Hassan Ahmed Found Guilty of Breach of Members Code of Conduct

Blimey, I reckon I must be psychic. Barely an hour after finishing my post about complaints about councillors and codes of conduct the news comes in that Hassan Ahmed has been found guilty of breaching the members code of conduct by the Standards Board for England because he failed to declare a number of interests.

Despite this the board decided to take no further action accepting that -

"...there is an inherent risk for any member who is involved in the number of organisations that Councillor Ahmed is involved in, of inadvertently failing to consider the requirements of the Code to register those interests, declare those interests at meetings of the authority, and consider those interests when approaching officers of the authority."

Oh for fucks sake. How hard can it be? Harder than being an executive portfolio holder? Does he need someone to remind him where he lives? After all, he does own two properties, must be very easy for him to get them mixed up.

But in a spectacular combination of breathtaking arrogance and delusion he told the 'Post' -

"I am delighted that, after a thorough investigation, I have been exonerated. The Standards Board found that I had no case to answer."

Erm, no mate, you weren't exonerated at all you were found to have BREACHED YOUR CODE OF CONDUCT. That's not the same as being exonerated. Being exonerated would have meant that you were found to have NOT BREACHED YOUR CODE OF CONDUCT, which wasn't what happened.

Do you see the difference Councillor Ahmed? One is being exonerated, the other is being found guilty. You were the latter. I realise that telling the difference is almost as difficult as remembering which pies you've got your fingers stuffed in but keep working at it you bullshitting fucking twat.

One of the factors that helped Ahmed escape any sanction was that -

"The ESO found that there was no evidence that Councillor Ahmed had attended any council meeting, while a portfolio holder, at which one of his registered, or unregistered interests had been discussed or where funding or grants had been considered or approved."

Well no, he wouldn't have been. That's because, unless it was a very big grant (>£500k) virtually all funding decisions are taken by a single portfolio holder. Unless Ahmed happened to be that portfolio holder (and I think that would be too brazen even for him) he wouldn't be formally involved. But that ignores the informal influence that any councillor might have and the Standards Board should have taken that into account.

And of course, as we've written about previously, Ahmed was very much involved with a decision to suddenly end all NCC funding for the Council for Equality and Human Rights Nottm + Notts which is arguably a potential competitor to Nottingham Equal, one of the organisations Ahmed was involved with. Although this decision was made after he was forced by the Post to declare his interests, a councillor's involvement in an organisation is not only relevant to how NCC deals with that organisation but how it treats its competitors. It may or may not be relevant to note that the details of this decision was kept secret.

Interestingly, Ahmed has recently submitted a new register of interests which no longer lists Nottingham Equal as one of his interests. Wonder why that is? (older edition here)

Do You Know How to Complain About a Councillor?

Being a stroppy so-and-so, I recently decided to submit a complaint about one of our elected representatives (more about this if it goes anywhere).

Naturally I first had a look around NCC's website to find out how to go about it. To give you an idea of how well that went here are the results of a Google search for the term 'complaints against councillors Nottingham'.

As you can see, precious little information specifically about how to complain about a councillor at Nottingham.

Compare with the results of a search for 'complaints about councillors'. Evidence of quite a few councils across the UK providing details of how to make a complaint against one of their councillors.

Just to be sure, here are the results of using the search facility for 'complaints against councillors' on NCC's website. As you can see, lots of details about how to complain about anything from social workers to the cleaner and his dog but not councillors.

This is an important omission because complaints against councillors can only be made on the basis that they have breached the code of conduct and they have to be sent to the council's Standards Committee. While using NCC's generic complaints system MAY result in it getting to the right person, not knowing the basis on which a complaint must be made will only result in more complaints that aren't specifically about code of conduct issues and which cannot be upheld and that's a waste of time for everybody. That's presuming that people aren't put off by the lack of any info on the website about how you go about it.

So, for your future reference, here is the Standards for England page on how to make a complaint against a councillor, you have your link to the code of conduct above and here is the link to the various Committee Administrators' contact details page. I strongly advise that you at least copy any complaint about a councillor to the Standards Committee Administrator, he seems like a nice man and he does seem to acknowledge emails pretty quickly, which is more than can be said for the generic complaints system.