Lack of Engagement Woes...Again

Unfortunately I have to report that my initial optimism at One Nottingham's response to my request for a copy of the decision to award Nottingham Equal funding appears to be misplaced.

As I said before, ON's PR chap Kevin Bartlett provided me with copies of board minutes but said that the decision to pick NE was made by a tender panel, a detail not mentioned in the NCC decision to provide match funding. That just mentioned a lack of other potential organisations.

I have written back to Mr Bartlett, twice, asking him for a copy of the tender decision and meeting minutes as their guidance says that this should normally be provided under the Freedom of Information Act and Kevin did say he would deal with my request under FoIA principles. Not a peep back from him sadly and he sounded so friendly at the outset.

What have they got to hide?

The next tactic I think is to test just how independent ON is from NCC by putting in a FoIA request to NCC itself. NCC's financial regulations state that contracts over £50k must have three bidders. The financial regs can be dispensed with if a justification can be provided but according to Kevin that didn't happen. We'll see what they say.

In other clamming up news, after encouraging all and sundry to write to their councillors about discretionary housing payments I made a point of doing so myself. Ten days ago I wrote to my own local councillors, Cat Arnold, Rob Lee and Mick Newton, the three party leaders and relevant portfolio holders Graham Chapman (resources), Eunice Campbell (adult services) and David Liversidge (housing).

Wanna know how many replies I've had? One, from Lib Dem leader Gary Long who said he would support DHPs being sent for scrutiny. Hats off to him at least. Nothing from anybody else, not even my own councillors which is an absolute disgrace. I've never had a reply from any of my local councillors apart from one from Mick Newton and that was when he was off sick.

These wasters are a disgrace to democracy. How can they complain about people not voting or otherwise engaging in political life when they steadfastly ignore people who do? How often do politicians howl in condemnation when people dare to take matters into their own hands and riot or stage other forms of direct action? We hear them mewling and puking that we should effect change by democratic means but ignore us when we do. It's not a party political thing, they're all part of the same disease, although we do have a particular problem with councillors being little more than vote fodder at the beck and call of the leadership in Nottingham. The last thing that elected representatives of that calibre want is for people to take an interest in what they're doing.

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.

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.]