What was Mayor Anderson and Cllr Roz Gladden’s response to a campaign to save the Liveability service?
Protest before Liverpool City Council meeting about Liveability
Above are three women protesting in the rain before the Liverpool City Council budget meeting last week.
As the slogans are hard to read on the resized photos they are (from left to right), “LIVEABILITY for old, lame, sick, obese, lonely, confused. Don’t cut us off”, “It’s false economy to cut Liveability” and “LIVEABILITY helps us to help ourselves and saves money”.
Before the meeting I’d not heard of Liveability, but according to Liverpool City Council’s website it’s “a nurse led service that promotes the health and independence of people aged 50 and over”.
There were plenty of people apart from the three in the photo above that turned up to express their support for it.
Liverpool City Council meetings have a public question time/petitions/statements slot which was used by a campaigner against closure of the Liveability service. Second to speak during this slot was a Sue Carmichael. You can watch what Sue said below.
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Liverpool City Council Budget meeting 2nd March 2016 (public question time/statement/petition item)
Sue Carmichael (pictured below on the right) said, “Lord Mayor, Mayor Anderson, elected members, thank you for the opportunity to speak on behalf of the newly formed Liveability Action Group.
Sue Carmichael addresses a meeting of Liverpool City Council about the Liveability service
We have a petition with over 550 signatures which I’ll hand over now.
We very much welcome the great achievements for a city under your leadership and we also understand the impact of nationally imposed cutbacks on the city’s finances.
Our action group was formed last Thursday and over two hundred attended. We are all deeply shocked by the summary destruction of this award-winning NHS-led, nurse-led service and there’s no consultation about options. It was all done completely by stealth from our point of view.
We believe it’s an ill-considered decision halfway through Liverpool’s decade of health and wellbeing.
The Liveability service is fifteen years old and it’s for the physical and mental health and well-being of people over fifty, but most are in their sixties to nineties. Only about ten per cent are in their fifties.
The 1,500 registered members, there are 500 users each week with 24 brilliant volunteers who help. There are about twenty different sessions including a chair based one and ones for those with dementia and their carers. Plans were already in place to roll the scheme out elsewhere because we know how important it is.
Most users have acute or chronic conditions or mobility issues, or like myself have had major surgery of chemotherapy and Liveability has been part of our recovery.
Many live alone or are housebound carers. The twenty-four volunteers are critical to the service’s success. They are welcoming, they support the staff, they make drinks in the cafe and arrange social events and trips. There is a 50+ charity which also fund raises alongside.
Liveability is much more than exercise. It’s an informal village hub, where we meet different people on different days thereby extending our social contact as well as getting physically healthy. The social aspect is crucial.
It’s won many awards deservedly, been on national TV and even been visited by the Department of Health.
The proposed annihilation will be a cruel blow. Many say Liveability is a lifeline for them.
We’ve just heard earlier on today, there is a surprise announcement that there will be a new 50+ exercise program being city-wide, that is most welcome.
But this instant replacement cannot reinvent Liveability, the nurse led service, mainly for those in their sixties to nineties. It’s a unique city health and well-being asset. We must save it!
The fifteen years worth of staff, volunteer and user experience is available to build on. Liveability certainly ain’t broke so don’t fix it by killing it off.
Mayor Anderson, please abandon this hasty and cruel decision done in such a surprisingly underhand way without consultation. Liveability’s experience and success is there to use. Let’s jointly find an intelligent way to do this.
Keep Liveability and roll it out across the city, it’s really magic. Thank you.”
In response to what Sue Carmichael said there was applause.
A heckler shouted, “Shame on you!”
The Lord Mayor of Liverpool Cllr Concepcion said, “Mayor Anderson, would you like to respond?”
Mayor Anderson responds to concerns about the Liveability service Liverpool City Council 2nd March 2016
Mayor Anderson replied, “Lord Mayor, I just want to make one comment and then if it’s ok for you, I’ll just hand over to the Cabinet Member who can explain what we’re doing and why the decision has been made but we’re more than happy, I’ve been to the Liveability scheme and I’m more than happy to meet with people that are using the scheme to explain why we’re doing and what we’re doing. We’ve lost a huge amount of funding and this … fit for purpose and ready to replace the existing one, but as I said, I’ll let Cllr Gladden explain a little bit more.”
Councillor Roz Gladden (Cabinet Member for Adult and Children’s Social Care and Health) responds to concerns about the Liveability service at the Liverpool City Council meeting on the 2nd March 2016
Cllr Roz Gladden (Cabinet Member for Adult & Children’s Social Care & Health) responded by saying, “Can I first of all thank you for the amazing campaign that you’ve brought together in such a small amount of time?
