The Net is Closing...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will they appeal? Time will tell.

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

A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away

Finally we hear from the Post that Cllr Grocock has been cleared by the Standards Committee over his 'grandson' getting a house, as highlighted originally in the report on the housing allocations scandal.

Not really a surprise, especially seeing as the monitoring officer appears to have been acting as an unofficial advocate on Grocock's behalf. His preliminary report urged the committee to throw the case out without a hearing. However, the committee would have none of that, possibly because on the day only the independent members and a Lib Dem were in attendance.

Oddly, when it came to appointing the members of the hearing sub-committee last July, i.e. the people who would hear the case, the committee deviated from its normal practice of appointing the members themselves and, on the recommendation of the monitoring officer, agreed to delegate responsibility for doing so to the Deputy Chief Executive 'in consultation with the Chair' who hadn't turned up that day. So apart from what's in the Post report we currently don't know who sat in judgment.

Anyway the Post does report that the independent member on the committee made it clear she thought his conduct was a breach of the Code of Conduct. However it seems that the monitoring officer swung the day saying -

"This happened because a senior housing officer [Tyron Browne] issued what could be described as an oblique instruction to the housing office and a tenancy was allocated. I remain of the view that the actual cause was the senior housing officer and the culture at the time."

Browne of course has since resigned and has never faced any sanction.

So, as you can see, a big boy really did do it and then ran away.

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?

Not 'Vexatious' After All (But We Can't Bring Ourselves to Say It Out Loud)

Remember a little while back I had a couple of FoI requests refused on the grounds that they were vexatious? I got round one of them by getting the information elsewhere but the other ended up going to the Information Commissioner because NCC failed to deal with my request for a review. Which is so unlike them.

However, they have now responded (about 3 months late mind). It's quite interesting.

First thing to notice is that, despite the fact that my original request was clearly refused on the grounds of being vexatious, they seem to have forgotten about it by the time of the latest response. All they say is that they have failed in their duty under s.10(3) of the Act which, as far as I can tell is the provision that allows them to go beyond the normal 20 days for a full response if they are considering public interest arguments under a possible exemption.

This wasn't the situation at all. They refused on the grounds that my request was vexatious (although their reasons clearly showed that in fact, what they meant was that it was ME that is vexatious rather than the request which isn't allowed). This is an absolute exemption so there would be no need to consider the public interest.

It seems that NCC couldn't bring themselves to actually admit in writing that my request was not vexatious and that they were wrong to say that it was. Which is pretty pathetic really. Almost as pathetic as their rather obvious tactic of delaying responses by not dealing with requests properly until the Information Commissioner gets involved.

I'll be writing a separate post about the actual content of the response because a) I can't be arsed to deal with it right now and b) I need to consider how I'm going to challenge it first.

Notts Police Authority See No Evil etc

Sorry to upset the current lovefest and hero worship for our wonderful police force following their apparently effective handling of the local riots and I suppose I should also apologise for again reviving the festering pustule that is the housing allocations scandal.

I thought I'd try a bit of a curveball in my attempts at getting hold of information about how aa bunch of NCC and NCH employees got away with nicking a load of council houses. So I sent a FoI request to Notts Police Authority (as opposed to Notts Police themselves, more on that in a bit) asking about any communications, meetings etc they'd had where the subject had come up.

After all, NPA's job is to monitor Notts Police's performance so if there were any doubts about their failure to look into the misappropriation of council houses you'd think that they'd have reason to discuss it wouldn't you? And that would pop up all sorts of difficult 'conflict of interest' questions for any NCC councillors also serving on NPA including, of course, its Chair.

Strangely, the Whatdotheyknow site got its wires crossed and initially sent my request to Notts Police itself. What could have been a slight irritation turned out to be quite interesting as their response confirmed that they held such information but refused it on the grounds of an exemption under s.30 FoIA, investigations into crime. They said the information had been previously requested and refused and the matter was currently before the Information Commissioner.

The thing is, I understood that the justification for Notts Police letting NCC investigate the matter themselves was that there was, in their opinion, no evidence of a crime. Furthermore, this is a 'qualified' exemption i.e. the public interest must be considered. This is one to watch therefore.

