Beechwood Children's Home Abuse Scandal

Institutional child abuse. How horrible a concept is that eh? You're taken from an abusive situation as a child to a place that is supposed to be safe, a place where people, part of the state machinery, are supposed to look after you. Except they do exactly the opposite...

The news has been full of stories of such abuse recently, largely because many of the abusers are/were famous and, in some cases dead.

So it's with some trepidation that I'm now going to look at an emerging story of institutional abuse in our manor. Everything I have got hold of is in the public domain. It's all second hand obviously and finding what you might call 'facts' is a bit like nailing jelly to the wall. But here goes.

First thing is to set out a basic historical context. Until 1998 children's homes, along with all other children's social services in the city were the responsibility of Nottinghamshire County Council. In 1998, the City Council was given unitary status and took over all services within the city boundaries which had previously been the County's remit. This included all social services, education, trading standards, all sorts. I think it's probably fair to say that, as far as I can tell, the majority of the abuse allegations concerned incidents happening prior to the 1998 handover.

The first allegations appeared in 2011 concerning the former Beechwood Children's Home on Woodborough Road, which closed in 2006. Claims of abuse at other homes locally surfaced in 2013 and hit the nationals. Note the bravery of the individual who gave up his right to anonymity for that story, this led another brave individual to do the same. The latter individual wrote a much longer personal account which you can read here. I think it's fair to say he has been unimpressed with officialdom's attempts to 'help' him. The police have called their investigation 'Operation Daybreak'.

Not entirely surprisingly, it appears that some records have been 'lost'. Knowing local authorities as I do I should say that may not be entirely due to evil intent (as opposed to some dumbass chucking them in a skip) but it hardly lightens the atmosphere or encourages a feeling of mutual trust.

More recently it has emerged that a total of £250k compensation has been paid to some of those alleging abuse. Again, most cases were from the time of the County's administration but there are more to be considered. The information apparently originated from a journo's FoI request but unfortunately, the City's Freedom of Information 'Disclosure Log' gives us the question asked but is one of the many entries that neglects to include the response files (general point NCC, please sort this issue out, it happens a lot).

Anyway, that's the mainstream stuff. This blog doesn't deal with County Council issues, that's for others to worry about with my limited mental energy. According to the media links above, it seems that the City is leading on all legal claims against both councils so that keeps that aspect within our remit. The police? Fuck knows who really makes the decisions there.

Anyway, a bit of simple Google search has thrown up huge amounts of stuff, only a tiny proportion of which I can link to here. But here's one thing that seriously caught my eye, I think it's a bit sinister.

Back in 2003, Community Care magazine ran an article about the death of a resident at, you've guessed it, Beechwood Children's Home. It concerns a 15 year old girl who was found hanged. The article states as fact that she was a victim of bullying at the home. That's a grim story in anybody's language but, sadly, not completely unheard of in the looked-after children sphere. Was it 'just' bullying?

It gets significantly dodgier looking when you read the allegation that the National Care Standards Commission (now defunct/replaced) had previously advised the City Council to close the home on the basis that the home had become “steadily more unstable and difficult to manage”. The Social Services Director at the time said “I don’t recall this recommendation ever being made.”

Hmm. "I don't recall..." There are lots of things I don't 'recall' but that doesn't mean they didn't happen.

I'm presuming that the lawyers representing the survivors have all this because I would've thought it would significantly undermine any claim by the City that they had no idea there were any problems at the home. That's not the same as saying they knew about all the abuse but you know, a kid hanged herself, you'd hope they'd have looked into it.

The final bit for now is the rather disturbing claims concerning a woman called Melanie Shaw.

Most of the allegations appear to come from the blog UKColumn. There are countless other entries on the web but most seem to be a copy and paste from the original.

What is claimed is that Ms Shaw is a witness and a victim of abuse at Beechwood. However UKColumn reported that Ms Shaw has recently been arrested and was being held on remand in Peterborough Prison. This is backed up by a Nottm Post court report. I'm not sure of the political stance of UKColumn but the detail demands that we take the reports seriously, at least until they are credibly disproved. There is talk about a 'secret hearing' at the Crown Court and that Ms Shaw is accused of arson. There is a later report of a further hearing where her remand at Peterborough was extended. I can't verify anything in it but it doesn't make pretty reading, especially about her treatment in prison. What also seems a bit odd is that local media don't seem to be willing to touch Ms Shaw's story with a bargepole.

Whatever the actual detail of the allegations that got Ms Shaw in front of the Crown Court, you have to wonder why an abuse survivor is on remand in a Cat B prison when she just happens to be making allegations against the people who used to look after her. Longtime readers of this blog would not be surprised at a suggestion that Notts Police might be willing to help the City Council out in a time of need. Frankly, I doubt that anybody sensible in the UK would be surprised at the suggestion that the police would be there for the establishment if the shit hit the fan.

Hopefully much more of this will come out. Hopefully, at least some of the police are actually doing their job. We'll see.

Housing Benefit Fraud

I've taken the piss out of NCC's anti-benefit fraud measures before but with new figures available it's time to have another go.

Again, the report before the Audit Committee is the source of our interest here. On page 8 we are told that, during 2012/3, NCC detected 178 Housing/Council Tax benefit fraud, worth a total of £586,490. Even without any help from a responsible adult, I have worked out that is an average of £3295 per case.

The Midlands and East of England average is 332 cases, totaling £698,296, an average of £2103 per case.