You know one of the sadnesses of being the Cabinet Member for Social Care is watching over a six-year period cuts happen to the service and very few people have actually complained about it, so I honour the fact that you care so much about your service that you’ve come out to campaign for it. So thank you for doing that.
Lot’s of people think that public health do nice wooly things like making sure you eat salad, not put sugar in and don’t eat cake and things like that but I think these cuts have proved, cuts to public health have proved that actually they do really important services such as the Liveability services, such as looking after people who are homeless, the rough sleepers and those with drug addiction problems and naturally as an Authority we have to take care of those who are most vulnerable. That’s not to say that you aren’t of course, but we’ve had £2.9 million of council cuts within this financial year and next year we’ve got a further cut of £7 million just to the public health budget. They are government cuts, they are not imposed by us, they are cuts directly to the public health service.
And what we’ve decided to do, what we have done is we’ve been looking for some time now as a physical activity strategy that will be announced later this year, but we are running this, three centres across the city.
I don’t know where you’ve been looking to roll this out across the city. I visited Liveability three years ago. I’ve been trying to negotiate, my officers have to try and get the Liveability model because we value it rolled out across the city. That’s not happened and I can’t, I don’t want a service that just operates in Austin Rawlinson, I want to see it where people in the north of the city and the centre of the city can benefit from it too because I think it’s really important.
So that’s what we’re going to do and we’re going to ask you how you think we can do that for the rest of the city? This won’t be excluding you, we will include your knowledge and your experience in how this services works really expertly in how we can do it. So I welcome you, I welcome on board this. We will come along to you, I will meet with you next week and we’ll carry on from there. So thank you so much for coming along tonight, I really do appreciate it, thank you.”
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Wirral Council’s Cabinet to decide on whether to have public meetings on Monday mornings from 2016
Wirral Council’s Cabinet to decide on whether to have public meetings on Monday mornings from 2016
Councillor Phil Davies (Leader of Wirral Council) at a Cabinet meeting earlier this year
There are many decisions on the agenda of Thursday’s Cabinet meeting and many are about changing how Wirral Council does things to be more like how they’re done at Liverpool City Council.
I’m going to write about one proposed change that could be described that way and explain the problems it might cause.
Item 9 with the exceedingly dull title of Executive Arrangements and Pledge Champions (the latter doesn’t mean some councillors are pledging to stop drinking alcohol) proposes that from next year instead of Cabinet meeting in the evening, Cabinet meetings will be on Monday mornings at 10.00am.
From a public relations perspective I can see why they’d do this. For example each year for the past years I can remember, a rabble rousing trade union representative has turned up to a Cabinet meeting with a lot of supporters (I think one year so many it had to switch to the Civic Hall) which would be nigh impossible to do if your trade union members were at work on a Monday morning.
If Cabinet meetings had been on Monday mornings when a decision was made about Lyndale School, that would’ve meant the staff (including the headteacher) or the children affected couldn’t attend the meeting where politicians decided about their school.
On the plus side, public transport during the day means councillors would able to get to and from meetings without relying on taxis, but that’s not the point as strictly speaking public meetings are for the public not for the councillors.
Essentially having a Cabinet meeting on Monday mornings will rule out the public turning up or at least the ones with jobs. Of course some councillors have jobs too, but their employers have to give them paid time off work for this sort of thing.
Now the decision states that the Leader can decide to change the time of the meeting away from Monday morning. However if the agenda is published, the date and time of the meeting is set, then a topic on the agenda kicks up a fuss with large numbers of Wirral residents, how will it be possible to change the time of the meeting without confusing people as to when the meeting is?
Of course going back to public relations, a meeting on Monday evening would mean reports of Cabinet decisions could make the next edition of the Wirral Globe. I would be interested to hear people’s thoughts on changing Cabinet meetings to Monday mornings as there may be issues with this change that I haven’t thought of.
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Although industrial correspondents seem to have disappeared from the media, as a political journalist reporting on political protests is part of the role. As you’d expect I’ve seen many protests (in fact nearly every Liverpool City Council meeting I went to earlier this year seemed to have a protest outside) but never have I ever seen a protest involving a massive tuna can.
Greenpeace did send me a press release, however I haven’t based this story on the press release but instead some questions posed to Greenpeace instead as there are already other stories in the media based largely on the press release.
You are probably wondering what the connection is to the Merseyside taxpayer. A long time ago, Merseytravel moved its headquarters from Hatton Gardens and signed a lease for Mann Island. For some reason (don’t ask me why) they rented the whole building at Mann Island including many floors they wouldn’t need.
I posed some original questions to Greenpeace and these are their answers. I was at Mann Island yesterday for a public meeting, but due to the protest Mann Island was in partial lockdown so it would’ve been impossible to speak to John West to report on their side. My questions are in bold.