Anyway, back to Notts Police Authority.

Their response was that they did NOT hold any information related to the housing allocations scandal. In other words, NPA has never discussed Notts Police's decision not to investigate the matter itself, no meetings have been held to discuss it and, most amusingly, no NPA members have had any contact with police or council officers to discuss it.

I find that one a bit difficult to believe meself. Might have to follow it up.

So we have Nottingham City Council and Notts Police doing everything they can to cover up what happened and now the Police Authority seem to be playing the see/hear/say no evil thing. Not good.

PS If you are the person who submitted the FoI request to Notts Police mentioned above, please do get in touch and let me know how you are getting on.

District Auditor LOLs

It's been mentioned before that NCC has abandoned its investigation of the housing allocations scandal. As we know, they've sort of spent £100k on paying outside solicitors to do Legal Services' normal work while the cosy in-house team 'investigated' the housing corruption that went on.

The District Auditor says that this is reasonable (see p4 and beyond). After all, £100k is a lot of money.

The District Auditor charged £388k (para 8 p5) for her annually required services. Yet abandoning an investigation into the worst public housing scandal since Dame Shirley Porter's shennanigins, having only spent just over 25% of that figure is apparently 'reasonable'.

Btw, in an unrelated fact, Jon Collins works as a self employed consultant to the Audit Commission.

A Surprising Event Happened

After the Labour Party showed its contempt for collaborative politics and accountability at the full council meeting this week the Post reports on the an example of opposition councillors showing how it should be done.

As well as Cllr Sutton's motion asking that NCC calls on the IPCC to investigate Notts Police's failure to do its job by not taking any action over the housing allocations scandal, Cllr Chapman also submitted a motion condemning the cuts to funding as 'unfair'.

With the Lib Dems currently on secondment to the Tory government you'd expect them to vote against but in fact they backed it. Admittedly it may well have been electoral suicide for them not to but at least they have set an example that not all votes need to be along party lines. Maybe Labour might learn something. Unlikely I know but we can live in hope.

Talking of Cllr Chapman, Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has tried to humiliate him by 'hilariously' calling him 'a very naughty boy' because he shares his name with the Monty Python member who, as I'm sure you know, played Brian in 'The Life of...'.

I mean for fuck's sake. JoCo is right about one thing, that man is a buffoon and that's being polite.

An Early Contender for Least Surprising Event of the Year

I mentioned before that Cllr Tony Sutton submitted a motion to full council asking that it support his call for the IPCC to investigate Notts Police for their criminal and likely corrupt decision not to investigate the housing allocations coruption scandal at Nottingham City Homes. Over to the Post to tell us what happened with that one but before you click on the link try guessing the result. Go on give it a go.

Yup you were right. The motion was defeated with the vote split clearly on party lines i.e. apparently every single Labour member voted against.

There's a rather sinister quote from Cllr Chapman -

"Why would we want to cover up? The easiest thing for us would have been to get a few heads rolling, get a few martyrs – guilty or not guilty – prosecuted and we could have got on with it."

In other words, Cllr Chapman thinks it's more honest to cover up corruption using the time honoured method of hiding the matter under the carpet as opposed to the alternative one of fitting somebody up. Notice he doesn't see the third option i.e. of actually catching the real perpetrator and handing them over to the police. That's because the perpetrators are either still in power or working with some of NCC's most favoured 'partners'.

So let's round up what has happened so far -

JoCo called Cllr Sutton a 'prat' fpr mentioning that he himself had contacted Tyrone Brown on behalf of a tenant who was then handed a property outside the normal procedures.

The Standards Committee quietly rejected a key Audit Commission recommendation that councillors should be required to declare any personal relationship with tenants on whose behalf they make representations. Apparently it would be too complicated for them.

Cllr Grocock has been openly named as having dishonestly tried to help someone get a property by saying he was his grandson. Despite there being no apparent dispute over the facts of this the Standards Committee has still not completed its investigations into the matter. I'd bet £1.50 of my own money that they won't do either until after the election. In the meantime he has been severely punished by, er, being appointed as Lord Mayor which just happens to carry with it an extra £25k personal allowance.

