Liar, Liar, Townhall on fire (pt4)

Watching Dominic Cummings squirm in his own lies, bolstered by Bozo Johnson, reminded me that there's always evidence. It also jogged my brain that I've a number of mostly-complete-but-need-editing pieces from my own time strictly observing Lockdown, that I should schedule to publish.

So, as an update to Liar, Liar, Townhall on fire (pt3), let me remind my one dear reader of where we were in the tumultuous turn of events of the first and second weeks of March [what feels like half a lifetime ago]. Jonathan Edwards (Plaid Cymru) had paid a gravely worrying visit to my office, which forced forward my business's orderly contingency plan into a scrabble to "get out of Dodge". Amidst that:

1. On 9 March 2020 Ammanford Town Clerk (Duncan S Morgan) told the whole of the Council (including Members of the Public present - myself included) that all the "not so nice letters" from the ICO had been dealt with in February. 
2. On 13 March 2020 the Lead Case Officer at the ICO confirmed that she'd spoken with the Clerk on 9 March 2020 as they'd received information from the Council. She firmly explained that the information must be provided to the Requester and should have been provided via WhatDoTheyKnow - as it was an electronic request and Public Bodies must adhere to the "form & format" guidance.
3. On 14 March 2020 I blogged about doubling down on the lies (pt3) and scheduled to publish on the 15 March 2020, outraged by the lies.

Monday 16th March 2020 was a bit of blur, trying to balance/close off the books for the year, accelerating the miserable task of stripping out the office, triple-checking every process could be carried out by at least four of us (in case one of us were incapacitated or didn't survive the sweeping pandemic) not to mention follow-up with new business opportunities from our (expensive) investment at a recent shadow-of-itself world-leading international tradeshow. So busy that I didn't hear the letter flap spring shut sometime that afternoon; I'd checked the mail at lunchtime (due to Royal Mail cutbacks/changes our delivery is invariably in the afternoon). But lo and behold I had a letter! Here's the envelope:

Note the franked stamp from the Sorting Office says "13/03/2020 20:04:35", confirming it wasn't posted until Friday - and clearly not in February.

Let's move on and take a poke at the letter:

Firstly we observe that it is dated "9th March 2020"

• but that wasn't in February!
• conflicts with the report given the same-day at Council some hours before/after
• conflicts with the Draft Minutes (6.3 ICO letter of 18 Feb 2020)

Next, note that the reference says "Public Services Ombudsman for Wales Complaint" when this complaint was lodged with the Information Commissioner's Office - who'd already issued a Decision Notice against the Council, demanding a rapid resolution.

Might 'Compliant [sic] Reference FS50954938' be correct? Nope, it was/is FS50904938.

And then we turn to the guts of the letter, with good news and bad. Firstly the good news, the Council was able to find the dates of correspondence for Agenda points 6.5-6.8. Hurrah! In a well functioning Council it would seem that they'd be on-top of correspondence requiring a response that was sent in the two weeks immediately before summonsing Councillors to attend.

The bad news is quite sad. 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 & 6.4 were all missing, and the extensive search appears to have consumed a very non-PC "three man day hours per person" between the Clerk and Mayor. So was that six person days? Six person hours? Three man days and three woman hours or even some combination thereof? What's even more perplexing is: how was the new Clerk able to prepare the Agenda for 9 December 2019 without sight of the very same letters he (assisted by a she) has been unable to find since 19 December 2019?

Had the Council published the (redacted) letters, as required by Welsh law with the Agenda, then there'd have been no hunting; and no FOI request to begin with, then no escalation, no ICO resources consumed, and certainly no Decision Notice ordering it to comply within 35 calendar days.

Sadly there's really, really bad news to follow, as if the new Clerk had just asked I'd have been happy to help furnish him with copies of the letter referenced in 6.1, which was written and hand-delivered on 28 August 2019, 6.2 on 16 August 2019 and 6.3 also on 16 August 2019. Agenda point 6.4 was the persistent issue of  the never-worked-properly £17K CCTV system. That stemmed from an FOI request of 11 March 2019 with the correspondence likely directly from the Information Commissioner's Office about 14 October 2019 (all in electronic form, with possible physical chasers).