I don't think we can make too much of the lower than average number of cases, that average is clearly elevated by one LA (Birmingham?) with 3500 or so cases. But NCC's higher value per case could be said to imply that frauds are not caught as early, which is not a good thing in fraud detection circles. There are probably other potential explanations as well.

But hello, what have we here? (word document) It's a Freedom of Info request asking about how much NCC spends on anti benefit fraud activities. It says that, in 2012/3 NCC spent £586,000 on such work, the money going on

...cost of the fraud staff in wages and then a percentage of all other costs based on fraud staff as a percentage of total benefits staff. Other costs include such things as IT, accommodation, central charges etc.

That's pretty clear, the question was unambiguous and the explanation of the costs makes it plain that the cost of the activity hasn't been confused with, say the amount of fraud detected...

Because the two figures are rather similar aren't they? It seems an extraordinary coincidence that, for a spend of £560,000 anti-fraud activity you detect fraud worth a total of £560,490.

Unless of course you've been a bit lazy and, rather than come up with a system to estimate the worth of each fraud case you catch and collating the results annually, you simply record as the 'cost' of detected fraud as how much how much was spent on the wages, IT and paperclips of your crack fraud detecting team. And in the FoI response linked, they DID say they didn't have an estimate of the value of fraud committed.

If it wasn't for the fact that NCC's housing benefit service has a long track record of pisspoor management information systems (largely due to having pisspoor management) I would find this explanation impossible to believe.

The alternative of course is that NCC's benefits fraud team saves the council the grand total of less than £500/year. Before anybody says that any saving is worthwhile you must remember that many people are investigated for fraud and found to have done nothing wrong. It is always a stressful, sometimes terrifying experience. I sincerely hope it is the 'crap management information' explanation that turns out to be correct because a saving of £490 is not worth a single person being wrongly accused and investigated.

Hold the Front Page! A Bit of Info About the Housing Scandal has been Allowed Out!

Only a little bit mind you. And what has come out simply raises more questions than it answers.

Okay then. As you know the housing allocations scandal has been going on forever with NCC desperate to prevent any info about what went on, and more seriously, why nobody has been made to answer for it, getting out into the open.

My own FoI request has been going on since May 2011 and there has been allegations of vexatiousness (quickly but wordlessly dropped), exemption bingo and a thoroughly unsatisfactory Information Commissioner's decision which brought us back to square one.

Since then NCC has withdrawn an appeal against another requester's case where the Commissioner ordered disclosure of some information and, as my request overlapped with that one, I got the info too.

Considering what has come out, the suspicion that NCC is frankly taking the piss with resisting FoI requests is somewhat reinforced. It is pretty fucking outrageous that public money has been spent stopping this information getting out.

So, what have we got? Well, only information from 2006 unfortunately consisting of

• Hand written notes of a meeting between NCC and the Police on 15 May 2006 where removing IT equipment from housing offices for examination was discussed (note also the reference to 'players'!)
• A detailed briefing document summarising a meeting on 11 July 2006. This clearly shows that the Police were on message with investigating the matter, had formed an initial view on what the focus of the investigation should be (this is redacted but I think we can safely assume it to be 'The Sports and Social Club That Must Not Be Named'). If anything, NCC are saying that the Police have been a bit directionless and seem fired up with getting further info together and passing it on.
• A brief summary document on the three meetings that had occurred between NCC and the Police that year.

And that's it. My request asked for quite a lot more, in particular later meetings, so I have written back to remind them of this fact. Probably best not to hold my breath...

But the upshot of this is that it seems clear that the Police were well up for investigating the matter. So why did this attitude change, leaving NCC to spend £100k on external solicitors covering for its own legal team carefully looking the other way investigating the matter, with no prosecutions?

The answer will presumably be in the minutes of meetings in 2010 (which we know happened from earlier disclosures. Note also in there, Notts Police Head of Fraud Kevin Fidler. This shit writes itself). As such, I suspect a continuing battle to get hold of them.

Wish me luck.

Addendum; Following a comment on Indymedia I went back and checked some dates and it does seem that the July-Sept 2010 meetings that likely decided the fate of the police investigation were hot on the feet of JoCo being appointed Chair of the Police Authority and installing his 'Change Management' team. Which is rather an amazing coincidence.

NCC Withdraws Appeal Against Housing Allocations Disclosure Decision

Good News!

I think anyway.

A while ago I wrote about NCC's appeal against an Information Commissioner decision ordering them to release minutes of meetings between themselves and Notts Police, during which it was decided that the Police wouldn't be investigating after all.

According to the Information Rights Tribunal's current cases list, that appeal has now been withdrawn. This presumably means those minutes will be published in the not too distant future. Scroll down to case number EA/2012/0112, or do search for 'Nottingham'.

I will be keeping an eye on the disclosure log.

Will NCC Pick Up the Crumbs from Central Government for Council Tax?

As the consultation exercise for the replacement of Council Tax Benefit nears its end two things spring to mind.

Firstly, NCC has not responded to my FoI request for the costings of the individual measures they propose in their new scheme, impairing my ability to respond properly to the consultation (some might suggest this is more than a coincidence. Worth noting that the facilitators at the consultation event I attended promised to forward this info too but no cigar). Secondly there seems to have been a bit of a panic at the Department for Communities and Local Government.

