Jumping the Gun

I suppose you can forgive their giddy enthusiasm but are Nottingham's inner circle of politicians getting a little ahead of themselves?

Full council meets today for the first time since the election. Early on in the agenda is the election of the leader who has the gift of appointments to the executive/portfolio holders in her/his power. Somewhat helpfully, JoCo has already written a report "...in the event that [he is] elected as Leader of the Council..." setting out who will be his chosen few. It's listed as a 'report from the Leader'. Even though he isn't the Leader yet. But he should be by the time the relevant agenda item comes up so I suppose that's alright then.

Mind you a couple of these prospective portfolio holders have also been making hay before the sun's even out of bed. Graham Chapman has already signed off three portfolio holder decisions, one of which involves expenditure of £270k, and 'Calamity' Jane Urquhart has done one. Surely, technically these can't be valid because the councillors concerned were not portfolio holders at the time of signing?

Another Day, Another Freedom of Information Post

It's getting tedious isn't it? Maybe I should write articles when there ISN'T a major NCC FoI fail instead?

But seriously folks, we have a further decision notice from the Information Commissioner upholding a complaint I made, further details of which can be found here.

As you can see, NCC is blatantly flouting the FoIA here. The ICO has previously issued a formal instruction to provide the info or issue a valid refusal citing grounds, which NCC ignored. They have since promised the ICO that they would provide a response by 25 March but haven't delivered. The decision notice says that they really, really must comply this time, with five weeks to comply. So that's jolly well told them, by George.

It seems that failure to follow the decision could result in the matter being registered with the High Court and further non-compliance would be a contempt of court. That I'd like to see...

The final point the decision makes is that NCC is unable to rely on the power to extend the time limit because it has failed to confirm that it is relying on a qualified exemption under the Act, merely saying that it may do so which isn't enough. Silly NCC.

In other FoI news, NCC has missed the deadline to respond to a meta request about how often it fails to meet the deadlines for FoI requests. As the requester invites NCC to agree, that is 'somewhat ironic'.

Freedom of Information Botheration

One of my freedom of information requests to NCC has taken a slightly sinister turn. The original request was refused, ok, nothing unusual there and quite dealable with by asking for a review. If that request isn't successful and NCC still refuses to give you the info then you go to the Information. In this case however, NCC has not simply reviewed the case and stuck by its decision to refuse to provide the info, it has refused to carry out a review at all.

Some background. There are quite a lot of circumstances where information is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act and these are set out in Part II of the Act. Many of them you wouldn't argue with and many require a weigh up of the public interest before information is witheld.

One that's caused me a few problems though is s.44 which says -

"44 Prohibitions on disclosure

(1) Information is exempt information if its disclosure (otherwise than under this Act) by the public authority holding it—

(a) is prohibited by or under any enactment,

(b) is incompatible with any Community obligation, or

(c) would constitute or be punishable as a contempt of court.

(2) The duty to confirm or deny does not arise if the confirmation or denial that would have to be given to comply with section 1(1)(a) would (apart from this Act) fall within any of paragraphs (a) to (c) of subsection (1)."

and it pops up in this case. In particular para 1 (a) is what we're dealing with and it is what's known as an 'absolute' exemption in that such information is always exempt, there is no requirement to weigh up the public interest in releasing or withholding the info. The idea is that it prevents two bits of law being in conflict.

As far as councils are concerned there are various bits of legislation about the place requiring that the public are entitled to attend meetings and that agendas, minutes and decisions must be made available for inspection at council offices and stuff. For a decision made by an individual member of the executive the relevant law is in regulation 21 of The Local Authorities (Executive Arrangements) (Access to Information) (England) Regulations 2000. It refers to exceptions to these requirements known as 'exempt information' which is defined by Schedule 12A of the Local Government Act 1972. These requirements to make documents available are in addition to the FoIA and in some cases pre-date it.

Now NCC has been assuming that anything covered by the definitions in Sch 12A is effectively secret. Rather handily, the person who decides whether an executive portfolio holder's decision is covered by the 'exempt information' definition is the portfolio holder her/himself. I'm sure you don't need me to suggest ways in which that could be abused.

So, NCC believes that sch 12A prevents them from publishing the information and that this in turn invokes the absolute exemption of disclosure under s.41 of the Freedom of Information Act. I'm not sure where they got the idea that it meant that they didn't even have to carry out a review, as far as I know they do have to in all circumstances, even if they believe the outcome is a foregone conclusion. Which they clearly do cos they think an absolute exemption to the Freedom of Information disclosure requirements applies.

This where the wonderfulness of the 'What Do They Know?' website makes an appearance. The site allows you to leave annotations on other peoples requests and there is a growing community of people who use this facility to give you tips and that's what happened here. A helpful chap called Matt left me a note providing a link to an Information Commissioner's decision which said that sch 12A does not necessarily invoke the s.41 absolute exemption for disclosure so I quickly passed the reference on to NCC which should give them something to think about for tomorrow.

