing everything they can to cover up what happened and now the Police Authority seem to be playing the see/hear/say no evil thing. Not good.

PS If you are the person who submitted the FoI request to Notts Police mentioned above, please do get in touch and let me know how you are getting on.

Riots # 3

2011-08-13T03:16:00.001+01:00

One of the surprising things about the Nottingham Riots is that I haven't seen a single word of criticism about the way Notts police handled things. In fact everything I have read points to them dealing with matters pretty much as you would hope they would.

Also refreshingly we don't appear to have had any of the ridiculously over the top sentencing for what are often minor offences so far. A judge has thrown himself into the verbal attacks on those before him but you kind of expect that these days.

What a good job therefore that we can rely on fucking idiots like Jon Collins vigourously wanking themselves into a frenzy of frothy revenge fantasy in order to keep up appearances. This is the lying bastard who has done everything possible to protect the crooks who stole Nottingham's council houses as well as looting taxpayers' funds to pay his consultant mates £100,000s with no lawful authority*.

Stinking hypocrite, it's people like that who should be up in front of the beak.

*And Collins, if you're reading this, remember that if you sue me you'll have to produce the evidence that Tinworth was lawfully engaged which your officers have been unable to do so far. And we both know that the last thing you want is a court looking into the housing allocations scandal.

Good News!

2011-08-13T00:55:00.000+01:00

No really! And it's about freedom of information too! Not shitting you I PROMISE!!!

Anyway, via a slightly bizarre route*, I have received confirmation that NCC is planning on publishing all its FoI responses on its website.

This is an excellent development and, not only will it increase openness, it will hopefully reduce information governance staff workloads a bit too. So they'll have more time to answer all those extra FoI requests we've all got saved up! (only joking).

But yes, good stuff, lets keep it up and all that and I hope it works ok.

*I originally asked about this on the questions for full council bit of the website because, naively perhaps, I thought it was a policy issue that the politicians would have to decide. I was a bit confused when it got shunted off to FoI. Not least because I wasn't accused of being vexatious...

Riots and Hypocrisy Part 2

2011-08-11T18:55:00.000+01:00

After my last post it occurred to me that I was concentrating entirely on the hypocrisy of the rich and powerful. It might be worth remembering that such double vision is rife among other social classes as well.

Over the last couple of days I've been talking to a former Nottingham resident in his mid 40s. He's been condemning the rioters in florid terms with a tasty bit of racism thrown in. Sending people back on the 'banana boat' was one of his solutions.

Thing is, this person used to work for Nottingham City Council's street cleansing department. He has repeatedly and proudly regaled me of all the things he'd nicked from the stores during his time there, in fact he's shown me a few of the goodies as well. He tells me that it's rife and tolerated by management, although this could simply be to try and claim some legitimacy for his actions.

Obviously I can't identify him and it's perhaps worth saying that he's not the sharpest tool in the box so it might be asking a bit much to expect him to see any connection between robbing taxpayers in this way and those who loot shops. Certainly he sees no problem with telling me, a Nottingham council tax payer in years past, about his escapades despite directly contributing to my taxes increasing.

Of course he's not alone. It quite likely is rife at NCC. I suspect if you challenged any of those doing it they would respond with tales of how management treat them badly (and if it were a worker in the Woolsthorpe depot they'd have a point), poor pay etc. These are valid issues. Looking wider how many of the rest of use are quite happy to justify our own casual lawbreaking? Speeding kills children but anybody caught is full of righteous indignation about how the police should concentrate on 'real criminals'. I've sat in pubs while blokes come in selling knock-off cigarettes which deprives the exchequer of much needed taxes. I've argued online on photography forums with a serving police officer justifying his use of overseas ebay sellers which falsely mark £1500 lens packages with 'no commercial value' in order to avoid import duties. This is a key selling point of these merchants, they even offer a guarantee that if you are clobbered with duties they will refund them, confident that Customs and Excise only have the resources to check a tiny minority of packages.

Think about the levels of hypocrisy on that last one. A publicly employed law enforcement official using a service which illegally deprives the UK government of taxes and helps to put UK companies out of business.

The fact is that society is riddled with 'respectable' crimes, crimes that aren't 'real crimes', crimes that 'don't really matter' and that we 'shouldn't worry about'. We're all guilty of it. Yet we all excuse it when it's us that do it.

Of course when it's 'them', 'over there', those who aren't 'one of us' it's different, out come the pitchforks. Some of the magistrates salivating over 'making an example' of the recent troublemakers would do well to subject themselves to close examination of their own lifestyles and bear them in mind before throwing away the key.

Riots

2011-08-10T23:14:00.002+01:00

So we got riots in Nottingham too. We can still kick it with the big boys eh? We're still nationally relevant aren't we?

Obviously I'm being ridiculously obtuse for comic effect. Or it would be comic effect if it was actually funny. I ummed and ahhed about writing about any of this because I really wasn't sure if I had anything useful to say. Time will tell I suppose.

The thing I've been asking myself is why did riots occur in Nottingham? It's not like the entire country has been engulfed in civil disorder, it seems to have been confined to a few urban areas, London obviously, Manchester/Salford and Birmingham as far as I know saw significant problems, although there was some less serious trouble in Leicester. Why these and not, say, Leeds or anywhere in Scotland or Wales.

An easy answer of course is poverty. The Guardian made an interesting map of the London riots against deprivation and there certainly appears to be some visual correlation there. Nottingham does have areas which are very much at the ~~upper~~ ~~lower~~ worse end of deprivation indices. It's also probably not controversial to suggest a certain 'copycat' element and of course, the reality is that individuals are making bad, selfish, destructive decisions about how to behave.

It's this latter element that the right wing tends to concentrate on in isolation whereas us lefties are duty bound to think about the first. I think there's more to it than that and it's important to remember that just because one explanation has merit doesn't mean that none of the others do. As a lefty I would never try to argue that a person in a hoody making his way into town and smashing his way into JDSports is entirely blameless and had no choice in what he was doing because it's poverty innit. Such a person is an individual and is capable of making his own decisions. However, context does, I believe have an impact in how often those decisions turn out to be bad but that context does not mean the individuals shouldn't be held to account.

Another crucial aspect of context is, I believe, the example set by authority. Again there is a certain amount of selectivity in how this is discussed by the right, concentrating almost exclusively on bad parenting, as if our parents are the only examples of behavioural standards in our lives. Of course this can be a factor and it's right to discuss that. But what is often forgotten, mainly because our politicians have an absolute vested interest in never acknowledging it in any way whatsoever, is the example set by those in power. I'm talking here about how politicians, police, judges, media bigwigs, councillors etc behave.

Things the British public have been expected to swallow uncomplainingly include MPs massively defrauding their expenses with only a tiny proportion held to account, bankers looting our financial system with barely a job lost, being bailed out by public funds and then going out and doing it again with bonuses back at boomtime levels. Meanwhile we're told that because of this bailout we have to endure years of austerity.

We have had to watch how the phone hacking scandal has unfolded after years of denial from the Metropolitan Police, now followed by numerous media figures arrested and a growing list of resignations and investigations into senior police officers.

Locally we have had to sit by as the Housing Allocations scandal has been covered up by local politicians who then feel able to threaten rioters (or their parents) with eviction*. There have been absolutely no evictions for illegally obtained council houses and one councillor publicly implicated was rewarded with a spell as Lord Mayor with the investigation into his behaviour strangely making no progress throughout his entire term of office and now extending way beyond the election. While our local police force appears to be dealing with the current disturbances well, they were entirely complicit in allowing NCC to cover up the housing scandal.

The Post has said the police are expecting an extra bill of £400k for the riots and this is clearly bad news but let's remember that they were happy to shell out £700k on a doomed and corrupt operation to stop a protest at Ratcliffe power station. A fine example to us all.

I understand of course that, just as we were all told by our teachers when we were very small, two wrongs don't make a right. But if you constantly see these powerful people constantly getting away with allsorts, while you can't get a council house and maybe got beaten up by the police at a demo recently, you may not feel as committed to the high minded principles of law and order and responsibilities for your actions as you once did. Multiply this up to a societal level and the chances of a breakdown of law and order is bound to increase as more people think 'why bother?'

So yes, of course those individuals have individual responsibility for their actions down at JDSports but our politicians and other people of power need to get their own houses in order and accept their responsibility for creating this context. I would at least then feel a bit more enthusiastic and supportive of the calls for condemnation that are being parrotted robotically by our politicians at the moment.

*Addendum - they have also issued calls for private landlords to evict people as well.

Cunning Stunt

2011-08-03T21:01:00.000+01:00

You might guess from the title that I'm not a particularly happy blogger. And if you'd guessed 'Freedom of Information' you'd be spot on but I don't think that deserves a prize.

This one goes back to the Radford Unity Complex affair. That's the one where a Nottingham Arts group were strangely offered a former school at around half its market value and the council's legal services forgot to take into account that there were a bunch of community groups based there who hadn't been consulted properly and hadn't been served a valid notice to quit. The arts group were represented by an agency called Artreach.

So, I thought it might be an idea to ask for details of all the negotiations between NCC and Artreach because it seemed a bit fishy that there should be such a rush to get this particular group into a former council property at the expense of a number of voluntary groups and at an apparent loss. And there was evidence of JoCo being involved too.

So, I made my request on 8 November 2010 and NCC acknowledged it the same day. Then silence until I requested an internal review on 8 December 2010. This was acknowledged the next day and that was the last time I heard from them until today.

In the meantime I sent numerous chase-ups, the ICO wrote on 9 March 2011 instructing NCC to reply within 10 days which was ignored. By that I mean that the ICO told me clearly that NCC did not respond to any of their letters and chase-ups. Despite this it took until 28 July for the ICO to issue a decision notice which, because NCC had not provided any response at all, could only be framed with reference to s.10 of the FoIA i.e. the time limits for a reply.

Now, give it 5 days and suddenly NCC provides a response. After over 8 months. Here is the reply they sent.

As you can see, they have refused to provide the information under s.43(2) FoIA i.e. that its release could damage the council's commercial interests. The effect of this is that I am back at square one with regards to challenging the refusal because the ICO decision notice couldn't deal with s.43(2) because they obviously had no idea NCC would rely on it. I thought I was cynical but I have to admit I didn't see that one coming.

