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!

Auditor Schmauditor

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?

"No Scams" Cllr Collins?

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?

Tinworth Waters Slightly Muddier

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?

Nice Work if You Can Get It

The news that NCC is investigating whether public money was siphoned off to pay for Labour's campaigning in the 2007 elections is not a big surprise, including the bit that they're being allowed to investigate the matter themselves.

The documents reportedly have the names 'Harold' and 'Stephen B' on them. Some people, nasty suspicious paranoid people obviously, are asking whether these names refer to political consultant Harold Tinworth and NCC's Director of Communications Stephen Barker.

NCC has been repeatedly caught out over its publicity being over political and as Barker is in charge of all that it wouldn't be a huge surprise to find his prints all over this. He also leads a charmed life - how many other senior officers would still be in post after putting videos of work colleagues on the internet, seemingly without their knowledge?

Tinworth has of course graced these pages on a number of occasions and famously included a proposal to advise executive councillors on their election manifesto in his pitch for a new contract. He only had to submit a tender because the District Auditor told NCC that the rather informal way his services had been procured for the previous five years wasn't acceptable. Gosh! You don't think he was giving campaign advice during the last election as well do you? Surely not.

Of course if the DA could have been bothered she could have looked into this but she refused to do so, claiming that she couldn't go back to accounts that had already been audited. Now it turns out that actually she can. It'll be interesting to see if she finall pulls her finger out and does something useful for a change.

Someone Does the Wrong Thing

I am genuinely stunned by the latest development in the Harold Tinworth Saga.

The Post has published another three articles on the call-in sub-committee (my report of the first day is here) meeting held to look into the decision to formally award him a contract instead of it being all unofficial. It now turns out that in his pitch he proposed advising councillors on preparing their manifesto for the 2011 council elections.

Yes, this supposedly expert consultant who has been both a Leader of a council and a Chief Executive was happy to include an offer to carry out (illegal) political work in exchange for council taxpayers money in a document that would be seen by officers.

It's been clear from the off that the contracted work was a continuation of the work he had been doing since 2006. It therefore seems reasonable to conclude that at least some of his earlier work included political advice which we paid for, seeing as the last election was in 2007. This might explain some of the apparent discomfiture expressed in an early memo on the subject to the then Service Director of Democratic Services Tony McGovern.

However, the bit that really gets my goat is the fact that NCC was intending to keep this secret on the basis that publishing it was against the 'public interest'. The minutes are out now and there is nothing of this in there apart from a summary of the discussion from which the public were excluded.

In a paragraph which gob-smackingly starts with the phrase "In the interests of openness and transparency..." we hear -

  

"...that the contract, if and when awarded, should have specific managerial parameters; and the work conducted be explicitly non-political in nature;"

and that's it. It turns out that the meeting decided to write to Tinworth to clarify this point.

None of the officers who assessed the bids challenged the original proposal and Cllr Hassan Ahmed must have approved it in its original form with the illegal political activity intact, meaning he had effectively led NCC into an illegal contract. Does approving an illegal contract make you a crook?

Worst of all is that none of the opposition councillors, which included both Tory and Lib Dem group leaders, challenged the decision to hear this part of the meeting in closed session. Way to go chaps, thank you for sticking up for democracy. Although presumably one of them is likely to be the person who leaked the details to the Post.

This is final and conclusive evidence, as if it were needed, that NCC equates 'politically embarrassing' with 'not in the public interest'. See the treatment of the Hardmoor Associates report for earlier evidence of this contemptible attitude.

There appears to have been a brief discussion on the District Auditor's intervention during the second day of the hearing which I didn't attend. Both Cllr Ahmed and Angela Probert the Director of HR admitted that they knew about this yet both were asked about the timing of the tender on day 1 and neither saw fit to mention it then. At the time I thought this info had been kept in the 'exempt information' category but it seems not to be the case.

Despite all this the committee decided that everything was above board and tickety-boo which is something of a whitewash.

Personally I think this was a scandal of the utmost seriousness. £110k of public money appears to have been spent on blatant political activity. I think JoCo should be surcharged for this and I have written back to the District Auditor to request that she reconsiders her decision not to investigate the legality of the payments.

In addition I believe that the contract with Tinworth should not be proceeded with as he is clearly tainted, not just by a willingness to engage in illegal spending of taxpayers' money but by being somewhat incompetent.

Tinworth News Pt 94 etc

The Post has written about the Call-in Sub-committee examining the decision to examine the decision to hand more cash to Harold Tinworth.

