Golf Wars and Other Secrets

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

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

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

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

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

In this rather unconvincing rant NCC says -

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

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

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

among many other things.

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

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

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

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

"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?

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.

Radford Unity Complex Sale Falls Through

Just a quick note to say that I've received word from the Audit Commission that the sale of the Radford Unity Complex has fallen through so they are suspending their investigation.

Where this leaves the tenants I have no idea. Presumably they're still on notice of eviction and NCC still presumably still sees RUC as 'surplus to requirements'. After all, the decision to sell couldn't have been due to any back room deals could it?

Coincidentally the minutes of the Call-in Sub Committee reviewing the decision are out in the wild. The explanations for the notices to quit predating the decision to sell are farcical.

So another resounding success for Leader Collins. Anyone want to give me odds on a 'redevelopment' resulting in the demolition of RUC being announced in the next six months?

Closure of Radford Unity Complex

This is another of those 'coming late to the party' moments for me. I did see it but completely failed to take in its significance until yesterday.

Radford Unity Complex is an old Victorian school building in Radford. As well as housing some NCC staff it also caters for a number of BME voluntary projects including Nottingham Teaching College and the Sikh Community and Youth Service amongst others. The NCC staff are all moving out, mainly to the new NCC HQ at Loxley House.

Some of you might already see where this is going. Essentially, NCC saw an opportunity to save money and, via a portfolio holder decision by Cllr Jon Collins, they decided to close it down.

Now I did see this but, as I say, I didn't think much of it. After all, it's not that controversial for councils to consolidate their property portfolio and the report attached repeatedly states that the groups "can be relocated to alternative accommodation" with "better facilities". Naively, I assumed that this meant that alternative accommodation had already been found.

This turns out not to be the case. From 'Evening Post' articles here and here it seems that the groups were simply given 90 days notice to leave and it's very unclear exactly what support to find new premises is being given. What's more there appears to have been very little consultation with those affected, beyond establishing that they wouldn't have the means to take the building over as a community enterprise. It's worth reading some of the comments to the articles which appear to have been added by people connected with the groups, although you do have to navigate around the usual racist bollocks that the 'Post' insists on tolerating on its comments boards.

So, to my mind, the report supporting JoCo's decision to shut up shop is extremely economical with the truth and there seems to be quite a bit of spin going on. Plus ca change you might say.

Finally, I was checking Twitter and I saw some references to the issue on Cllr Alex Foster's Twitterfeed, which I've reproduced below -

I was very interested to see the phrase 'first ever call-in sub-committee'.

Some background. In the year 2000 most councils changed their governance structures following an Act of Parliament. There were a number of possible different options but NCC decided to go for an Executive Board, comprising of a number of Executive Portfolio Holders. Essentially the idea is that, as full council is somewhat unwieldy it would be required to make only a small number of the most important decisions like approving the annual budget, other 'key decisions' would be taken by the Executive Board and most other decisions, defined by financial limits and other factors could be taken by Executive Portfolio Holders. The decision to close the RUC was one such decision.

However, such decisions are subject to 'call-in' where the Overview and Scrutiny Committee can set up a sub-committee to examine at the decision and ask the Executive to look at it again. It's all that exists in terms of checks and balances on these decisions and in fact it's pretty toothless because if the Exec decides not to change the decision there's nothing else that can be done. These arrangements have all been in place for 10 years.

Like I said, I was very interested in that 'first ever' bit. As you can see from the list of agendas for the call-in sub-committee, as Cllr Foster says, there has never been one before in 10 years. So much for checks and balances.

Back to the actual issue involved I was even more interested in Cllr Foster's report that Cllr Long had picked up that the groups based at the RUC had been given their 90 days notice BEFORE the decision to close had actually been made. That really does smell of a big piece of fish.

So, to sum up, jumping the gun re starting the eviction process, little or no consultation, somewhat uh, 'generous' NCC background report and the serious prospect of six community groups working with the BME community out on their ear. Very 'community cohesion'.

And all topped off with the revelation that the only check and balance on portfolio decisions has never been used before. Isn't local democracy wonderful?

[Interesting side note not specifically connected to NCC; a request for call-in has to be signed by three non-executive councillors and in this case it was three Tories. Now fair play to them for that but I'm just saying it's the first time I've seen the Tories on NCC get involved in any issue not connected with Wollaton Golf Club. And if you look across the river at the County you might well conclude that their party's reputation as community champions has yet to be firmly established.

Radford Unity Complex is of course situated within Nottingham South constituency which is a target for the Tories in the upcoming general election. By some extraordinary co-incidence, Tory PPC for Nottingham South has also been getting involved in the campaign too.

If you live in Nottm South (especially NG7 area, maybe not in leafy Wollaton), expect to see this issue feature in Tory election leaflets, coming through your door soon.]