According to this week’s EDDC Knowledge e-newsletter – 6 out of 11 of those taking place.
Category Archives: Misc
Are Devon council bosses worth more than £100,000 per year?
Mystic Meg predicts
Photograph below reproduced with the permission of COVOP, of which EDA is a founder member:
Monitoring Officer: is it a dead end job or a powerful way to exert control?
On the one hand:
“Hands up: who wants to be a monitoring officer?”
“With the recent trend across local government to downgrade the monitoring officer from the top table and new regulations proposed by Communities Secretary Eric Pickles to remove the designated independent person from the process of dismissing statutory officers, I am sure that some lawyers within council legal departments will be asking themselves why they should put their head above the parapet and seek to become a monitoring officer in what is an uncertain and changing climate.
… With the move to reduce senior management costs, it is becoming increasingly common for the monitoring officer role to be combined with that of head of legal services. Unfortunately, the roles do require very different skill sets. …
..Don’t underplay this role, however, because as the monitoring officer, your role is to ensure that the council and its members maintain the highest standard of conduct. Your intervention on an informal basis can have a significant impact on the cultures and behaviours of the organisation ….
On the other hand:
If either a complainant, or the councillor against whom a complaint has been made, is unhappy with the way in which the local authority resolves the complaint, there is no higher authority to which they may appeal. Neither the Local Government Ombudsman nor the Department for Communities and Local Government has a role in respect of councillors’ conduct or registration of pecuniary interests.
The powers of the local authority in relation to alleged breaches are for local determination, following advice from the authority’s Monitoring Officer or legal team. These powers might include censure or the removal of a member from a committee, but the authority cannot disqualify or suspend councillors: suspension was permitted under the 2000 Act regime.”
http://www.parliament.uk/Templates/BriefingPapers/Pages/BPPdfDownload.aspx?bp-id=sn05707
Another councillor gets away with disgraceful behaviour
In other walks of life they might well have lost their jobs but in local government the bad behaviour appears to have little effect – unless “grovelling” counts as punishment:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/top-tory-forced-grovel-after-5037897
It’s where the Housing Minister DIDN’T go that’s interesting!
The housing minister, Brandon Lewis, made a whistlestop (i.e. quick and under the public radar) visit to Lympstone and Cranbrook yesterday.
He DIDN’T visit Feniton, Gittisham or Clyst St Mary or anywhere else blighted by over-development and Council Leader Paul Diviani is conspicuous by his absence in rhe photograph. Not many people at all in the photograph, actually!
Only “good news” visits between now and the May elections!
EDDC Monitoring Officer and complaints
We have received the following email from Sandra Semple. This is a personal view only and does not necessarily represent the view of this blog:
“May I point out that the district council spokesperson, who has said in a recent newspaper report that “As far as Mark Williams, chief executive of East Devon District Council is aware, there is no new and relevant evidence that would give cause to reopen either the Councillor Twiss or Councillor Wragg cases” is incorrect.
I submitted new and relevant information on one of these cases in December 2014 in two specific areas relating to the Council’s Code of Conduct and the Council’s Media Policy. In early January 2015 I urged that the Monitoring Officer to give me his decision on this new and relevant information in good time so that, if this information did indeed matter, it could go to the late January 2015 Standards Board Meeting which was then about 3 weeks away.
To date, I have heard nothing from the Monitoring Officer and my 2 complaints are not included in those dismissed, unless he has dismissed them without letting me know.
It seems unlikely that they were amongst those dismissed as I wrote to him recently saying that if he did not make a decision on my new and relevant information before the next Standards Board scheduled for March 2015 it would be likely that we would not know the outcome of these complaints before district council elections.
As the Monitoring Officer has cleared so many complaints he obviously has time to deal with these outstanding complaints now, although as he still appears to work full-time for Mark Williams sister council in South Somerset, perhaps he is not finding it easy to deal with his workload in East Devon.”
It’s contagious!
This week’s Private Eye “Rotten Boroughs” column has stories on:
Outrageous expenses and behaviour of senior council officers in Lancashire and Croydon
Senior officers in Norfolk concocting evidence to suit their needs
A councillor using the council’s press office in Stoke on Trent to create his personal tweets
A cosy relationship between a district council and the owner of development land in the Cotswolds
A council in Tower Hamlets claiming short-listing for an award it DIDN’t win the previous year
Which of these would you think might have already happened, be about to happen or is planned to happen at EDDC?
Communities need more protection against unsustainable development
Children in our towns and cities “being robbed of places to play”
Monitoring Officer perhaps “economical with the truth”
There is a report in today’s Sidmouth Herald about complaints made against councillors – page 11. It says that most (7) have resulted in a “no case to answer” result which would appear to cast complainers in the “silly nuisance” category.
However, the article neglects to say there are at least four potentially serious complaints yet to be adjudicated by this officer according to the agenda of the Standards Committee.