There's not a lot new in there. The unsurprising conclusion of the committee was that everything was done by the book which, from a purely procedural point of view is true. The committee did make recommendations to improve the process to be followed but time will tell as to whether anything changes. My guess is no because the changes that have been suggested, which are to have a panel of approved consultants to choose from and to ensure at least three bids are to be received, as opposed to simply invited, would simply make the procurement procedure for small contracts of <£50k the same as that for contracts >£50k. I suspect that such a move will eventually be abandoned for being too 'bureaucratic'.

According to the call-in request one of the aspects to be examined was the reason for picking Tinworth over the other bidder. Now on the surface the reasons were obvious, the bid from Tribal was nearly twice the cost and had little information about what they would do.

And yet, there is more than a little circumstantial evidence for there being a stitch up -

1) Tinworth had already been doing the work since 2006, it was probably inconvenient to be told by the District Auditor that this cosy arrangement had to be placed on a formal footing,

2) Other, larger sections of the so-called 'Leading Nottingham Transformation Programme' were put out to open tender and received a lot of interest (see p4 here). Why was the bit for working with the executive hived off separately and only three bids invited, when if it had been included with the section aimed at senior managers it would have been seen by the 189 companies that bid for that contract. They didn't need to insist that all bidders bid for both parts but a wider circulation would have attracted more interest and been more transparent.

3) The choice of the alternative bidders, Tribal Group (who have, at least in the past, done recruitment work for NCC) and Solace Enterprises (who, coincidentally, both JoCo and Harold Tinworth have worked for in the past, in fact it appears that it was Solace who were the initial intermediaries for Tinworth working at NCC) leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. It does seem odd that a company of Tribal's size would put in such a spectacularly inferior bid and that Solace Enterprises, a subsidiary of the Society for Local Authority Chief Executives, would not have the skills to fulfill the contract as was claimed.

It's not difficult to see a route by which it could have been ensured that Tinworth would be the successful bidder. Bearing in mind that does look a bit conspiracy theory it's fair to ask why anyone would want to do that and my answer would be to refer you back to 1) above. Yet none of the opposition councillors asked anything about this part of the story at the meeting I attended, in fact Lib Dem Gary Long said he didn't know anything about the District Auditor's investigation when I asked him. There's no mention of it in the Post article so I can only assume it didn't come up when the meeting was reconvened next day.

As I said in my previous post, without the back-story there would be nothing remarkable about Tinworth getting the contract. So I'm suspicious as to why the District Auditor's role seemed to be kept out of the discussion and I can't help feeling that opposition councillors could have asked more difficult questions.

Call-In Sub-Committee LOLs

I did my proper concerned citizen thing today and attended my first ever NCC meeting. I've sort of planned to go to a few but this was the first time a meeting that I was at all interested in coincided with a sensible night's sleep and no feeling that facing the outside world was less preferable than chewing my own feet off. I'd like to say it was an interesting experience. Well, I'd like to, in fact it was crashingly dull, but there you go. I won't be making a habit of this.

My interest in going was due to the fact that it was examining the decision to give Harold Tinworth the £30k contract for 'Executive Development' which is the new name for the work he's been doing for the last four years or so without so much as a decision to approve the expenditure or a proper tendering exercise.

Now it's arguable that it wasn't necessarily that vital in the grand scheme of things but what struck me was that nobody in the meeting seemed to know that the District Auditor had become involved and told them that they couldn't just keep handing money over to a consultant with no official basis and that they had to put it on an official footing. Well, either that or they did know and were under strict instructions not to say so out loud. In answer to questions as to why Executive members suddenly needed the training, Hassan Ahmed went on about the 'dynamic political environment' and mentioned the new government as a reason. The Director of HR said that the Chief Exec's office had suggested that suddenly it was a good idea to put the work that Tinworth was doing on a formal footing, like they'd somehow woken up one morning and thought "I know what would be a good idea..."

Personally I was having trouble hearing what was going on over the huge trumpeting sound coming from the elephant in the room that was something like 'Harold Tinworth has been working for NCC for years, nobody really knows what he was doing or who authorised it but we're not allowed to look at that because call-in can only be used to look at a portfolio decision.' To be honest, if it wasn't for the Tinworth back-story it wouldn't have been a strong candidate for call-in at all. So there was an awful lot of to-ing and fro-ing asking why Tinworth got the contract and how it was known that he was good at his job when there had clearly been no formal evaluation of the work he did because nobody outside the inner circle knew he was doing it. Hassan Ahmed was forced to admit that their knowledge of his expertise had previously been kept 'within the political environment'.

