EXCLUSIVE: 155 invoices paid by Wirral Council in 2013/14 for legal services, external audit, physiotherapy and psychological assessments
EXCLUSIVE: 155 invoices paid by Wirral Council in 2013/14 for legal services, external audit, physiotherapy and psychological assessments
Below are 155 of the invoices I requested during the 2013/14 audit. They range from invoices to the Council’s external auditor Grant Thornton UK LLP, criminal work, a couple of judicial reviews, appealing an ICO decision notice to the First Tier Tribunal (Information Rights) as well as a lot of times Wirral Council have taken parents to court about their children. Some of these invoices I’ve previously written about on this blog, such as about the invoice about appealing the ICO decision notice. Turns out now I look at it more carefully there was a further invoice for £1,008 from February 2014 in that matter too.
Some of the others I’ve already on the blog as I received them in August 2014. However I didn’t publish them in August because I’ve had to go through a process of blacking out all the names (and partial names) of children and parents.
Added in green to many invoices are the representative (where known) from the list of payments in 2013/14 greater than £500. I’ve also added back in (on some) text which has been obscured by information blacked out on double-sided pages and bled through.
There is an index to all 155 invoices that can be downloaded here. I’ve tried to use the following file format when naming each file “Wirral Council invoice” followed by representative/organisation, amount, date, page number where there are multiple pages for the same invoice followed by invoice number.
Invoices 73 & 74 aren’t published here as they were cancelled and replaced by invoices 75 & 76. There is another batch of invoices I have yet to scan in, which is a mix of invoices for legal services and other general invoices. Below you should find all 155 invoices.
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Outrageous 20 Page Wirral Council Contract over Secret Hourly Legal Rates
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.
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.