What was the point of the Caller Report?

 

Six months ago the Government’s local government inspector, Max Caller produced a report looking into the wrongs and wrongs, yes wrongs and wrongs, you read it correctly, being delivered in the name of Northumberland County Council.

His report gave a bleak glance to the public of how Councillors had bullied staff, how the Council spent £millions on paying off anyone they didn’t like the look of. How staff reacted and he exposed the facts that a number of Councillors were facing serious conduct charges and industrial tribunals had been lodged.

Other elements in his report criticised the Councils handling of freedom of information requests, the lack of openness and therefore scrutiny, in the Councils dealings not only with the public but between political groups and how fractured politics was and still is within the ruling team and its extended secrecy at a level which puts democracy in doubt.

An improvement team was sought and eventually put in place to try to rectify matters and they will report in the future but things have drifted from bad to worse in the interim period and we wish to provide a few examples which have used public funds to colour the scene between reports.

The buy out of industrial tribunals and council standards board cases, as part of the deal between the Leader of Council and the beleaguered former Chief Executive, we’re led to believe from press reports that the Leader of Council personally negotiated away the tribunals and standards board cases against his own group and its well rumoured that his first offer of £25K as compensation to the CEX was upped towards a quarter of a million pounds of public cash to achieve his main aim that of any pouring of light on the dark side of the actions of himself and his colleagues.

As a lead protagonist in all things wrong, the shouty Leader appears to have left one of his own out to dry to possibly take the blame and Murky will name this person as soon as more information drips out from the rotting carcass that sits in power at County Hall in Morpeth.

On the shouty subject and bullying at last Wednesday’s full Council which was televised, the public were able to see and hear the Business Chair of Council shouting at unnamed opposition members following his inability to respond in a reasonable manner to a member of the public at question time. His lack of skill illustrated why and how the Council’s bullying reputation hasn’t gone away. The business chair called the Police to have the person asking questions removed instead of attempting to aid the person's need to know in a civilised manner.

Moving on with the need to know and the abject failure of scrutiny at Northumberland County Council.

When running the Council with a Leader and Cabinet method as opposed to a Committee system, Councils must be scrutinised by members of opposition parties. That scrutiny of the business of Council and its public face covers all things undertaken in the Councils name except planning matters. According to reports from the LGA, Councils organising body, that scrutiny of the Administration must include accurate performance figures as well as up to date reports from officers of the Council. Those figures are produced through set targets known as ‘Key Performance Indicators’ they are harvested by Councils an a regular basis from figures collated on the ground by the councils employees feeding into ‘Local Performance Indicators’, In the papers and reports from Council its obvious that opposition scrutiny members do not receive information from Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) or the Local performance Indicators (LPI’s) which are used as targets leaving them unable to pinpoint problems across such a huge geographical area or question the target setting and service delivery process.

Its noticeable that a recent Freedom of Information request issued via the Government website ‘What do they know’ seeking Key and Local performance data to see what's gone wrong with service delivery across the County of Northumberland has been refused.

We hope that opposition Councillors who may read this blog begin to realise that scrutiny is a major failure and that they themselves must demand the figures and data which allows them to hold the Council to account and begin to break down the secrecy and open up the activities the public pay dear to have delivered on their behalf to shine a light on what's really going on, particularly when the Leader of Council states he is going to save £1M per annum on top staff wages when he has to offer his new Chief Executive over £100,000 a year more than he was paying his outgoing CEX as half of her wages were paid by the NHS.

Much more to come as panic sets in prior to the improvement board reporting in public.