Now I was recently accused by a commenter of being a 'conspiracy theorist' so if he's still around I suggest he sits up and pays attention. Because I am extremely suspicious of a public authority ignoring a FoI request for 8 months, 7 months longer than the time limit for a reply, then, 5 days after the decision notice arrives, issuing a refusal notice on the grounds of an exemption.

Now why would they do that? Surely it would have been sensible to issue the refusal notice a bit sooner, keep the ICO informed of what was going on and then any appeal I make to the ICO could have included arguments around the exemption relied on. The only 'good' answer to this is that it took Legal Services all this time to draw up the grounds for refusal which, bearing in mind how they dealt with the RUC issues, isn't totally unbelievable.

The thing is, there is no actual time limit in the legislation for dealing with internal reviews. Guidance says 20 working days (as does NCC's own procedure) but a quick leaf through Whatdotheyknow.com website's NCC pages reveals that this is rarely complied with. So I have to sit and wait for NCC to do an internal review (which I have requested natch) and, presuming a refusal, go to the Information Commissioner again. Worse still, if NCC simply ignores my review request, the ICO is likely to simply 'instruct' NCC to provide a reply within 20 working days and it's a hell of a battle to get them to take such cases seriously. Essentially, we're probably looking at at least as long again before we get a result and that depends on the ICO finding in my favour which can't be relied on.

I'm sorry but is there anybody reading this who doesn't think this was deliberate? A particularly dishonest ruse to stop or seriously delay a matter that might embarrass JoCo and others reaching the public domain? All this delay being a mistake? Bollocks on stilts.

Sometimes, Sorry Is The Hardest Word...

2011-07-26T16:07:00.000+01:00

A mixture of *facepalm* and sympathy for a particular Information Governance worker today.

NCC's latest solution to its inability/unwillingness to respond to FoI requests is to send apology letters to all those cases still waiting on the Whatdotheyknow website. At time of writing 12 had been sent out.

Not sure that's the best use of a chap's morning but that's for his manager to decide.Wonder how many of these are down to being held up by the Comms team due to the non PR friendly nature of the answer.

Two of the letters have gone out to me but they forgot the one where I've been waiting 8 1/2 months for any response at all. The ICO told me that decision notice is going out on this on this week. If it's still ignored it's contempt of court time.

Gor Bless Ya Ma'am

2011-07-24T17:52:00.000+01:00

Turns out that Cllrs Chapman, James and Unczur approved a grant of £600 for a Royal Wedding street party on the date of the royal nuptials back in April.

What a load of old bollocks.

Can't see why a grant for a party in April wasn't approved* until July. Must have been a bit risky going ahead without knowing you could pay for it but there you go.

*Officially approved anyway

Is the Enemy of My Enemy My Friend?

2011-07-24T16:07:00.000+01:00

No, is the short answer.

One of the problems with writing critically about the public sector, especially an element of the public sector that happens to be a Labour administration, is that you can end up attracting the attentions of and being linked to a range of rightist wingnuts.

Examples I've had include being followed by Grant Schapps on Twitter, my Freedom of Info trials and tribulations being featured by the Taxpayers Alliance (I'm not linking) and finding myself uncomfortably close to Eric Pickles' views on NCC's (lack of) transparency. However, my views on Eric Pickles are in fact much closer to JoCo's i.e. he's a pie faced buffoon.

The TPA is particularly opportunistic and hypocritical because, although JoCo has repeatedly exaggerated the costs of FoI, it's a fact that openness does come at an extra cost, not something the TPA is known to be in favour of. They get round this by claiming to be 'transparency campaigners' but they're particularly selective on that front. For example, we haven't heard much from them about the government and Prime Minister's links with the Murdoch empire. There are several million other ways in which they are full of shit but space is tight.

For that reason I should perhaps let people know that I write from a left/liberal point of view and I am very much in favour of and believe in a strong public sector. If you're looking for an ally for your market based pro private sector 'solutions' you won't find one in me. On the other hand I'm passionately against abuse of power in any form, wherever it may be.

The flipside of having a strong belief in the public sector is that I get very unhappy when I see it being abused and that's my motivation for writing the blog. I'm not really that interested in the fact that NCC is nominally a Labour council and I do in fact support a number of its policies, particularly those around transport. My criticisms tend to be organisational rather than policy based and, unfortunately, organisations that claim to be of the left tend to be just as susceptible to such problems as those of the right.

You're Not Interested in That Are You?

2011-07-21T17:33:00.000+01:00

There's been a slight re-arrangement of NCC's website, specifically index. Here it is

There used to be an item in there called 'Council and Democracy' which was where you'd find all the various meeting minutes and agendas, the constitution etc. Basically, the stuff that 75% of this blog is based on and of interest to anyone who wants to take a bit more interest in what goes on at the council than just what day your bins are emptied.

So, why has it been taken off the front page? Is NCC getting a bit less keen on citizens taking an active interest on what their local taxes are spent on?

Framework's Judicial Review of City's Supporting People Cuts Failed

2011-07-14T03:50:00.003+01:00

One from earlier in the year that I missed. Can't really find anything in local media and blogs either except in the NCH Bulletin.

It seems that Framework Housing's application to have NCC's Supporting People cuts Judicially Reviewed was refused back in March, according to an article in 'Inside Housing'.

It's not overly surprising, judicial reviews of governmental policy decisions, both local and national, are somewhat hit and miss but what is interesting is IH's reporting that correspondence between JoCo and DCLG "...indicated that the city’s formula grant allocation for the coming year includes at least £19.8 million for Supporting People..." whereas NCC cut its SP budget by 45% to £12.4m.

That £19.8m figure appears to have come from this letter from Grant Schapps to JoCo sent in January. The thing is that 'Supporting People' no longer has a ring fenced amount provided by central government. It was decided to roll SP into the overall 'Formula Grant' from this year (a decision actually made by the previous Labour administration) meaning that councils can more or less spend it as they see fit. This is probably why the JR action was refused; it was a local decision as to how to allocate formula grant to SP and other services and NCC's decision was not considered to breach the limits of 'rationality'.

I've touched on this before but as JoCo is still going about the place saying that it was the Tory Government that cut SP by 45% not NCC, it perhaps bears repeating. The Tory government axed NCC's overall 'spending power', a new measure which includes contributions to NHS and other services and thus probably disguises the true extent of cuts, by 8.9%. NCC calculates that this is equivalent to a cut to the actual council of 16.5%. Lets make no mistake this was an appalling and unjustified cut and we must continue to challenge it.

However, it was NCC that decided to disproportionately cut Supporting People by 45% rather than apply a proportional cut of 16.5% (or less for that matter), while at the same time protecting funding for Community Protection Officers (waste of space and a remnant of Labour's authority wank) and children's centres (more justifiable). We must all continue to challenge this with equal determination and Collins could do us all a favour and come clean.

I Remember It Well..

2011-07-13T02:01:00.000+01:00

Many readers will have happy memories of sitting around for hours at this location, wondering what had happened to their benefit claim.

This is where the Housing Benefit offices used to be

...whereas now there's just a great big hole.

Some might suggest that's all it ever was, a big hole for losing housing benefits applications in. Such people are obviously bitter and twisted and have no place on a blog like this. Oh no.

If you're wondering what they did wth the management, here's another shot, this time giving you a clear view of the passage they used to report their works to Satan...

...I'm not sure they've been seen for a while.

How Much Does Freedom of Information Cost?

2011-07-08T15:38:00.000+01:00

Back to JoCo on Twitter again for the latest in his campaign to discredit Freedom of Information.

Firstly, he told the Save Supporting People campaign that FoI costs NCC £500k pa and that you 'could save a lot of services with that'.

Ignoring the fact that you probably couldn't save 'a lot' of services with £500k, maybe one or two perhaps, it does seem strange that NCC is spending the equivalent of five housing scandal 'investigations' just on Freedom of Information.

Especially seeing as a report to the Overview and Scrutiny Committee last year said that at full strength (at the time there were two posts open), the whole Information Governance service had a compliment of SEVEN staff. And they have to deal with Data Protection as well.

Even allowing for 'on-costs' that suggests that the average salary in Info Gov is around £58k. Don't tell the Daily Mail.

What Does He Mean?

2011-07-08T15:05:00.000+01:00

JoCo is behaving a little strangely on Twitter atm. If I didn't know that he was a man of impeccable integrity I'd be wondering if he was hinting at something. It started with this -

then...

Somebody then asked him what he was on about...

to which he replied...

Well, that's cleared that up then!

Jon Collins Receives the News that the Post Has Defied Him

2011-07-07T14:31:00.002+01:00

Yes, we've done a 'Downfall' parody at long last. See the previous post if you want the background. It is a bit sweary though so prob best not to watch it at work.

Now all there is to do is wait for the trained idiots to write in with their 'outrage' at me comparing Collins to Adolf, like an internet meme never happened.

JoCo Parks His Tanks on the Post's Lawn

2011-07-06T16:36:00.001+01:00

It seems that Collins was a bit rattled by the Post's recent reporting of his apparent refusal to let NCC's Information Governance staff search his emails for a FoI request. So rattled in fact that he's made a subject access request to the Post asking for any information they hold on him and written a blog post about it.

JoCo says -

"I believe this was misleading since all my Council e-mails are covered by the act..."

Well yes, we know that but stating that the emails are covered by the FoI Act doesn't explain why the Post's article was misleading. Information being covered by the Act is not necessarily inconsistent with a public authority withholding that information; it just means that the authority is in breach of the Act. Is JoCo saying that he didn't try and stop his emails being searched and that the Post was lying or had made a mistake? Perhaps he'll be going to the Press Complaints Commission about it?

He goes onto claim -

"... the Council has spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of City tax-payers money providing this information to the Nottingham Post."

Ah, the oft claimed NCC Freedom of Info victim status makes an appearance. Except of course NCC hasn't spent hundreds of thousands of ponds on providing JoCo's emails to the Post, he's referring to the total spend of NCC's FoI obligations. A sum inflated by NCC's often unjustified attempt to avoid disclosure requiring unnecessary and time-consuming trips to the Information Commissioner.

Cllr Collins of course has as much right to make a request for information under the Data Protection Act as any other citizen and the Post of course has a duty to treat his request in the same way it would treat a request by anybody else. In the event, the Post has refused his request under s.32 of the Data Protection Act, an exemption to disclosure rights for information that has been processed for journalistic purposes. JoCo says this is hypocritical.

