Did officers breach Wirral Council’s constitution when they sent out the eviction notice for Fernbank Farm?

This is the story about what happened behind the scenes when the tenants of Fernbank Farm were sent an eviction notice in the July of 2012. However before this tale starts I need to explain about some of the people involved.

Bill Norman

The person above is Bill Norman. He was the Council’s Director of Law, HR (which stands for human resources) and Asset Management. On the 27th June 2012 he was suspended from work because of how the Colas contract was awarded, however it is important to point out that in September councillors found there was “no case to answer” with regards to wrongdoing on Bill Norman’s part. By this time his post had been made redundant so he signed a compromise contract and left the employment of Wirral Council and got a golden goodbye of £151,416 (comprising of £112,848 termination payment, £28,568 redundancy payment, £5,000 legal costs and £5,000 legal costs direct to Bill Norman). This brings us now to the next person.

Surjit Tour

Surjit Tour is the person on the left of this photo. During the period Bill Norman was suspended, (that is from 27th June 2012 onwards) he was Acting Director of Law, Human Resources and Asset Management.

On Friday 13th July 2012 an eviction notice was signed and so was a letter accompanying the eviction notice. The letter and two copies of each eviction notice were sent out to each tenant with a request that the second copy of the eviction notice was returned to Wirral Council.

The letter used is below and below that page one of the eviction notice (you can click on it for a more high resolution version). I have erased from both documents the home address of the tenant it went to, the name of which tenant it went to and the signature of the tenant from the copy of the eviction notice returned.

Letter accompanying eviction notice

Eviction notice (page 1)

Wirral Council has a constitution which determines how decisions are made and whether they’re made by officers or councillors. The detail of this was determined by a very dull bit of Wirral Council’s constitution at the time called Schedule 4: Scheme of Delegation to Officers.

Under section 38 it details the responsibilities of the Director of Law, HR and Asset Management.

“The Director of Law, HR and Asset Management is authorised,
….
In respect of Property Management functions:
…
(12) Authorise the grant and renewal of leases, tenancies and agreements of land and premises at current market rentals subject (where appropriate) to the receipt of satisfactory references and planning consent and (as appropriate) the termination thereof.
…
(14) Approve the review of rents reserved by existing leases and tenancy agreements of Council land and property at current market rental levels.
…
In respect of trading standards, environmental health and related functions and responsibilities:
(46) Subject to paragraph (2) below, take any action under any relevant legislation (and related statutory instruments) including, where relevant (but not limited to), the service of notices
….
Relevant legislation under this paragraph shall include but is not limited to:
…
Landlord and Tenant Acts 1954, 1985 and 1987″

Now obviously Bill Norman couldn’t authorise the renewal of the lease or approve an increase in rent or agree to an eviction notice being served because he was suspended so he would have hardly been given a look at this before it was sent out!

Section 14 deals with this eventuality (note the Director of Law, HR and Asset Management is one of the officers referred to in paragraph 2):

“In the event of a Chief Officer referred to in paragraph 2 not being available for whatever reason, his/her Deputy (or, where there is no officer designated as such, the next most appropriate senior officer of the department) shall be authorised to implement approved delegated arrangements.”

Now as Acting Head of Law, HR and Asset Management while Bill Norman was suspended, Surjit Tour was deputising for Bill Norman during his suspension. However Surjit Tour’s signature does not appear on the letter or the eviction notice.

Section 3(a) states

“3. (a) Unless otherwise provided for within this scheme every officer listed in paragraph 2, may authorise officers in his/her department/service area to exercise on his/her behalf, functions delegated to him/her. Any decisions taken under this authority shall remain the responsibility of the relevant officer named in paragraph 2 above and must be taken in the name of that officer, who shall
remain accountable and responsible for such decisions.”

However Bill Norman couldn’t authorise officers in his department to exercise functions on his behalf as he was suspended! However the letter went out in his name. Bill Norman’s name was at the top right of the letter and the person signing it had below their name “Director of Law, HR and Asset Management”.