Q. The building you were protesting outside today is leased by a body called Merseytravel. However they realised they had leased too many floors and needed tenants.
Did you know about this taxpayer support that was behind John West’s HQ being based at Mann Island?
This looks interesting but it’s not something we have a position on I’m afraid – as our focus is on the sustainable and ethical fishing methods of John West and their owners – Thai Union – who are the world’s largest tuna company.
Q. You state that John West have broken their promises. Are there other brands of tuna you’d recommend consumers buy that are fished for sustainably?
Yes, we have a tuna league table which ranks the tinned tuna sold by the UKs major supermarkets and tuna brands, according to how sustainable and ethical it is. It’s here – scroll down. Overwhelmingly, the most sustainable options for consumers are supermarket own brands. Waitrose, M&S, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Aldi all perform very well. So too do Asda, Morrisons and the Coop – all of which sell 100% sustainably caught tuna in their own brand tins. At rock bottom is John West, with just 2% sustainably caught tuna in their tins. Princes and Lidl also need to do much better and change the way they source their tuna.
Q. What is John West’s response to your protest? As someone who was in the building today, it was basically put on a partial lockdown in case protestors wanted to go to the John West part. Have you had any formal response from John West?
There has been no response from John West today as a result of our activities. We tried to deliver our petition containing the names of more than 70,000 people who are demanding that John West honour its sustainability commitment and its owners – Thai Union – clean up their act globally. But Paul Reenan, the John West MD refused to come down and accept it.
John West has put out a previous statement, responding to the launch of our campaign just over 4 weeks ago. The main points they raise and our rebuttals are here.
Q. If John West made claims that turn out to be false have you taken this up with trading standards?
A Greenpeace investigation found 1000s of John West tuna products coming from Thailand and some of them had 100% traceability labels on tins that were misleading. This is because they claimed the tuna could be traced back to the vessel that caught it, using their website, but this was false. More on that investigation here. It’s an interesting angle and it’s definitely something that could be looked into.
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Notice of Motion on flooding in Moreton to be debated by Wirral’s councillors tonight
Notice of Motion on flooding in Moreton to be debated by Wirral’s councillors tonight
Cllr Chris Blakeley (foreground centre) the proposer of the Notice of Motion on flooding in Moreton at a public meeting last month
Wirral Council has a sub domain (democracy.wirral.gov.uk) on its website which is used to publish information to do with public meetings.
Due to the way its configured, the search engines (at least the search engines that respect such rules) are barred from searching pages on its website.
I have to declare at this point that I earn money from Google. However to illustrate this point a quick search of the site in Google will only show one page even though there are many more pages than that.
So I used a program called Xenu Link Sleuth to create an index of pages on that part of Wirral Council’s website. This has thrown up many interesting (and some quite frankly dull pages).
That report mentions in detail the risks of various types of flooding and refers to the River Birket. As it states in the report:
"The main river draining the Wirral Mersey Heartland, the River Birket, relies on pumping, and the area is reliant on flood defences to minimise flood risk to the existing development both from fluvial and tidal flood risk and surface water drainage channels. Failure of these defences constitutes a residual risk of flooding to the area."
If you’re wondering what fluvial means, it means “of or relating to a river”.
The report also details what how new homes should be more water efficient through the Water Efficiency Targets such as through water efficient showers, rainwater harvesting and other measures to cut down the amount of water used by households.
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EXCLUSIVE: Wirral Council continues its multi year battle to keep the 320,000+ Wirral people and press completely in the dark on councillors’ expense claims but in an exclusive you can now read 44 pages of the taxi contract for councillors
EXCLUSIVE: Wirral Council continues its multi year battle to keep the 320,000+ Wirral people and press completely in the dark on councillors’ expense claims but in an exclusive you can now read 44 pages of the taxi contract for councillors
Updated: 16:56 7th October 2015: 3 minutes after this blog post was published Wirral Council got in touch about my request under the The Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015. Wirral Council asked for more time to reach a decision (which seems to be on line one page one of their big book of responses. 😉
However I have written back (and carbon copied in Surjit Tour) explaining that Regulation 5(5) excludes such documents because in order to access them I had to prove a legal interest (in this case being a local government elector for the Wirral area) during the 2014/15 audit.
This does mean that as this matter has been resolved, I will be publishing more information unearthed during the audit in the future, such as the Bam Nuttall contract.
Those who pay close attention to this blog will realise I haven’t published anything on this blog for a week. Apologies for that and here is an explanation. For some of that time I wasn’t well and the combination of nights of disrupted sleep due to dogs barking outside/helicopters/extremely noisy weather*(*take your pick as that’s just one night) resulted in severe lack of sleep that made me feel so ill that the last thing I wanted to do is write (and believe me I have to feel very ill not to want to write).