But is it? Well it is conceivable that SOME of the information the Post has on JoCo isn't necessarily connected with its journalism . Furthermore, JoCo rightly points out that there is a public interest consideration for this exemption. JoCo presumably considers that there is no public interest in not providing the information to him. He would therefore be entirely justified with pursuing a complaint to the Information Commissioner.

I have to admit that Data Protection is not my strong point but you can see why there is an exemption for journalistic purposes, even though I can understand that it would be frustrating for an individual affected. Journalists need to protect their sources and people may be less willing to help journalists if they know that the subject of an investigation will see a copy of any info they provide. Even if any personal details are redacted it may well be possible to identify a whistleblower from the nature of the information concerned. I'm sure journalists could come up with a number of other reasons. Some of the info held may also be wrong and providing it to the data subject may open a journalistic source to a defamation claim. Again, the risk of this may well cause sources to dry up.

Furthermore, it seems clear that JoCo is only making the request to make a point (more on possible motivations in a bit) which hardly assists his public interest arguments. You might even see a parallel with the 'vexatious' request provisions in the FoIA, although there isn't an equivalent provision in data protection as far as I know.

But what if that isn't his motivation and he is in fact trying to find out who's been dobbing him in at the council? What would that say about his respect for journalists' responsibility to protect sources? I've left a comment on his blog post asking that very point and it will be interesting to see if a) he publishes it (it was subject to moderation last time I looked and I wouldn't be surprised if it stayed there, JoCo has form on that) and b) if he answers it. I'll update if he does.

Update - 10.30pm and my comment on JoCo's blogpost is STILL awaiting moderation

Housing Benefit Expenditure

2011-07-04T15:06:00.001+01:00

It's not one of mine (because that would be 'vexatious' and we can't have that can we?) but there's an interesting FoI response on the 'What Do They Know' website about Housing Benefit expenditure.

The reply gives us the figures for actual expenditure on Housing Benefit and the number of claimants for the last three financial years. Expenditure has increased from £105,437,333 for 2008/9 to £125,973,607 in 2010/11, an increase of just under 20%. It's not a particularly meaningful comparison but to put that in context if expenditure had increase purely by the rate of inflation it would have increased to £109,654,826.

Furthermore, and partly in explanation for the above inflation increase in expenditure, the number of claimants rose from 30,465 to 34,085, an increase of about 11%. This means average annual expenditure per claimant has risen from £3461 to £3695, whereas by inflation alone it would have been £3599.

It's not clear what conclusions we can draw from this. I certainly don't think it is fair to blame NCC, in fact it's more arguable that NCC and the various advice agencies have been successful in increasing awareness of HB entitlement in Nottingham which is a good thing. I also don't feel safe in drawing any conclusions about rent levels due to the complex way in which HB is calculated, other variables include government set 'applicable amounts' (a kind of income threshold above which HB entitlement starts to reduce) and of course people's incomes.

I do feel on stronger ground in guessing that the figures are hardly consistent with a booming and expanding Nottingham economy. "No shit Sherlock", I hear you cry and you'd be right; it's no secret that the economy is in the shit pit and has been over the period covered by the figures. And despite NCC's tendency to claim the credit for any inward investment or other economy boosting measures in the city, government in the UK is highly centralised and I don't really think councils really have that much power to buck the national trend.

Paul Dacre is a Cunt (off Topic Post of the Week)

2011-06-30T01:24:00.001+01:00

Paul Dacre is the editor of the Daily Mail 'newspaper'. That on its own is enough to condemn him as a cunt.

However, it appears that the Mail's lawyers have taken to threatening bloggers for 'defamation' when in fact no such thing is happening. In fact, I think this makes it reasonable to label him a dickhead as well. Although, the fact that he is doing so by threatening the web-hosts rather than the author, who obviously have no interest whatsoever in not caving, pushes him more back to 'cunt' territory.

It's a bit like when NCC sent me a letter telling me to stop being nasty, although even they had the decency to contact me direct and weren't quite stupid enough to claim defamation.

So, in my humble opinion, Paul Dacre is a cunt and a dickhead. I look forward to hearing from Google.

Addendum; and he allows stuff like this crass nonsense into his paper

(Probably) My Last Word on CEHRNN

2011-06-28T23:54:00.002+01:00

I've written quite a bit about the withdrawal of Council for Equality and Human Rights Nottm & Notts' funding already. However, following NCC's reluctant compliance with a long-running FoI dispute, there are a few last little details to fill in.

There is another whole story behind this request which I may write about in the future, if you're very good boys and girls, but I finally got hold of the portfolio holder's decision, made by Cllr Chapman and then Cllr Hassan Ahmed to withdraw CEHRNN's funding at a stroke, becoming heroes of the EDL in the process. This decision had previously been kept secret and was only provided after NCC ignored my FoI request for nearly nine months. And it's probably no co-incidence that CEHRNN has closed in the meantime.

Anyway, one thing that the decision document confirms is that NCC considered that ALL wards would be affected. As such the matter should not have been eligible to be decided by a portfolio decision, according to NCC's constitution. Still, nobody gives a fuck about such things do they? Certainly not the opposition councillors at the time anyway.

The next item of interest is that the supporting report demonstrates that NCC knew that they were legally obliged to carry out an equalities impact assessment of any decision to reduce funding to CEHRNN (para 8.2 of the supporting report). Yet that never happened. What NCC did was carry out an EIA on CEHRNN as they were operating before the decision to stop their funding, not of the funding decision itself. I discussed the dodgy use of EIAs in the debacle in more detail here.

So far therefore we have an inappropriate use of portfolio decisions (coincidentally these require no debate, not that there would have been at a full committee meeting mind you) and an effective failure to carry out a proper Equality Impact Assessment. That's a breach of NCC's constitution and an illegal omission so far.

It's probably fair to say that CEHRNN was an organisation with problems. However the report repeatedly remarks on the areas in which improvements had been made, before seeking to belittle those attempts e.g. -

"CEHRNN has been providing a service at an individual and grassroots level that has made a difference for some individual citizens and groups and targeted relevant local issues. However, despite interventions by officers, Board members and the Chief Executive challenging the circumstances, there are still clear indications that CEHRNN has not been able to prevent staffing problems from continuing"

and

"Although some work has been carried out to broaden Board representation, the Board is still predominately weighted towards race as is the membership of the organisation."

"Since the October 2009 review meeting the organisation has achieved some limited progress around staffing and governance issues - however there are still real concerns about the long term ability to deliver effectively against the SLA."

Furthermore, this was a key criticism -

"the organisation has effectively failed to move from a race focus to a broader equalities remit (as agreed in their SLA"

and yet one of the recommendations is as follows -

"The strategy proposes inviting bids from consortia as well as individual organisations, in recognition of the challenge of providing an all-encompassing equality and human rights service."

An acceptance that CEHRNN was set an impossible task? It was never a large organisation, the report mentions four full time posts. Certainly since they were only allocated the funding in December 2008, and this would most likely only have been payable from the beginning of the next financial year i.e. April 2009, it seems odd that the report notes that the above 'concerns' were being noted from May 2009. How quickly can an organisation be expected to solve all its problems?

Another interesting little corner of the EIA says the following -

"There were two similar examples [in the past] where organisations delivering equality related SLAs had experienced staffing or other difficulties. The learning from these examples had been that in these cases, stepping in early to remove funding if an organisation isn’t functioning properly is likely to be an appropriate step to minimise disruption if opportunities to address the issues have been given and the issues remain unresolved."

Does this mean that NCC believes that the need to dive in and remove funding at the first sign of trouble only applies to organisations 'delivering equality related SLAs'? I can say with certainty that there are countless grant aided organisations in Nottingham that have had appalling problems, including huge staffing issues, even embezzlement, yet NCC hasn't said a dicky bird. Frankly the issues that my old team within NCC were as bad as it can get, when I started there were four (out of 11) people off sick, all of whom returned strangely close to the 6 month limit for full pay with nobody raising an eyebrow. And I may even write a whole post about the team member who refused to provide a services for clients with learning disabilities. She's still there, my managers and HR wouldn't let me instigate disciplinary action despite her approach putting the council at risk of legal action. And I haven't even brought up my own Employment Tribunal. Oh, sorry...

So not only was CEHRNN treated in a different way to most grant aided organisations (which was arguably discriminatory due to such treatment only being applied to 'equalities' organisations), it's not as if NCC is in any kind of position to lecture any organisation on governance or staffing matters anyway, having acted illegally, unconstitutionally, in a discriminatory manner and being managed incompetently itself.

So, what has NCC managed to put in CEHRNN's place, seeing as this was a big focus of the report? Well they've given a pile of money to Nottingham Equal as we know. And they are supporting a new hate crime reporting initiative but that's it as far as I can see. Not a lot, especially as one of those is run by a ~~crook~~ former 'friend' of the council. What about measures to support people with disabilites or the LGBT community?

We'll have to wait and see I suppose but bearing in mind the cuts I suspect such groups will be left wanting. And the last thing NCC will want to do when it is cutting services to the disabled is to fund a voluntary group which might encourage service users to mount a legal challenge to those cuts.

Shedding Light on NCC's Hiding, sorry FREEDOM, of Information

2011-06-26T15:39:00.001+01:00

More good leaks obtained by the Post last week which gives a fairly illuminating insight into the way that NCC deals with Freedom of Information requests that it finds a bit inconvenient to deal with. Some of these details may explain some of the delays that I've been experiencing.

Firstly, the Post reports on Councillor Jon Collins acting in an uncharacteristically high-handed manner by refusing to let Information Governance staff search his emails in order to reply to an enquiry by former Cllr Tony Sutton concerning communications prior to the 2007 election.

Funnily enough, one of my FoI requests which has been outstanding for 8 months (and 3 months beyond a time limit set by the Information Commissioner's Office for a reply) is likely to involve some of JoCo's emails. I wonder if that's what's holding things up?

The second interesting thing that the Post has uncovered concerns the same request for info from Tony Sutton. It is alleged that NCC's Director of Communications, Stephen 'Pugwash' Barker pretended that certain documents requested were not held by the authority. Then, after Information Governance staff involved Monitoring Officer Glen O'Connell, who isn't exactly renowned for his anti-establishment views, Pugwash "...volunteered to the Council's Monitoring Officer" that he probably could find the documents after all.

