Tag: children and young people

Wirral Council spends £2,294.57 on a German translation and the prize for the most pointless redaction

Wirral Council spends £2,294.57 on a German translation and the prize for the most pointless redaction

Wirral Council spends £2,294.57 on a German translation and the prize for the most pointless redaction

                                                

Wirral Council invoice Capita Translation and Interpreting Limited £2294.57 11th July 2013
Wirral Council invoice Capita Translation and Interpreting Limited £2294.57 11th July 2013

Wirral Council spent £2,294.57 with Capita Translation and Interpreting Limited for translation of documents from English to German. Quite why Wirral Council would spend this much on translation is unknown.

The list of payments made over £500 list the department as being the Law, HR and Asset Management department, however the invoice itself has CYP (Children and Young People) written on it.

There’s not much more to be said than this, so I’ll just move on to the most pointless bit of blacking out I’ve seen by Wirral Council on an invoice:

Wirral Council invoices Weightmans £942 24th September 2013
Wirral Council invoices Weightmans £942 24th September 2013

As you can see on this invoice the total sum payable (£785 + VAT of £157 which comes to £942) is blacked out.

So why was the total blacked out (which can easily be determined by adding two figures together)? I quote from the official response:

“Just to clarify, the invoices I supplied to you were redacted on the basis of advice from our legal section rather than by departments themselves.”

Yes this is Wirral Council, a Council that describes itself as “open and transparent”, which is seemingly something not believed by its legal department!

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A tale of 2 invoices paid by Wirral Council: Mystery Employee (£2,496.53) & Martin Clayton's wasted costs (£1,728)

A tale of 2 invoices paid by Wirral Council: Mystery Employee (£2,496.53) & Martin Clayton’s wasted costs (£1,728)

A tale of 2 invoices paid by Wirral Council: Mystery Employee (£2,496.53) & Martin Clayton’s wasted costs (£1,728)

                                            

Ed 22:02 8/12/2014 Although it was initially confirmed one invoice related to Mr. Martin Morton, it appears this was incorrext and this article has been amended.

Below are two invoices paid by Wirral Council’s legal department in the last financial year (2013-14) unearthed as part of my “armchair audit”. A lot was blacked out on both invoices, my annotations are in green.

The first is an invoice dated 8th January 2014 from Ralli Solicitors for £2,496.53. This is for (in part) attendance at mediation meeting on Monday 16th December 2013 involving a mystery employee? to try and reach some type of settlement. Those with long memories will remember there was also a meeting of Council on the evening of 16th December 2013. Had a settlement been reached on 16th December 2013, I wonder if it was connected to what was on the agenda for that meeting.

When this invoice was given to me as part of the audit, Wirral Council blacked out the name.

Some of this bill is for £15.00 (+VAT) for car parking and £15.44 (+VAT) for car mileage. The location of the meeting is also blacked out by Wirral Council so it’s impossible to tell how reasonable the £36.53 for travel expenses tacked on to the bill is.

Ralli Solicitors invoice to Wirral Council 8th January 2014 £2456 53p
Ralli Solicitors invoice to Wirral Council 8th January 2014 £2456 53p

Ralli Solicitors invoice to Wirral Council 8th January 2014 £2456 53p

The second legal invoice I will show you dear reader (moving away from the Department for Adult Social Services to the Department for Children and Young People) is for Wirral Council having to pay another party’s legal expenses after a wasted costs hearing on the 16th October 2013. The invoice is below.

Bear in mind for a court to award a wasted costs order under the court’s rules the court must have deemed that the following happened (legal representative refers to Wirral Council’s legal representative who is again blacked out on the invoice):

“5.5 It is appropriate for the court to make a wasted costs order against a legal representative, only if –
(a) the legal representative has acted improperly, unreasonably or negligently;
(b) the legal representative’s conduct has caused a party to incur unnecessary costs, or has meant that costs incurred by a party prior to the improper, unreasonable or negligent act or omission have been wasted;
(c) it is just in all the circumstances to order the legal representative to compensate that party for the whole or part of those costs.”