Should the Monitoring Officer not make a decision on these four (or now maybe more)cases before the NEXT and last meeting meeting of this current council scheduled in March 2015, no-one will know how serious they are before the next election or which councillor or councillors were involved.
Just to give an example of how toothless a tiger a local Monitoring Officer now is can be is seen in this astonishing story of a councillor in Wigan who cannot be barred because there is no mechanism to do this under current monitoring arrangements:
“A councillor has been branded the ‘most expensive’ in Britain after running up a £2,500 phone bill calling sex chatlines [on his council mobile] and using his mobile to send ‘inappropriate’ and sexist messages. …
“… Robert Bleakley, who has an £11,000 allowance as a representative of Tyldesley in Wigan, Greater Manchester, also used a work computer to watch pornography and did not bother attending a meeting in five months and was found to have sent a message saying: ‘Aren’t they [women] f*****g idiots. No wonder women are just cooking and washing material.”
In 2004 Mr Bleakley was disqualified for three years after he verbally abused a female cleaner at Wigan town hall and threatening to get the sack after a minor traffic accident.
The Standards Board of England, which oversees councillors conduct [should read: oversaw at that time, the national Standards Board was abolished by this government in favour of local Monitoring Officers] investigated him and ruled that he was ‘aggressive, domineering and intimidating’.
He stood as the Lib Dem’s parliamentary candidate for Worsley, Greater Manchester, in the 1997 and 2001 general elections. At the time of the 2004 investigation he was leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Wigan Council.
He was suspended again for six months in 2010 after being accused of bullying an ex-policewoman who got a job as a community safety officer and branding her ‘that woman’ during meetings.
He had also been investigated by police over accusations of misconduct in a public office but was told he would face no criminal charges.”
Why are we (ALL councils that is) employing a senior officer who can basically do nothing?
To see Wigan Monitoring Officer’s futile attempts to discipline this councillor, see
Click to access Z385967688485-and-99-(Sanctions)-Councillor-R-Brierley.pdf
“Ask Pickles” – videos of questions and answers from a parallel universe!
Polished spin by Mr Pickles on a number of important topics in videos produced from “Question Time” events held last year.
Topics given the Pickles treatment include:
What help is there for villages under threat of over-development? Yes, he REALLY thinks there are things we can do!
Fracking (live with it)
Are councils doing enough to engage voters? (Well, he thinks so – our missing 6,000 voters might not have agreed and the Parliamentary Committee pointed the finger at EDDC for not doing enough)
Why have new unitary councils bedn blocked? (Because we can, and some of them might be too powerful and the wrong party)
What are the solutions to unaffordable affordable housing? Yes, Pickles thinks we can solve this problem!
Ch-ch-changes for 2015
Watch this space: some surprising changes in store!
We are metamorphosing ….
n. pl. met·a·mor·pho·ses (-sēz′)
1. A transformation, as by magic or sorcery.
But Phil Twiss said that I would be upstaging Claire WRIGHT …..!
Merry Christmas to all our readers
We shall be back in the New Year …
… oh, how we shall be back – inquiring, rummaging, uncovering, challenging, snooping … call it what you will …
… for us, the not-so-silent majority in East Devon.
New council HQ to be surplus to requirements by 2020?
” … So what might English government look like by 2020?
… Free-standing smaller cities and counties (probably combined with their districts and smaller unitary councils) may still be waiting their devolutionary package.”
Power and absolute power at EDDC
Transcript of Richard Eley’s Speech at the Sid Vale Association Meeting at the Unitarian Church, 9th December 2014
(Richard Eley was speaking about Richard Cohen’s figures for relocation costs.)
“The numbers are completely, hopelessly and scandalously wrong. They are useless, they are terrible and have to be challenged vigorously and strenuously. These numbers are rubbish. They don’t include the green travel plan, they don’t include compensation for the staff, they don’t include the cost of the move itself, they don’t include the costs of hubs the other towns and, most importantly, they don’t include the cost of officer time and members time that is involved in all of this.
The expert, Mr Steve Pratten from Davis Langdon, he is going to cost £1million or more on his own. It doesn’t include the legal costs in all this. I say to the District Council that I have estimated the real costs to be £20 million. That figure was not disputed – Richard Cohen did not say it was exaggerated – he said he didn’t recognize the number. What that means is that I was bang on the money.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are trusting Richard Cohen to mastermind this whole process and we are assuming that he’s accurate in the mathematical calculations. This is the same man who measured the Knowle 40% smaller than it turned out to be! He got it wrong by 40%. Robin Fuller had to write a paper, he was rubbished in the press and it turned out that he was correct. The Knowle is 40% bigger than Richard Cohen thought it was.