Here’s a comparison between Surjit Tour’s signature (below) and the signature on the eviction notice.

comparison of signature on eviction notice to Surjit Tour's

Here’s the signature used on the letter (again it wasn’t Surjit Tour’s):

letter signature

So to conclude, the letter and eviction notice about the Fernbank Farm lease should’ve both been signed by the Acting Director of Law, HR and Asset Management (but weren’t). Instead they both went out in the name of Bill Norman (who was suspended). Bill Norman can’t have seen the letter and eviction notice before it went out, therefore how could he have authorised the officers that did sign the letter and eviction notice to do this on his behalf? If the signatures had been on someone else’s behalf pp would have been put before the signature to show that they were signing on behalf of someone else. This didn’t happen.

If Surjit Tour agreed to other officers signing the eviction notice and letter on his behalf (instead of signing them himself), then he didn’t have the authority under the constitution to do so as he was only Acting Director of Law, HR and Asset Management.

I think the most likely eventuality is that junior officers, who weren’t authorised under the constitution to make such decisions, signed the letter and eviction notice because Bill Norman was suspended and therefore unavailable. Surjit Tour should’ve been asked to do it, but if he had been asked, then why wouldn’t his signature be on the documentation? Therefore this seems to have been done without his knowledge.

So what are your views on this? Did junior officers sign off on something and make an unconstitutional decision? Is this maladministration? If the decision wasn’t properly made in the first place but Wirral Council went to court and got a possession order, what should happen next? Is this what Wirral Council mean when in a later letter dated 14th March 2014 they state “I do not believe the authority intentionally used the wrong letter in July 2012.”?

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Councillor John Salter “when you make a decision you’ve got to do it behind locked doors”

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Standards and Constitutional Oversight Committee meeting of the 3rd July 2014

Last Thursday Wirral Council’s Standards and Constitutional Oversight Committee met and there was an interesting discussion by councillors (and the independent members) on agenda item 4 (the work programme for 2014/15) and its Appendix (terms of reference of the Standards and Constitutional Oversight Working Group.

This transcript below starts at about 14:38 in the video above. Apologies for any poor sound quality in the video, but microphones weren’t provided to the Standards and Constitutional Oversight Committee that evening.

SURJIT TOUR
One example is the issue about filming, the regulations around filming, blogging, tweeting has now become operative and will be operative by the end of this month. So that’s expected there are a number of areas where we need to ensure the constitution reflects some of those changes which are reported… so those are the key areas I’ve suggested which obviously you can add if you confirm areas of work which you feel are necessary around the committee’s remit.

COUNCILLOR LES ROWLANDS
I just have a comment. Over the years I’ve noticed that there’s been less and less public coming in to see our Councils and so forth. This has a bearing on culture as well because when you’ve got members of the public there observing the Council meeting then you know bode for somebody to start shouting all kinds of obscenities across the Chamber. So I think the level of etiquette when I first started as a councillor here was much, much higher than it is today. I think in my own mind that’s part of it because the public was involved.

Is there any way that we can err whether it’s publicising, I realise we can’t drag them in off the street but is there any way that we can work on a project where we can actually start to try and engage in meetings. I mean it’s a great start by having independents but you know participation in the Council Chamber itself ie bringing the public in to view what we’re doing. I just think it’s really sad that that has dropped off and we seem to have lost this connection with our public. We do have our own constituencies but they don’t seem to know what goes on in this Council.

COUNCILLOR MOIRA MCLAUGHLIN
One of the things that came out very strongly in terms of the survey that I’m going to talk about was for Members, as I said open and accountable to backbench Members errm was that one of the ways full Council operates, notwithstanding that and I suppose we’re all guilty at some time or another of that behaviour, absolutely I put my hands up to that, but all of us felt that actually that the way full Council behaves and the idea of a that first one was just to re establish things like standing up when the Mayor comes in, those sort of things that have fallen by the way.

… not being the Chair as I need to be, he or she has that, it’s that kind of very errm basic respect really for first of all for the authority of the Chair or the Mayor, Mayor as Chair and then each other and it’s a culture but if we put our minds to work on that basis, then possibly we wouldn’t be subject to criticism as well, but certainly we wouldn’t be embarrassed to see that happening but it’s a chicken and egg isn’t it?

COUNCILLOR ROB GREGSON
The other Les, I think the timing of what you’ve just said is perfect as well, because in the Mayor’s speech he did say about it, the role of councillors and you know you should revisit how we market ourselves, how we get together and go out. Errm, I think I’ve said about it but I’ll just finish with students, full-time students and you know I was at university talking to many of the younger students who were studying politics and they weren’t even aware that you could just walk in to public meetings and I’m talking about Liverpool, you know we met outside and they drew me on what do you mean, the back cleared area at public meetings, they weren’t aware of the public gallery and obviously that could be an area we could easily promote.

