More Info on Making the Lawyers Rich

There's been an interesting response to a Freedom of Info request posted up today, concerning the amount of money spent on external lawyers in employment cases. Remember this is on top of internal costs of their own lawyers involved with the cases.

Long story short, since 2003 NCC has spent between £29802 and £142448 per year between 2003 and 2009 (the 2010 figure probably isn't a full year) on external solicitors firms and barristers, averaging £65921 per year. In 2009, which was the year of my tribunal, they spent £72792. All costs include VAT.

The only solicitors firm named is Freeth Cartwright in Nottingham, something you might want to bear in mind if you've been fucked over by NCC and are looking for a solicitor. The barristers who I came up against, 7 Bedford Row Chambers, appear to have a fairly longstanding arrangement with NCC. I wonder how often these things go out to tender...?

Longstanding NCC watchers will remember that NCC claimed to have spent £100k on investigating the housing allocations scandal, saying this was a fortune and that further investigation was not justified. Yet that was the TOTAL cost spent and here they are routinely spending approximately two thirds of this amount each year on employment cases, in excess of their internal legal costs. So they're happy to shell out wads of cash on covering up workplace bullying yet investigating a massively important institutional corruption case only justifies peanuts. Good stuff.

The Employment Tribunal Investigations Unit; You Couldn't make it Up (although it seems someone did)

I know I haven't mentioned it much but last year I was involved in an Employment Tribunal case with Nottingham City Council. Modesty prevents me from mentioning the fact that I won obviously.

So you can imagine my interest being awakened when I saw a mention of an 'Employment Tribunal Investigations Unit' mentioned in the minutes of the Audit Committee meeting of 18 December last year. So I stuck in a Freedom of Information request to find out a bit more about it.

Here's the reply I got.

"I have investigated your request and the answer to your questions is that there is no 'Employment Tribunal Investigations Unit' and the mention of such within the minutes of the meeting you speak of was a clerical error."

I mean, what would your first reaction be? Why would someone randomly ask about a fictitious 'Employment Tribunal Investigation Unit' at a meeting? Why not 'Paperclip Accountability Commission'? Or 'Robot Kitten Recovery Squad'?

Then I had a thought and rushed off to check the minutes of the meeting again and yes, you've guessed it, they've amended them. Now, the mention of 'Employment Tribunal Investigation Unit' has been changed to "the Council's approach to dealing with Employment Tribunals". (see minute 54(2))

Hmmm, something smells a bit like fish. I suppose it's feasible that the minute taker misunderstood what was said and conflated a request to look into the approach to employment tribunals as meaning a full blown 'investigations unit' but it's also just possible that NCC would be embarrassed about having such a thing, as that would imply that NCC is subject to quite a lot of employment tribunals, suggesting that they weren't the most sympathetic of employers, and that would never do.

I can't be bothered asking for review, I'll just wait for the minutes of the meeting where it's being discussed.

What's the betting that that they pull the shutters down and claim a public interest exclusion?

Update 14 Feb; I have received reliable info that the 'Employment Tribunal Investigation Unit' WAS mentioned at the December 09 meeting but that at the next meeting it was announced that there was in fact no such thing. In other words it doesn't seem to be the fault of the minute taker.

Tales from the Tribunal Part 4

I was going to wait until I received the employment tribunal's full statement of reasons for its decision before doing another TftT but that's probably going to be some time so I thought I'd write about one of the issues where NCC fell down big style.

It concerns the issue of weighing up evidence and the related matter of deciding the credibility of witnesses. Throughout the tribunal it became crystal clear that, when deciding disputes via its own internal procedures, NCC doesn't bother with any of that.

Take two examples of how Lisa Black dealt with this when deciding on some complaints made against me.

First example. Imagine that you have three witnesses stating that scenario A was true and one witness saying that scenario B was true. Add in the fact that the one witness arguing for scenario B has a strong interest in that being accepted because if scenario A wins the day they are likely to face disciplinary action. Assume that, on the face of it, both scenarios A and B are plausible but contradictory.

Now a sensible intelligent person would conclude that, on the balance of probability, scenario A is correct. You couldn't really go any other way in the vast majority of circumstances.

Now guess what Lisa Black decided? Fair play, she couldn't quite go as far as saying that scenario B was correct but she decided that it was "ambiguous" whether scenario A or B was correct.

WTF?

It just so happened that this issue had major repercussions on my ability to return to work as my position would have been seriously undermined.

Second example. In one dispute a certain witness made a rather extreme claim that, to be honest, just reading it in isolation would make you burst out laughing. This claim was flatly contradicted by five other witnesses.