This is the same man who was responsible for four attempts to compose the economic impact assessments rejected by his own planning committee. He can’t get simple mathematics right. This same man tells us that energy prices are going to go ahead for the next 20 years at 10% over inflation. He is alone in the entire world in thinking this. Nobody else believes that including your energy companies who will fix your energy costs for the next four years. That instantly takes £1.5million out of all the savings that are supposed to be made by moving, so he hasn’t even bothered to explore that possibility.
He is also the man who shifted the southern boundary of the Knowle to include the second tier of parkland without telling anybody and in contradiction to the specific instructions of the Development Management Committee. I was told this would not be investigated because the Inspector would look at it, which he would not do because it was not in his remit. So that has never been investigated by anybody at the Knowle.”
“He did it without managing to record that process; without managing to record any conversation with any individual, without writing a single email, or keeping a single note or sending any kind of correspondence to any third party. Because I made a freedom of information request, and there was nothing there.”
“He did it unilaterally, on his own, secretly, and he didn’t tell a single soul, and I only found out by accident.”
This is not the kind of person I would trust to do these calculations. Now when he says it is going to cost £15.9million to refurbish the Knowle, I would tell him that that’s a load of bunkum. This relates to the entire building, which nobody advocates retaining. Why is anybody working in a bathroom when the Knowle is two and a half times the size of the building EDDC says it needs? How can that be possible? Mr Cohen in his calculations also asserts that there is nil chance, not 1% chance of local government reform in the next 20 years.
Anybody who listened to the Autumn Statement knows that local government reform is highly likely and as John Dyson correctly said there is an 80% chance that EDDC will not exist in 5 years time, so the chances of us recovering all these millions over the next 20 years is much reduced.
Finally, he assumes that over the course of those 20 years with energy now costing astronomical amounts of money the average domestic bill according to Richard Cohen would be 30% of your income in energy costs. He assumes that the government, EDDC and none of the people working there will make any effort whatsoever to reduce the costs of energy in that time. They won’t switch off any lights, they won’t turn off any central heating and they will continue to occupy every single bathroom throughout that period despite the fact that there is going to be 140 less people working there, assuming they don’t go to Exmouth.”
Oh, oh! East Devon District Council wants no more cuts and more powers
“… COUNCIL leaders from Devon are among more than 100 English council bosses who’ve publicly opposed further cuts in their funding.
The leaders who have demanded in an open letter more powers be devolved from Westminster included West, North and East Devon district councils. …
… In a letter to the Observer the leaders – including many Tories and some mayors – said English voters would not accept greater devolution to Scotland if a transfer did not also take place in England, adding “It’s England’s turn now”.
… The Observer letter has 121 signatories in total. It is signed by senior Local Government Association (LGA) figures including chairman David Sparks, along with 65 Labour council leaders, 40 Conservative leaders, 10 Liberal Democrat leaders and one independent
Source: http://www.torquayheraldexpress.co.uk/Devon-councils-demand-spending-cuts/story-24921724-detail/story.html
Do we REALLY want the council, with its current power base, in charge of more of our hard-earned money? If EDDC was a bank might we be looking to change to a better one?
Why didn’t they ask almost anyone but EDDC councillors and officers? The signs were there …
9 February 2014 from EDA website:
‘ANOTHER COSTLY HEAD OFFICE ERROR BY EDDC ?
Local residents, EDDC’s own watchdog committee, and own staff defied
The Cabinet of the East Devon District Council has selected Skypark as its preferred site for its headquarters. If the decision is approved by the full Council on 26th February, officers would carry out further research into the viability of the move. Marketing of the Knowle would begin “promptly”. A final decision would be taken in the summer. No financial details of the proposed move were announced to justify the decision to leave the Knowle in favour of a site which, currently, has poor transport links and certainly does not fit the Council’s claims that its District headquarters should be somewhere more central than Sidmouth.
The East Devon Alliance deplores this choice, and EDDC’s undemocratic insistence on a project which has no clear financial justification. As Head of the Relocation Team, Richard Cohen , admitted to the Council’s own Scrutiny Committee recently, he has not asked the Head of Finance for “a full breakdown of the costs”. And yet, in addition to the substantial expenses already incurred (well over £350,000), the Council plans to set aside a further £400,000 of tax payers’ money over the next two years, just for preparations.
EDA Chairman Ian McKintosh says, “Economically, this is not the time to rush ahead with a massive spending of public funds, on a move that is widely regarded as imprudent.” Coherent arguments in favour of retaining the Knowle have been ridiculed by the Leadership, without serious debate. Sidmouth resident Robin Fuller’s detailed suggestions for refurbishment of the existing purpose-built buildings, and possible sale or conversion of the historic former hotel, were patronisingly dismissed by Councillor Diviani in just two words, as “Fuller’s Folly?”.