COUNCILLOR BILL DAVIES (CHAIR)
I think that’s a good idea, I mean we could go to colleges and also … I’ve seen colleges go into art galleries and some I’ve seen them … why can’t they come into the Town Hall?

COUNCILLOR BRUCE BERRY
Yes, a bit more on the second point in relation to all that. While I was canvassing, errm I did go up and people were asking me if I could give if some, how many of the meetings weren’t open to the public? People do want to get involved and it’s a case of publicising it, it’s easily done in the press and people do want to attend, I’m sure we’ve even thought about that.

COUNCILLOR BILL DAVIES (CHAIR)
There’s a flip side to that, people might come along and see all the members seated in the House of Commons, Councillor Salter.

COUNCILLOR JOHN SALTER
Yeah, I mean the biggest attendance of anyone from outside is either at licensing or planning and that’s when and I’ve been on both. I’ve been where on planning where we’ve got these two rooms open and absolutely chock a block and Committee Room 1, so you know it’s only when there’s something happening really that they want to come along to, otherwise like anything it’s apathy, they’ll go ahead and do it anyway and that’s the attitude, we don’t.

You know we sit down and we do this planning and on licensing and we have one of the biggest arguments going, behind locked doors, when you make a decision you’ve got to do it behind locked doors to give you a sufficient chance to discuss.

COUNCILLOR BILL DAVIES (CHAIR)
I think as well as I remember, when I came on the Council it was electric the atmosphere it was. Errm, it was almost intimidating really and … the Council things have changed, I mean sometimes I think remarks like we’re watching paint dry and that’s true because things have changed, there’s not a lot of debate going on and if you think about by the time they have question time, then question the Cabinet and so on and before that we … have notices of motion, so things have changed now since I’ve come on.

COUNCILLOR PATRICIA WILLIAMS
If the general public know that the Cabinet is going to make a particular decision, they will turn up and they will make an issue about it and they will make representations about that.

They will also at full Council, if Cabinet have made a decision which they disagree with, you wait and see what happens about Lyndale, other people have clearly came and they speak very strongly about it and there have been times, I’ve been a councillor since 1987, so there’ve been a lot of things happening during that time, but I’ve had to fight my way in to this Town Hall on numerous occasions over these years but I believe now the committee system that we have, with the Cabinet and the scrutiny split and people think it’s a waste of time turning up and once Cabinet have made a decision it is very, very unusual for that to be changed.

So people think ‘what’s the point?’ and once they, once they’ve been here and they’ve been up in the public gallery, when their particular issue of concern has been dealt with. It’s, it’s, they’ve got to really want to be here because it’s not so easy to hear from the public gallery especially when councillors are shouting at each other and being you know disrespectful, so I think you know, we councillors have got a big responsibility to treat each other with respect and also then in mind if members of the public are here we should behave ourselves to allow people to listen, speak clearly and make sure they are welcomed into the Town Hall and you know they’re able to be here, it’s a privilege to be here but it’s also their right you know so we’ve got to make it welcoming and positively encourage people to come in.

Of course the Youth Parliament is a good way to encourage young people isn’t it to know about Council about how they can turn up at any time you know to witness what goes on. So I think a lot of it is in our hands to do something about.

COUNCILLOR BILL DAVIES (CHAIR)
Well, people, well that’s goes for our Labour Party and the party over there, we don’t do business shouting and screaming at each other especially at Council meetings and that’s the way it is. I think all sides of the Council, all parties agree on that.

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5 questions for Wirral Council’s auditors

Dear Mike Thomas (Grant Thornton),

I am writing to you in your capacity as the auditor for Wirral Council.

Last Friday I received a series of emails from Wirral Council’s Head of Legal and Member Services Surjit Tour about a comment left by an individual on a blog I write about Wirral Council. The comment made was about Graham Burgess (Wirral Council’s Chief Executive) and was in relation to his invitation to some Wirral Council councillors offering them tickets to the Open Golf Championship.

The first email from Mr. Tour contained the lines “This is clearly a serious matter and I formally request that you immediately remove the email and the associated commentary concerning this subject matter from your blog.