What's more it set me off researching the legislation behind all this. Essentially, sch 12A does not prevent disclosure at all, it just defines what is classed as 'exempt information'. Other legislation, such as regulation 21 mentioned above sets out what must or must not happen to information so defined. In the case of regulation 21 an executive decision classed as 'exempt information' is not actually prevented from disclosure, it just means that there is no requirement for the council to make it available for inspection and the like, which there would be normally. It's not saying you CAN'T publish, just that you don't have to and therefore there is no prohibition on publication at all. The upshot of that is that s.41 of the Freedom of Information Act doesn't apply after all so there is no absolute exemption.

I'll be interested to see where NCC goes with this. My guess is that they'll apply another FoIA exemption but that will likely involve a public interest test which can be challenged. It will certainly rattle a few cages because I strongly suspect they've been using this assumed FoIA exemption to hide all sorts of embarrassing info. The decision to end CEHRNN's funding was one such decision. If they stop using it it will be small increase in accountability which can only be a good thing.

CCTV Decision

Wrote before about hearing that the decision whether to install CCTV posts in Forest Fields had gone through, now the Executive Portfolio Decision made by Cllr Jon Collins has finally been posted on the Council's website.

Have a look at this bit from the supporting report -

"Residents asked that the whole of Forest Fields be consulted and that it went to a vote which was included in the second letter. Neighbourhood management are of the opinion that this has skewed the results as only one vote per household was allowed therefore biasing multiple occupancy households."

I don't know about you but to me that reads as though they are claiming that the consultation biased results in favour of multi occupancy households when of course the opposite would have been true. Pulling the wool over eyes or just badly written?

And have a look at this bit, I wasn't aware of this before -

"Concern has been expressed that 2 of the 3 proposed columns are outside mosques."

In response 'Equalities and Diversity' recommend -

"To work with the Muslim Communities Steering Group (MCSG), Safer Neighbourhood Teams, and the targeted communications strategy to tackle the negative perception."

Yeah, I'd do that.

A quick note about these portfolio decisions. A portfolio decision is one which has revenue implications of less than £500k or capital implications of less than £1m. The decision must also not affect 2 or more wards. If the decision does not fit in with these restrictions then it must be taken by the Executive Board unless it is one of the decisions that must be taken by full council as set out in the Council's constitution.

Clearly the idea behind delegation of authority in this manner is that large numbers of councillors' time is not taken up with making every single decision. Fair enough in principle, nothing would get done.

But as you can see it still leaves quite big decisions within the gift of one individual. And should the inner circle decide that a controversial policy (like CCTV) needs to be imposed with the minimum of democratic interference all they need to do is ensure it is rolled out on a ward by ward basis, thus making each individual decision a 'portfolio decision' to be taken by just one individual. Just saying.

Surely area committees should have some say over genuinely area specific decisions? Otherwise what's the point of them?

We Pays Our Money...Or Rather JoCo Does

Days after reports of Nottingham City Council overspending by £3.4m (it was actually formally announced at the last Executive Board meeting), we hear that NCC has decided to hand over £30k to PricewaterhouseCoopers (as we're legally obliged to write it, fuck knows why) for

"a report identifying the financial costs and savings of providing a range of services through a trust or Non Profit Distributing Organisation."

This is just the first phase of the investigation, if it concludes positively then a 'detailed business assessment' will be undertaken. How much that will cost isn't mentioned.

I touched on this briefly before as the intention to look into these alternative management arrangements was mentioned in the Budget. The whole idea baffles me as I can't for the life of me see any real prospect of saving any money. I'm also concerned that NCC's first step is to chuck a load of cash at some accountants when surely the expertise in this sort of thing already exists either in other authorities or the LGA. Its not as if it's never been done before, a quick search found two general reports on the issue (here and here if you fancy some background reading), the second of which certainly has an ideological rather then pragmatic flavour to it.

So why haven't you heard of this elsewhere? Well it's one of those 'portfolio' decisions where one of the portfolio holders on the Executive Board gets to decide things without discussing it with anybody. I'm not sure of what exactly makes a decision a 'portfolio' decision* as opposed to one that's got to be discussed with other people but I presume the process is for minor decisions of relatively low expenditure, although clearly £30k is quite a bit.

The last one of these 'portfolio' decisions that I wrote about was the one to pay Carl Froch £1000 an hour to have a pic of Robin Hood on his dressing gown and open a few supermarkets. So I'm pleased to see that he will be earning some of that money next Monday.

Mr Froch will be in the Market Square for £3,000 worth of his time promoting the 'Proud of You' awards, another chance to vote for your favourite bin man or whatever.

Actually we could have some fun with these as it includes a 'Champion of the Environment' award. Anybody know the name of the person behind the abortive Ratcliffe power station protest?

*Actually I've now found the definition of a portfolio decision (or Executive Portfolio to give its full title), it's on page 23 of this document.