Cllr Louise Reecejones criticised for failing to formally apologise for how she treated whistleblowers

Cllr Louise Reecejones criticised for failing to formally apologise for how she treated whistleblowers

Cllr Louise Reecejones criticised for failing to formally apologise for how she treated whistleblowers

                                                      

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Standards and Constitutional Oversight Committee (Wirral Council) 31st October 2017 Part 1 of 2
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What’s in a whistleblowing report about Wirral Council’s “dismal decade?”

What’s in a whistleblowing report about Wirral Council’s “dismal decade?”

What’s in a whistleblowing report about Wirral Council’s “dismal decade?”

                                 

ICO Information Commissioner's Office logo
ICO Information Commissioner’s Office logo

On the 5th August 2016 a former Wirral Council employee Martin Morton made a Freedom of Information request to Wirral Council for a copy of a report commissioned from Nick Warren on whistleblowing by former Wirral Council employees.

After Wirral Council had ignored his request for a month, Martin Morton requested an internal review on the 6th September 2016.

Wirral Council completed that internal review and communicated the results to Martin Morton on the 3rd October 2016 refusing to supply the report in its entirety.

The refusal was made by Wirral Council’s Monitoring Officer Surjit Tour on the basis that it would prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs (section 36).

Martin Morton then appealed Surjit Tour’s decision to the regulator ICO (the Information Commissioner’s Office).

During the course of ICO’s investigation, Wirral Council apologised for how long it had taken to reply to Martin Morton‘s request, but added an additional reason for refusing some of the information giving personal information (section 40) as a further reason.

On the 27th April 2017 ICO issued a decision notice (FS50649341). The decision notice required some of the information requested to be released to Martin Morton within 35 calendar days as ICO disagreed with Wirral Council and felt there were parts of the report to which neither section 36 nor section 40 applied.

Wirral Council released that information yesterday which comprise paragraphs 1-8 of the report (although part of paragraph 4 is redacted) and paragraph 76. I’ve put in a line break between different pages and in the conversion from print to HTML there may be some minor formatting changes.

I include what has been released below yesterday as it is rather short. A series of XXXX represents the redacted bit. I’ve made two additions. The first is that I’ve linked the words “precise terms of reference” in paragraph 4 to the terms of reference as the report makes more sense when read together with the terms of reference. The second is that I’ve made it clearer that paragraphs 5-75 haven’t been released of the report.



Report


A. INTRODUCTION

  1. This review arises from events which formed part of a dismal decade for Wirral Borough Council (“Wirral”) culminating in a remarkable joint statement from the Leader of the Council and the then Chief Executive (CE) which have accepted a number of failings and recognised the need to improve Wirral’s corporate governance, culture and workforce policies.

  2. Part of the statement concerned the Highways and Engineering Services procurement exercise (“HESPE”). This work was put out to tender; there were bids from the private sector and an in house bid from the Wirral “DLO”. It is convenient to state here some important dates concerning HESPE.







    Dec 2007 Announcement in the Official EU Journal.
    13 March 2008 Qualifying bidders chosen
    2 July 2008 Bidders invited to tender according to a Bill of Quantities.
    4 Sept 2008
    (later extended to
    5 Sept 2008)
    Tender return date.
    16 Oct 2008 Contract formally awarded to COLAS.


  3. The DLO bid was therefore unsuccessful. This meant that the DLO staff would transfer to COLAS from April 2009.



  4. In November 2008 some employees of the DLO made a disclosure on the advice of their Trade Union to Wirral’s CE. I will refer to them collectively as “the Whistleblowers”. They had all worked for Wirral for many years. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX I have been asked to review the treatment of the Whistleblowers. It is not necessary to recite precise terms of reference.

  5. I have interviewed the Whistleblowers and other witnesses and have read a large number of documents provided by Wirral. I thank Wirral staff for the co-operation which I have received. I will not deal with all the evidence because I want to make my report as short and as readable as I can. If required, I can expand on or explore any individual issue.