One part time temp has been let go. This is the sum total of disciplinary action taken. Similarly, no houses have been repossessed.

The council's internal investigation has cost £100k (or £150k if you believe Cllr Chapman's latest claim). This is apparently as much as can be justified*, although compare with this the £700k spent on the investigation and prosecution of the Ratcliffe environmental activists. Different organisation I know but let's not forget that JoCo is the Chair of Notts Police Authority too.

Furthermore, and if this isn't the clincher on this being a cover up I don't know what is, this £100k was spent on paying external solicitors to do NCC's Legal Services' normal work while they did the investigation themselves. Why? Surely a fresh set of eyes would have been more appropriate for the investigation rather than make them all learn NCC's systems which they would be completely unfamiliar with. Even on an efficiency aregument this was the wrong way round. It's difficult not to conclude that the idea was to make sure no-one looks in the wrong (right?) places. Where this leaves NCC's lawyers' professional standing I don't know.

All this is dodgy as fuck and, in theory should result in Labour being shown the door at the next elections in May. Unfortunately I doubt this will happen, I rather expect postal voting to play a pivotal role in the final result.

*To put this into context I reckon my employment tribunal case cost them over £40k including internal staff time.

More on the Whitewash

The Post has an article today quoting a former senior police officer saying that he is 'baffled' that the police haven't investigated the housing allocations scandal. There are later subtle hints about the closeness of the relationship between the police and senior members and officers of the council.

More interesting to me though is the following extract -

"The city council has now decided to drop the investigation, claiming it had spent £100,000 on in-house solicitors.

The majority of this money was spent on employing other people to carry out the solicitors' normal work while they conducted the investigation."

I did question the use of in-house solicitors carrying out the investigation the other day on the basis that NCC is normally very keen to bring in external consultants so it's strange that they don't bother in one of the situations where it would be extremely appropriate to do so. Now it seems that they DID bring outside lawyers in but not to do the investigation, just to free up the internal legal teams who presumably could be relied on not to look in the 'wrong' places.

This just gets murkier by the day.

Nottingham City Values

Police investigation and trial of 20 environmental activists for conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass - £700,000

Curiously abandoned NCC self-investigation of massive housing allocation fraud by useless in-house legal team, complete with NO POLICE INVESTIGATION - £100,000

Getting yourself to be leader of NCC and Chair of the Police Authority, thus meaning you can get yourself and your corrupt mates off scot-free while wasting taxpayers money trying to lock up dedicated activists, about whom even the trial judge couldn't find a word to say against - priceless.

Collins Cover Up #1

Before Christmas I received notification from NCC's Monitoring Officer Glen O'Connell that a Standards Committee Review Sub-Committee had confirmed that no further action is to be taken against JoCo over his 'erroneous' claim that Radford Unity Complex would raise over £300k for council coffers when it had already been offered for sale for £150k.

The Assessment Sub-Committee had previously found that JoCo couldn't have known about the lower sale price. However, for the review sub-committee I had managed to get hold of emails that demonstrated that Collins had involvement in the matter for some considerable time, making it somewhat unlikely that the only things he knew were what he had been told in reports from officers.

Yet the review sub-committee decided that 'no additional information' had been provided.

I'm going to stick my neck out here but that is bollocks on stilts and wearing fire-engine red lederhosen. My conclusion of all this therefore is that this is a cover up and the Standards Committee is corrupt.

Housing Scandal Pratfalls

I've just been having a read of the Evening Post's reports about last night's Council meeting called to discuss the recent Audit Commission report on council house thievery. You might have heard something of this.

It turns out that, despite all the rhetoric, NCC aren't going to make a formal referral to the police after all. Strangely, the formal response issued immediately on publication of the report which quoted Jon Collins extensively (and which I linked to in my earlier article) seems to be no longer available so I can't go back and compare his attitude then with now.

[Update, thanks to Nick B (see comments) here's a quote from JoCo from that statement;

"The Police were informed in 2006 of investigations into these matters and we may ask them to consider again whether they should investigate them now. Where individuals involved in any of these cases are still employed by either organisation internal investigations will be commenced immediately." (my emphasis)

So he left himself some wiggle room. We 'may' ask the police to look into it but, now much of the fuss has died down we're not going to bother. Lets move on eh people?]