The closest I can describe it to is like suffering from something like jet lag from sleep deprivation (which didn’t help me get better as quickly as I should and had the opposite effect). So apologies if I have either been slow (or not responding at all) to emails and comments. I just haven’t been particularly up to the art of stringing together words into real sentences as typing and actually using my joints to type just made the pain worse. So if I’ve written any emails to you over the past week or so where I seem unusually cranky or cheesed off hopefully this explains why.
However I was better yesterday but was busy doing writing of a different sort, which forms part of what I’m going to write about today.
This blog post is a new chapter in a long running saga about taxis, Wirral Council and secret expenses system. However the story has got far wider than that.
First, before I get into fourth gear of what is a story that seems to now have more interesting angles than the Watergate affair and as this blog is read in many countries around the world I need to explain.
For reasons far too complex to go into here, Wirral Council tends to go in for similar types of high political drama that surrounded the Watergate affair, except people very, very rarely resign (resigning being a once in a blue moon event at Wirral Council that tends to really take people by surprise). This was summed up by the attitude of the former Improvement Board at a public meeting who I will paraphrase here, no one is ever held personally accountable and you mustn’t name names (as if you name names that’s blaming people)! My own personal political philosophy is there are always matters people are personally accountable for, but organisational failings of checks and balances and abuses of power have more serious outcomes for society as a whole than people (or even groups of people) behaving badly. However I digress and I need to briefly summarise the story so far as this is starting to have echoes of the MP expenses scandal. In fact not just echoes but marked similarities.
Wirral Council (official long name the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral) has sixty-six councillors (for foreign readers unfamiliar with the word councillor it’s a form of politician). Nearly every year the people who get to vote on the Wirral (Wirral’s population was estimated at 320,295 in mid-2013 according to the Office for National Statistics) get to choose a candidate. The candidate with the most votes (and I’ll leave out a long argument as to why the First Past the Post system that is used for this is unfair and the merits of STV [single transferable vote] for another day) becomes a politician called a councillor. The person who is elected (unless it’s in a by-election) is then elected and called a councillor generally for a four-year term of office.
During their term of office they receive allowances, but there is also an expenses system too. Under our "democracy" (although technically the United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy) politicians such as councillors are answerable to the people.
Many politicians stand for re-election (there are no term limits for being a councillor so for some people it can become a "job for life" (however as councillors on Wirral Council are not employees and not MPs (Members of Parliament) they don’t get a gold-plated pension)) so if you’ve been a bad sort of politician and stand for re election (or if you’re a good politician but are very bad at actually communicating this to the public and/or your political party does bad things) you’ll lose your seat. This is the greatest form of accountability to the public.
During their term of office (on top of their generous allowances) councillors can claim expenses (or have expenses paid on their behalf) under a set of rules written into Wirral Council’s constitution called the Members Allowance Scheme (pages 329-338) of Wirral Council’s constitution. Members in local government jargon means councillors.
Wirral Council are legally required to keep a record of all payments made under the scheme (whether to councillors themselves or to third parties). These records are required to be "be available, at all reasonable times, for inspection and at no charge" to any local government elector for the Wirral area.
However the right to copies of such information is wider than that as under the regulations "any person" can request copies.
This is a bit of a laugh really, as it takes Wirral Council months merely to assemble such information on councillors (therefore strictly speaking the information isn’t available at all reasonable times for inspection breaching one of the regulations).
I am however taking about a thousand words so far and slightly digressing from the points I wanted to make (which wasn’t just about local government record keeping).
Another part of the regulations requires an annual list to be published by Wirral Council for each councillor for the total of allowances & expenses claimed by each councillor for the previous financial year. This way the public can see what councillors are personally receiving (or is being paid on their behalf to third parties) in relation to their duties. Some councillors chose to claim no expenses at all.
However it probably requires a certain amount of forensic accountancy to prove that the expenses lists as published by Wirral Council have been incorrect and they have been for many years.
I am now going to refer to why this happened and what Wirral Council needs to do to correct this and why despite it being pointed out to them they probably won’t bother as to Wirral Council getting things right seems to be too much effort and too expensive as the politicians decide on an annual revenue budget of hundreds of millions of pounds a year and large amounts of capital expenditure too.
At the moment the published expenses lists are only part of the story. Based on looking at a similar situation at Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority, what the public are actually told about is probably only approximately 50% (or half for those who don’t understand percentages) of what is actually claimed in expenses.
It has become a party political issue which is illustrated by this quote from the Leader of Wirral Council Cllr Phil Davies in this Wirral Globe article earlier this year. Again members is referring to councillors (our members refers to the councillors who are part of the ruling Labour Group on Wirral Council).