The Council would prefer to avoid taking action in respect of this entry; however, I must put you on notice that the Council will have little alternative but to consider alternative action should you refuse or fail to remove this entry from your blog forthwith.”

It transpired later that the email was genuine (despite Mr. Surjit Tour first claiming it wasn’t).

The Local Authorities (Indemnities for Members and Officers) Order 2004 prevent local authorities providing insurance or indemnities to officers (or councillors) to start libel cases. However in this case Wirral Council’s Head of Legal and Member Services seemed to be making a threat of exactly that on behalf of Wirral Council’s Chief Executive Graham Burgess.

Other people have noticed comments about Wirral Council officers have disappeared from the local newspaper website (Wirral Globe), therefore I would like you to investigate and respond to the following questions please:

1. Has Wirral Council ever sued any individual or organisation since The Local Authorities (Indemnities for Members and Officers) Order 2004 came into effect on the 23rd November 2004?

2. Why are the resources of the authority being used to make such threats when Wirral Council is barred in law from starting such a claim in the courts?

3. Is there currently any indemnity or insurance provided to officers within the terms of The Local Authorities (Indemnities for Members and Officers) Order 2004 and if so which officers does this cover and at what cost (or approximate cost)?

4. If there is any indemnity or insurance provided to officers (or councillors) has this been agreed by councillors and if so when?

5. How many times over the last 12 months have the media (whether print, broadcast or online) received communications from Wirral Council threatening legal action unless they remove content?

Yours sincerely,

John Brace

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Wirral Council takes 5 minutes to U-turn on libel threat over Graham Burgess golf email to councillors

Wirral Host of the Open Championship 2014

Yesterday’s blog post about Graham Burgess inviting councillors to the Open Golf Championship seems to have hit a raw nerve somewhere at Wirral Council as it led to an email from Wirral Council’s Head of Legal and Member Services being sent to myself this morning which in the interests of openness and transparency I include below (along with a further email from Surjit Tour five minutes later withdrawing his original email and my response to the original email).

from: Tour, Surjit
to: John Brace
date: 4 July 2014 10:06
subject: Your Blog – (A Blog about Wirral Council, Wirral Council’s Councillors and Officers) – Fraudulent Email
mailed-by: wirral.gov.uk

Dear Mr Brace

Your Blog – (A Blog about Wirral Council, Wirral Council’s Councillors and Officers) – Fraudulent Email

It has been brought to my attention that you have posted on your blog (referred to above) an entry dated 3 July titled “Graham Burgess invites Wirral Council Councillors to 5 days of the Open Gold Championship”.

The blog purports to include an email dated 12 June 2014 (timed at 11:49) from Graham Burgess to Wirral Councillors. The content of the email has been edited and is fraudulent and misleading.

This is clearly a serious matter and I formally request that you immediately remove the email and the associated commentary concerning this subject matter from your blog.

I would be grateful if you would confirm how you came into possession of the aforementioned email and/or its content.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely

Surjit Tour
Head of Legal & Member Services
and Monitoring Officer
Department of Transformation and Resources
Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council
Town Hall
Brighton Street
Wallasey
Wirral
CH44 8ED

Tel: 0151 691 8569
Fax: 0151 691 8482
Email: surjittour@wirral.gov.uk

Visit our website: www.wirral.gov.uk

**********************************************************************
This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and
intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they
are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify
the system manager.
This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept by
MIMEsweeper for the presence of computer viruses.
www.clearswift.com
**********************************************************************

from: Tour, Surjit
to: John Brace
date: 4 July 2014 10:11
subject: Recall: Your Blog – (A Blog about Wirral Council, Wirral Council’s Councillors and Officers) – Fraudulent Email
mailed-by: wirral.gov.uk

Tour, Surjit would like to recall the message, “Your Blog – (A Blog about Wirral Council, Wirral Council’s Councillors and Officers) – Fraudulent Email”.

**********************************************************************

This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and
intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they
are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify
the system manager.
This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept by
MIMEsweeper for the presence of computer viruses.
www.clearswift.com

**********************************************************************

Dear Mr. Tour,

Thank you for your email. Might I take the opportunity to correct you that you have given it an incorrect title using “Open Gold Championship” instead of “Open Golf Championship” .