Some trivia points that came out of the day was that Tinworth was supposedly initially hired by Michael Frater (nice and safe, implied blame for lack of paperwork, no chance of anybody checking thanks to the watertight confidentiality agreement he would have signed) and secondly that JoCo had previously done some work for one of the companies, Solace Enterprises, that had been invited to tender but who didn't bother. This latter point was eventually agreed not to be too sinister though.

One thing I've yet to work out is why the tender assessment document (see document (c) page 8 here) quoted a cost of about £22k for Tinworth's services but by the time of Ahmed's portfolio decision it had risen to £30k. No doubt that will be clear to someone somewhere. Please do write in.

The meeting ended up having to be adjourned as it couldn't go on into the afternoon. I'd pretty much lost the will to live by then. They're back tomorrow but I'm currently considering whether to rejoin them.

Updates - have had a look through the paperwork and it seems that Solace were also initially involved  with Tinworth's early work for NCC. Also, despite JoCo's previous protestations that Tinworth wasn't just working with him but with other Executive Members and senior managers from the off, all the early documents talk exclusively of Tinworth's work and meetings with the Leader.

I didn't go to the reconvened meeting in the end, will have to wait for the 'Post' report to find out what eventually happened although I can largely guess.

Calling (In) Mr Tinworth

Three Tory Councillors have invoked the 'call-in' procedure on Hassan Ahmed's portfolio decision to award Harold Tinworth the £30k contract for 'Executive Development'. The Overview and Scrutiny' Call-In Sub-Committee will consider the request on 8 September.

The 'call-in' procedure is the little used means by which a portfolio holder's decision can be examined by councillors. Following a good old chinwag, absolutely bugger all happens due to Labour members resolutely refusing to ever challenge the leadership. It's only the second time it's ever been used, the first being the decision to sell Radford Unity Complex. At that one, Councillor Jon Collins, he of 'Leader of the Council' fame, sold the committee a porkie regarding the sale price. Hopefully the Standards Committee should be looking into his conduct there but they're probably desperately trying to think of a way to avoid doing so. Certainly you shouldn't hold your breath.

You may remember that the 'Executive Development' gig was formally put to tender following the District Auditor's failure to do anything significant about the seriously dodgy way that money was finding its way to Tinworth without any formal sanction.

Shocking News!

You'll never believe this but Harold Tinworth has been successful in his bid to carry on doing whatever it was he was doing for NCC.

I know! I was as surprised as anyone.

The news was sneaked out in a portfolio decision by Hassan Ahmed, so everything is clearly absolutely above board if he is involved. The decision is nominally one to award a contract for 'Delivery of the Leading Nottingham Transformation Programme' to OPM and that part of it went to open tender. But look closely at the end and you will see there are two elements, the bit for 'senior leadership' which went to OPM and a bit for 'Executive Development' which was awarded to 'Regional and Local Associates' which is Tinworth's stage name, if you will.

It's going to cost us £30k for 25 days work. Maths fans will have already worked that out to be £1200 per day. Another one for the 'nice work if you can get it' file.

Interestingly, there is another portfolio decision for the 'Delivery of the Leading Nottingham Transformation Programme', this time nominally going to a company called La Gente. This also included an element for sending some more cash to one of NCC's old pals Invigor8. I'm sure that this bundling up of decisions is purely about keeping things tidy and in no way is an attempt to hide back-scratching from the casual observer.

Harold Tinworth - Nearing the End of the Story (Although Probably Not the End of Harold Tinworth)

Surprisingly quick work from NCC's Info Governance bods for a change.

Following the District Auditor's mild telling off for NCC and an instruction to put the work previously done by Harold Tinworth out to tender, I decided to ask for a copy of it and here it is!

Points of interest include a specification of only 25 days work plus any extra for preparation. By my reckoning Tinworth was doing around 35 days a year from his invoices. Either the work is nearly done or they plan on re-tendering in less than a year's time. Quite right too. If I remember I may well check up on that at the time.

Clearly, this will be an entirely open competition and I'm sure that someone other than Mr Tinworth has every chance of securing the gig. And I'm sure Councillor Collins will do the right thing and confirm the successful applicant in a published portfolio holder decision.

District Auditor in 'Mild Rebuke of Council' Uproar

We've been having a look at the somewhat murky status of the various payments made to Mr Harold Tinworth, murky because no-one has ever seemed to have formally agreed the expenditure to pay for his services and there is no formal record of what he actually does.

The District Auditor has now completed an investigation into the matter and, while the total lack of any sanction is hardly going to be much of a disincentive against frittering away £111k of public money with no records kept again in the future, NCC have now been told to formalise the arrangement and to issue a proper tender for the work required that is compliant with NCC's financial regulations. I thought I'd get in quick and ask for a copy of the tender under the Freedom of Info Act.