Possibly following evidence of panic at local authorities who are preparing for large rates of non-payment (NCC said at the consultation event that they are expecting collection rates to drop to 70%. But then they also said they'd send me a bunch of costings...), DCLG have announced a £100m transition fund which authorities can apply too to offset the cost of schemes that protect the poorest.

If this money was divided up among all authorities in proportion to their share of council tax benefit expenditure it would provide something approaching an extra £800k for Nottingham. However, there's no telling whether this is how it is intending to allocate the money and not all councils will be eligible because their support schemes don't fit the criteria which are;

• those who would be on 100 per cent support under current council tax benefit arrangements pay between zero and no more than 8.5 per cent of their council tax liability;

• the taper rate does not increase above 25 per cent;

• there is no sharp reduction in support for those entering work - for claimants currently entitled to less than 100 per cent support, the taper will be applied to an amount at least equal to their maximum eligible award.

That first one is going to prove tricky for Nottingham because, as we've seen, they intend to make those even on maximum help pay 20% of Council Tax. I've estimated that this measure alone is likely to raise £3.5m so a grant of £800k isn't likely to tempt NCC to join in. Furthermore, it is a one-off transitional fund and NCC is likely to see that as saving problems up for the future, as they have done with the government grants for freezing Council Tax.

So my guess is the they will snub it. In fairness it is crumbs from the table and likely designed to embarrass councils like Nottingham when they don't join in. On the other hand, I can't help feeling they should clutch every straw that comes our way.

I think it is well worth anybody going to the last listed consultation event tomorrow (10am Loxley House) and bringing this up. I will try to go myself but the usual health issues make this probably unlikely.

FoI Costs/JoCo Hissy Fit; A Further Analysis

I've had a re-read of the spat involving JoCo and his dislike of inconvenient figures demonstrating the relatively low costs of FoI and, with the help of the re-appearance of this follow-up in the Post where some poor spokesdroid tries to give JoCo's side of the story. I have to say, it's a bit muddled.

First of all, let's have a look at what the original FoI response actually told us. Basically, it told us of two exercises where the FoI team had attempted to establish how much FoI cost.

The first, from what I understand from what they say, was a one off exercise to calculate the average (presumably the mean) cost of a FoI case which gave them a figure of £94 each. This is made up from the following;

"Case administration 0.5 hours
Case management 2 hours
Quality assurance 1 hour
Reputation impact assessment 0.5 hours"

They go on to state clearly that this does NOT include the time taken by the bod from whatever department the information request relates to squirrelling about actually finding the info. It does however, include 'reputation impact assessment' which is presumably carried out by the Communications peeps. Other than that, it seems pretty clear that this estimate of costs relates to the internal work carried out by the Information Governance team i.e. staff time/wages etc.

It appears from the Post follow-up the the NCC spokesdroid is saying that this £94 figure has now increased to £138.07 per case. I'm having to assume from the context that we are comparing like with like here, there's nothing to suggest otherwise. The alternative is the possibility that they calculate the average figure now including the costs of workers from other departments chasing down the info. I'm not sure but what we can be certain about is that this figure definitely includes the work done by the Information Governance team. This is important, more on this in a bit.

The second exercise described is one involving a trawl of their new casework system which presumably works out the costs as you go along. This is the system that, we are now told (and it would have been worth this having been mentioned in the original FoI response if anybody's asking my opinion) only had 'half' the case recorded on it, the other half being on the old system. This is the one that gave us the figure of £32,161 for 6 months. As we discussed before, presuming all else is equal and there was nothing unrepresentative about the tie period concerned, our best estimate of the annual cost is 4 times this i.e. £128,644. Note that the FoI response is quite clear that the figure derived from this exercise DOES include the cost of external department bods fishing out the info.

Right. Now let's have a look at the explanation by the spokesdroid in the Post, I will reproduce in full;

"The costs of the Information Governance team clearly form a large part of the overall cost – currently totalling £210,000. (This figure was substantially higher at £320,000 in 2010/11). We estimate that, added to this, the latest full year of FOI responses will amount to £155,577 – giving a total of around £370,000. This is based on the council handling and closing 939 cases between September last year and June 2012 at an average cost which now stands at £138.07. As the number of requests rise beyond 1,000 a year, this total figure is likely to increase."

We first hear about the total cost of the Info Gov team, £210k apparently, which must include all their FoI processing work plus data-protection, advising departments etc. Then we are told that the full year costs of FoI cases is £155,577, based on multiplying up 10 months worth of cases (939) to 12 (1,127) and multiplying it by the new average cost of a case, £138.07. All well and good so far but then HE ADDS THIS TOTAL TO THE FULL COST OF THE INFORMATION GOVERNANCE TEAM.

Now hang on, we can be pretty certain that, as the average case cost already includes Info Gov staff time, adding the cost of the team on again is double counting and thus invalid no? So I'm very sorry but Cllr Collins is going to have to be disappointed that his latest claim of the cost of FoI being 'around £370,000' has just been blown out of the water.

So what does that leave us with, apart from the fact that JoCo is a serial bullshitter who bullies council staff when they simply get on and do their jobs? Well, I would have to say that the best estimate for the cost of FoI to Nottingham City Council is probably about £155k. This comes from the above calculation which includes an updated average case cost and a bigger sample of cases than the one derived from the original FoI response. Also, it is of a similar order of magnitude to that earlier estimate which adds to its credibility.