Asked why only Labour councillors appeared on the list, Cllr Davies said: “The reality is that quite a lot of our members don’t have cars, so they need to use taxis to get to council meetings. If they had cars then they would be making a claim on council expenses for their car allowance, but they don’t. There are more Labour councillors who don’t have a car than those from other parties. These are legitimate claims within the budget of the council for elected members to allow them to do their jobs. Quite often taxis are the only form of transport they can use to get to their meetings.”
Apart from this having echoes of militant Labour delivering redundancy notices to all Liverpool City Council staff by taxi, basically this is a councillor (Leader of the Labour Group) somewhat begrudingly explaining about a secret expenses system for claiming taxis that the public and the press are presumably deliberately kept in the dark about. Wirral Council has known about this corporate governance matter about councillors expenses but despite claiming it would fix it has refused to do so. These figures for taxis (which come to £thousands) don’t appear in the annually published lists) and as detailed in the Wirral Globe article (based in part on my earlier story on the matter) that are used exclusively by one political party (Labour) are according to Cllr Phil Davies justified.
Cllr Phil Davies wears many hats, one as Leader of the Labour Group of councillors, one as Leader of Wirral Council (with the Cabinet portfolio for finance and corporate governance) and a third as a local councillor. The quote referred to above makes Cllr Phil Davies sound like a union rep for the other Labour councillors trying to keep hold of an expensive perk for his fellow politicians.
This has parallels with the approach by Michael Martin MP when he was Speaker of the House of Commons over the MP’s expenses scandal. Michael Martin MP saw himself as a representative of his fellow politicians and eventually had to resign because of the fallout over MP expenses when a national newspaper (in an example of chequebook journalism) bought and published the information. This ultimately led to a lot of embarrassment and prison sentences for some politicians (but ultimately reform of the system) whereas councillors at Wirral Council don’t even get the bare legal minimum of scrutiny of their expenses due to poor corporate governance (which is a matter that the person with democratic acccountability to the public is Cllr Phil Davies).
He compares Labour councillors’ use of taxis to a car mileage allowance used by other councillors. However the latter appears in the annual lists, but Labour’s use of taxis doesn’t. In order for the people to know what’s going on and compare one to the other they have to both appear.
I hope this doesn’t come across to people as an attack on Labour politicians or Labour Party, it’s not. If this was being done by Conservative, Lib Dem, Green Party or other sorts of politicians I would be writing this same sort of blog post.
However it reminds me of an email exchange I had before the General Election with a Labour Party member. They told me that they couldn’t campaign against their own party on an issue (I think it may have been about Lyndale School or possibly some other controversial issue) as instead their efforts were better put into getting Labour elected nationally into government in 2015.
Their view was once elected a Labour government in 2015 would have power and therefore be able to solve the policy problem. It was a stark example of how political parties may have individuals that care about policies, but ultimately as a group the Labour Party wasn’t interested in campaigning for something popular with the public (therefore winning votes and support) which may have ultimately led to them winning the 2015 General Election. This point was pointed out to them many times in the lead up to the election by the press and others.
Instead the Labour Party decided to pursue a strategy of ignoring public opinion, brazenly going for power at all costs, then got confused when the Conservatives got a majority and Labour lost seats.
I will point out that when I was a former member of the Lib Dems, there was a controversial joint Labour/Lib Dem policy decision to close half of Wirral’s libraries. I expressed my views against this in Lib Dem party meetings, stubborn councillors decided play brinkmanship, there was a public inquiry and the whole thing descended into farce and fiasco with a lot of people losing face over the whole matter. I even got ticked off by Sue Charteris as I unfortunately turned up about fifteen minutes late to the public inquiry (which was being filmed) and was told off for having the temerity to discreetly take a photo of what was going on (an omen of the later long running battles over filming public meetings).
At no point do I remember telling anyone within or outside the Lib Dem party (I decided to leave the Lib Dems in January 2012 and indeed sued the entire Liberal Democrat party for breaking the law, had my day in court and won), sorry I personally believe half of Wirral’s libraries shouldn’t close, but I refuse to campaign against the combined Labour & Lib Dem Parties as it’s important that I instead put my efforts into making sure the Lib Dems became the sole party of national government in 2015.
I think if I had made such claims fellow party members would’ve asked me if I was being sarcastic or not thinking straight. My position on the disastrous policy was well known, my views were dismissed partly because of my youth (one party member referred to me as a "baby" during a party meeting) although I doubt the full story about what happened internally within the Lib Dem Party over its politicians setting an unlawful budget will ever be told. The problem with that coalition is the buck could always be passed to Labour just as two halves of the recent 2010-2015 Coalition government could do with each other. The Lib Dem Party has always made it clear to me that they don’t care about the reputational consequences of its politicians or employees breaking the law. As obeying the "rule of law" is a part of democracy it makes me wonder how they have the gall to truthfully call themselves the Liberal Democrats.