  6. I have of course used hindsight. That is in the very nature of a review. There is nothing wrong with this provided I do not use it to criticise people or actions unfairly.

    B. WHAT THE WHISTLEBLOWERS HAVE DONE FOR WIRRAL


  7. It took Wirral about four months to respond to the Whistleblowers. They were dissatisfied and went to the Audit Commission. The Commission took the


    unusual step of issuing a public report identifying serious weakness in Wirral’s arrangements for:-

    (a) Declaration of Interests.
    (b) Internal Audit
    (c) Reporting to Elected Members
    (d) Dealing with Whistleblowers
    (e) Evaluating Tenders

  8. As a result Wirral has altered and improved its procedures in these important areas of work. It seems clear that the weaknesses would not have been exposed, nor would the improvements have come about, if the Whistleblowers had not had the courage to speak out. I am not aware that Wirral has acknowledged publicly or privately the contribution which the Whistleblowers thus made to our community.

    (Paragraphs 5-75 are redacted).

    L. CONCLUSION



  1. The Whistleblowers have not received sufficient credit for exposing poor practice within Wirral. The “informal” nature of the first investigation resulted


    in them having to work under great stress for several months. While they were still Wirral employees, their names were disclosed to their new employer as being in some way untrustworthy. Their health and their jobs were adversely affected over an extended period.

    Nicholas Warren 6th October 2015.


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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Wirral Council

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Wirral Council

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Wirral Council

                                                                

A question on councillors expenses to Cllr Adrian Jones Wirral Council 14th December 2015
A question on councillors expenses to Cllr Adrian Jones Wirral Council 14th December 2015

The following is meant as satire.

Wirral Council [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] says, is one of the most perplexing organisations known to mankind. It’s motto is "by faith and foresight".

Those unfortunate individuals who have experienced its public meetings have said the experience is far worse than listening to Vogon poetry (the third worst poetry in the universe). It is hard to put into words the experience of a public meeting at Wirral Council, but to give one example one evening Wirral Council so upset the universe that nearby buildings owned by Wirral Council spontaneously collapsed to the ground merely to bring one public meeting to an end. People have been witnessed leaving meetings in tears or having to leave suddenly as the whole process made them feel ill.

It is a well-known fact across the universe that politicians seem unable to answer questions (leaving some people to wonder what planet they’re actually from). However at Wirral Council politicians have made this frankly useless skill that would in any other profession get you the sack, into the sort of art form that you’d wonder if they’d actually received a performance arts grant for this from Arts Council England.

Even if by some one in a million chance, your question isn’t consumed by the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal before a politician gets a chance to read it (or said politician hasn’t been bamboozled (which we are told by our own legal team that we have to clarify is the meaning of bamboozle to confuse) by Chief Bamboozler at Wirral Council Mr Tour first, a politician will not give you an accurate answer to the question you’ve asked. You see despite being highly paid, politicians at Wirral Council are reduced to doing something a seven-year old could do and given answers to read out that are written by other people. This is what politicians call "research".

If really pushed for an answer a politician will promise to send you a written answer (which in some cases you will not receive). This system has evolved over time so that the employees of Wirral Council aren’t put under threat by a politician actually having the chance to say anything.

A whole new industry has grown up at Wirral Council to deal with whistleblowers. Whistleblowers are seen as a threat to the smooth running of Wirral Council and persuading the public that black is indeed white. In fact anything outside Wirral Council (and indeed inside such as the trade unions) is seen as a threat to the smooth running of Wirral Council. Therefore information is controlled. English laws (in fact Wirral Council does not recognise the law as applying to it unless it decides it wants to) such as freedom of information do not apply and if Wirral Council was a country America would be referring to it a rogue state.

However back to whistleblowers. Wirral Council has a secret (not subject to freedom of information) playbook for dealing with whistleblowers and troublemakers (a category which covers pretty much everybody including its own politicians) which if it actually considered the law applied would be banned as it would be classed as a cruel and unusual punishment.