Without an opportunity to closely examine the methodology and to confirm the added assumptions I've made that's the best I can do. However, we can definitely be sure that JoCo's latest claim of the cost of Foi is demonstrably wrong. That won't stop him repeating it ad nauseam mind.

FoI Staff Give Out the Info, Boss Not Happy, Issues Thinly Disguised Threat

Bit of a follow up drama on the true costs of FoI that I wrote about a while back. Seems that Tories have found the original FoI request my article was based on and it's all found its way into the Post.

To recap, a FoI request unearthed the 'surprising' info that FoI doesn't cost anything like as much as JoCo likes to claim. He likes to over-inflate estimates of the cost in order to discredit FoI because he's scared it will reveal the various shenanigans behind the scenes. He's on record as claiming it costs £500k/yr, whereas the above mentioned response said it was less than £64k/yr.

Clearly, this will never do. One might get the impression that FoI is an insignificant cost and certain people should stop blubbing about. So NCC has come up a new figure of £370k/yr, along with an explanation that the £64k figure only represents about half the total cases, the ones that are logged onto the new system as mentioned in the FoI response. The other half, recorded on the old system, represents over £300k of expenditure. They know this despite the open admission that the cost per case wasn't recorded.

Some points to consider. If I had a reasonably accurate new information management system that told me that half of my workload cost me £64k per year, my best estimate for the whole workload would be £128k per year. In order to guess it to be £370k I'd need to see some pretty convincing evidence that, for some reason, the cases on the old system were so much more labour intensive.

What is perhaps the most sinister aspect of the event is JoCo's quote that he gave to the Post, which I reproduce in full;

"I've always referred to costs of the information management team and other officer time spent dealing with questions and queries – so more than FOIs.

With regard to this paragraph, no I don't think he has done at all. He particularly seems to gloss over the fact that Information Governance also deal with Data Protection, which is a big job in itself, and also have to spend time preparing the various policies, keep the publication scheme up to date and no doubt advise others on its operation, the disclosure logs and all the day to day hygiene stuff like team meetings and supervision.

"Still, if they think they can do the job for £30,000 then I can cut their budget to that and save hundreds of thousands of pounds for more useful frontline services."

This part is rather sinister. It rather looks to me like a rather menacing threat that if certain persons don't play the game budgets may be cut resulting in redundancies. Collins is frequently disparaging about Information Governance's work but this does somewhat take the Abbey Crunch.

As I've said before, if Collins and the crew weren't so secretive they wouldn't have to pay the lawyers so much to fight off the requests for information. Not being seriously dodgy in the first place would mean that fewer people would feel the need to see so much information.

Frankly, Collins wants to thank his lucky stars that the Information is a bit of a pussycat as far as enforcement goes. If they started fining authorities a bit more often the costs would snowball.

We Pay As NCC Ramps Up the Guarding of JoCo's Secrets

A couple of months ago I wrote about an Information Commissioner decision notice that looked like it might well open up some of the murkiness around the police's decision not to prosecute anyone involved with the Housing Allocations scandal. The Commissioner refused to accept NCC's claims that minutes of meetings between the council and the police were exempt. The decision notice is here.

However, I did say 'subject to appeal' at the time and this appears to have been sensible. Because, yes folks, NCC has decided to spend your tax pounds on an appeal to the Information Tribunal. It is asking YOU to pay for it's attempts to keep you in the dark, to cover up its shifty little dealings.

Scroll down about a quarter of the way down this document (or do a search for 'Nottingham', it's the first one) and you'll find case number EA/2012/0112, formerly known to the Information Commissioner as FS5031799. Yes, it's the case linked to above with Nottingham City Council up there as the appellant.

JoCo regularly bleats on about the cost of Freedom of Info to the council and we have previously taken the piss out of him for doing so. It must be very time consuming and expensive for NCC's lawyers to be pursuing appeals to this level and you really have to wonder whether to do so is within the public interest.

I won't be holding my breath, waiting for JoCo's principled stand against the cost of his lawyers.

Future Jobs Fund Report Arrives at Last

....or most of it at least.

Yes, in a surprise development, NCC has released a copy of the District Auditors report into Future Jobs Fund irregularities that they had been desperately trying to keep from the hoi-polloi. Presumably this is following discussions with the Information Commissioner.

First thing to say is that there seems to be absolutely no excuse for them to have kept the report secret at all. Originally they told me that the report was exempt because they were intending to publish it in the future. Presumably the fact that this hasn't happened has prompted the Information Commissioner to prod things along a bit.

Now they are saying

"...it was this Council’s opinion that the report should not be disclosed (at that time) as it was yet to be considered by the Council’s Audit Committee..."

At the Audit Committee meeting itself, councillors voted to discuss the report in secret because publishing it would supposedly prejudice a potential Standards Committee investigation into former councillor Hassan Ahmed's conduct. Are we to assume that's not going ahead now?

The thing is, the main body of the report doesn't actually mention anybody or any of the groups by name. Yes, it's obvious they're talking about Ahmed when it mentions the Portfolio Holder for Employment and Skills and the two Corporate Directors mentioned are identifiable (Barry Horne and Michael Williams, both also long gone) but that is no good reason to keep the report secret. The only part with any personal details in is an appendix with details of Ahmed's myriad connections to groups who, by an amazing coincidence, received a large amount of public money. And that was all redacted.