However I am going off track in an explanation of the terrible policy failings of party politics and the errors of judgement of politicians (who seem to have a blind spot when it comes to abuses of power) that make unpopular decisions that are not only unlawful but not supported by their own political party either.
This article is going to be about the nuts and bolts of the Passenger Transport Contract issue though.
Last year, Wirral Council agreed to a one-year Passenger Transport Contract worth about £4.1 million. It’s possibly worth more than this as there’s an option in the contract for a one year extension. However I’m not sure if the £4.1 million figure relates to the one or two years of the contract.
This contract is with a company called Eyecab Limited based in Upton (Upton makes a lot of geographical sense for a taxi company to base itself as it’s in the middle of the Wirral).
The contract is divided up into four parts called lots. I’d better describe what each lot is about.
LOT 1
This lot is for transporting children with special educational needs and/or disability from home to school and school to home. It also covers transport for children in care. Children in care is a term that those involved in social work might be more familiar as looked after children. If you’re still not familiar with the term looked after children it refers to for example (but not exclusively) to those in foster care for whom Wirral Council is their "parent". It also covers transport for vulnerable adults to day centres.
LOT 2
Lot two is for ad hoc travel for children with special educational needs and/or disability, vulnerable adults and children in care by taxi, people carrier or hackney carriage (black cab).
LOT 3
The third lot is for journeys by taxi to work and training for Wirral residents (where journeys start or end in East Wirral) known as the "Maxi Taxi". This is to "support individuals travelling to locations not served by traditional public transport and too far or too unsafe to cycle to."
On that latter point, in my younger days I classed a 16 mile cycle ride as not too far and for many years regularly used to cycle a 7 mile round trip to work and back. I’m presuming the "too unsafe" comments are in relation to the rise in people killed and seriously injured on Wirral’s roads since that time. However as you can take the bike on a Merseyrail train (and most areas of Merseyside are within one mile of a train station). It is possible to use bike, train, bike as I did for many years as a university student and for work travelling all over Merseyside as the trains run from very early in the morning to very late in the evening.
LOT 4
I’ll just quote the official description for this lot. "This contract is for ad hoc journeys by taxi to allow Wirral Councillors to travel to various venues across Wirral.
This contract will allow Wirral Councillors to travel around Wirral on official Council business. The times will vary and may include evenings and weekends."
Much as I would happily write about the millions spent by Wirral Council on lots 1-3, effectively lot 4 is the focus of this piece.
During the audit I requested the contract with Eyecab Limited. I did this as I’m a local government elector for the Wirral area using Audit Commission Act 1998, s.15. I will add here that this is the last year I can do this as that right has now been repealed by the previous Tory/Lib Dem government.
It’s been replaced with a much more watered down right which has the following two major changes (amongst others).
(a) the safeguard of the independent auditor deciding what is personal information (not relating to officers) rather than the body itself and whether this can or can’t be redacted from information supplied has been removed,
(b) showing perhaps a Tory philosophy that will no doubt fill my Labour-leaning readers with glee as another example of government pandering to the sorts of commercial interests that make large donations to the Conservative Party, an extra category of withholding information on grounds of "commercial confidentiality" has been added.
I will point out that Wirral Council has withheld some information from the contract supplied to me. The phone number for Eyecab Limited is such a secret that presumably Wirral Council got permission from its auditors to withhold it.
When the phone number for Eyecab Limited is in the Yellow Pages as 0151 201 0000 (therefore hardly confidential after all please leave a comment if you ever heard of a taxi company that deliberately keeps its phone number a secret?), I do wonder why Wirral Council just make work for themselves (and me) in blacking such information out.
Other information that has been withheld has been pricing information and routes.
On the subject of Wirral Council and its well paid auditor Grant Thornton, when I complained to Grant Thornton about one of contacts to blow the whistle to (Ian Coleman on page 36) having received early retirement from Wirral Council two years before this contract even started, I got an email back stating that contracts weren’t to do with the accounts, therefore weren’t the auditors’ responsibility.
Auditors it seems such as Grant Thornton don’t know what they’re doing (maybe Wirral Council could ask for a refund of their fee when they get things wrong) so they just seem to spout nonsense like this in an attempt to fob people off.
As nobody is ever personally accountable in local government I will spare the particular auditor’s blushes by merely quoting from the email and my reply without naming names. It shows however that some auditors in my opinion are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard (a general point aimed at the entire accounting profession rather than this particular auditor).
I think the term is fobbing off as from other bloggers I know that auditors up and down the country are trying to evade their responsibilities in law by giving this sort of reply to local government electors. The likes of Cllr Ron Abbey (who I recently heard being critical of local government electors exercising their rights with auditors at a Merseytravel meeting because of the cost) would probably not approve of me teaching an auditor they’re wrong as the cost of this (in the form of increased external audit costs) is falling on the taxpayer (whereas sadly my advice and grumpiness is not something I can charge them for).
