More Mayoral Mayhem

Well, 'mayhem's a bit strong maybe but basically, JoCo's been out being a bit of a dick on Twitter again so I simply have to take the piss. As you've no doubt guessed already he's getting increasingly desperate about the possibility of a mayor nicking all his power so he's been doing a sort of 'why vote no for a mayor' series of tweets. We'll take them apart one by one but first, can I warn you that the phrase '£1m Extra Tory Mayor' gets a repeated look-in...

Here we go then, #1

See? Now then, is Cllr Collins comparing like-with-like here? Of course he isn't. His '£1m' cost for a mayor is a total for of the imagined 4 year cost of the mayor's wages, plus referendum costs, election costs (which in fact will be lower because those costs will be shared with the police commissioner election but that's another story). On the other hand the £80m which the government has cut from the budget is for one year. I agree with Collins that one of those costs is very bad and unjustifiable.

#2

Ok, cost is an issue but Collins as leader of the Council gets about £45k, much of which will be lost if a mayor is elected because the post of Leader will be much diminished (you see how this is going?). Futhermore, it's not yet clear how mayors' salaries will be decided so this is all conjecture.

#3

I've touched on this before but clearly, JoCo has to pretend he doesn't read my blog. To summarise, under the current system, the leader of the Council has huge powers already and as far as the legislation says so far, a mayor won't really get anything extra apart from the ability to appoint assistants. So councillors are largely merely cannon fodder as it is, a mayor won't change that. The difference is we get the chance to vote for a mayor, the vast majority of the city has no possibility of any say in who gets to be the leader of the council.

If JoCo really believes this to be the big issue, he could issue a cast iron promise to return power to councillors by re-establishing the committee system if the referendum results in a 'no' vote. He won't do that though because hius agenda is solely based on his own self-interest.

#4

Oh. Em. Gee. He really said that out loud folks. Can I re-refer you to the link above re power of leader vs mayor but there's too many scandals to link to. Let's just say that Collins' problem is that the 'one person' would no longer be him.

#5

Well, it doesn't really does it? Any mayor is likely to be Labour and you'd worry if their manifesto was radically different to Labour councillors. Of course, if a Leader with much reduced power and influence was to make trouble out of personal spite then that might cause difficulties but I can't see anyone being so immature, can you?

#6

Not the strongest of arguments is it? It's failed elsewhere so the whole concept is screwed. If it had failed in the majority of places he may have had a point. It's worth pointing out that the failure of the mayor in Stoke was partly due to wholesale political meltdown in the city. It was within a hair's breadth of becoming the first BNP council. A lot of that was due to the failure of Labour politicians who lost the confidence of the electorate due to complacency.

#7

Ah yes Doncaster, the ultimate Labour political basket case. People voted for the English Democrats chump due to wholesale disaffection with years of corrupt Labour regimes. Is JoCo concerned about a similar situation in Nottingham?

#8

If they stand and the people see one of them as the best option then that could happen. People vote for 'joke' candidates when they are totally disillusioned with the mainstream ones (how do you think Boris got half his votes?) As it happens, the monkey in Hartlepool got re-elected and his administration does at least appear to be functional.

#8. No, sorry 9

Diff'rent strokes etc. It's a different kind of election. And why keep a leader who can't count?

#10

This is, of course, a particular problem for a politician with no discernible personality whatsoever so you can understand JoCo's hostility. But of course, any leadership election has an element of personality to it. You might as well argue against the tides.

Oh, as you can see, I've left a reply in this one. 'Mayor for Nottingham' is run by Stephen Barker, former PR chief at NCC. Looks like things weren't very happy in the hen-house after all.

#11

Yeah, he's supposedly running and if the people of Salford decide that the best person to run their city is an ex-con with a record of violence and no political experience then that's the world you have to deal with and their mainstream politicians need to ask themselves a lot of difficult questions. Who knows, he might decide to run as a ward councillor next time. Is Collins suggesting he should be banned from doing that?

#12

Actually, he might have a point on this one. Another way of looking at it is that it's such a good idea that both Collins and Price oppose it!

So there you go. That's the best our current Leader of our Council, the man who already holds mayor equivalent powers (not that he likes to broadcast that at the moment) can do.

Anybody really want to argue that stripping this idiot's powers and giving them to someone we actually get to vote for is a bad idea?

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!

Where the Bodies Are Buried

Last night I sent the following message out on Twitter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nottingham City Council Press Releases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over Sensitivity Alert

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

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

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

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

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

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

NCC's Comms Team Vets Freedom of Info Responses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

NCC Bigwigs Afraid to Engage In Debate?

As mentioned before both JoCo and his Alistair Campbell wannabe Stephen Barker have blogs.

However, both seem to have missed one of the points of blogging which is to engage in debate with your readers via the comments system.

Barker in particular seems to have had a hissy fit when I made a detailed comment on one of his blog posts, the comment remained in moderation for ever and now his original post has been deleted completely. JoCo, as mentioned yesterday, has still to allow my comment about his lack of enthusiasm for publishing financial data, as requested so politely by our dear Tory government.