Anyway, there follows a short summary of what the report says. I've linked above to the rather comprehensive summary the Post wrote when it got hold of a leaked version so have a look at that, or the report itself, if you want more detail

• In some circumstances e.g. urgency the council can suspend normal procurement rules but to do so must be formally authorised by the Portfolio Holder. In this case the rules were dispensed with but no formal authorisation took place.
• Decisions to award contracts that should have been authorised by the Portfolio Holder apparently taken by officers instead. Contracts were worth around £500k in some cases and the maximum an officer can authorise is £200k.
• Barry Horne in particular is singled out for not keeping on top of this and for not keeping records of decisions that he made.
• Decisions for 5 contracts of £1m each which should only be made by the Executive Board, yet no clear records of who made them.
• One contract extended twice, from £1m to £1.5m, then to £2.5m, despite clear rules prohibiting contracts being extended more than once.
• Lack of required input from Legal Services in award of large contracts.
• Late addition of further requirements to contracts putting some tender organisations at a disadvantage.
• Hassan Ahmed's many connections to organisations bidding successfully for contracts, his involvement in the decision making to award such contracts and his failure to notify others involved of his interests.
• The bid for funding for the programme differed markedly from reality; the bid stated that 'partners' formally signed up, in fact the bid was submitted via the already long formed One Nottingham, some 'partners hadn't even seen the bid even though it was submitted in their name, steering group mentioned in bid not formed until late in the day.
• Late involvement of 'intermediary' organisations, lack of clarity as to how they had been chosen, half of all contracts issued via these intermediaries.

Like I say, there's lots more in the detail so do have a read.

The bit I don't understand is that the District Auditor says -

"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)."

before going on to, as far as I can see, provide lots of details of how contracts were awarded inappropriately. If a contract is awarded by a public body without the required authorisation then that is at the least 'inappropriate', probably illegal I'd have thought.

But of course no-one will face any sanctions. To be fair, the main players are all now gone, sacked stood down by mutual consent, sacked retired and sacked deciding not to stand again. And of course, no doubt that great public sector fuck-up mantra can be repeated, 'lessons have been learnt', even if they haven't.

Batman Mystery Solved?

Probably not the one you were thinking of.

You will not have failed to notice there's a new Batman film coming out. Last summer, many of the scenes were filmed at Wollaton Hall which was the new setting for Batman's day-clothes persona Bruce Wayne's mansion. Presumably the filmmakers paid handsomely for the privilege.

For some reason NCC is very unkeen for the amount paid to be made public, citing commercial confidentiality. You have an FoI refusal here and a refusal to answer a councillor's question here (see pp 152-3).

But the Post has twice claimed the amount paid was £100k here and, more recently, again here.

So, did they just make it up? Alternatively, why hasn't the council challenged them if the commercial sensitivity is so great? Odd.

New Discretionary Housing Payments Policy; It's, Erm, Not Brilliant

When I asked my big question about Housing Benefits and DHPs to full council, Cllr Chapman's response mentioned 'local policy and criteria' for awarding DHPs. As I had previously been told there was no such local policy I was intrigued and fired of a FoI request for what must be a new development. Well folks, in defiance of my honest but admittedly cynical expectations, here it is.

It starts off well, explaining the context and background of DHPs and encouragingly, makes the early point that DHPs should not be seen in isolation but as part of a wider strategy to prevent homelessness and maintain housing. Of course saying it is one thing and doing is another but the starting point is actually writing it down clearly and you can't argue with that.

It sort of goes downhill a bit from there. The section detailing the start date of a DHP award (see p5) is very confused. In particular, para ii) gives the incorrect impression that a DHP can only be backdated if a claim is made within a month of the mainstream housing benefits start date. In fact, there is no legal bar on backdating a DHP but, within the discretionary framework, authorities are entitled to set out situations where doing so may be a lower priority than paying for current shortfalls. NCC's policy doesn't even attempt to do that.

This lack of a 'priorities' framework is a repeated problem throughout the policy. It's structure essentially sets out the various problem areas that DHPs may be used to help alleviate, such as young people finding accommodation or preventing homelessness, then goes on to stipulate situations where they would consider a DHP, followed by situations where they would NOT consider one.

This is a massive issue. In discretionary schemes like this you cannot issue such prescriptive guidance, in legal terms it is known as 'fettering discretion'. It goes against the principle that all cases must be judged as individuals  on their own merits.

What you ARE supposed to do is to set out factors which may increase or decrease a person's priority for a DHP. The decision uses this guidance to determine the applicant's overall priority and depending on the budget position, uses this to decide whether to award a payment or not. Of course, you must also recognise that people may present situations that are outside your 'priority' definitions and the priority/non-priority should not simply be shorthand for will/won't get a payment. NCC's policy doesn't begin to do this, it just says 'yes you will get one if you are in list A' and 'no you won't if you're in list B'. Unfortunately, this makes it totally unfit for purpose.

Within this there are other bizarrities. For example, in the 'Young Individuals' section, the list of those who won't be considered for a DHP includes those in 5 bed accommodation who haven't faced a restriction to 4 bed HB levels (one of the standard Tory HB cuts which came into play this year). I mean, it's not impossible I suppose but how many 'young individuals' are going to have families so large that they need a 5 bed house?