Pugwash told the Post that the Info Governance officer, who had expressed concern that a criminal offence could have occurred, had "...a very partial understanding of these matters at the time..." and had "...hold of completely the wrong end of the stick." Yet it's clear from Barker's own quote that he only offered to find the documents to the Monitoring Officer. If Information Governance had 'got the wrong end of the stick', whay was it necessary for the Monitoring Officer to become involved?

We've noted before that Information Governance have to get responses signed off by the Communications Team i.e. Pugwash himself and we wondered allowed what would happen if the truth didn't reflect the required spin. Well, we might have a bit more of a clue to what the answer to that question is now. It certainly looks like Info Governance officers find themselves in a difficult position from time to time.

The upshot of this is that Barker has abused his position as Head of Communications to defend himself personally against a perfectly reasonable concern by an Info Governance officer doing his/her job, somewhat belittling that officer and undermining NCC's handling of FoI in the process. Barker's job is to present information on the council's behalf and is paid quite a lot of public money to do so.

The Council's code of conduct for employees (see p15 onwards of this document) requires officers to advise each other impartially. It also says that officers have the right to be treated with respect. I'm not sure how wrongly informing an Info Governance officer that documents are not held, then slagging off that officer in the press complies with these requirements.

Addendum; NCC is currently being monitored by the ICO. The monitoring period started beginning April and is due to end at the end of June. Whether anything comes out of that remains to be seen.

'Shadow' Mayors Not Happening After All

2011-06-21T21:55:00.000+01:00

The Localism Bill has been amended in the House of Lords to remove any mention of the proposal to impose elected mayors on 11 major UK cities, including Nottingham (see column 1142 of the debate) and with it the requirement for 'shadow mayors'.

The abandoned clause would have meant that JoCo would have been elevated to shadow mayor, meaning even greater powers. This will now no longer happen, which is a very good thing.

Collins is on record as being against elected mayors so he will presumably be pleased. My theory is that this is because he would face the choice of running for the job himself (once the shadowship had ended obv) or seeing most of his powers go to someone else. His failure to secure the nomination for the Nottingham East parliamentary seat suggests that he cannot bank on even getting Labour's support for anything beyond his little St Anns burrow, never mind ~~manipulate~~ persuade all of Nottingham to vote for him.

Workplace Parking Levy to Use Auto Number Plate Recognition

2011-06-18T05:02:00.000+01:00

Firstly, I should say that I support the principle of the workplace parking levy. I do believe that we need to reduce car use whenever possible and especially short journeys which cause the most environmental damage. This can really only be done by some form of 'green taxation' i.e a means to translate some of the external costs of car driving i.e. pollution etc into a financial cost to car users and the revenue from that used to invest in alternatives i.e. more public transport. In addition, it will be useful to be able to compare the effectiveness of WPL schemes compared to congestion charging and I suspect that this fact is a significant reason for the WPL to be still going ahead despite the change in government since the scheme was first approved.

However, I may have been naive but I had largely misunderstood how the scheme was to be operated. I presumed that businesses would apply for their car park license by saying how many spaces they had and a bloke from NCC would turn up with his tape measure and check. No, it's not as simple as that.

You see, the WPL Order set before parliament says that spaces provided for people visiting the premises but who don't work there or spaces for delivery vehicles and spaces used by blue badge holders aren't charged although must be declared for the license. Therefore employers are expected to work out how many parking spaces are provided for people who normally work there. Of course this has to be checked at some stage to ensure that employers don't suddenly sprout a huge number of disabled employees, or find that they need an awful lot of deliveries. And it seems that this checking is to be done by an ANPR equipped vehicle, which has just been ordered for the princely sum of £93k, including software.

I have concerns about ANPR, mainly around how the information is used and who it is passed onto. There are stories of it being used to identify protesters traveling by car to demos and it arguably requires proper authorisation under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. I can't see any mention of the use of ANPR in any of the documents on the WPL page of NCC's website (although I haven't read all of them I must admit) and it doesn't seem to have come up in the public enquiry or any of the consultation documents. If anybody knows where there is any previous discussion on this or has any info on compliance (or not) with RIPA please let me know in the comments.

And this is a big issue because as far as I can see the method of monitoring is to drive the ANPR car into the employers' car parks and record the registrations of all the cars parked there. This is done 8 times in a 28 day period and the data analysed to identify the regular parkers.

So unlike the normal use of ANPR which is to monitor car use on the roads, which are in fact highly regulated public spaces, and merely produce data identifying when a person momentarily passes a fixed point*, it will be used to monitor private spaces and will collect data which could establish where an individual spends an awful lot of their time or whether a person is disabled (which is actually sensitive data under the Data Protection Act and thus requires explicit permission to record).

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to work out a whole list of agencies who would dearly love to get their hands on this info from the police to the social security agencies. It really is a whole new order of surveillance.

*Yes, I realise that a network of ANPR can build up a detailed picture of a person's traveling habits but the fact remains that the roads are public and there are good reasons for regulating car use. I'm not saying there aren't valid objections, merely that routine surveillance by the state of private spaces where individuals are staying is a big step up.

Some More on Postal Votes

2011-06-12T22:48:00.000+01:00

I've written before about my suspicion of postal votes in Nottingham and, once the 2011 elections had gone by I tried to find out the figures for postal voting that time round. However my search for knowledge was stymied by my FoI request being deemed to be 'vexatious'.

Temporarily stymied that is because someone kindly sent me the figures anyway. They shall remain anonymous but they know who they are and they have my thanks. I should say that this person had the figures entirely legitimately and there is no reason why they couldn't pass them on to whoever they liked so no skullduggery has taken place. Oh and so as not to waste their time, as you can see I have contacted Information Governance at NCC and withdrawn my request for which they are no doubt very grateful.

So, I have tabulated the figures for postal voting from the last three elections (and yes, it took me bloody ages, thank you) and you can download the pdf here. I have included figures for the turnout, actual numbers of votes cast and number of registered voters and I have calculated the postal votes as percentages of both votes cast and registered voters.

First thing to note is that overall turnout increased significantly this time round, probably largely due to the referendum being held on the same day. As you also will be aware, Labour increased its majority again, including the total removal of any Lib Dem representation on the council. The figures show that postal voting increased again, in absolute numbers, the proportion of votes cast and as a proportion of the total electorate.

In the last three elections, the proportion of votes cast that were postal votes went from 19.2% in 2003, to 30.9% in 2007 and on to 32.7% in 2011. Expressed as a proportion of the total electorate the figures are 5.57%, 10.2% and 12.0%.This last increase is not as great in percentage terms as that between 2003-2007 but the rules on postal voting were relaxed during this period so that's when you'd expect the bigger jump.

According to a previous FoI the number of postal vote applications in April 2010 was 31,591. The number of postal votes cast in May 2011 was 23,986 which demonstrates clearly that those who applied for a postal vote were much more likely to actually get round to voting than those who chose to stick with voting in person, around 75% compared to 25% for non-postal voters. You'd perhaps expect this because, having made the effort to arrange the postal vote it would be daft not to use it. But it's still a pretty big gulf nonetheless.

I'm not sure how much a story we can derive from individual ward figures, although the two wards with the highest rate of postal voting as a proportion of votes cast happen to be Aspley and Bestwood (both 43.5%), homes to the Deputy Leader and the last two Lord Mayors respectively. St Ann's isn't far behind at 38.9% (JoCo's ward). However we should perhaps read more into the fact that such figures are partly down to low voting turn-out, especially in St Ann's. Compare these to the numbers in Wollaton West with its highest overall turn-out of 51.7%, postal vote rate of 27.2% of votes cast (relatively low) and 14.1% of the electorate (relatively high). And they elected Tories.

So the trend that made me suspicious before i.e. postal voting rates increasing with Labour's majority continues. However, the trend is not so pronounced this time round and it has to be said that in 2007 it was in the context of a nationwide drop in Labour support, whereas this time it seems pretty clear that Labour, in the East Midlands at least, has benefited from a protest vote against the coalition government. And as I said before, all this info could only ever be described as circumstantial evidence anyway.

Feel free to add your own theories in the comments.

Not About Nottingham...

2011-06-12T16:45:00.000+01:00

This is a brief post expressing solidarity to Welsh blogger Caebrwyn who writes a similar(ish) blog to mine but focusing on the trials and tribulations of Carmarthenshire Council.

Recently she attempted to film a public council meeting on her mobile phone. Predictably, officials told her to stop but she correctly pointed out that she was not doing anything wrong and continued. Police arrived and she was bundled away and locked up on spurious 'breach of the peace' grounds.

Outrageously, the police told her they would keep her in overnight if she didn't sign an undertaking not to film council meetings again. Understandably she decided to cut her losses and signed.

Caebrwyn is currently considering her legal options but I hope she takes both the police and the council to the cleaners.

Her blog posts about the incident can be found here and here. The story seems to be hitting the mainstream media as well.

The Continuing (and Repeating) Story of the Housing Allocations Scandal

2011-06-03T19:11:00.001+01:00

If you've been reading the Post over the last couple of days you'll have noticed that they are going with a 'drip drip' style run of articles about the housing allocations scandal.

Yesterday started with this article claiming that 'sports club members' were among those who benefited from a leg-up the housing queue. Having loftily stated that they weren't going to name the club concerned they brilliantly left the comments open (since removed) and within minutes it was full of jokes about 'West Indians' having a 'cavalier attitude' and similar. This article gives a few examples of cases that (allegedly, legal fans) happened. It includes the one where one of the properties was squatted and a group of blokes came round and violently evicted them, using a cricket bat among other weapons. This incident was reported on Indymedia back in 2006.

Today we have a nice description of a couple of cases that JoCo either got involved with, or didn't if you listen to ~~his personal lawyer~~ NCC Monitoring Officer Glen O'Connell. Because of course Collins himself refused to comment for fear of making a twat of himself like he did when the matter came up at a council meeting. Back then he called Tony Sutton a 'prat' and had to be calmed down by Graham Chapman in true "leave it Jon 'e's not worth it" style. That's the Leader of NCC calling an opposition councillor a 'prat', statesmanlike demeanor fans, in flagrant breach of the councillors' code of conduct.