You state “The content of the email has been edited and is fraudulent and misleading.” yet you do not specify how the email has been edited, or is fraudulent or misleading.

You ask me to remove the associated commentary, which I presume by that you mean comments left by individuals in response to the blog post. Respectfully I direct you to The Defamation (Operators of Websites) Regulations 2013 in respect of the blog post and comments.

Regulation 2 requires a notice of complaint to contain the information outlined below (along with other legal requirements not specified here):

(i) factually inaccurate; or

(ii) opinions not supported by fact;

which your email does not.

In respect of comments that I have not written on that blog post, as a valid notice of complaint has not been received, s. 5(2) of the Defamation Act 2013 states “It is a defence for the operator to show that it was not the operator who posted the statement on the website.”

I might also point out there is existing case law which bans “The Council” starting a libel action.

I refer you to the famous case law in this matter which was decided in the House of Lords in Derbyshire County Council v. Times Newspapers Limited and others and I quote from that judgement “The same applies, in my opinion, to local authorities. In both cases I regard it as right for this House to lay down that not only is there no public interest favouring the right of organs of government, whether central or local, to sue for libel, but that it is contrary to the public interest that they should have it. It is contrary to the public interest because to admit such actions would place an undesirable fetter on freedom of speech.”

Thank you for your request asking me “I would be grateful if you would confirm how you came into possession of the aforementioned email and/or its content.”

If I was to reveal the source of the email, it would damage my reputation as the press have to protect their sources of information. I’m sorry but I cannot tell you.

Yours sincerely,

John Brace

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Cllr Ann McLachlan “the key problem here that we have a high volume of FOIs from a small number of people”

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Wirral Council’s Cabinet discuss freedom of information (19th June 2014) starts at 2:29 in the video above

Wirral Council’s Cabinet discuss the Freedom of Information Scrutiny Review (19th June 2014) L to R Cllr Stuart Whittingham, Cllr Bernie Mooney, Cllr Chris Jones, Shirley Hudspeth, Surjit Tour, Cllr Phil Davies, Graham Burgess

Cllr Ann McLachlan “the key problem here that we have a high volume of FOIs from a small number of people”

Wirral Council’s Cabinet discussed the Freedom of Information Scrutiny report, the Cabinet report, report and final report of the scrutiny panel can be viewed on Wirral Council’s website. The reason for it being on Cabinet’s agenda is that it was referred to Cabinet by the Transformation and Resources Policy and Performance Committee on the 14th April. I wrote a transcript of what was said then back on the 17th April so I’ll be following the same format here.

COUNCILLOR PHIL DAVIES (Chair)
Right, which takes us on to item 16 in the governance, commissioning and improvement. It’s the freedom of information scrutiny review. This was a piece of work done under the Transformation and Resources Policy and Performance Committee. I’m delighted that Councillor Sykes, you’ve come along tonight to Cabinet and it’s really good that we’re giving you kind of an opportunity just to make to talk to the recommendations. OK, thank you.

COUNCILLOR ADAM SYKES
Chair, I’ll keep things brief because everyone eager to get home.

COUNCILLOR PHIL DAVIES
What’s happening tonight?

COUNCILLOR ADAM SYKES
Apparently there’s some football. During the last municipal year, the Transformation and Resources Committee carried out a scrutiny review to look into the FOI performance of the Council. As we began the review, the Council already began taking steps to improve FOI response times after the Information Commissioner had investigated and asked us to make some improvements and I’d like you to know obviously that you know that improvement came, response times to over 85% now within the guidelines which has improved since this report was done.

Eight recommendations came out of the report which are detailed in the report so I won’t go through each individually but I’ll take any questions should people ask them. They basically covered a couple of areas, firstly having designated people who are responsible for FOI throughout the Council rather than the current situation which is different across the Council depending on departments which answer your question.

Also to produce a more consistent and robust process throughout the Council as to how the FOI request is tracked and how it proceeds to make sure things run on track and things move forward in a quick fashion. Finally, to also improve the monitoring for carrying out both the scrutiny duty in the, in the… finally note the improvement in that and also by councillors as well, a strategic review that the Council’s put in place. That’s the Chief Executive’s Strategy Group. So I’m happy to take any questions.

COUNCILLOR PHIL DAVIES
Thanks for that Adam, I’m going to ask our Cabinet Member who this item comes under Councillor Ann McLachlan just to respond to this report, Ann over to you.