The reasons why the DA decided not to look further into this matter are somewhat disappointing. She says that her remit is limited to investigating years that haven't yet been subject to full audit. Because of this restriction as far as she is concerned the amount of money at stake is negligible. 'Negligible' in as much as it would have paid for a social worker for the best part of a year that is. Essentially, what is being said here is that if you can keep your skullduggery under wraps for long enough, you have a much better chance of not being investigated.

Of course, we might do well to remind ourselves that the person at the centre of this is the leader of the council Jon Collins. The invoices all said that the work charged for was 'services to the leader' and Collins seemed to be the only person who knew what Tinworth was up to.

This is the second time that a Collins scheme has escaped proper scrutiny. He was at the centre of the Radford Unity Complex debacle which the District Auditor was looking into, before abandoning the investigation when the sale fell through.

NCC Annual Meeting

I just found the minutes to the council's annual meeting. That's not to to say that I'm claiming they were previously well hidden, simply that I hadn't really bothered to look.

Anyway I was interested to see the minute of the exchange between Tory Councillor Georgina Culley and Cap'n Collins over his alleged 'personal mentoring'. For more details on the background to this see here. Let's quote it in full -

"Councillor Culley asked the following question of the Leader of the Council:

Could the Leader of the Council explain the nature of the personal mentoring that he has received since 2005/06, and what value the public has received from the £111,000 spent to date?

Councillor Collins replied as follows:

Thank you Lord Mayor. As I have previously made clear in a question to Council on this matter, I have not received any personal mentoring. I cannot therefore comment on the nature or value of something I have not had."

Remember, these are the official minutes of the meeting and are therefore supposed to accurately report formal replies in full even if (and they often do) go on a bit.

Two issues strike me here. One, if that is all he said, it is a woefully inadequate answer to a question about over £111k public expenditure which nobody seems to be able to trace. Secondly, and possibly partially in Collins' defence, Charles Walker at the 'Post' seemed to hear him say quite a bit more. Shouldn't all that have gone into the minutes? (Update - see comments for an explanation of what actually happened)

I do note Collins reference to a previous reply to a question to Council and maybe the extra detail was given there and Walker or his sub-eds conflated the two for simplicity. I haven't been able to find any trace of this earlier question on the issue and I'll keep looking but if anybody else can enlighten me please do.

By the way, I received a message from the District Auditor telling me that she had been in Nottingham last Friday but hadn't been able to conclude her enquiries at that time. It does look like there is quite a bit to look into.

As to why this is an important issue, well there is of course the value for money question, what did we get for the cash? This appears to be the only aspect that the Tories were looking into (happy to correct this if one of them wants to get in contact). However, to me, a bigger issue is the lack of accountability behind the spending of this money on our behalf.

The fact is that Collins could have quite legitimately made a portfolio holder decision to employ a consultant to do whatever it was that Tinworth was doing (presuming it was within his remit, if not I'm sure he could have got the relevant portfolio holder to do it for him). This decision would have been published and we would have some idea of what was going on. He could also have quite legitimately formally decided not to go to an open tender because NCC's finance rules allow it to do that if the circumstances justify it. That would also be recorded on the portfolio decision. Essentially, two pieces of paper and a couple of signatures would have made it all above board.

The thing is, when the Leader of the Council doesn't follow those simple accountability measures, and over a hundred grand gets spent on somebody who Collins does appear to have history with (Tinworth was involved in trying to rescue the One City Partnership, the predecessor to 'One Nottingham' which Collins has been running as his personal fiefdom until very recently*) then we have the right to wonder if there is a bit of a stinky fish involved.

Anyway, moving on. I was interested to see that both opposition parties tabled some fairly detailed amendments to the budget. With the current political make-up of NCC their amendments had no chance of being passed so you might wonder why they bother. I for one am glad that they did. If nothing else it gives us some insight into their parties' thinking on the issues (e.g. both seem to want to see expenditure on the Arrow reduced and the Lib Dems also suggested ending the ridiculous 'Proud' campaign, the use of Executive Assistants and to scrap the Viccy Centre 'rebuild') and at least keeps alive the impression of democracy happening. Must be a thankless task drafting those amendments for what may be essentially a symbolic gesture but again, I'm glad that they do.

Lastly, there were a large number of questions from the public about the Radford Unity Complex debacle, to which Collins provided the response. He mentions the 'unprecedented' Call-in Sub-commmittee meeting held just four days before but this time doesn't repeat his (subsequently revealed to be false) claim that selling it would raise £320k. In fact, a buyer had been offered it last Autumn for less than half that. It's difficult to see how Collins couldn't have known about that and why he failed to include it in his response. The Audit Commission were keen to look into until the sale fell through which I reckon Collins can count as a lucky escape.