However the fun really starts when opposition councillors start suggesting that, horror of horrors, Labour councillors might possibly have realised that their humble and completely legitimate representations on behalf of their constituents got them a not totally legitimate leg up the queue. Cllr Brian Grocock is the headline boy on this one. For some reason he pretended that a constituent was a relative when contacting on his behalf. Its difficult to imagine a reason for this other than that the clear message that 'Cllr Grocock's lad' needed a house pronto would be heard loud and clear.

One of the Lib Dems highlighted a case where JoCo himself wrote in on behalf of a constituent resulting in a memo from Tyron Browne saying

"As you are aware this is a case that has been brought to my attention by the leader, I should appreciate it, therefore, if you would arrange for an offer to be made as soon as possible."

On being confronted with this JoCo apparently showed his statesmanlike qualities by calling the Lib Dem a 'prat' and blaming his secretary.

Whats interesting to me here is the whole dynamic of what was happening in NCH at the time and, probably, for years previously. Councillors will say in their defence that they never explicitly ordered staff to bump their constituents up the queue and therefore accusations of a conspiracy are unfounded. Yet clearly the report from the Audit Commission shows that those constituents clearly benefited.

I think there are parallels with a media theory constructed by Chomsky and Herman called the 'Propaganda Model'. This examines how the media's capitalist interests effectively 'filter' the stories that are published but not necessarily by an explicit central 'command' from capitalists. Rather a "...decentralized and nonconspiratorial...system of control and processing..." occurs, carried out by individuals who nevertheless are aware of what's expected of them.

So I think a similar thing was happening at NCH/NCC Housing Dept. Of course, councillors never said "move these people to the top of the queue" because they never needed to do, staff already knew what to do. Occasionally a hint would have to be dropped such as claiming that the constituent was a grandson for instance but generally the wheels were already well greased.

Incidentally this whole business of Cllr Grocock is very strange. In an ideal world where everybody is above board, when a Councillor makes representations on behalf of a constituent who is also a close family member or friend, in my experience at other authorities they would declare this interest. The idea being that everyone is open and honest and a councillor's family doesn't get an unfair advantage.

Yet in Nottingham, the Grocock case shows that not only had this basic principle of accountability flown out of the window, it had actually been turned inside out so that a Councillor, knowing that one of his family members would get special treatment, went as far as pretending that a constituent was a family member so they could take advantage of the family special offers too. Unbelievable.

Its hit the fan, JoCo eats dirt

This is the big one.

You may remember when Nottingham City Homes was formed from the old Housing department and an investigation found that it was run by a bunch of crooks? Well the District Auditor's report is due out later today and not even JoCo is trying to brazen it out, he's got his grovelling apology up on the NCC website already and the report isn't even formally published yet.

The Evening Post has gone to the extraordinary lengths of posting a story at midnight which I think demonstrates the gravity of the situation. And the 'predictable comments by the twats' (an occasional series I'll feature when linking to EP stories) are already out;

"How many immigrants and asylum seekers have been given council houses instead of the British public. What is the point in having a points based system to ensure the most needy cases take priority."

Hang on, that comment was by Andyman from, yes DERBYSHIRE. Go back to where you came from Derbyshire boy, don't you go sullying our pure bred Nottingham websites with your dry stone walled tosh! Thats NOTTINGHAM taxpayers' webspace that is, keep your hands off!!!

Ahem. Sorry. Where were we?

Ah yes, I also found a rather interesting article on Indymedia from a couple of years ago concerning the illegal and violent eviction of a squat. Its alleged that the property was an NCH one and it was being set up for a right to buy scam by an NCH staff member's relative. Its also alleged in the article that the evicters were off duty NCH staff...

Coun Brian Grocock is said to have lied when making representations on behalf of a couple. However he doesn't appear to have resigned yet. Still its early.

I reckon this one is about as bad as it can get, I'm sure fallout will continue. I'll endeavour to write about any future developments, a task which will give me no pleasure at all as I'm sure you'll realise.