"Dear Mr Brace
I have now had an opportunity consider the contents of your email to me of 6 September 2015.
I understand from your email that you have exercised your rights under the Audit Commission Act to inspect certain documents associated with Wirral Council’s accounts for 2014/15, including a Passenger Transport Contract with a specific contractor named in your email. You highlight that page 36 of the contract identifies the individuals who should be written to in the event of a whistleblowing complaint. The second of these names is the former Director of Finance who left the council 2012. You have asked us to explain why someone who ‘was not an employee of Wirral Council at the time the Passenger Transport Contract was put out to tender (or when the contract was agreed) … was he included as a whistleblowing contact in the contract?’
I have carefully considered this matter and I am not sure this is a valid question that it is appropriate for us to answer. As you highlight the power to question the auditor is set in section 15(2) of the Audit Commission Act 1998. Although interested persons can ask questions of the auditor, the questions must be about items in the Council’s account. It seems to me that your question is not about an item of account and therefore we are not in a position to respond to your question. It seems to me that your question is more appropriately addressed to the Council.
In summary, I would suggest that you contact the Council with your specific request for information.
It is currently our intention to close the audit of the Council’s 2014/15 accounts by 30 September 2015.
I hope that is helpful in clarifying the position.
Yours sincerely"
I however have learnt the art of being concise in emails and played this game of re educating the external auditor in the trump suit of 3 High Court Judges. Here is one of my replies (which meant the auditor had to change their mind).
Dear all,
I would also like to point out that a Court of Appeal case established beyond a doubt that contracts are part of the accounts. See [2010] EWCA Civ 1214 .
So as three High Court Judges seem to agree with my interpretation, I would ask you to reconsider..
Thanks,
John Brace
As you would probably say in tennis, game, set and match to me (not that I’m competing with an auditor, it’s just well whether deliberately or by accident they don’t really seem to know what they’re actually doing or the legal framework within which they operate properly but what’s new eh?).
However if I wanted to blow the whistle on the contract about taxis for councillors (and there are many reasons why one should), the contract suggests I blow the whistle to a person who was granted early retirement by Wirral Council in 2012.
Bear in mind this contract isn’t just about councillors and their taxi journeys. It’s also about children with disabilities & vulnerable adults. It is possible a family member might have cause for concern that they wish to raise. If so they could be directed to a person who doesn’t even work for Wirral Council.
Back however to lot 4 and taxis for councillors. As a reward for having to read through nearly 3,000 words of my ranting about poor corporate governance, I have a reward for you dear reader but I want to first explain the price at which publication of this contract comes.
First I had to request it during the audit. Wirral Council exceeded the time limits set down in law for giving it to me so I had to wait a bit longer. I then had to travel for a meeting at a Wirral Council building just off Hamilton Square to inspect it and pick up a copy.
It comes to 43 pages (even after the information has been removed I referred to earlier). I then had to scan these pages in one at a time (because that’s the way my A3 scanner works). I made a request to Wirral Council under The Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015 to publish it.
Despite this request being made some time ago, I have not received a response back from Wirral Council. As my communications to Wirral Council often seem to disappear into if I was being charitable what must be a black hole operating in one of its departments that sucks up my emails, I’m having to use my editorial discretion to use the part of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998, s.30 that deals with criticism, review and news reporting. I’m also covered bythe Data Protection Act 1998, s.34 in that its been made available to the public (myself) therefore isn’t subject to the non-disclosure provisions of the data protection legislation.
The way I have digitised this contract was by taking the 73 image files, putting them in OpenOffice Writer one at a time and creating a PDF file. However this file (as each page is an image) comes to 124 megabytes. As Wirral Council raided a reserve for high speed internet access some time ago, not only would this use up a lot of space but peoples’ internet speeds would mean it would take a long time to download.
I therefore spent one work day (yesterday) initially typing up the contract only using images for those that needed it (a MaxiTaxi logo and some signatures). This is very boring and time consuming work, but part way through I found a way to speed things up dramatically by putting the multi-page pdf file through FreeOCR.
Passenger Transport Contract Wirral Council page 36 of 40 thumbnail compressed
The versions of the contract I finally ended up with are far easier to read than the version provided to me by Wirral Council. For those with disabilities, the text can now be magnified without just blowing up the blemishes too. The file sizes of the new files (and I’m providing it in multiple versions because I’m trying to be helpful) are massively smaller.
I have not included the Wirral Council logos and replaced these with (Wirral Council logo). As you can see from the image above it’s the five Ws logo with WIRRAL in bold letters. The typographical errors in the contract (such as the many instances of Disclosure and Baring (rather than Barring) Service), missing full stops etc I’ve left in and not corrected. I hope people appreciate the work put into producing it and I realise it has probably been hard work reading through over 3,000 words to reach this point.