Interestingly, and it may just be a coincidence, last week there was a big PR push in the Post on the 'zero tolerance' of NCH tenants being evicted for drugs activity. It was hilarious, a second article had Richard Antcliff dipping straight into the 'drugs are bad m'kaay?' catchphrase book, claiming that -

"Drugs can literally destroy individuals and communities".

Bless him. A housing director, Gill Moy, claimed -

"To a lot of offenders, the prospect of going to prison is something they are not scared of, but losing their and their family's home, is a much more powerful deterrent."

This was somewhat contradicted by the main thrust of the article which was that evictions for drugs activities were increasing, which doesn't really suggest that losing their houses was much of a deterrent at all.

I could witter on for hours about the phenomenon of drugs offences occupying a special place in the crime hierarchy requiring an extra sentence of eviction in addition to what you get from the criminal justice system. One of the commenters correctly pointed out that homelessness is likely to increase the likelihood of recidivism and drugs problems getting worse. Clearly high level drug dealing can be extremely disruptive and may subject neighbours to danger but I can't see why having a crafty toke of an evening when you get back to work should result in you ending up on the streets.

But I digress. The killer quote in the context of the allocations scandal was this one from Antcliff -

"Housing is a precious commodity. There are lengthy waiting lists and we want people in properties who deserve them."

Do you think NCC got wind of the Post's campaign and tried to spoil it by throwing this story at them?

And then this afternoon, and bear in mind that he was unwilling to comment on specific allegations of his own conduct in the affair, Collins was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in a press release calling on Nottingham peeps to 'get behind' Carl Froch in his punchy game this Saturday. Got to get those priorities in order and if jumping on a populist bandwagon draws a bit more attention away from those pesky housing matters then that's just a risk he's just going to have to take.

I'm Only Surprised It Took Them So Long

2011-05-24T17:20:00.001+01:00

Well, it's finally happened.

Two of my freedom of info requests to NCC, this one and this one, have been refused on the basis that they are 'vexatious'.

It is claimed that, because I have made 22 requests in 12 months (I actually make it 19, 6 of which so far remain unanswered but we'll leave that for now) and write some of them up on this blog, my requests are 'obsessive' and are having the effect of 'harassing the authority'. They also claim that my requests are 'frequently' submitted simultaneously and often overlap.

This is of course nonsense. The 'obsessive' and harassment' claims are potentially libellous but as I'm not a premier league footballer I have to let that go. Harassment is a criminal offence and if NCC genuinely believed that I was harassing them I think I would have heard about it by now. They haven't even contacted me to dispute any of the claims on the blog, despite my invitation for them to do so if there was anything they felt was untrue.

It might be a coincidence but one of the above requests was a request for internal reports on the housing allocations scandal, something NCC is determined will never see the light of day. It's difficult to see any other exemption they could use to refuse to provide this info. Surely they aren't cynically using the 'vexatious' provisions to keep its dirty laundry out of the public eye? It would be a shame if anybody else had access to this info and were to send it on to me.

I have of course challenged their accusation via internal reviews. I suspect that, as well as the fact that I have written about it here, this will be used as further evidence of my obsessive and harassing behaviour but I'll just have to take my chances. Most of my posts are based on already available information anyway and it's better that the readers of this blog get to know about the lengths NCC will go to to cover things up.

Jumping the Gun

2011-05-23T12:02:00.000+01:00

I suppose you can forgive their giddy enthusiasm but are Nottingham's inner circle of politicians getting a little ahead of themselves?

Full council meets today for the first time since the election. Early on in the agenda is the election of the leader who has the gift of appointments to the executive/portfolio holders in her/his power. Somewhat helpfully, JoCo has already written a report "...in the event that [he is] elected as Leader of the Council..." setting out who will be his chosen few. It's listed as a 'report from the Leader'. Even though he isn't the Leader yet. But he should be by the time the relevant agenda item comes up so I suppose that's alright then.

Mind you a couple of these prospective portfolio holders have also been making hay before the sun's even out of bed. Graham Chapman has already signed off three portfolio holder decisions, one of which involves expenditure of £270k, and 'Calamity' Jane Urquhart has done one. Surely, technically these can't be valid because the councillors concerned were not portfolio holders at the time of signing?

My Apologies...

2011-05-20T20:04:00.000+01:00

...for lack of recent posts.

The truth is I just can't be arsed right now and there's not a huge amount going on what with the new council not yet settled in. But that will no doubt change and I'll be back soon.

If you have any stories that I've missed let me know.

The OTHER Vote

2011-05-13T18:52:00.000+01:00

An intriguing question has arisen from the voting patterns in Nottingham.

As we know, Labour was overwhelmingly re-elected to power with something in the region of 60% of the votes cast. But strangely voters in Nottingham voted against the adoption of the AV system for national elections, with 63% of the vote going to the 'No' camp.

Isn't that a bit weird? The Labour Party appeared to be urging its supporters to vote 'yes' and yet in Nottingham it's in inescapable conclusion that a very large number of Labour voters said no, giving the Tories nationally a significant shot in the arm.

It could be explained by simple small 'c' conservatism, voting for Labour and No to AV is certainly sticking with what you know round here. Alternatively it could be part of the general 'kick the Lib Dems' trend that seems to have gripped the city, rather than the Labour leadership's call to kick the Tories instead. Any other theories, add them in the comments.

Nottingham Plays 'Pin the Red Rosette on the Donkey. Any Donkey'

2011-05-06T16:36:00.003+01:00

Well it's pretty clear that nobody listens to me.

Whatever your views as to which party is best for Nottingham I defy you to argue convincingly that the virtual removal of all opposition to Labour on NCC is a good thing.

As you probably already know the Lib Dems have paid the ultimate price locally for their national leadership's hunger for power. Former Leader Gary Long has made no secret as to what he thinks the solution is, although he's apparently ~~bottled out of repeating that on the national stage~~ too knackered to do Newsnight. The loss of decent campaigning councillors like Tony Sutton and Alex Foster is a real source of regret and gives the impression that voters don't want to know about corruption in the council and will punish you by voting you out if you wake them from their slumbers.

There are still five Tories which means that Nottingham's golf courses continue to have their advocates in the city, although they will have to find a new leader as Andrew Price got his marching orders.

In my ward the odious former 'high class' (self defined) escort Cat Arnold kept her seat. My bet is that she'll be on the new Executive as she's been crawling up JoCo's arse for years. Mick Newton, who ran as an independent, didn't make it which I think is a shame. Again, a red rosette means more than a record of actually getting out into the community and doing your job it seems.

It has to be said that, despite some best efforts, the corruption issues haven't gone away. The District Auditor is set to report on alleged Future Jobs Fund dodginess, the Harold Tinworth affair is still ongoing (and hasn't he earned his money) and as Tony Sutton has a bit more time on his hands I suspect he won't let that go. I've got FoI requests regarding the funding cuts to CEHRNN and whatever went on between NCC and Nottingham Studios over Radford Unity Complex. These issues could be embarrassing for JoCo and his sidekick Chapman. Could there be resignations?

Addendum - nearly forgot, the NCC website has a rather impressive results information portal. It's only missing turnout figures so far (as a %) but the votes cast numbers indicate a much higher turnout than 2007.

A Further Snippett Concerning Hassan Ahmed Slips Out

2011-05-04T18:02:00.001+01:00

You might remember that I have been trying to get as much info as possible about the Standards for England decision that Hassan Ahmed breached the members' code of conduct. I've had limited success, so far getting hold of a redacted report, and I've been trying to get as much material as possible unredacted via the Information Commissioner.

I have to say it is looking unlikely that I'll get any more of that report revealed but an email I've received has let a little more light on the internal NCC processed behind the scenes.

For example, information obtained under a SfE investigation cannot normally be released 'the person to whom the information relates has consented to its disclosure'. Now check out this extract from the email I received from the ICO -

"This is because none of the conditions set out in (a)-(e) are satisfied; in particular, Cllr Hassan has explicitly refused to consent to the report’s disclosure."

So, as you can see, one of the obstacles in seeing the full circumstances behind Hassan Ahmed's little games is the fact that he is exercising his veto over publication, an extraordinary privilege for him considering he was found guilty of the breach of the code. Clearly the system is designed to protect corrupt politicians whereas the little people are hung out to dry.

A more positive development is that NCC appear to have accepted that their tendency to hide stuff behind sch 12A of the Local Government Act 1972. That email again -

"The Council also acknowledges that section 12A of the LGA 1972 does not provide a statutory bar under section 44 of the Act."

If NCC sticks to that it is a significant boon for openness. NCC has been routinely relying on this as a route to an exemption to disclosure under s.44 of the FoIA which bans publication of information withheld under other legislation.

Some More of My Opinions on the Local Elections

2011-05-03T21:32:00.000+01:00

If anybody should care here are some of the issues that I believe are important when deciding how to vote in the local elections on Thursday.

My first thought is that, before deciding HOW to vote, it's vital to first decide TO vote. Local elections are notorious for their low turnouts and this is a serious threat to true democracy. Turnout in 2007 was 32.4%, up from 29.1% in 2004, an improvement but still nowhere near a majority of those eligible to vote. And that increase is more than explained by the increase in postal votes which bring in their own problems.

I have to say it, voting for someone is nearly always better than not voting at all in my opinion. Nothing encourages complacency, self-interest and downright corruption in our elected representatives than them knowing that they are in a safe seat and not enough people care about their poor performance in order to bother voting against them. Whatever your political views I firmly believe that just turning up for each election and voting against the current incumbent will improve the health of democracy, at least it would keep them on their toes.

So, presuming that you have decided that you are going to vote, my next piece of advice would be to be sure to avoid voting on national issues at the expense of local. It's tempting to assume that they are one and the same and, while there is clearly overlap, it's not necessarily so. For example, I believe very strongly that the biggest local issue in Nottingham City is the out and out corruption and cover up within the Labour establishment at NCC (housing scandal etc, see the blog passim) and voting Labour to teach the coalition will not solve this. I'm not necessarily saying that Labour in local government is intrinsically bad, and I'm certainly not saying that I would never vote for a Labour politician again, it's just that the current Labour establishment consists of three groups; a small controlling core that has no respect for democracy and due process, a small group of lickspittles desperately trying to get into group one and lastly, a larger group of useful idiots/vote fodder who do as they are told regardless.