What's up chaps? Are you chicken?

Bwaaaaak bwak bwak bwak!

NCC Comms Chief Gets a Bit Upset

It seems that NCC's Director of Communications is back in the social media scene, this time blogging under his own name rather than hiding behind his 'Bulcote Cowby' moniker.

He seems to have got a bit hot under the collar (warning - there are asterisks) about an investigation about local authority mismanagement. Not the most neutral writing on the subject I'd agree, some of it does descend into Daily Mail reader porn but there are valid points in there and in some cases they seem to have been a bit kind. However, it seems to have hit one of Stephen's sensitive spots for some reason.

In an effort to play nicely I added a comment. I put quite a bit of thought into it so I was most upset to find that it is still 'awaiting moderation'. So here it is -

"Let me help with the link then people can see what you’re on about

http://thebureauinvestigates.com/

Unfortunately some of the criticisms are valid. I take your point about not dropping employees as soon as they go off sick but high levels of sick leave can be symptomatic of a wider malaise such as workplace bullying. NCC got off very lightly with my constructive unfair dismissal damages, pity they spent around £20k on legal representation and an estimated £10k on staff time for senior managers who fancied a few days out of the office to go along and watch.

As for the junkets, some of these might well be considered unnecessary. Certain local civic dignitaries popping over to USA to investigate theme parks springs to mind, if it has to be done at all what’s wrong with Eurodisney? £40 on Squeasyjet and you’re laughing. And don’t get me started on MIPIM.

Oh alright then, there is absolutely no justification for anybody from NCC having attended MIPIM ever. The interviews with porky businessmen telling wonderful tales of parties, rubbing shoulders with a Lord, and, oh yes I got a couple of leads in Coventry and Derby. As for flogging the Guildhall, nobody needed to go to the Riviera to clinch that deal. Notice how the private sector has suddenly lost interest now NCC doesn’t want to throw and cash at it any more?

As for redundancy, again, councils can’t be criticised for complying with the law but high levels of redundancy can signify poor recruitment and retention issues and bad planning and, annoyingly, we have to accept that public employees advantageous redundancy terms compared to the private sector are a matter for public interest. The issues around early termination settlements is moot though and there can be no excuse for a council like NCC getting through 3 Chief Executives simply because of the Leader’s personality problems. The common man/woman in the street also wonder why it is that if they’re not up to the job they just get sacked with no pay off, yet top brass seem to do very well out of it. 

On the other hand, sometimes employers including councils do have to dismiss staff on performance grounds but councils’ HR services are uniformly so poor that they can end up creating an unfair dismissal case when there was no chance of one before. Nobody at NCC HR even understands their own policies and tend to interpret them as what they would like them to mean rather than what they say. Mind you they’re so badly written that’s not surprising.

Then of course there is the matter of pay offs as part of a compromise agreement due to the workplace bullying. All I can say on that is don’t bully your staff and force them to resign, eh Stephen?
Where the report shoots itself in the foot is quoting criticism from a consultant “who has advised the government and councils on efficiency and remuneration” criticising waste. Huge irony and a pity he doesn’t mention the untold sums wasted on consultants (who sometimes do little more than find another consultant and charge for two profit margins).

So I agree some of the criticism is unfair but councils could help by not providing ammunition. Sadly their usual response is to waste huge amounts of cash on control freak PR to try and paper over the cracks and pointless glossy Pravdas delivered to your door."

What a pity Stephen can't control the whole media and blogosphere so easily eh?

Corporate WankSpeak Uber Alles

Back in the good old days, when I used to do something useful for a living, I had what I considered to be a healthy distaste, nay hatred, for jargon. I think it stemmed mainly from the fact that, as a welfare rights adviser, I had to translate preposterously complicated rules into a format that the average Joe/Josephine on the street would understand.

Drafting leaflets was particularly difficult because you have limited space, the person you are trying to help has gone away with their leaflet and can't ask you to clarify a point or tell them what DLA stands for. You also have to balance that with the fact that it is quite possible to simplify information to the point that what you are telling them is not just inadequate but has actually reached the point of being wrong.

On moving into management, I instinctively saw no reason to change this approach. After all you are still trying to get a message across to someone about what they need to do or know about. When I was still at Leicester I went to a meeting which was supposed to be a kind of touchy feely departmental show-and-tell thing. Heads of Service (i.e. managers who were at least a grade or two above me) all did presentations and I've never heard so many three and four word acronyms in my life. I sat there wondering if the people talking were aware that half their audience had no idea what they were going on about or perhaps were doing it deliberately because it made them feel clever.

I then studied for a management qualification (Professional Certificate in Management at the Open Uni seeing as you ask. Oh sorry, you didn't) and the course was refreshingly free of jargon. I found this encouraging and resolved to stick with the jargon free approach. As time went on I not only became more certain that the main reason for most people using jargon was not just about making themselves appear clever (in their minds) but to hide the fact that they were often thick as pigshit and had little or no idea what they were talking about.

