“A Bath councillor was asked to step out of discussions about a multimillion care contract after the council found out she had signed a petition opposing Virgin Care’s bid to win it.
Lin Patterson, who has called the incident “spooky” and “heavy handed”, said she was asked by a council officer to remove herself from relevant committee discussions over fears Virgin Care would sue.
The Lambridge councillor said she was told that she had a “conflict of interest” because she had signed a private petition opposing Virgin Care’s bid to win the £700m community care contract.
But at the time she was asked to step outside when the “Your Care, Your Way” contract was being discussed by the Health and Wellbeing Select Committee the names of the signatories were private.
The petition, hosted by 38Degrees, was not handed to Bath and North East Somerset Council until July 21. But Ms Patterson said she was “pulled aside” a whole month beforehand on June 20.
She said she was denied an explanation about how the council had found out she had signed the petition, and the council has since refused to answer the Bath Chronicle’s questions about the matter.
Ms Patterson, who represents the Green Party, added that the request for her to leave the room was “a bit of a departure”.
Conservative councillor Paul May said he had voluntarily excused himself from any committee or council discussions about the contract ever since becoming a non-executive director of the board of Sirona care and health, the other major bidder. When asked whether he thought Ms Patterson should have done the same, he said: “I don’t think I’m really qualified to say. My situation is very clear; hers I don’t think was quite so clear.”
Ms Patterson said: “The fact that the petition had not been submitted is actually very spooky and the fact that I was asked to leave the room I think was heavy handed.”
One wonders how the matter would have been handled by her Party Whip had she been a majority party councillor …..
East Devon Watch 
It is indeed spooky. And heavy handed. And probably illegal on both counts.
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This is really scary. They are implying that Virgin Care would sue Bath Council if they didn’t get the contract? No intimidation then.. Is someone in the council getting a back-hander for this contract? It smells of some deep corruption.
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1. Whilst signing the petition may show predisposition against Virgin, that would not stop her from listening to the arguments and changing her mind. The Localism Act 2011 Section 25 effectively abolished the concept of predetermination. To quote from a letter in May 2013 available on gov.uk from Brandon Lewis Sec. of State for DCLG “Section 25 clarifies that a councillor is not to be regarded as being unable to act fairly or without bias if they participate in a decision on a matter simply because they have previously expressed a view or campaigned on it. The effect is that councillors may campaign and represent their constituents – and then speak and vote on those issues – without fear of breaking the rules on predetermination.” So the decision to ask this councillor to withdraw was illegally preventing her from undertaking her role as a democratically elected councillor.
2. Her signature on the petition constitutes personal information and is therefore subject to the Data Protection Act. Implicit in the signature is an agreement that her name will not be shared with anyone prior to the petition being presented (though if there are explicit statements in the formal Ts&Cs that would be different). THEREFORE disclosure of her personal details before the presentation date of the petition would likely be a breach of the Data Protection Act and therefore illegal.
These are the scary things: that council officials are failing to act in a robust manner to protect democratic freedoms and denying councillors their democratic role, and that either data was shared by 38degrees prior to presentation of the petition undermining their position and trust, or someone hacked into the 38degrees website/database and found this out and then passed the information to the council, or the councillor used council facilities to sign the e-petition and the council invaded her privacy (and presumably other councillors privacy) to research who might have signed the petition.
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