A bit like Schrödinger’s cat, although I requested this contract and the what must be about ~6 monthly invoices that relate to it during the audit, I can only at this point in time observe one (the contract).
Wirral Council are still stalling me on inspecting and receiving copies of the monthly invoices for councillors journeys by taxis. Anyone would think that Wirral Council hasn’t quite got the staff to deal with the sort of investigative journalism I tend to be good at. However as the taxi contract is used solely by the ruling Labour Group councillors I can see how it would be in no officers’ interests to actually comply with the legal deadline for this as no doubt I would publish them which would cause politicians to be embarrassed. Wirral Council are &improving& their website, the legal notice they’re required to publish on their website with the deadline on has also vanished at the time of writing.
Certainly I await to see what other corporate governance horrors Wirral Council get up to and will (hopefully) keep readers of this blog advised of what’s happening. In the meantime at the end are the pages of contract information.
This does raise a lot of questions but I will just concentrate on one which seems to demolish one of the reasons given for this contract. When Councillor Adrian Jones read out an answer to me prepared for him by officers at a public meeting as reported previously he stated, "The Council has negotiated competitive prices and entered into contracts with a local taxi company to provide transport for Members in accordance with the Members Allowances Scheme. The taxi company submits its invoices and the details of the Members that used the taxis each month directly to the Council for payment. The advantage of this arrangement is that the cost of transport by taxis is always at the negotiated rate and is a more efficient way to manage the service."
It does raise an interesting point though as the pricing information for councillors’ journeys by taxi are included. In the method statement that Eyecab Limited completed when bidding for lot 4 (councillors’ taxi journeys) Eyecab Limited stated on page 34 of 40 "Eye Cab is an all Hackney taxi firm vehicles range from five passenger seats to seven passenger seats at present we operate approximately twenty seven vehicles this number is increasing on a regular basis."
When I heard Cllr Jones’ answer about "competitive prices" anyone hearing it would think that it was stating that taxis through this contract are better value for money (in terms of the actual cost of the taxi ride) than a councillor paying for it themselves, then claiming the money back.
However having read the contract and that I know now that Eyecab Limited is an all hackney carriage company, I’m puzzled. That’s because the prices at which all hackney carriages on Wirral charge is set by Wirral Council. Therefore for the same journey surely all hackney carriages would charge the same amount and it wouldn’t be cheaper doing it through a contract. When you factor in the costs of putting this contract out to tender (yes I realise lot 4 is part of a wider contract however potential contractors had to bid on each lot separately), the costs of procurement will outweigh any efficiency saving from just having to pay a monthly invoice rather than when councillors claim on an ad hoc basis.
A small saving does occur because Wirral Council isn’t actually doing it legally and including these amounts in the annual lists but by small saving I’m talking about an employee cost time of maybe £50-£60.
However by not doing it that way it increases costs elsewhere at Wirral Council, for example the cost of processing FOI requests, providing me with a redacted copy of the contract during the audit, providing me (hopefully eventually) with the underlying invoices etc and of course the expensive cost in senior officer time (probably an employee on ~£80 an hour) in having to answer questions posed by me to Councillor Adrian Jones at a public meeting.
The point I will finish on is that Wirral Council doing things the right way and legal way saves money in the long run in the communications you get from people trying to persuade Wirral Council just to do things the right way.
However officers across local government (in fact some have even said this to my face) see this sort of press scrutiny as a drain on "scarce resources".
In other words, the kind of major embarrassing politically sensitive fiascos (politicians’ expenses just being the tip of an absolutely massive corporate governance iceberg) I write about on my blog probably cause no end of awkward questions behind the scenes from politicians to those on high 5 figure and 6 figure salaries as to why things aren’t right.
I’m sure some people paid by the taxpayer well above my pay grade don’t always see the sort of journalism as a good thing for their future career prospects. I’m pointing out things to the world that if the checks and balances that these employees are supposed to be were working properly would be spotted internally and corrected.
Some bureaucrats (while stating they welcome accountability) I’m sure don’t really feel it’s right that they should be under a legal requirement to hand over embarrassing information to me, that’ll then form stories that politicians will read (or in the case of video watch) and use to hold the bureaucrats to account.
It’s the way I’ve been trained though and the independence of the press is something that this country should value.
Please note, although I proofread the contract before publishing due to the poor quality of the original pages at times the OCR program has misidentified one character incorrectly such as the postcode CH44 8ED, the OCR program has outputted as CH44 BED (page 23 of 40). The other errors (typographical such as baring for barring & punctuation such as missing full stops) were made in the original document.