It is apparent that the Clerk & Mayor of the Council have intentionally tried to keep their response from public view by posting a letter which was not delivered until 16 March 2020, in the hope that their tardiness, and direct disregard of the ICO's instructions, would not face scrutiny.

The quality of the response is shocking. Amateurish, inaccurate, confusing and self-conflicting. I'd be too ashamed to sign my name at the bottom of such a letter.

Circling-back, why did it take nearly four months for the Council to look at correspondence clearly marked as requiring a response? In extremis, the Council's own complaints policy requires it to formally acknowledge issues within five working days, resolving most in twenty working days and promising regular updates if protracted. Fifteen Councillors should have had their finger on the pulse of operations, stepped up to support interim/part-time efforts and latterly ensured their handsomely rewarded wonderboy could spell, count and discern between Regulator and Ombudsman. The reality was most Councillors were too busy playing party politics and ego-jousting.

Here's the Hopeful conclusion to that Ratified complaints policy:

If the Council really wants to learn then the elected and appointed Councillors need to step-up, require the Council's Clerk to put together a coherent Agenda with precision, publish necessary documents and follow-up meetings swiftly by promulgating Draft Minutes. Act transparently and keep short accounts! None of this is rocket science, just basic statutory duties.

Liar, Liar, Townhall on fire (pt3)

Eccles famously said "Everybody's got to be somewhere". Last Monday night I, and probably Ammanford Town Council's eight Councillors and Town Clerk, wished I were somewhere else.

By means of an update to "Liar, Liar, Townhall on fire (pt2)", I'm just going to focus just on the doubling-down on one set of lies. Absorbing the whole of 'Fawlty Towers'-cum-'Vicar of Dibley'-cross-'Dad's Army' car crash of the Full Council Meeting of 9th March 2020 in one go would just be too much. Trust me, I did the time!

Jumping into mystery item "6) Correspondence - Requiring a Response", I was intrigued from the Agenda as to what would be presented. Good practice would dictate that each matter would be titled, along with the date it was received.  Councillors ought to be keeping an eye on things that require a response, and publishing the date is essential to avoid the multiple run-away calamities that the Council has orchestrated since 2016. Sadly, those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

This portion of the meeting looked like a raid of an in-tray from a random desk, made on a low budget for the inebriated watching late night telly. Charity letters were described in general terms, as if they had never been read after opening, and then ditched on the grounds of "out of ward".

I have some empathy with the dilemma of how a Community or Town Council can handle chugging by email/letter. Some residents are struggling to pay their Council Tax, it is collected by statute and arrears is a serious, criminal, thing. Is it right that Councillors have the discretion to give away public money on a whim? No resident can opt out. Each of the charities that "we got a letter from..." seemed very worthy, helping stroke victims, supporting the bereaved and a children's hospital charity. I expect some of them operated within Ammanford's geographical limits, but having a Garnant, Cardiff or Haverfordwest letter-head was enough to ditch.

Not-so nice

And then we moved on to what the Clerk said were "not so nice letters from the ICO". He rattled and floundered over four case numbers, blurting 6th & 13th February dates for two, mumbling February dates for the other two and summarising that "all requests have been dealt with in February". Due to the frenzied nature of this part, and the seriousness of doubling-down on the lies, my notes have been cross-checked with two other members of the public. Each independently recorded the same.

I recognise FS50837144. The ICO passed this case to its solicitors on 24 January 2020 for High Court action, after running out of patience and the Council refusing to respond to an extension to a second Information Notice. It relates to the dodgy £17,000 (+/-20%) CCTV system over the splashpads, that didn't work in the summer/when the leaves were on the trees and is now defunct. Here's the sorry trail on WhatDoTheyKnow, now over a year old. The ICO confirmed, when contacted on 13 March 2020, that no correspondence has been received from the Council relating to FS50837144.