Anyway, the purpose of this preamble is to try and give you some idea why this report made me so spitting angry and nearly lose the will to live. That and maybe that my leg is still in plaster and the anti-depressants have run out.

To save you some time it's formal title is -

'Communications and Marketing - Efficiency and Ensuring Value for Money - savings Made in Recent Years and the Introduction of a New Budget and Spend Prioritisation Model'. 

It's written by the Director of Communications Stephen Barker, presumably on a rare moment away from posting videos of his staff on the internet. Note the use of the words 'prioritisation' and 'model'; I'm not claiming to be scientific but in my view these words tend to be reliable indicators that you are about to be drowned in bullshit. If you take one thing home with you from this, that's my tip of the day.

That ear-splitting 'arooga' noise you can hear is the 'NCCLols Translation Service' emergency alarm going off so I'd better quickly pass on the results of putting the above through our patented process. Essentially the report's true title is -

'Why it is Only Right and Proper to Take Money Away From Individual Comms Budgets and Give it to Me - I get to Keep My Empire Intact - Everyone Else Can Fuck Off'.

The BS just gets worse. Check this out from para 2.1 -

"It has not proven practicable to achieve a saving of £100k pa via committees becoming paperless during 2009/10 due to a more elongated new technology adoption profile being required."

I'm sorry, "...a more elongated new technology adoption profile..."?

NCCLols translation service -

"I could just have said that it's taken a bit longer to show councillors where the computer 'on' button is but the word 'elongated' gives me a bit of a shudder."

And get these -

"This model can result in bottom up – rather than priority-driven - spend prioritisation..."

"Pulling all Communications & Marketing budgets currently held by service teams...together and under the control of Communications & Marketing...will enable priority-driven prioritisation of communications spend in line with the Council Plan and The Nottingham Plan..."

What the fuck are you talking about with your 'priority driven prioritisations'?* What other kind of 'prioritisations' are there if not 'priority driven'? We don't need to qualify 'arse scratching' with 'arse driven'.

Remember, this is the Director of Communications here, in other words somebody who should be able to string a sentence together. Don't get me wrong, I don't claim to be the greatest communicator in the world, I like to think I do ok given enough time but 'priority driven prioritisation'? Is it just me?

No doubt the councillors on the 'Overview and Scrutiny Committee' will read the report, nod sagely at the need for further elongation of their new technology profiles and ignore the voices screaming in their heads that it's all bollocks. The report will be 'noted' and everyone will go home secure in the feeling of a job well done.

* Just in case anyone is wondering or perhaps thinking that I'm just being a bit thick, what I think Stephen is trying to tell us here is that individual services are setting their own 'prioritisations' which are not necessarily in line with the big grown up corporate priorities - and so aren't properly 'priority-driven'. Essentially, what I'm saying here is that he could have been a bit clearer about that.

Bulcote Cowboy Videos

I mentioned before that the Bulcote Cowboy (yeehaa!) had deleted his dodgy videos of his staff from his Bambuser site.

However, he had left a couple up on his blog and I was wondering whether I should ridicule him some more over it.

However, I'm glad to see that these have now gone too so it looks like the staff at NCC's Communications Directorate can go about their work without having to worry about whether their their arses are all over Youtube and the like.

NCCLols. Helping senior NCC managers not be twats one day at a time. Its a valuable service we provide you know.

New Internet Toys

I've just come across a new website which is pretty cool. It's called Bambuser and it allows you to video stuff straight to the web from your phone near live ie only a few seconds delay.

Here's a page of someone having hours of fun demonstrating it to his work colleagues. Cool no?

A highlight is this one where we get a nice tour round this guy's office with quite a bit of coverage of other workers.

There's several more where he show's his clearly impressed collegues footage of them on the interwebs (although forgetting to mention that it's not only monitoring but recording and that it would still be there for the likes of me to dig up 12 months later), one or two where he puts his phone down so the screen goes blank and the conversation continues, presumably without the other party realising. We get to hear them discussing poor ticket sales of an unspecified event (although I think its probably NCC's 'Splendour' festival at a guess).

"There goes your privacy!" laughs our amateur filmmaker at one stage...

Hmmm, on reflection I'm not sure about the morals of this. If my manager did this I reckon I'd be pretty pissed off. I suspect this person's employer might be a little unhappy too.

So who is the lucky organisation getting snatches of its inner workings plastered over the internet and its workers data protection rights soiled? Well the fact thats it's up here should have alerted you pretty much immediately that it is, of course, Nottingham City Council. The Communications Directorate at a guess.

And the cameraman? None other than the Director of Communications, Stephen Barker.

If you see yourself in one of the videos you might want to have a word, although I suspect they won't be up there much longer...

Update; as this article is getting visitors again and tthe vids have obviously been removed (see anon comment below, wonder who that could have been?) here are a couple of screenshots


Click on em for big.