I would guess that Hillyer McKeown Solicitors were acting for one (or both) of the parents and Wirral Council is representing one (or more) children.

Wirral Council invoice 24th January 2014 £1728 wasted costs hearing HillyerMcKeown Solicitors Children and Young People Martin Clayton added
Wirral Council invoice 24th January 2014 £1728 wasted costs hearing Hillyer McKeown Solicitors Children and Young People Martin Clayton added

Wirral Council invoice 24th January 2014 £1728 wasted costs hearing Hillyer McKeown Solicitors CYP Martin Clayton added

Wirral Council invoice 24th January 2014 £1728 wasted costs hearing HillyerMcKeown Solicitors Children and Young People
Wirral Council invoice 24th January 2014 £1728 wasted costs hearing Hillyer McKeown Solicitors CYP

Wirral Council invoice 24th January 2014 £1728 wasted costs hearing Hillyer McKeown Solicitors CYP

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Lyndale School Consultation Meeting: David Armstrong explains why there’s a consultation and questions begin (Part 2)

Lyndale School Consultation Meeting: David Armstrong explains why there’s a consultation and questions begin (Part 2)

Lyndale School Consultation Meeting: David Armstrong explains why there’s a consultation and questions begin (Part 2)

                      

Continues from Lyndale School Consultation Meeting: Julia Hassall explains why Wirral Council are consulting on closure (Part 1).

David Armstrong (Assistant Chief Executive) said, “OK, thank you. Apologies to those of you who’ve heard this five times before. This is the last time for you. I wanted to just set out the bones of how the school is funded and set out some information requested by staff and I’m responsible for the two budgets and I’ll come back to those and I’m also responsible for school assets and school buildings and I have been responsible for those back in fact to the days when it was relocated from Clatterbridge.

I look after two budgets, a £80 million budget for the Children and Young Peoples Department budget which pays for things like fostering, adoption and a whole host of the other none related schools services. We also have a £240 million budget which is the schools budget. It comes with the title of Dedicated Schools Grant, it comes from government summarised as DSG, it comes into the Council it has to be passed onto schools.

So as Julia [Hassall] said, it’s not about the Council somehow undertaking some of that money and treating it as a saving. It’s about the long term financial security of the school. The DSG when it comes in covers four areas, early years, primary, secondary and special.

(drowned out by someone’s mobile phone)

It goes through a formula, a local formula and that is distributed into schools.”

He explained how the Schools Forum decided on the formula and how it the Schools Forum comprised of volunteers representing the various types of schools. He said that when he was a head in the 1980s, he only managed two budgets in the school. One was books and paper and the second was whatever the school made selling photos. In 1990 there was a change and the big budgets that had been managed by councils were redistributed to schools.

Mr Armstrong said that to begin with each council had its own formula and that every council used different things to redistribute the schools budget. With special schools he said “it has always been slightly different”. He said that nationally that there was a movement at least in part to fund special schools by pupil and not just by place. David Armstrong said that the numbers at Lyndale School had fallen, making it difficult to run the school. In the last few years he said Andrew [Roberts] working with the school governors, the Schools Forum and the other special schools had funded Lyndale School for a number of empty places.

Looking forward, he said that Wirral Council would have to seek authorisation on whether they could do that from a national body called the Education Funding Agency. In his view the future was less certain because the EFA had said that they’d like Wirral Council to come to a point where they were funding per a pupil and not per a place. He said it was a question about the long term financial stability of the school and it wasn’t about making a quick saving by closing the school.

David Armstrong said that they’d been through this process with other primary schools and a secondary school and that the savings had been recycled into the formula. He was happy to take questions.