A more basic error occurs where, in a couple of the lists where a DHP would not be considered (e.g. p8 and p12), one of the categories is where the council has good reason to believe that the tenancy is not on a commercial basis. The thing is, a tenancy not being on a commercial basis means that a person should be treated as not liable to pay rent and as such wouldn't be entitled to housing benefit at all (see Reg 9(1)(a) HB Regs 2006). As one of the basic entitlement conditions for a DHP is that there must be some entitlement to housing benefit, so in the circumstances where a claimant's tenancy is not considered to be a commercial one the question of a DHP is simply not going to arise. This just gives the impression that the policy was written by someone who has no idea of what they are talking about.

It sort of goes on like that. The last issue that concerns me is that there is no mention of budget profiling throughout the year i.e. planning in advance to ensure you don't spend the lot in three months and take into account known seasonal factors etc. All we get is -

"On a quarterly basis a report detailing all DHP applications received, decisions made and DHP fund available is forwarded to the Head of Service for  approval."

Yeah right, like she's going to bother reading that. When I worked at NCC one HB worker described handing a report to Lisa Black (for it is she) as a reason for nothing else happening on the initiative. Funnily enough, that was about DHPs too, back in 2006.

On the plus side, they have at least got a policy and its existence is useful for anyone trying to challenge a refusal to pay a DHP. Who knows, maybe they pulled their fingers out in response to the fuss I made on here? If so, maybe they'll read this post and look at it again.

In the meantime, anybody who IS challenging a DHP decision, my advice is to get a good lawyer on board and consider challenging the whole policy via Judicial Review.

What Freedom of Information REALLY Costs (Spoiler, a Lot Less Than JoCo Claims)

I've occasionally touched on JoCo's often verging on the hysterical claims on how much the council spends on processing Freedom of Information requests. He generally claims it's about £500k/yr and then goes off into a whinge about 'how many services' you could fund with that.

However, someone recently submitted a FoI request asking for detaiils of calculations that had been carried out to ascertain costs of responding to requests. According to the response, the total costs, i.e. the Information Governance Unit's own costs plus the time spent by the person in the information holding department, was £32,161 for the period Sep 11 - Feb 12.

Funnily enough, the IGU's costs include an average half hour for 'reputation impact assessment' (NCCLols translation service; 10 mins of 'ohshitohshitohshitohshit' followed by20 min phone call to Legal about how it can be covered up).

In other words, FoI costs slightly over 20%* about 13% of what Collins has been claiming.

Footnote; NCC has now sorted out a decent disclosure log of FoI responses which runs from September 2011. It also has a search facility. This is a Good Thing.

(H/T Joseph C)

*Momentarily forgot how to do sums.

Personal Data is Not 'Personal Data', Not When It's Gathered For the Purposes of the Workplace Parking Levy

About a year ago I revealed that enforcement of the Workplace Parking Levy would involve officers in a vehicle equipped with Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) tech touring the car parks of Nottingham, recording the registration numbers of cars parked there to determine how many spaces are being used by people working there. I suggested that this was a bit dodgy because, arguably such activity should be registered under RIPA and it would mean shunting quite a lot of individuals' personal data around which implies certain obligations. As the WPL rules do not include spaces used by Blue Badge holders i.e. people with disabilities, this includes what is defined as 'sensitive' personal data which requires explicit consent for processing. In other words, from a data protection point of view, this is some heavy shit.

Not surprisingly others are interested in this issue and there has been a rather illuminating response to a Freedom of Information request. Be amazed at this extract;

"We have determined that the information collected by our ANPR vehicle for the purposes of the WPL does not constitute personal data.

We have not completed the ICO self-assessment questionnaire.

We have obtained legal advice regarding all aspects of the Data Protection Act and the Workplace Parking Levy however, this information is exempt from disclosure under section 42 of this act as we feel releasing the information would breach legal professional privilege."

Ok, so they are claiming that records of thousands of individuals' number plates do not constitute personal data. They claim to have legal advice on this but they're not going to tell us. Handily this let's them off all the obligations for processing personal data fairly, including whether they pass it on to all and sundry which is another of my key concerns.

Let's have a look at the definition of personal data from the Information Commissioner's website;

"Personal data means data which relate to a living individual who can be identified –

(a) from those data, or

(b) from those data and other information which is in the possession of, or is likely to come into the possession of, the data controller,

and includes any expression of opinion about the individual and any indication of the intentions of the data controller or any other person in respect of the individual."

Now it's probably fair to say that this information doesn't count as personal data under part a), you can't identify somebody from their number plate alone. But what about part b)? We know that NCC has access to the DVLA database because there was a hoo-har about them allegedly being suspended from it a while back due to lax security procedures. The council also processes Blue Badge applications. There's probably more but from these two sources, combined with the ANPR data, individuals would be personally identifiable and the latter is thus personal data. No wonder they're unwilling to share the legal advice that says it isn't, it sounds well dodgy. That FoI exemption they used looks a lot less than watertight as well.

Later on in the response NCC appears to be saying that the ANPR vehicle has yet to be used in anger but it cost £93k so it will be at some point.

There is one other element of the response which has quite a lot of amusement value as well as being wrong. The questioner asked for the locations of signs at NCC's administrative boundaries informing people that they are entering ANPR surveyed areas. Here is the priceless response;

"These signs are in the public domain therefore this information is exempt from disclosure under section 21 of this act as it already publicly available."

Ok, there is an exemption under the Freedom of Information Act for information obtainable elsewhere but I'm really not sure that's what it means. The fact that the signs are physically viewable at the side of the road is not the same as a list of their locations. I hope that actually is a kind of a subtle 'fuck you' because if the FoI officer really believes that is the correct response, the work is only just beginning.