COUNCILLOR ANN MCLACHLAN (Cabinet Member for Governance, Commissioning and Improvement)
Yes thank you, well, Chair I’d like to start by congratulating Adam and Councillor Whittingham I believe and it’s Councillor Muspratt who formed this scrutiny review for Council and undertook what is an excellent piece of task and finish work really helping us to refine and you know be more efficient in dealing with a particular problem area and certainly it’s an excellent piece of work and I’d really like to congratulate you but as you’ve pointed out Adam there are eight recommendations which flow from your, from your review and as a result of that now in conjunction with Surjit [Tour], Head of the Legal Service I’ve now worked on an action plan to address those eight recommendations.

Just briefly I’d like to talk about that Chair and what those actions will be, but suffice to say that those actions will be implemented between now and December and we will have further reports to Cabinet and certainly to Council on those and they will include the nomination of champions. So a single point of contact for FOIs within departments and I understand the strategic directors and heads of service will be identified in nominating champions and that action will be done fairly soon.

There are a number of actions that are going to relate to our CRM which is our customer relationship management software system and we’re going to look at that in particular in a number of areas. One is how can we do better recording and monitoring to shorten the timescales when we receive FOI requests and also a solution possibly to look at how we capture all the information about an FOI before it’s actually disseminated so we’ve got it all in one place and a further piece of work is going to be undertaken with our software also to look at whether it’s actually fit for purpose to deal with some of these issues and if it is identified that we actually need a new kind of piece of software then we’re going to ask for a business case to be brought forward to show that we demonstrate that that’s going to you know have some good outcomes for us.

Also in terms of one of the recommendations that you made was you know at what level in an organisation are the FOIs dealt with. From the FOI reporting is now going to be escalated to the Chief Executive and his Strategy Group but also and I think quite importantly to go to the policy and performance committees into our new performance management framework now. So you can actually have much more oversight in terms of scrutiny of this area.

Another piece of work is going to be undertaken to identify all the new trends and themes really, so we can categorise FOIs. You know that the key problem here that we have a high volume of FOIs from a small number of people who request them but are some of those on particular trends and themes, when we could create something on our website which would be like frequently asked questions so that information is there it’s readily accessible.

What we want to do is make sure that we’re as open and transparent as we possibly can be in order that we can lessen the number of FOI requests that need to put through the Council. Another piece of work that we’ll be undertaking with our marketing team to look at how is information structured and accessed on our website in other words how accessible is information? If you come onto the Council’s website and you’re trying to find something out, how easy is it? So we’re going to ask the department to kind of market test queries and see whether we need to do some work there but I think all in all what this piece of, this exercise has demonstrated is that members [councillors] working together have come up with shared solutions that are going to help us to deal with this in a more effective way.

It is going to involve some of internal systems, some of our ICT but again I’d like to thank you and I’d also like to thank Surjit [Tour] and his team and those people that are going to undertake the workload going forward and I’ll be looking forward Chair to reporting to the Cabinet and Council on what I hope will be you know will be a more successful story going forward in terms of the numbers of requests that we’re receiving. OK, thank you.

COUNCILLOR PHIL DAVIES
OK, thanks Ann, well can I suggest we agree kind of Ann’s sort of plan for taking this work forward and that means, I’d just like to reiterate I think it’s been a really excellent piece of work by the scrutiny team so well done Adam to you and your colleagues and thanks for coming along tonight to take us through it. OK, thanks very much. OK

COUNCILLOR ADAM SYKES
OK, I’d just thank the Cabinet Member and the officers for their response in a positive way in moving this forward and I’m grateful for the recommendations.

COUNCILLOR PHIL DAVIES
OK, thanks very much. OK, so we’ll agree that as a way forward. Is that agreed Cabinet?

CABINET
Agreed

COUNCILLOR PHIL DAVIES
Thank you.

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Did officers breach Wirral Council’s constitution when they sent out the eviction notice for Fernbank Farm?

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Councillor John Salter “when you make a decision you’ve got to do it behind locked doors”

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5 questions for Wirral Council’s auditors

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Wirral Council takes 5 minutes to U-turn on libel threat over Graham Burgess golf email to councillors

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Cllr Ann McLachlan “the key problem here that we have a high volume of FOIs from a small number of people”

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