In the same dispute another witness made a very specific claim in their written statement but changed their story very significantly in the internal decision meeting. This same witness made another claim that Lisa Black said later that she had disregarded.

During cross-examination Lisa Black made it absolutely clear that at no stage had it even entered her head to consider whether the credibility of either of these witnesses was possibly compromised. During the tribunal she gave a fairly robust explanation why she believed the second witness's account in the main but then couldn't explain how she squared that with disregarding the second claim he had made.

Believe me this is all basic stuff. In any dispute you will get contradictory accounts as to what happened and you have to make a decision as to which is the correct one. You have to give rational reasons why you have made that decision. If you can't evaluate evidence then you might just as well spin the bottle.

As if it were not bad enough that the Head of the Housing Benefits service cannot understand the importance of such basic decision making skills, the decisions of hers that these scenarios (along with many others) fed into were appealed via NCC's grievance procedure. There are two stages to this and in my case each stage was heard by a Director.

At the first stage, heard by Hugh White who is Director of Sport, Lisa's decisions were largely upheld although he did criticise the length of time taken to make them. At the second stage Helen Shipway, the Director of Customer Services, went as far as saying that she couldn't overturn Lisa Black's decisions because they were so well reasoned.

Under cross-examination both Directors had to admit that it did not occur to them that Lisa's decisions may be flawed because there had been no consideration of the credibility of witnesses. In fact Hugh White was almost pathetic to watch as it became increasingly clear that this was a totally alien concept for him, he looked more and more at sea until by the end of his time on the stand he looked like he needed his mum. I found myself checking under his chair expecting to find a little trail of wee but thankfully he was clear in that respect.

This might seem a little dry and lawyerish but it potentially affects anybody currently working at NCC. This total lack of rationality in decision making will potentially affect any internal council processes such as grievance, harassment and discrimination or disciplinary procedures. Take it from someone who knows, such matters can be career destroying and I know I'm not the only one this has happened to.

What's worse is that if you take out the rationality you open up far more scope for nefarious types to manipulate the processes for their own ends. Essentially there are people working at NCC who are effectively untouchable because they have their feet under the table with the right people. They have nothing to fear of people complaining about them because it's so easy for their mates to come to the rescue. I am 100% convinced that Lisa Black is one of the people who benefits from this situation, however, once the decision making got outside of NCC to an employment tribunal she could no longer rely on her protectors and she doesn't come out of it looking good.

Of course the final aspect of this is that NCC's Legal Services didn't see any of this coming. They were absolutely confident of winning and spent who knows how much on a London barrister for what was originally going to be a 12 day hearing. As I've pointed out before, only a tiny number of employment tribunal cases against NCC get as far as a full hearing, the vast majority are settled.

It is essential that Nottingham City Council initiates a comprehensive retraining programme for the people it charges with the huge responsibility of officiating over formal internal disputes. There should also be an investigation of a sample of past cases to establish those who have the least ability to hear cases properly and ensure that they do not hear any further cases until the council has satisfied itself that they have been brought up to scratch.

Not only does getting it wrong cost a fortune, it ruins people's lives. I think NCC has got just a little bit too casual about both.

Tales from the Tribunal Part 3

It seems that Housing Benefits supremo Lisa Black wasn't happy about my likening of her to Little Britain character Marjories Dawes so she tried to get her own back when she was giving evidence at my tribunal.

The judge asked her whether she had thought to answer an email I had sent her when I was still employed by NCC but off sick. She said that she didn't because the email was rude and insulting and she didn't think there was anything she could have said.

She then said that this view was reinforced by the fact that at the time I sent her the email I was blogging about her being like a 'comedy character'. She had her special 'outraged' face on when she said it.

I then pointed out that I didn't even start the blog until November 2008 and the email was sent in April 2008 so there was no way I was saying that about her at that time and in fact was no longer even employed by NCC when I started this blog.

This made her look like a proper charlie. Having attended the tribunal every day up to that point she no longer felt the need to do so after this.

Funnily enough, if the verbal judgment we got on Wednesday was anything to go by, the Tribunal agreed with quite a lot of what I said in that email.

Tales from the Tribunal Part 2

An interesting mystery still remains from my tribunal experience.

First, a little background. During the preparation of the evidence bundle for an employment tribunal either party might want to see evidence that only the other party has. Most of the time if you ask for it you get it and everyone gets on fine.