Update;

Thanks to 'Sanman' in the comments for the news that NCC's Data Protection Register Entry now includes vehicle registrations. See 'Purpose 7; Assessment and Collection of Taxes and Other Revenue', further description of purpose includes 'ADMINISTRATION AND ENFORCEMENT OF WORKPLACE PARKING LEVY' and 'Data Classes' includes 'VEHICLE REGISTRATION MARKS'.

This kind of implies that they do accept the vehicle reg numbers are personal data after all which in turn implies that the FoI response is incorrect.

Proud to be Still Failing to Pay Discretionary Housing Payments

Yep, it's bee-in-the-bonnet time again. I've just got back a response to a Freedom of Info request about the most recent two years of Discretionary Housing Payments. I don't like to ask every year, that would overwork our hard-pressed Information Governance Team.

What this means is that I can update my occasionally published table illustrating past performance on the issue. I've also added a running total at the bottom.

Now, I previously speculated whether NCC would pull their socks up and sort DHPs out seeing as the government had impose swingeing Housing Benefit cuts and had increased DHP allocations as a kind of sticking plaster solution. After all, those in poverty were more likely to need them and consequences for not sorting it would be much worse right?

Have a look at the last two years on the table. See how the government contribution more than doubles in 2011/12? See how the number of applications increases from 2010/11's 556 to 701, possibly due to the cuts starting to bite? And see how the number of successful applications drops from 201 to 176 and the total amount paid out drops from £71,183 to £56,575.

So. The council gets given more money to hand out as DHPs. Economic conditions are not improving and benefit cuts are starting to bite resulting in more applications. And their solution is to make FEWER awards. Not more awards. FEWER.

WT absolute F?

Because of this and the other aspects of worsening Housing Benefits performance I have decided to post a question to be asked at Full Council. I know it's a bit long and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it gets knocked back on that basis (even though there's no limit given on questions to full council), failing that it'll probably be shunted off for a written response. Anyway, I reproduce it here and I'll let you know if it goes anywhere.


"Question to Full Council Concerning the Operation of the Housing Benefits Service

I would like to ask the following of the relevant Portfolio Holder and the Full Council;

Should the Portfolio Holder and the Council not be concerned at the extremely poor performance of the Housing Benefits Service in this time of continued recession and Tory benefit cuts?
 
According to the latest statistics available (Q2 and Q3 of the last financial year) Nottingham was the second worst in the country for speed of processing new claims. It was the fifth worst for processing changes in circumstances. Does this not exacerbate the problems of benefit cuts and poverty already experienced by claimants? Don't delays in processing changes in circumstances lead inevitably to more overpayments, which is in neither the council's or claimants' interests?
 
Furthermore, NCC has had to repay considerable sums of overpaid housing benefit subsidy. Over £400,000 in 2008/9, £78,000 in 2009/10 and potentially £729,000 for 2010/11. If a claimant received overpayments of benefits so consistently they'd be prosecuted for fraud. When will this issue be tackled?
 
Are the Portfolio Holder and the Council also not deeply concerned about the alarming maladministration of the Discretionary Housing Payments scheme?
 
In the 11 years of the existence of the Discretionary Housing Payments Scheme, the Housing Benefits Service has paid out the equivalent of the full government grant in only two years (2009/10 and 2010/11) and has never paid out more than 51% of the full amount it is allowed to by law in any financial year. And yet the majority of applications are refused. The highest success rate for applications was 55.4% in the first year of operation. After that it varied between 21.2% and 53.3%. Over the life of the scheme 33% of applications have resulted in an award. Is this high rate of refusal not a strange anomaly?
 
In terms of the amounts paid out, over the life of the scheme so far NCC could have received £889,132 in central government grant for DHPs yet it only paid out £527614. That is £361,518 that could have been paid out to Nottingham's poorest citizens AT NO EXTRA COST TO THE COUNCIL.
 
Except that it's worse than that. Between the years 2003/4 and 2010/11, if the previous year's allocation from central government was not fully utilised, the following year's allocation was reduced. This happened in Nottingham year on year from 2003/4 to 2008/9. Imagine if the central government grant had remained at 2003/4 levels throughout the rest of the life of the scheme (up to 2011/12 when the system changed) Nottingham would have received £1,131,390. That is a very conservative estimate, all it would have required would have been for the Housing Benefits Service to have paid out what it was given by the government and it makes no allowance for any inflationary increases. And of course, if more had been paid out then the next year's allocation would have increased. On this very conservative basis then Nottingham's citizens have lost out on £603,776. Think how many evictions that could have prevented, all at no extra cost to the City Council. Does the Portfolio Holder and the Council see this as a success?
 
In 2011/12 the system was changed to take into account vicious Tory cuts to mainstream Housing Benefits. DHPs were increased in an attempt to offset the worst of the effects. Nottingham's central government allocation increased to £119,386 from the previous year's £55,863 i.e. it more than doubled. Applications increased to 701 from the previous year's 556, perhaps reflecting the initial bite of the cuts to mainstream benefits. So what happened to the number of successful applications? It dropped from 201 in 2010/11 to 176 in 2011/12. So, the grant allocation was doubled, mainstream benefits were cut and we continued in recession, yet the Housing Benefits Service decided that FEWER people should be paid a bit extra to help with their rent. Can the Portfolio Holder explain why this was the case?
 