Step 1 is whistleblowers will be told they are not being "reasonable". Completely missing the irony that Wirral Council is under a legal duty to be reasonable (which it rarely is), this can be combined with lying to the world and stating whistleblowers are flat out wrong. If the word reasonable doesn’t work, whistleblowers are told they’re "inappropriate" instead.

If a whistleblower isn’t fobbed off in this way and doesn’t fall at the first hurdle and takes some bold step such as telling the press and/or regulators step 2 is employed.

Step 2 is more tricky for Wirral Council as even step 1 can spectacularly backfire (despite highly paid PR advisers). At step 2 the whistleblower is thanked, but told that Wirral Council is seeking legal advice. Properly employed this tactic can stall matters for months. Therefore nothing is done until that advice is received (this advice will however remain confidential). If by some fluke Wirral Council receives legal advice it doesn’t want, it can ask for more until it receives advice it wants to hear. At this stage Wirral Council sincerely hopes the whistleblower will just give up and not force it to step 3.

Step 3 depends on whether denying what the whistleblower stated would get you laughed at and accused of perjury if you tried it in a court of law. By this point the game is up, so it is admitted that mistakes were made in the past (although no individuals can ever be found to be accountable), lessons have been learnt and an action plan has been drawn up with recommendations to make sure it never happens again. This is known in PR terms as a partial hangout. The whole fiasco is never admitted, but it is hoped that by admitting (what by now is in the public domain anyway) that the political pressure will drop and people will "move on".

There used to be a different stage 3 which was paying whistleblowers to keep their mouths shut, but it didn’t seem to be effective.

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REVEALED: Grant Thornton’s previously secret £50,0000 report into how Wirral Council played the regeneration game

REVEALED: Grant Thornton’s previously secret £50,0000 report into how Wirral Council played the regeneration game

REVEALED: Grant Thornton’s previously secret £50,0000 report into how Wirral Council played the regeneration game

                          

If there’s somethin’ strange in your neighborhood
Who ya gonna call (Grant Thornton)
If it’s somethin’ weird and it won’t look good
Who ya gonna call (Grant Thornton)

Yes, my challenge for today is “making accountants sound interesting” (wish me luck)!

So where to start this tale that has about as much twists, turns and complexity as a Dan Brown thriller? Well in order to keep your attention and not send you to sleep I’ll be comparing what happened to far more exciting things (as this blog isn’t called “101 fascinating tales of bean counting”).

Wirral Council paid a company called Enterprise Solutions (NW) Limited approximately a million pounds for work done on a program called ISUS (a program to support businesses). It also paid them for work on another scheme called BIG (a business grants program). However something had gone wrong so Wirral Council sent in a crack team of accountants from Grant Thornton to investigate.

Grant Thornton as Ghostbusters
This blog has no file photo of Grant Thornton’s crack team of accountants, so using perhaps more artistic licence than is necessary this is the blogger’s impression of them (from the film Ghostbusters) (although being accountants they were probably wearing suits instead).

This intrepid team (who were paid ~£50,000 for all this) went to interview the whistleblowers who worked for Enterprise Solutions (NW) Limited to find out what had happened. As Enterprise Solutions (NW) Ltd is an absurdly long name that takes forever to type I will from now on instead be calling them the USS Enterprise instead.

There was trouble on the USS Enterprise and the whistleblowers said (this is a summary of hundreds of page of a report) that the “the engines cannae’ take it anymore”. Money was being fed into the USS Enterprise’s engines from Wirral Council. Its mission was to seek out new businesses and boldly help them (in the form of grants and other assistance). However the whistleblowers knew that thing were going very wrong and detailed the who, what, where, why and when.

The crack team from Grant Thornton heard what the whistleblowers had to say and then tried to investigate what had happened. They even went to the USS Enterprise to investigate further and spent three days there.