Again, I should emphasis that this is not a syndrome that is exclusive to the Labour Party, I firmly believe that if the Green Party won three elections in a row you'd end up with a very similar situation but with different colour hats. You'd probably find a lot of the same names as the politicos changed allegiance to the party that could deliver them into power. The important thing here is that when these cliques do establish themselves the important thing is to bring them down.

So for me at least I will not be looking to vote against the Lib Dems simply to punish them for selling their national souls to a poor-hating disablist right wing government. Locally they have been effective constituency representatives and sources of opposition, their effectiveness limited mainly by their numbers. The Tories are a little different of course, while they have taken on certain issues such as the Radford Unity Complex but I'm quite sure that was for cynical electoral reasons as they were targeting the Nottm South seat in the general election at the time. If a comment on Alanadale's blog from one of the candidates in Radford and Park ward is anything to go by they still see some mileage in this issue yet. In power, the Tories wouldn't give a shit about RUC but most importantly, everybody who's nice hates Tories anyway, that's just a fact.

So, to be a bit more prescriptive and specific, I've made no secret in the past that I strongly believe that a Green Party presence on NCC would be a good thing and if you are lucky enough to have a candidate in your ward I would urge you to vote for them. Those against Tesco on Eastside might want to look at Dave 'Lord Biro' Bishop in Dales ward too. In Basford, former Labour councillor Mick Newton is standing as an independent and seems to be good at getting stuck in to local issues so he will probably get one of my votes.

But in the end I suppose that it is pretty much inevitable that there will be a Labour majority in the end so what to do? My personal opinion is that a 'decapitation' strategy is the best bet i.e. get rid of those who are at the top of the dodgy clique. Luckily, we have already seen the last of Hassan Ahmed for a while so the priority is to get rid of JoCo and Graham Chapman. If you live in either St Anns or Aspley ward I implore you not to vote for these two even if you are a Labour supporter, their removal will result in an immeasurably improved local Labour Party I'm certain. We can but hope...

So that's what I think, see you at the ballot box.

More Info on Making the Lawyers Rich

2011-05-03T16:46:00.000+01:00

There's been an interesting response to a Freedom of Info request posted up today, concerning the amount of money spent on external lawyers in employment cases. Remember this is on top of internal costs of their own lawyers involved with the cases.

Long story short, since 2003 NCC has spent between £29802 and £142448 per year between 2003 and 2009 (the 2010 figure probably isn't a full year) on external solicitors firms and barristers, averaging £65921 per year. In 2009, which was the year of my tribunal, they spent £72792. All costs include VAT.

The only solicitors firm named is Freeth Cartwright in Nottingham, something you might want to bear in mind if you've been fucked over by NCC and are looking for a solicitor. The barristers who I came up against, 7 Bedford Row Chambers, appear to have a fairly longstanding arrangement with NCC. I wonder how often these things go out to tender...?

Longstanding NCC watchers will remember that NCC claimed to have spent £100k on investigating the housing allocations scandal, saying this was a fortune and that further investigation was not justified. Yet that was the TOTAL cost spent and here they are routinely spending approximately two thirds of this amount each year on employment cases, in excess of their internal legal costs. So they're happy to shell out wads of cash on covering up workplace bullying yet investigating a massively important institutional corruption case only justifies peanuts. Good stuff.

Another Day, Another Freedom of Information Post

2011-04-27T16:22:00.001+01:00

It's getting tedious isn't it? Maybe I should write articles when there ISN'T a major NCC FoI fail instead?

But seriously folks, we have a further decision notice from the Information Commissioner upholding a complaint I made, further details of which can be found here.

As you can see, NCC is blatantly flouting the FoIA here. The ICO has previously issued a formal instruction to provide the info or issue a valid refusal citing grounds, which NCC ignored. They have since promised the ICO that they would provide a response by 25 March but haven't delivered. The decision notice says that they really, really must comply this time, with five weeks to comply. So that's jolly well told them, by George.

It seems that failure to follow the decision could result in the matter being registered with the High Court and further non-compliance would be a contempt of court. That I'd like to see...

The final point the decision makes is that NCC is unable to rely on the power to extend the time limit because it has failed to confirm that it is relying on a qualified exemption under the Act, merely saying that it may do so which isn't enough. Silly NCC.

In other FoI news, NCC has missed the deadline to respond to a meta request about how often it fails to meet the deadlines for FoI requests. As the requester invites NCC to agree, that is 'somewhat ironic'.

Over Sensitivity Alert

2011-04-20T19:31:00.000+01:00

I was having a bit of a strop yesterday because the Post seems to be deleting a lot of my comments on articles these days so I decided to email them. Here's part of their reply -

"The only comment of yours we have recently removed, following a complaint that it was in breach of our rules because it was insulting, is this one:

"Gosh! How WILL they survive without this essential cog in the machine? "

which was submitted on April 4 on an article headlined: City's communications head taking unpaid leave."

Note the phrase 'following a complaint'. Is Pugwash keeping tabs on his media mentions while he's bobbing around on the canals? Diddums.

Incidentally, it may be that the Post has a techy fault cos numerous comments have been disappearing and reappearing over the last few days and others have noticed it as well.

Snippets

2011-04-19T15:07:00.000+01:00

Another round up of bits and bobs that don't really warrant a post on their own...

It seems that JoCo has invented time travel. On 13 April the Save Supporting People peeps tweeted that he'd blown out an appearance at a 'Fighting the Cuts' debate that evening. On Sunday JoCo blamed this on being "too knackered from having run the London Marathon raising money for charity!" inducing guilt trips in us all. Except of course, the marathon was four days after the debate Save SPServices were talking about...

Remember NCC refused to allow the use of the Council House for the 2010 East Midlands Vegan Festival, resulting in its cancellation? They claimed excessive 'wear and tear' was the reason but there was already some doubt on that and now they've held a wedding fair which, with nearly a 1000 people attending would presumably result in a bit of wear ant tear, especially with all those brides to be trying on their wedding heels. Still, fobbing off the little people is one thing but when there's a need to promote Nottingham's hottest new (moneyspinning for NCC) wedding venue that's a different matter entirely.

Looks like Nottingham Equal are being funded for another year for helping with 'community cohesion'. However, it seems that 'community cohesion' only extends to race and religion in NCC's eyes. Of course, that was very similar to the criticism they made of CEHRNN before withdrawing its funding in its entirity, resulting in its eventual shutdown.

Odd things going on with recruiting Michael Williams' replacement as Corporate Director of Communities. The Appointments and Conditions of Service committee has just handed the post to someone on a six month temp contract. There's no mention of that in an earlier report setting out the recruitment process. How much more will this extra stage cost us, not to mention that a temp appointment will probably be paid at a higher rate than a permanent postholder.

Now One Nottingham Ignores Discretionary Housing Payments

2011-04-13T14:27:00.000+01:00

One Nottingham discussed the potential effects of welfare reform at its meeting on 25th of March.

I've previously taken the piss out of ON's sudden panic at policies New Labour has been laying the groundwork on for years. Why weren't there briefings before?

This time there was an 'update' paper which spent quite a lot time discussing the effects of housing benefit changes without once mentioning Discretionary Housing Payments. Can you believe that?

We haven't got the minutes of the meeting yet but there is a new edition of the ON Bulletin out which reports on the meeting. However the welfare reform bit is a largely word for word reproduction of the above paper so it seems unlikely that anybody brought DHPs into the discussion.

Fuckwits.

Information Commissioner Monitoring Nottingham City Council

2011-04-12T14:23:00.001+01:00

The Information Commissioner has announced that Nottingham City Council is to be monitored having failed to meet one or more 'performance markers' on promptness in dealing with FoI requests.

The press release doesn't mention which marker NCC had failed on but it could have been one of the following; six complaints of lateness in a six month period, significantly exceeding the time limit on one occasion or more or, in the case of authorities that publish their stats on speed of compliance (which NCC doesn't natch), if less than 85% of requests are met on time.

Frankly, NCC would probably have no problem failing the first two markers in my cases alone and the only thing stopping them failing the third one is that they don't publish the data. There's a sort of perverse incentive in there somewhere. Mind you, when NCC were asked for the figures in response to a FoI request they were woefully short of that target.

Still, there's probably little more than a smack on the wrist waiting for them. The last lot subjected to monitoring appear to have been merely asked to 'sign an undertaking'.

NCC's Contempt for Freedom of Information is Unravelling

2011-04-11T14:26:00.002+01:00

Long term attentive readers with good memories may remember Stephanie Pearson's proud claim to the Overview and Scrutiny Committee last year that NCC had received no decision notices from the Information Commissioner in the previous two years.

Notwithstanding that she was talking rubbish, the case concerning the legal advice on the appropriation of part of the Arboretum was in 2009, things seem to be falling apart now.

Looking at the ICO's list of cases involving NCC, a case popped up barely two months after Ms Pearson's impassioned self-congratulations.

And it gets worse, there has been four decision notices already this year and it's only April.

Minor update - just phoned ICO about one case, it's "...with enforcement, can't tell you any more..."

Freedom of Information Fail

2011-04-08T02:37:00.001+01:00

Had another FoI decision back from the Information Commissioner's Office. Unfortunately, and somewhat bizarrely in my opinion, my complaint was not upheld.

Well I say it wasn't upheld but in fact it was partially upheld in as far as the breached s.10 of the FoIA because the response was delayed but that kind of goes without saying these days. The bit they didn't uphold was the important bit and demonstrates considerable gullibility on the ICO's part.

The case was about NCC's decision to appoint consultants Dunbar and Boardman to look after the council's lifts. I'd got most of the info including how much they were paying but I wanted a copy of the decision to hire them which NCC said they didn't have. The ICO decided to believe them on 'the balance of probabilities'.

Now I know it's hard to prove a negative but let's put this in the context of NCC's conduct throughout the case. Remember that they initially claimed that no consultants had been appointed, before having to contradict themselves at review when I pointed out that I knew Dunbar and Boardman were on board. They also claimed that no accidents had occurred, forgetting about the nasty Viccy Flats one which had just featured in the Post (and which is still under investigation by the HSE as far as I know).

Now have a read of the ICO investigator's account of his attempts to get this last bit of info from NCC, in particular para 21 -

Looks like a bit of a runaround doesn't it? Kind of a bit like they were trying to avoid the issue and hoping it would go away.