During this time Nottingham faced a recession, like the rest of the country. The council launched a campaign called 'We're On Your Side'. Why were DHPs not promoted as part of this? One Nottingham has held two sessions to discuss the effects of benefit cuts on the citizens of Nottingham yet DHPs were never even mentioned, when the scheme is one of the few measures at the council's disposal to mitigate these cuts. Why are they not shouting about DHPs from the rooftops?
 
What is the Council going to do about this double whammy of bottom-of-the-table performance of the mainstream Housing Benefit scheme along with the year on year failure to properly administer the Discretionary Housing Payments scheme that is faced by Nottingham's poorest? Does this not reflect an abject failure by the Housing Benefit Service Management?"

The Net is Closing...

It's the thing that JoCo has been hoping would go away but, in the manner of pulling teeth, NCC is being forced to reveal information on the Housing Allocations scandal. Subject to appeal of course.

The Information Commissioner has just released a decision notice on the issue. You may remember that, despite initial positive noises the police were never asked to mount a formal investigation into the matter. Council officials did meet with the police in 2006 but we don't know what was discussed. That maybe about to change.

Somebody has asked NCC for the minutes of those meetings under the Freedom of Information Act. Amazingly, NCC refused and went off on its usual delaying tactics and exemption bingo and the matter has ended up in the Information Commissioner's lap. He has now released his decision notice.

Initially, NCC's refusal was based on the exemption for information used in an investigation which an authority has a duty to carry out to decide whether someone has committed a criminal offence. The ICO was having none of that, saying that NCC was under no such duty. At most, its possibilities amounted to a power to decide on whether to conduct civil recovery proceedings against individuals but only the police could press criminal charges e.g. for misconduct in public office.

NCC's second objection, that the minutes included details of a 'group' of individuals they were investigating and releasing details of them would breach Data Protection principles was on stronger ground. After all, you can't go around being 'cavalier' with people's personal data can you? Even though the number of people in Nottingham who aren't aware of who EXACTLY that group is now only consists of sub-rock dwellers.

So the Information Commissioner has ordered the release of the minutes of three meetings between the council and the police in 2006 but with the details of the 'group' of individuals redacted. Like I say, that won't diminish their impact a great deal. It might finally shed some light on why the hell the police utterly failed to do their job at the time.

Will they appeal? Time will tell.

Note; I've also still got an outstanding complaint to the ICO about a request that covers the same ground plus some extras. Will let you know how I get on...

NCC Forced to Sign Freedom of Information Undertaking

Last year the Information Commissioner announced that he was going to monitor NCC's Freedom of Information performance due to concerns that things were a bit shit.

Now it has been announced that, following confirmation that it was indeed very shit, the council has had to sign an 'undertaking' in order to avoid formal enforcement action. The undertaking includes acknowledgement that only 40% of requests were responded to on time within the monitoring period.

An undertaking is the lowest level of action the ICO can take, below issuing a practice direction or court action. It's hardly onerous either, broadly all NCC is promising to do is to do what the law requires it to do anyway. Imagine if the only sanction for shoplifting is promising not to do it again eh?

There are some further promises on training of staff etc and NCC is required to provide monthly performance updates for 6 months ending in June. It remains to be seen whether this demonstrates any improvement but, considering JoCo's obsession with secrecy and resultant constant denigrating of FoI I suspect it won't.

In further FoI news, two further decision notices have been issued against NCC by the Information Commissioner. You can find them here and here. These concern requests for information regarding similarities between NCC publicity and Labour's election campaign for 2007 which was reported on by the District Auditor. Two council officers used gmail accounts for official business and the Commissioner was not satisfied that these had been checked properly.

What makes these decisions pretty extraordinary is the following -

• the officers are named. They of course include Stephen Barker but also Jamie O'Malley. Harold Tinworth is also mentioned
• it's pretty rare for the ICO to refuse to accept claims of not holding information
• the Commissioner requires NCC to check the above accounts if possible, requiring them to ask Barker to let them search his gmail account even though he has now left. That said, he was still employed at the time of the original request

Barker isn't very happy and has interrupted his busy schedule campaigning for an elected mayor from his secret island in Albania to say it's all very 'boring'. He also appears to imply that former councillor Tony Sutton may have been involved with the removal of certain documents from his office. Goodness!

Tell Me JoCo, Do You Prefer Freedom of Information or Leaks?

Collins has been whinging on Twitter again about the terrible injustice of the Freedom of Information Act getting in the way of him and his mates doing what they like and choosing what the public finds out about.

He generally claims that FoI costs NCC £500k/yr which, even if it's true (I'm skeptical) it probably mostly goes on legal costs of trying to keep things hidden. I wonder how the information governance staff feel about his constantly putting them down and devaluing their work?

Anyway, would JoCo prefer a world where we have to rely on leaks? A bit like this one reported in the Post. It's the 'Jobs Plan Review' which NCC has been desperately trying to cover up. My FoI attempt at seeing a copy is about to go to the Information Commissioner.

Do follow the link to the Post articles if you haven't already seen them. Very interesting indeed. No doubt Collins and co will soon to be found slagging the Post off for being 'biased', just as they recently rather childishly personalised their issues with Charlie Walker and former councillor Tony Sutton at the last full council meeting (scroll to p295). But of course, the Post is doing exactly what it is expected to do which is hold local decision makers to account.

Some Are More Equal Than Others

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.

How Much Does Freedom of Information Cost 2

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!

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.