John Brace | A blog about Wirral Council, Wirral Council's councillors & officers

Wirral Heritage Open Days 2013 (St. Oswald’s Church, Bidston, Bidston Windmill, Bidston Community Archaeology & Flaybrick Memorial Gardens)

As it’s September once more, a number of Heritage Open Days are coming up (some in Bidston and St. James). The first of four in Bidston and St. James is on Thursday 12th September when St. Oswald’s Church in Bidston Village will be open from 10 am to 3 pm. There’s no need to book, the church has disabled access and there will be refreshments. Tours around the church will happen throughout the day and for further information you can contact Mr Tony Endean, the churchwarden on 0151 652 7328.

Bidston Windmill “bats permitting” will be open for visitors from 10 am to noon on Saturday 14th September. There is no need to book in advance, but children under eleven need to be accompanied by an adult. A minimum height restriction of 1.06 metres applies for those who want to go to the upper floors. For further details contact John Jakeman or Nic Harding on 0151 653 9332.

Also on Saturday 14th September Bidston Community Archaeology are holding an open day running from 10.30 am to 4 pm. They are currently excavating a medieval farmhouse fifty metres from the Tam O’Shanter Urban Farm and will be showing the public their finds. Again no booking in advance is needed.

The last event in Bidston and St James running on two days (Saturday 7th September and Saturday 14th September both at 11 am) is a “Local Heroes Military Guided Tour” of Flaybrick Memorial Gardens starting at Tam O’Shanter Urban Farm. The walk will take about one and a half hours and does need booking in advance, which you can do by contacting Chris Morris on 0151 608 5050.

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Incredible £7404 spent by Wirral Council on legal advice for Birkenhead Town Centre regeneration

Earlier this year Wirral Council paid £6,000 to Weightmans for “professional charges in relation to the potential regeneration of Birkenhead Town Centre to include all time up to and including 17 December 2012” and £1,404 for procurement advice from Peter Oldham QC. You can see the invoices by clicking on these links and there’s a Wirral Globe article from July about Neptune being asked to come up with a master plan for the area.

Wirral Council have a Corporate Procurement Unit so why didn’t they ask them for advice instead? They even have sixteen in-house solicitors they could have asked. I wonder if they thought that asking a Weightman’s partner and a QC meant that if someone made a FOI request for the advice, Wirral Council can (rightly or wrongly) claim a section 42 exemption (legal professional privilege). However as this advice isn’t in relation to any legal proceedings, section 42 doesn’t apply. Therefore I’ve made a FOI request for the advice provided on the whatdotheyknow website.

Update: 26th September 2013: Wirral Council have switched it from a Freedom of Information Act request to one dealt with under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 and refused it under regulation 12 (5)(e) “commercial confidentiality” and 12 (5)(b) “legal advice privilege/legal professional privilege”.

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Incredible £2,697 spent on legal costs by Wirral Council in dispute with Volker Laser

Wirral Council legal invoices page 19 Volker Laser Eversheds LLP

I’ve erased some of the black boxes on legal invoices of Wirral Council and came across this one for £2,697 in a dispute that Wirral Council had with Volker Laser. Sadly Volker Laser is not the name of a Bond villain’s company but instead a civil engineering firm.

Helpfully on Evershed’s website they tell us the work was for Lucy Frith of Eversheds "defending a series of adjudications arising out of a remediation contract for a public sector employer" (at least that’s a reasonable guess considering it wasn’t any of the other three). So what does this actually mean when translated out of lawyer-speak?

Wirral Council’s Technical Services department contracted Volker Laser to do civil engineering work for them. Wirral Council weren’t happy that the work was done how they wanted, Volker Laser disagreed with this so Wirral Council got their lawyer involved to sort it out. This is only an “interim invoice” so who knows how much that fiasco actually cost the taxpayer in total? No wonder they wanted to black out the name of the contractor involved before releasing the invoice!

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Outrageous 20 Page Wirral Council Contract over Secret Hourly Legal Rates

Before Bill Norman left Wirral Council’s employment he said during a public meeting that Wirral Council had much less in-house solicitors than the previous Council that had previously employed him. Currently Wirral Council has ~~sixteen~~ fifteen people in-house to give legal advice (David Abraham, Ali Noman Bayatti, Louise Kate Bragg, Gregory Oghenebrume Eyitene, Angela Mary Green, Colin John Bennett Hughes, Victoria Michelle Leece, Rosemary Ann Lyon, ~~Elizabeth Macgregor~~, Anne Frances Quirk, Cecilia Mary Rathe, Sally Jayne Rotherham, Joanne Elizabeth Rutherford, Lucy Victoria Shaw, Surjit Tour and Karen Christina White).

As a result of having more legal work than people employed to do it, work gets outsourced. Some of this is through the North West Legal Consortium that have a website here. Basically it’s a collaboration between a number of local Councils and others (such as Merseytravel, The Office for the Police and Crime Commissioner for Merseyside and The Office for the Police and Crime Commissioner for Lancashire) for legal services from firms such as Weightmans LLP and Eversheds LLP. The “outrageous” clause in my opinion in the contract is this though:-

17. Confidentiality

The Consortium has entered into agreement with Solicitors Firms and Barristers Chambers in relation to discounted fee rates. Each of these rates is commercially confidential to that Firm or Chambers and as such should not, without the prior written consent of that Firm or Chambers be disclosed to any other Firm or Chambers or any other third party outside of the Consortium. Authorities should use reasonable endeavours to ensure either by themselves their servants or agents that they treat such Confidential Information as confidential and safeguard it accordingly; and they hereby agree to use reasonable endeavours not disclose such Confidential Information to any other person without the Solicitors Firm or Chambers prior consent.

What this means is that they can charge a three figure sum an hour for legal advice and despite the public’s right to inspect these documents and make copies (without redactions) Wirral Council will just black box out the amounts on for example this Weightmans table of prices here and here.

With this level of redaction (which extends to the invoices themselves too), how can the Wirral public know they’re getting value for money at these “discounted fee rates”? What’s the rate they’re classed as discounted from anyway? Links to the whole North West Legal Consortium contract are provided below.

EXCLUSIVE: 36 More Pages of North West Regional Development Agency’s Contract With Wirral Council for Business Grants Program

Continuing from yesterdays’ blog post of the first ninety pages of the North West Development Agency’s contract with Wirral Council, here are the next thirty-five pages. As European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) money was involved, these are the standard conditions of the European Regional Development Fund grant.

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Incredible £7404 spent by Wirral Council on legal advice for Birkenhead Town Centre regeneration

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Incredible £2,697 spent on legal costs by Wirral Council in dispute with Volker Laser

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Outrageous 20 Page Wirral Council Contract over Secret Hourly Legal Rates

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