However, someone senior on the USS Enterprise heard about this and perhaps frightened that they might find something that would lead to a court-martial prevented Grant Thornton from setting foot on the ship ever again. This was despite the contract between Wirral Council and the USS Enterprise stating that Wirral Council could have access to their “accounts and records” (although there’s a long running controversy as to whether this contract was ever signed). This didn’t however deter (much) the crack team of accountants who then wrote (as best they could) reports on both the BIG and ISUS programs.

These reports went to Wirral Council, who then refused to publish them, giving the reason that they had referred some of the matters in it to the Merseyside Police. They felt that publishing it would prejudice any potential future criminal prosecutions (but there are also others that felt this was an extremely convenient excuse to prevent Wirral Council being embarrassed by what Grant Thornton had discovered).

A long, long time later the Merseyside Police got back in touch with Wirral Council with a letter that can be summed up by we can’t charge or ask the CPS to prosecute people in this matter as the police had been denied access to key evidence they’d need.

So then Wirral Council convened a special meeting of its Audit and Risk Management Committee to discuss the whole matter.

That is it in a nutshell (leaving an awful lot out too). The detailed nature of what the whistleblowers alleged is far beyond a few hundred words I have here to do justice to and I’m sure will be discussed next Tuesday evening at a special meeting of the Audit and Risk Management Committee.

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Incredible: Cllr Foulkes “we seem to have some whistleblowers who are courted, almost feted”

A report on Wirral Council’s Audit and Risk Management Committee Incredible: Cllr Foulkes “we seem to have some whistleblowers who are courted, almost feted”

Incredible: Cllr Foulkes “we seem to have some whistleblowers who are courted, almost feted”

                                                       
The above quote is from Cllr Foulkes at Wednesday’s Audit and Risk Management Committee in a long comment on Wirral Council and whistleblowing which starts here.

His extremely honest comments call for a further report on the BIG & ISUS business grants program, partly because the Council’s auditors won’t sign off on Wirral Council’s accounts until it’s resolved. Surely after spending an estimated £50,000 on reports by Grant Thornton’s forensic department an officer at Wirral Council must have some answers for Cllr Foulkes? He accuses whistleblowers of raising issues that "drag the Council back into the past" and hopes (rather optimistically) that all the outstanding whistleblowing issues will be resolved "simultaneously".

He then went on to say that some whistleblowers were "courted almost feted" whereas others were forgotten, such as the group over the Highways and Engineering Service Procurement Exercise contract. The whistleblowing over the Highways and Engineering Service Procurement Exercise contract hasn’t been forgotten. In that case the name of one of the whistleblowers, who wanted to remain anonymous was published on Wirral Council’s website. The matters raised by that group were written about at length by the independent person, Richard Penn (whose report was published) and although not everyone agrees with Penn’s opinion and interpretation of events, in most people’s minds the matters regarding the senior officer suspensions has been resolved. Colas’s contract ends next year and will be put out to tender with Colas stating that they won’t bid for it.

Cllr Foulkes also believes that "whoever blows the whistle or complains should be taken seriously and dealt with as efficiently and quick but in all senses fairly". He also said he finds the whistleblowing issue "quite worrying". Would whistleblowers be offered and be paid large amounts of money if they had been treated fairly? He also said that they "have to be fair to those in the firing line of a complaint". The whistleblowing concerns of late haven’t been because of one anonymous and unknown Inspector Clouseau type employee that sadly Wirral Council can’t sack, but have been brought about by systemic failings in Wirral Council’s corporate governance systems and its culture. These two areas are the responsibility of many different individuals including its politicians. Cllr Foulkes said that "words I’ve said tonight may be misconstrued".

He said that many councillors found themselves being contacted by people with complaints, complaints that he found the resolution of "almost impossible". He said he "did not believe whistleblowers should ever be used in a political fashion" and that councillors "don’t seem to have an up to date picture" as to how whistleblowers concerns were being resolved.

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