Yet, when NCC finally says that there is no decision, despite this record of ahem, 'inaccuracy' and evasive behaviour, despite the fact that it is highly unlikely that a council would simply hand over £3.3k per month without there being a paper trail, the ICO accepts this.

I wonder how much money is thrown around without a record being kept?

Local Elections

2011-04-07T22:19:00.000+01:00

Yep, the local elections are approaching and I just know that you are all clamouring for me to tell you who to vote for.

No? What do you mean you can think for yourself? Oh alright then, I'll just whittle on randomly about a few issues without drawing any firm conclusions and you can jolly well decide for yourselves then, see if I care.

Lets start with a look at who isn't running. I've already written about a few rumours here and there but it seems that the numbers leaving the ship are higher than I thought. Here's the list -

Hylton James (Aspley)
Rob Lee (Basford)
Hassan Ahmed (Berridge)
Eileen Heppel (Bulwell)
Zahoor Mir (Dunkirk and Lenton)
Michael Edwards (Mapperley)
Mo Munir (Mapperley)
Katrina Bull (Radford and Park)
Afzal Khan (Radford and Park)
Penny Griggs (Sherwood)
Dick Benson (Wollaton West)

That's 20% of currently sitting councillors not running, all except that last one being Labour, two of them Executive members. Of course the best news is that Hassan Ahmed isn't running, possibly because some of his fun and games are catching up with him. He still features quite visibly among the pics on Labour's manifesto mind, not sure that was wise.

Actually, that manifesto has a few design fails if you ask me. I'm sure they could have got hold of a pic of a scaffolding free Council House for example and the tram pic heavily laden with adverts for train tickets out of Nottingham might end up looking a little bit symbolic in retrospect.

I'm a little disappointed that I'm still not going to get a chance to vote for a Green Party candidate and it looks like there's only four running citywide. I don't think the 'Elvis Turns Green' candidate in Berridge is quite the same thing. At least Dales ward residents have the opportunity to vote for Lord Biro, this time standing for the 'Militant Elvis Anti-Tesco Popular Front' ticket. So if you fancy giving David Mellen a bloody nose...

I should also mention that former Labour councillor Mick Newton is running as an independent. That could be one to watch.

Of course the Lib Dems will be hoping and praying that the national hate against them won't be reflected locally. That said, it seems that Dunkirk and Lenton candidate Alisdair McGregor seems to have had to nominate himself*. I don't hold out much hope for his ability to attract votes if he can't find two other people willing to nominate him.

One last thing. If you vote for JoCo you deserve to have your gonads removed with a rusty spoon. The single biggest factor that would improve NCC would be his removal if you ask me.

The full list of nominees is here.

*It could be a misprint

NCC's Comms Team Vets Freedom of Info Responses

2011-04-05T21:09:00.000+01:00

Someone in NCC's Info Governance team let slip an interesting detail when attempting to explain delays in a response.

When replying to a clearly frustrated enquirer on 31 March the officer said -

"Responses have to be signed off by both the head of the relevant service area and by our communications team."

This raises an interesting question. What happens if the comms team (which is JoCo's 'Pravda' after all and whose Director Stephen Barker reports directly to Jane Todd) decides that some of the info that Info Gov is planning to release is just a little bit too, erm, truthful for effective PR purposes? Do they have the last word of does Info Gov decide?

At the very least it appears to introduce significant delays into the process which is a big problem for NCC.

I wonder if Stephen 'Pugwash' Barker is being kept in the loop while he's on his extended boating holiday?

The End of the Road...NOT REALLY!!!!

2011-04-01T00:41:00.002+01:00

Oh come on, me, become an auxilliary CPO? For free? ;)

A few people bought it, there's a couple in the comments (along with an equal number who spotted my merry jape), one on the Facebook page and and I've just got a very nice email.

Actually, those who fell for it have all been very kind in expressing their disappointment which does make me feel a bit guilty. I hope you can all forgive me.

On a related subject here's NCC's April Fool. Maybe I'm a bit over sensitive or po-faced but isn't the last bit a teensy bit chilling?

Oh, and here's my effort from last time. Roll on next year...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yes folks, it's finally happened. This blog has reached the end of its working life.

In a bittersweet development, it may be the start of mine. I have applied and been accepted as an Auxiliary Community Protection Officer and I start training next Monday. It was made crystal clear that writing the blog is not compatible with these new duties.

I have to admit that it wasn't entirely my decision. As I've mentioned I do have health issues and I've been on one of those Jobcentre schemes for getting Incapacity Benefit claimants back to work. They've been getting a bit heavy with me not really making an effort and said that my chances of keeping my benefit would be 'assisted' if I took some steps to improve my employability. They suggested voluntary work and, after a suspiciously short delay revealed that NCC were looking for ACPOs. I kind of said yes to get them off my back.

But it's ok, I've been wanting to do something with my time anyway and this is as good as anything else. I'll miss the blogging mind.

So, goodbye dear readers. I hope my writings have helped you learn a bit about how NCC works. Who knows, maybe someone else will offer to take the blog over?

x

Housing Benefits Standards Slipping - Worst in E. Midlands for New Claims

2011-03-25T17:51:00.000Z

I have just found the most recent figures for Housing Benefits processing speeds on the DWP website. The numbers relate to Q2 2010/11, i.e. July-Aug 2010.

It's pretty poor news for NCC. They took an average of 37 days to process new claims for benefits over the quarter. This makes them joint worst performing (with Harborough) in the East Midlands. You probably won't see a NCC press release on that.

Worse still, this disguises serious in quarter deterioration in performance with monthly figures of 33days (July), 36 days (August) and 44 days (September).

They were better at processing changes in circumstances at an average of 14 days which is about mid table. The best for this was 3 days (Daventry) and the worst 27 days (Derby).

Compare these figures to Leicester City which took 19 days for new claims and 11 days for changes in circumstances, an awful lot better. LCC had an Audit Commission inspection in May 2009 and scored zero stars. Its average new claims time then was 37.5 days, hardly worse than Nottingham's is now. They were also criticised for not using their full allocation for Discretionary Housing Payments, something I've had a lot to say about in Nottingham.

This is relevant because NCC's benefits service hasn't had an inspection since at least 2007 because the Audit Commission sees them as 'low risk' due to their record of getting 4 star assessments, albeit after adjusting their service provision around the needs of the inspections.

All this comes after last year's revelations of serious processing accuracy problems and dodgy subsidy claims. On this basis if NCC was inspected tomorrow they would probably score one star at best.

Don't Tell Them About the Mobile Phones!

2011-03-25T16:04:00.000Z

It may be me but NCC appears to have reached new levels of paranoia over the release of information under the Freedom of Information Act.

Someone has made a request for details of senior posts who are issued with mobile phones paid for by the council, or alternatively, provided with expenses for phone use. He also asks for phone numbers and the associated expenditure over the last three years.

Not the sort of thing I'd be bothered about knowing I admit, partly because I don't think it's particularly unreasonable to provide senior managers with a means to be contacted easily and in my experience councils aren't particularly profligate in this area (by which I mean I never got one. I could have claimed for calls I made for work but frankly it was more work than it was worth). Still, not for me to judge the validity of other people's requests, I'm sure this guy has his reasons.

On the other hand, I will judge NCC on what seems like a completely unjustified claim of exempt information. They have said that they are considering exempting the info under s.36 of the FoIA which allows them to refuse requests for info that may "prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs".

For the life of me I cannot see how on earth they can consider that this exemption applies, with the possible exemption of the actual phone numbers. Having those out in the public domain may well get in the way of 'public affairs' if some joker decides it would be a laugh to phone them at inconvenient times of the day. But the rest seems like a simple 'lets see how much of our money councils waste on freebies for managers' type of request which may be a bit of a pain to deal with but hardly justifies the use of an exemption to keep it secret.

Taking His Ball Away

2011-03-24T01:37:00.002Z

Now you've done it. JoCo is upset

It seems that he thinks the Post has been beastly to him. It's a tough old world out there when not everyone slavishly believes everything you say.

Addendum - This would appear to be about the PM's visit

Golf Wars and Other Secrets

2011-03-18T20:02:00.001Z

Bulwell Hall Golf Course. Anybody give a shit? Some people apparently do.

Nottgirl did a piece on it a year or so ago, basically saying that the Jack Barker Golf Co got a rather generous deal when they took over the running of the place. She mentions that a commenter on a 'Post' article also expressed concerns but the comment was later removed.

The grounds maintenance part of the agreement has recently come up for renewal recently and portfolio holder Cllr Trimble has made a decision to bypass normal financial procedures and simply agree an extension. This seems to have upset the Tories who have had the decision subjected to call-in.

So far so dull. To me, golf is just a way to spoil a nice walk in the park and the reasons for extending don't seem too suspicious. I'm not even in a position to wonder about the VFM aspects of the original agreement as I don't know the going rates for golf clubs. However, this affair does cast a bit of light on some aspects of how both the Labour and opposition councillors' respective worldviews.

In a seemingly unrelated move, NCC has just released its latest whinge about revealing financial information (explaining 'once and for all' as they put it on Twitter, like we are all a bunch of rather thick schoolchildren).

In this rather unconvincing rant NCC says -

"...that the information published by other local authorities and the Department for Communities and Local Government does not improve transparency or accountability because it doesn't let people judge value for money or the need for the expenditure."

This is of course bollocks and this particular portfolio decision shows why. You see, NCC routinely makes all financial aspects of these decisions i.e. the cost to us, the local taxpayers, confidential under sch 12A of the LGA which allows councils to withhold information -

"...relating to the financial or business affairs of any particular person (including the authority holding that information)."

among many other things.

I'm not convinced that the purpose of this part of the act is to keep details of the amounts of money paid to contractors secret and it could of course mean that all sorts of woes are kept hidden. In fact if NCC's interpretation is correct Eric 'Buffoon' Pickles' demands to release all expenditure over £500 would be unlawful.

Could it be that JoCo and the team's fear of accountability stems from the fact that we would at last be able to make a judgment on the value for money of some of their decisions*?

The second thing this issue tells us is that the Tories on NCC care more about golf clubs than organisations such as the Council for Equalities and Human Rights Nottm and Notts cos they didn't lift a finger when Hassan Ahmed cut their funding and that has now resulted in its closure. Talk about fucked up priorities.

*In this case, somebody who knows about golf courses obviously, not me.