All in all, it's worth reading and comparing the not entirely identical stories he gave to the sub-committee and full council, especially in light of how it all fell apart when the dodgier bits of the deal found their way into the public domain.

*Of course, it's likely that he will continue running One Nottingham as his personal fiefdom via a proxy.

Harold Tinworth - An Update

Had a further response to my FoIA request about the decision to commission services from Harold Tinworth's company 'Regional and Local Associates'.

As you can see, NCC are saying that they have no further info regarding the decision to spend over £25k pa on a consultant to provide unspecified services. That's not good.

Apparently the Audit Commission is investigating this one and I'll hopefully be able to update you further on that fairly soon.

Harold Tinworth-gate

Everything's got to be a 'gate' these days so who am I to spoil the party?

So. Harold Tinworth. Who he? I hear you clamour.

Surprise surprise he's another consultant who's made quite a packet from NCC. £111k over four years according to the 'Post', which was where I first heard of him. I blogged about this briefly at the time.

Anyway, publicly at least, the Tories' angle seemed to be that JoCo needed a 'personal mentor' ner ner ne ner ner whereas Collins' defence was basically that no he didn't, not like some of those wimpy Chief Execs he'd got rid of in the past.

But that seemed to me to miss the point which is that there is a distinct lack of a paper trail for approving over £25k pa expenditure on behalf of NCC and as such, there's a bit of a stinky fish.

So I stuck in a Freedom of Info request and I've just got something back. While quite interesting, it doesn't get us much further forward on this most important point.

The interesting bit is the copy of the memo they sent me which seems to reflect a certain amount of discomfort that existed at the sort of work HT was doing. The official drafting the memo says, with some very classy understatement -

"Perhaps it is the fact that certain Executive Member/Senior Officer working relationships are not as close as in previous regimes, which brings this issue into spotlight?"

This was all around the time covered by the Hardmoor Associates report that famously described NCC as dysfunctional.

But the thing is, that's all this document is, a memo. It's not a Portfolio Holder's decision which it should be at the very least, considering the level of expenditure. So NCC have failed to provide the most important document that would get JoCo off the hook. Now, why do you think that could be?

Well, I'm chasing it up with NCC via the FoI process so hopefully we'll soon find out. Or not so soon more likely. Due to their failure to respond within the time limit it's already at the review stage so I've given them until the time limit for that to run out to get any further stuff to me. That runs out (I think) on 21 May.

In the meantime, marvel at the fact that Mr Tinworth's fees went from £600/day in December 2005 to £680/day by July 2008, an increase of over 13% in little more than 2 1/2 years. Compare and contrast with the sort of settlements local government employees have had over the same time period. After October 2008 NCC goes all secretive blaming 'commercial interests' which suggests to me there was another price rise after that.

As we say often around here, nice work if you can get it.

[Not] Jon Collins Personal Mentor

Bit of a rum do this business in the 'Post' of JoCo supposedly spending over £100k on a 'personal mentor'. JoCo is, of course, in full denial mode saying that the payments to a Harold Tinworth was for policy advice and support to himself, other members of the executive, senior officers and 'One Nottingham'. Kind of sounds as though HT is running NCC single handed in which case he sounds pretty good value for money.

But as Alanadale has already said, this attempt at a defense from JoCo shows that, in the political phrase du jour, he simply 'doesn't get it'.

What's a bit odd though is that there's very little info about Mr Tinworth in his role as a consultant. A Google search for his company (the 'Post' says he runs a firm of consultants called 'Regional and Local Associates') and a search for him mostly seems to bring up stuff about his local authority background. A search on the NCC website reveals he was once an adviser on the reform of (forerunner to 'One Nottingham') the 'One City Partnership Nottingham' (see p16 of this report) back in 2005 but I think that work was done for Government Office East Midlands rather than freelance.

I have to admit though that, just because I can't find something doesn't automatically mean it's not there but if anybody can enlighten me on this chap's background please do via the comments or email.

A little bit more worryingly, although subject to the same proviso as above, is the fact that there appears to be no record of a decision to approve the funding of HT's work for the council. At this level of expenditure any approval would be via a portfolio holder decision, most likely by JoCo himself. Yet I've painstakingly gone through the list of portfolio decisions back to the beginning of 2005 (that's a couple days of my life I won't get back) and I can't find anything remotely relevant to Mr Tinworth or his firm.

So it's all a bit mysterious and the lack of info makes it rather difficult to comment properly. Someone should have a bit more of a look into this business about the approval decision to employ him though.