Phil Ward (chairing the meeting) thanked Mr. Armstrong and said that before they started the opportunity to ask questions and raise issues, he referred to an attendance sheet and asked people who hadn’t signed it to do so. He said, “A lot of people have lots of things to say with conviction and passion and we would ask they allow everybody a chance to speak and put forward to the meeting to hear what’s been said. So on that basis, are there any questions?” After twenty-five minutes (of a two hour consultation meeting) the people present finally got a chance to ask questions.

The first questioner introduced herself and asked if they could get a copy of the notes being taken? Interrupting the questioner before she’d had a chance to finish and talking over her, Phil Ward barked at the questioner in the tone of voice you’d usually reserve for someone who’d stood on your foot, “I’ve answered that one a few times! We’re not taking minutes of the meeting but high level notes and these notes will be used to capture some of the key points raised at the meetings and these notes will also be reported to elected members [councillors] of the Cabinet. They’re not for circulation. Is that clear?”

The same questioner replied with, “but this is a public consultation!”, Phil Ward again interrupted her and said, “It is a public”, she continued, “it should be for everyone”. Phil Ward replied, “I’ve answered that already but the high level notes, we will capture the views, as we have done for the last five meetings and those views, and those views will be reported to members of the Cabinet.”

Councillor Phil Gilchrist asked whether the notes would set out so that they could get a feel of what’s been raised at the consultation meetings? Phil Ward replied, “We can do it in a different way, we can collate all of the notes together and just do a summary report of the key points or alternatively we could choose to do a summary report on each of the individual meetings laying out if you like the issues raised and I think that’s what you’re alluding to in terms of about each meeting the way it seemed to be borne out with these issues, there are those with these issues so we’ll look at that.”

Another question was asked about the notes to which Phil Ward replied, “They’re notes recording the high level points raised at the meetings and importantly we will be reporting them to Cabinet.”

A different questioner stated that he thought the meetings should be fully minuted. He described himself as a support worker that worked full time over three fourteen hour shifts. He referred to previous meetings that people hadn’t turned up to. A meeting at Lyndale School had been arranged and only seven councillors had turned up to it.

He continued and said that despite working full-time, he had found the time to come to the meeting. Continuing, he said he had asked people if they were against the decision to consult on closing Lyndale School and said that a hundred percent of those he had contacted were against closure of Lyndale School. He referred to flaws in the consultation and that there had been “100% disapproval” on “ploughing ahead” when Wirral Council was there to serve the people of Wirral.

Phil Ward replied with, “Is that something which you’d like to submit to us?”. He replied, “Oh, yes” and Phil Ward said, “Just to remind you the consultation finishes on the 25th June.”

Continues at Lyndale School Consultation Meeting: questions about banding, outdoor space and Stanley School (Part 3).

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Families and Wellbeing Policy and Performance Committee (Wirral Council) 9th July 2013

A report on the Families and Wellbeing Committee held in Committee Room 1, Wallasey Town Hall on the 9th July 2013

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Video footage of the first meeting of Wirral Council’s Families and Wellbeing Committee (that replaces both the Health and Wellbeing Overview and Scrutiny Committee and its Children and Young People Overview and Scrutiny Committee) can be watched above with a playlist of all parts here. If you’d like to be notified each time I upload a video, simply subscribe to my Youtube channel.

The agenda and reports for the meeting are as usual on Wirral Council’s website. In a meeting that lasted over two hours what was actually decided? Well they agreed the minutes of the previous two meetings of the Health and Wellbeing Overview and Scrutiny Committee and the previous meeting of the Children and Young Peoples Committee.

They noted a report and presentation on their terms of reference (which had previously been agreed at the last Extraordinary Council meeting back in April). They noted (and received a report on) the policy and performance procedure rules (which had already been agreed with minor amendments by the Coordinating Committee a week ago). All this (which along with a few interests being declared at the start of the meeting) took a staggeringly long thirteen minutes. These last two reports were something the Committee have no say over as it falls outside their terms of reference.