The Rumour Mill Pt 2

2011-03-17T14:40:00.002Z

Just for the record, my earlier claim of an Executive councillor not standing in the upcoming elections did not refer to Hassan Ahmed, so that means there two of them leaving in May.

Also, I've heard of another councillor no longer standing so, if all my rumours are true, Labour have lost two key executive members and three rank and file.

Update - Cllr Newton's 'Independent' status now confirmed on NCC website.

Hassan Ahmed's (Hopefully) Last Victim

2011-03-17T14:27:00.000Z

The Post reports today that the Council for Equalities and Human Rights Nottm and Notts is to close due to lack of funding. Previously known as Notts REC, it had been active in the city for 55 years.

It was of course Hassan Ahmed who jointly made the decision to end their funding last year. The decision was kept secret for reasons that remain unclear. I've got a FoIA request outstanding on that (and other issues) but NCC is simply stalling, having provided no response to my request which was sent on 2 September 2010 and so far ignoring an order from the Information Commissioner's Office to respond by 15 February 2011.

In a possibly connected matter, let's remember that One Nottingham are refusing to disclose who was involved in making the decision to award funding to Nottingham Equal, an organisation of which Ahmed was a founding member and whose Chief Exec is his bezzy mate Tyron Browne.

No doubt Cllr Ahmed will be very proud of his achievement, closing one of the most respected and certainly long lasting equalities groups in Notts.

Cllr Ahmed; A Heartfelt Tribute

2011-03-16T22:00:00.001Z

So. Farewell then. Councillor Hassan Ahmed.

On his announcement that ~~I will only have about half as much material to write about from now on~~ he is to stand down at the next election I thought it appropriate to remember some of the great works he has done for the city and the wider world of business. Not to mention some of his closest friends...

Firstly, Cllr Ahmed very nearly forced the closure of the Council of Equality and Human Rights Nottingham and Notts by suddenly halting their funding on dodgy equalities grounds. Doubly dodgy was the fact that he was involved with Nottingham Equal at the time which, not only had he not declared that on his register of interests, also happened to be a potential competitor organisation.

A number of coincidences followed. Firstly CEHRNN's Chief Exec lost his position as the BME representative on One Nottingham's board after an election that was run by erm, Nottingham Equal. Secondly, Nottingham Equal got a grant from NCC which was suspiciously similar to the amount removed from CEHRNN. This grant was decided by One Nottingham which Ahmed had managed to wheedle his way into as the Chair of its new 'Fairness Commission'. ON has refused to divulge any details of how it reached the decision to pick NE for receipt of grant aid, claiming that it is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

Interestingly, one of the criticisms levelled at CEHRNN was that they had failed to adequately address the equalities strands other than race. Nottingham Equal be covering the following strands; race, that's it.

In the meantime, Ahmed was found guilty of breaching the Members Code of Conduct due to multiple instances of failing to register his outside interests with NCC. He celebrated this by claiming in the local press that he had been 'exonerated'. It turned out that a significant part of the reasoning behind the decision by Standards for England not to impose any sanction was down to the fact that he wasn't a member of the Executive at the relevant time. However he WAS Graham Chapman's Executive Assistant so was in a position to influence decisions.

Like a moth to a flame, Ahmed even managed to inveigle himself in NCC's other big corruption scare by being the one who made the decision to award a contract to Harold Tinworth for ~~political advice on how to win the local election for Labour~~ providing support to members of NCC's executive members. This is now causing all kinds of unhappiness for JoCo and his cohorts.

And now he has apparently been implicated in this new Future Jobs Fund issue and he's decided rather suddenly that he needs to spend more time with his pets. He won't be missed.

One Down...

2011-03-16T17:30:00.001Z

The 'Post' is on fire these days with revelations about NCC and today's is the news that our old mate Hassan Ahmed has decided not to stand in the upcoming elections. The Post has suggested that his decision may be due to an upcoming report from the Audit Commission concerning irregularities in the Future Jobs Fund although Ahmed denies this.

Slightly frustrating for me because I actually got a tip-off a few weeks back about some dodginess involving Ahmed, the FJF and another local anti-hero but I couldn't verify it. As such I didn't dare run it for fear of a communication from m'learned friends. And I'm afraid I'm still chicken about naming the other alleged party so we'll all just have to wait for that Audit Commission report.

It's good that at least one of the chiselling little crooks has been upended, especially after the cover up over the housing allocations scandal meaning that Cllr Grocock and Tyron Browne have managed to wriggle free, so far at least. It's a long shot but if the poisonous influence that is Jon Collins can be removed at the election NCC will be immeasurably improved.

Addendum - JoCo wrote a puff piece about FJF on his blog recently. For some reason he seems to have switched the comments off...

You Win Some...

2011-03-07T21:58:00.000Z

NCC was justifiably proud for coming second in the 'UK's Cleanest City' awards. So proud that they spun it into winning 'Cleanest Big City' award which doesn't actually exist, on the basis that the actual winner Truro only has 18,000 residents.

I hope the workers on the ground were invited to the glitzy do and rewarded individually. After all they'd need something to take their minds off the increased risk of mesothelioma and other diseases, thanks to their employer failing to tackle the asbestos at the Woolsthorpe depot.

But of course you don't see that latter detail mentioned on the NCC website.

More Standards Committee Deliberations

2011-03-07T18:12:00.000Z

The minutes from the Standards Committee meeting held to discuss the Grocock case are out. As I said before, it wasn't the actual decision making meeting but a kind of pre-discussion.

Interestingly, monitoring officer Glen O'Connell argued for the meeting and investigation report to remain private but this was rejected by the committee, although I can't see it published anywhere.

The minutes also reveal that O'Connell's recommendation is that Grocock did not breach the code of conduct which, if the committee agrees, would be a bit of a bombshell. Can't wait to see how he's justified that one.

"No Scams" Cllr Collins?

2011-03-03T12:10:00.000Z

Yesterday Jon Collins said there were 'no scams' in the appointment of Harold Tinworth as a consultant to NCC's executive. It seems that the Post would beg to differ.

They have managed to get hold of email correspondence between Collins and Tinworth which appears to show blatantly political advice being given, the most damaging, in my opinion, being this extract -

"The solution to the problem is to change the government asap. The budget review has to be agreed on its tight timetable but has it/will it exclude, diminish the real priority for you all and how do you guard against it. ie If getting the least damaging package of cuts from 80% right to 90% right stops you campaigning as effectively as you could and are able to do would that be the right balance [sic]".

On one level this could be seen as simply a question of time spent by councillors either campaigning or working on the budget. Or could it be that Tinworth was advising that a budget with damaging cuts (e.g. to Supporting People) would be better for Labour attacking the Tories?

The government has regularly claimed that Labour councils were engaging in 'political' cuts and this plays right into their hands. Yet more top political judgment skills from JoCo there.

Let's not forget that this whole 'political advice' thing was supposedly nixed by the call-in process last year. It seems that, in a shocking show of contempt for due process they went ahead anyway.

How can the Labour Party continue to support Collins as a candidate after this?

The Rumour Mill

2011-03-03T03:34:00.000Z

I recently heard a rumour that Cllr Mick Newton was no longer a Labour councillor and was sitting as an independent. I wasn't going to write about it as I couldn't reasonably verify it but, after a look at the 'Nottingham Labour' website I feel confident enough to do so.

Have a look at the 'Labour Team' page. Third row down, the Basford councillors Cat Arnold and Rob Lee are there but where you'd expect to find Cllr Newton is someone called Bill Ottewell, who has cropped up elsewhere as a 'campaign team member' amongst other things. Whether he'll be running for the seat at the upcoming election I've no idea, nor do I know whether Newton jumped or was pushed. Either way I can't think of any other reason why he wouldn't be up there but if anyone knows different please let me know and I will correct forthwith.

However, I DO know that the Standards Committee was meeting to consider a case a couple of weeks ago and I do know that Cllr Newton was one of the councillors who was being investigated for something. However it's a bit of a jump to automatically connect the two for now.

Other rumours that I've heard are that an Executive Board member is not planning on standing again and that another Labour councillor had been effectively deselected. No names on these as I can't cross reference with anything but the next full council meeting is the last before the election and it's apparently tradition for there to be official tearful farewells. We'll see.

Tinworth Waters Slightly Muddier

2011-03-02T18:17:00.000Z

Been having a little Twitter chat with JoCo today and Harold Tinworth came up.

Collins said that Tinworth was first employed by Government Office (presumably GOEM). That's interesting because Cllr Ahmed said that he was first commissioned by former Chief Exec Michael Frater at the call-in sub-committee.

I mean, I'm not one for starting a row between councillor colleagues but there is a teensy bit of inconsistency here, maybe someone should clear it up?

Dumb Political Decisions R Us (cont'd)

2011-03-02T16:34:00.002Z

NCC got a mention in the mother of parliaments today in a classic demonstration of how not very good politicians turn themselves into a political football.

At Prime Minister's Questions today, Ed Milibean asked a perfectly reasonable question about the horrendous cuts to local government using a Tory council as an example of the hollowness of the government's claim that frontline services should not be affected. DavCam responded thusly (from Hansard) -

"The Prime Minister: Yes, we have made reductions in local government grant, because frankly we inherited a complete mess in the nation’s finances. What we have done is ask every single local authority to make public every single bit of spending they do so that members of the public can make sure that they are cutting bureaucracy, cutting councillor allowances and cutting pay, rather than cutting services. When the right hon. Gentleman gets to his feet, perhaps he can tell us why only one authority in the entire country, Labour-run Nottingham, refuses to do so."

Now by any standards that is a crap response, any idiot can see that. But political point scorers home in on the 'only one' and 'Labour run' aspects, shout 'yah boo sucks!' very loudly and Cameron gets away with it.

Now I'm strongly in favour of this initiative to publish local government spending because I'm a big fan of accountability. I accept it's flawed and that most people will be able to make only limited use of the data but it's a start. What's more I fully agree that it perhaps isn't the most important issue facing local government, although that in itself is no reason not to do it. However, Ed M was raising a serious point about a tory council shutting 13 of 16 children's centres and one council's (and probably one man's) belligerence allowed DC to avoid the issue entirely.

I wonder if the Labour party's national office is right behind JoCo's principled stand.

Update - some increasingly desperate sounding tweets from the man himself here and here.