I also recognised FS50904938. The ICO published a Decision Notice on 26 February, upholding a complaint that the Council has breached the FOIA and ordering it to provide the information within 35 calendar days. The ICO confirmed, when contacted on 13 March, that they had received a response from the Clerk on 9 March. They told the Clerk (also on 9 March) that he must provide the information requested to the complainant, not themselves, saying that replying on the WhatDoTheyKnow platrform would fulfil this. I estimate it would take less than 15 minutes to dredge out the dates from previous correspondence received and publish them. The entirety of this request has fallen within the tenure of the new Town Clerk.

In Pt1 I showed the former Plaid Mayor (forced to resign) had lied directly to the Council and its AGM, with a runaway process enabled by Councillors over many years.

As a update to Pt2, the partly fulfilled FOI request confirmed that the new full-time Town Clerk/RFO was the one to make the deluded claim that the Council "always ensure that policies and procedures are adhered to". And yet here we have an absolute case of the Council not complying with a policy, nor the law!

Furthermore, we have a full Council meeting being told that all matters were dealt with in February, but a simple fact check showed at least one hasn't been attended to, and another was handled that day, in March! March is not February, and February is not March. Lies are not the truth.

One has to wonder what else is being lied about? How about the lies of omission, with the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales having re-opened its investigation into maladministration and unresolved complaints. Action was ordered in January, not done in February and extended into March. An absolute deadline of Thursday 5th March 2020 was given to put the PSOW report onto the website (with some other missing Minutes). The frenzy of Wednesday 4th March (1543hrs) botched even those basic instructions.

Dear Reader, Ammanford Town Councillors and Ammanford Town Clerk:

 ICO != PSOW

Finally, after 14 months of subterfuge and deception, the good people of Ammanford (and beyond) can read the PSOW's investigation report from ATC's website, if they know where to look for it, mis-described as ICO Report. At least the Council isn't serving up 517 references to crypto-miners and iffy baby-sitting services, at the moment (we'll save that nugget for "Web of deceipt", to come in a future blogpost).

I'm perplexed by the behaviour of the new full-time Clerk/RFO. I'm not one to call a person names behind another's back, and these colours don't run. The new Clerk/RFO has shown he is inept and ill-prepared. He may have won 162 points at interview, but blatantly lying to Council and members of the public is indefensible, constituting gross misconduct. A member of the public even asked the Council to attend to these FOI matters, as Minuted from 3 February 2020 meeting of full Council. There is no excuse.

Wrong trousers/I'm on probation

The Meeting had been told a little earlier (in the ratifying Minutes debacle) to disregard the Minutes of the Personnel meeting, which they claimed had been published in error. The source of this confusion is One Voice Wales, who have briefed their membership in direct conflict with the FOIA.

At a recent One Voice Wales training session to Ammanford Town Council they responded to a Councillor's question stating that the Minutes of Personnel sub-committee should be withheld from disclosure. This was *previously* clarified by the Interim Town Clerk (about February-April of 2019) with direct advice from the ICO (summary: public records must be disclosed but some information may need to be redacted to comply with DPA2018/GDPR). This advice was sought as the previous Interim Clerk tried to clear up the mess at the Council for not complying to the law in response to ten FOI requests, namely to publish Minutes (since August 2016) - culminating in the issuing of an "exceptional" Information Notice, rolled into Decision Notices FS50755792 & FS50711667.

It was Minuted from the Personnel meeting of 13 February, when discussing the contract of current clerk:

The first employee review was to be undertaken in February 2020.
The Probationary review was to be undertaken in June 2020.

(bizarrely the Clerk was signing his own incomplete contract three months after taking up the post, and it took ~45mins to agree the drop from 21% -> 3% pension)

It is always difficult to accept that a bad hiring decision has been made. People are involved. Perhaps now it is inevitable that the Council must reflect on their skewed scoring methodology and question how candidates made it through to interview when their claimed skill-set didn't meet the minimum job specification. I understand there's still an open FOI request regarding the process, and the (only) advert for the job that appeared in the South Wales Guardian weeks after the closing date.