Then they went onto discuss the role of co-optees. There are ten co-optees on this Committee, some required by law, others were transferred over from the Families and Wellbeing Committee’s predecessor committees. Curiously none of the ten co-optees had been invited along to the meeting where their very existence was debated. I’ll point out here that who the co-optees are is decided by Council, not the Families and Wellbeing Committee. After much umming and ahhing as well as correction by Fiona Johnstone of the mistaken belief by one councillor (who shall remain nameless) that the Chief Executive of Arrowe Park Hospital and a doctor from the Clinical Commissioning Group had been co-optees of the former Health and Wellbeing Committee, Cllrs Moira McLaughlin, Denise Roberts, Mike Hornby and Pat Williams decided to meet in a task and finish group to mull over the co-optees’ future.

So after twenty minutes of noting reports and discussing things that fell outside their remit, did they finally at agenda item seven get to something within their committee’s remit and that it was worthwhile having fifteen councillors (plus two Cabinet Members) and about a dozen senior officers present for? Item seven was another Powerpoint presentation on the “Directorate Plan” given by Claire Fish, Julia Hassall and Chris Begya (in place of Graham Hodkinson).

The slides went on and on, the jargon and management phrases flowing seamlessly from senior officer’s lips. “We’re operating in a challenging fiscal environment” was said instead of the simpler “We’re making cuts”, “synergies” was used instead of cuts, “commissioning approach” instead of privatisation. Julia Hassall told councillors that that they had been “imagining where they’ll be in 2016” and invited them into her “vision of the future”. She then got onto slides about pyramids. You may think Ancient Egypt is way, way outside the remit of the Committee, but these weren’t Powerpoint slides about crumbling relics, these were “pyramids of need”.

Words cannot express how mind-numbingly dull it was watching the admittedly enthusiastic Julia Hassall explaining which children went where on each level of her “pyramids of need”. However it was, yes you’ve guessed it, more code for cuts as confirmed at the end by her saying that they had a balanced budget and were well on track to finding £11.4 million of cuts.

Cllr Williams complained that it was difficult to take in the information from the Powerpoint slides and could they have copies? Cllr McLaughlin also asked this (as well as a question about educational outcomes). Whilst Cllr McLaughlin was asking Julia Hassall a long question, Julia Hassall stood there nodding, seemingly doing a good impression of the Churchill insurance dog but without the “Oh yes”. When she wasn’t nodding, she had her head tilted to one side as if she was a teacher being asked a question by a pupil who hadn’t been paying attention. In a long answer with many, many, many hand gestures that really should’ve had their own accompanying music, Julia Hassall mentioned the Corporate Parenting Group and agreed in response to a question of Cllr McLaughlin that she would circulate the minutes of its last meeting to councillors (which was the subject of a recent FOI request of mine that was refused by Wirral Council on the basis it would take too long). Various other councillors asked questions or made comments, then Chris Begya of the Department of Adult Social Services gave her presentation.

This again was jargon heavy, “safeguarding peer challenge”, “Care Quality Commission” and “national sector led improvement organisation” peppered her talk which again was basically along the theme of the previous one, a hundred and one way to mention cuts without actually using the word. Bad budgets were mentioned, so were savings, so was a “more transparent leadership” and on that final point the Director of Adult Social Services was so transparent he wasn’t even there! As before councillors made comments and asked questions finishing with the Chair thanking Claire Fish, Julia Hassall and Chris Begya.

Claire Fish briefly (yes senior officers can actually be brief) talked about item eight, the Families and Wellbeing dashboard, but spent a lot longer fielding questions from councillors on it. A large print version of item nine (public health dashboard) was circulated to councillors, with a long summary from Fiona Johnstone, which again attracted questions from councillors (along with some very long answers).

Moving to item ten, the end was almost in sight! Cllr Povall gave a brief summary as to where the Task and Finish Group on the Francis Report had got to, there was a long discussion on the work program (eventually they agreed that the Chair and spokespersons would meet up to decide it), there were no questions on item twelve and finally after just over two hours in the sweltering heat of Committee Room 1 the meeting finished.