However, on occasions, one party may not wish to hand evidence over. There can be very good reasons for this, the documents requested may include details of other workers and the employer may not think they are relevant to the case, or it may be considered that you're going on a fishing trip. In such circumstances the party wanting to see the documents will need to request a disclosure order from the tribunal and usually a case management discussion will be held and you are expected to justify why you need the info.

This was the situation I found myself in on 3 September, I wanted to see some notes of meetings and NCC didn't want me to have them. In the end the judge ordered a partial disclosure for notes that related to a particular person and a bundle of notes duly arrived some days later. I presumed that was all there was. One of NCC's senior solicitors represented them at this case management discussion.

Moving on to the second day of the full tribunal hearing (or might have been the third, not sure, it's a bit of a blur now) I was being cross examined by NCC's barrister when we had another of those 'rabbit out of the hat' moments. Apparently one of the witnesses (who is a rather senior manager) suddenly remembered that they had some notes of a meeting which proved beyond doubt what a nasty man I was.

Not really good enough, I said, I at least need to look at them overnight, which the judge agreed to. The notes were provided and I put them away to look at later.

You can imagine my surprise when I got home and looked at the notes and found that they clearly should have been provided under the disclosure order. Very naughty. Why hadn't they been provided earlier? Was it the senior manager who kept them back or the senior solicitor?

Anyway, moving on to the next week and it was my turn to cross examine NCC's witnesses and the senior manager took the stand. First question I asked was why she hadn't provided the notes as ordered and, quick as a flash she said that nobody had asked her to. I clarified that the senior solicitor had never asked for the notes and she confirmed that was the case. She said all this on oath.

So you see we are left with a little mystery. Do we believe the witness on oath saying nobody asked her for the notes (and thus selling a senior member of NCC's legal team down the river) or do we assume that a senior solicitor would not be so stupid as to fail to comply with an order of the tribunal, seeing as that would arguably be a breach of the Solicitors' Code of Conduct rule 11.02. Especially when they had been in charge of the case for 9 months.

I don't know, the only way I can think of to get to the bottom of this is to make a complaint about the senior solicitor to the Solicitors Regulation Authority who presumably will be able to investigate and establish the facts. It's more work though and I'm not sure I can be bothered which is why I've left the names out of this story. For now.

What do you think folks? Thumbs up or thumbs down?

Tales from the Tribunal Part 1

So. I won an employment tribunal case against Nottingham City Council, my former employer. I'll be writing about different aspects of the case for a while but in my usual haphazard, when-I-feel-like-it way.

My blog made a bit of a guest appearance during the hearing. The barrister decided out of the blue that my blog demonstrated that I exhibited 'a certain turn of phrase'.

Think about that, he was trying to argue that because I write disrespectful sweary stuff on the internets then I must talk like that at work and to the people I managed. Which is obviously bollocks.

I should point out that it is extremely bad form to pull rabbits out of the hat like that at a tribunal hearing, you are expected to agree a bundle of evidence before the hearing and to exchange witness statements and there was no inkling of my blog having any relevence in these documents. The barrister claimed that he had no choice because the blog only went up "yesterday".

Which again is bollocks as the blog has been going for nearly a year or so now, when challenged he claimed he meant my most recent post which was clearly about the tribunal. Frankly if he'd wanted disrespectful sweary stuff he'd have been better off talking about this one.

He then went on to argue that, because I was capable of writing a blog and maintaining a photo website then I couldn't possibly have a mental health problem so serious as to count as a disability. To be fair he was on stronger ground here in that at least it was relevant but he quoted a passage from my photo website which was written months ago, somewhat undermining his reason for bringing up my web presence on the day.

In other words this was pure gamesmanship and says a lot about the sort of organisation NCC is when they'll stoop to tactics like that. And that's not the only dodginess they got up to either, more on that soon.

The Lawyers Get Rich...

More from the Freedom of Information goldmine.

Nottingham City Council has been spending nearly £100,000 per year on private sector lawyers, purely in disputes with its own former employees.

A Freedom of Information request via the 'What Do They Know' website revealed that during the financial years 2007/8 and 2008/9 NCC spent £195,064* on external lawyers for help preparing for and being represented at Employment Tribunals.

The bulk of this, £131,536* was spent on external representation at Tribunal hearings, despite only 5 cases going as far as a full hearing during this period, averaging around £26,000 per hearing.

All this despite the council having its own legal department, although they couldn't tell us how much was spent on internal lawyers working on employment cases because they apparently do other things as well.

Update 1 July - The 'Post' is reporting that NCC overspent by £3.4m last year. Clearly their lawyers' benevolence fund won't have helped.

*including VAT natch