From Save our Sidmouth 27 February 2014
“A Full Council meeting last night, that began with repeated warnings from senior Councillors about tough financial times ahead, terminated with a swift show of Tory hands which will result in a multi-million pound spend of public funds. The marketing of the Knowle, and pushing on with the relocation ‘ambition’, were voted mindlessly through with the Cabinet minutes.
Independent Councillor, Ben Ingham, had shrewdly said earlier,”I do not believe you know what you are doing”. Debate had been initiated by Independent Councillor Claire Wright and colleagues, but was persistently stifled by the Tories, with some appalling personal attacks and as Councillor Roger Giles had to point out in one instance, downright lies. The Council’s audio recording of the meeting will make interesting listening.”
http://saveoursidmouth.com/2014/02/27/knowle-sale-and-skypark-spend-voted-through-under-veil-of-cabinet-minutes/
From Sidmouth Independent News 27 February 2014
SIN hears from reliable sources that Leader, Paul Diviani’s poor performance on Good Morning Devon this week, has alarmed councillors.
Cllr Diviani was clearly rattled by Matt Woodley’s reference to the “relocation fiasco” and floundered badly when trying to justify the Cabinet’s proposal to move to a business park on the edge of Exeter.
He failed to address Cllr Claire Wright’s comments on the same programme that it was a reckless suggestion at a time of austerity that would export East Devon jobs to Exeter and make it more difficult for residents to visit the offices.
“It is a business that we run”, he said and made the promise that if people can’t visit the new HQ “we will visit them” (SIN –How much will that cost?) His only comment on the financial aspect of the move was that “the cost has shifted around a bit”!
He bumbled on, seeming to argue that because he had to travel a long way from his Yarcombe home to Skypark, lesser mortals could be expected to bear some hardship as well.
Sceptics are beginning to wonder if the choice of Skypark for EDDC’s HQ move is an attempt to bale out one of the leader’s pet projects. The huge new business park site is rumoured to be rather short of eager tenants.
http://sidmouthindependentnews.wordpress.com/page/6/?s=Skypark&submit=Search
EDDC Tory party line on omnishambles: East Devon is “sovereign”
Response sent to a correspondent by EDDC councillor Peter Sullivan on the EDDC omnishambles. You can see the original request at the end of this post.
Interestingly, the reply was copied by Councillor Sullivan to EDDC councillor Phil “I am not and never have been a Whip” Twiss, who responded:
“Thanks for cutting to the chase on this one Peter and saying it as it is”.
Here is the reply, below is the original request for information. You be the judge – if we are a sovereign state. (NB: our bold text)
Definition: “sovereign”: 1. One that exercises supreme, permanent authority, especially in a nation or other governmental unit, as:
a. A king, queen, or other noble person who serves as chief of state; a ruler or monarch.
b. A national governing council or committee.
2. A nation that governs territory outside its borders.
3. A gold coin formerly used in Great Britain.
Dear [Correspondent]
“A memorandum of understanding has been put together which is a starter for taking forward shared services. It will put document on the table which we can now debate within the council and which can go through the democratic process. Without a document on the table there is nothing to discuss.
For as long as I have been a member there have been calls from all political parties for greater links between neighbouring councils I just see this as an on-going process.
In other areas of the country councils are coming together forming combined authorities and attracting considerable financial investment. Although this is not Unitary if that is your concern – the reorganisation into unitary will cost millions, it was about £120M + on-going costs in Cornwall’s case and they are now devolving to 19 regions within the county.
It’s about working together and maintaining our own sovereignty.
As for Sky Park and Manstone this was and has been going through a continuous evaluation recently and this has always been the stated position, as we all know this was only a preferred option not the final agreement as with any business case no decision will be made until ALL the relevant facts and figures are known and with member discussion.
I can remember a major exercise like this with a previous employer who had eventually to look at three different new locations / options for a new HQ, interestingly though it was the Board that made the final decision, the shareholders and workforce and public (even though there was public finances involved ) were informed after the event.
I believe we are being a lot more open and democratic with the way we are moving forward with our future plans.
As you know these issues will be discussed in future council meeting.
Peter Sullivan
[Conservative councillor for Sidmouth Town ward]
This was in response to this enquiry:
Councillors, (also sent to Cllrs Kerridge and Newth)
Three decisions with potentially major consequences for the people of east Devon have been announced by EDDC this week.
1. An agreement has been signed for ever closer union with Exeter and Teignbridge councils.
2. Skypark has been abandoned as a potential site for a new council HQ.
3. The Manstone depot may now be retained as an employment site and accommodate depot facilities currently based at Knowle
I can find no record of any Council, Cabinet, Working Party or sub-committee at which these proposals may have been discussed so can you, as my representatives on EDDC, please tell me:-
1. When and by what means did you first become aware of these decisions?
2. Do you know which Councillors or Officers were involved in making these decisions and on what authority they were published?
I look forward to your responses
[A correspondent]
Sidmouth
