Friday, 7th February, 2014
Where is the love?
The date has been set for Pembrokeshire’s county councillors to debate the highly critical public interest report into the pension payments scandal.
The appointed auditor, Anthony Barrett, will present his report to councillors at an extraordinary meeting, which I can confirm has been arranged for Friday 14th February, at 10 am.
The only details known so far are:
“The purpose of the meeting will be to consider the report in the public interest issued by the Wales Audit Office on Senior Officers’ Pay and Pensions, dated January 2014.”
A Valentine’s Day meeting will come as a relief to those who had heard – and feared – the rumours of a desire among the council’s leadership to sandwich this topic between other matters on the agenda of the March 6th regular full council meeting, at which other important matters will be voted on such as the authority’s 2014/15 budget.
I have received further information recently that confirms this was definitely the intention, as the discussion of such a damning report at a meeting all of its own was feared to be too potent.
No agenda has yet been published, but for those of you thinking this meeting is the one requested by opposition members on Tuesday, it looks like you could be wrong. As well as the debate on the public interest report, Cllr. Paul Miller’s Labour-led requisition also tabled the immediate scrappage of the pension opt-out payment scheme, a full investigation, and suspensions pending the outcome of the investigation. These topics received no mention in the email sent out to councillors late this afternoon, but, as the formal agenda hasn’t yet been formalised, it could end up making an appearance yet! If nothing else, Cllr. Miller can at least claim credit for forcing the matter to be held at a standalone meeting.
The historians among you with a keen interest in matters of corruption and duplicity won’t need it pointed out that, aside from red roses, corny cards, slushy sentiments and county council meetings, St. Valentine’s Day is best remembered for the barbaric mob murders in crime-ridden Chicago, eighty-five years ago.
On February 14th 1929, Al Capone’s henchmen cut down members and supporters of the North Side Irish gang, the intense rivals of his own outfit, the South Side Italian gang. The notorious scar-faced mobster’s hatchet men did a hatchet job, spreading bullets everywhere. The gun-toting gangsters of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre left only a dog to survive, along with a man who later succumbed to his fourteen bullet wounds in hospital.
Fortunately we live in more enlightened times!
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Didn’t they get Al Capone for tax evasion in the end?
“They” did, sort of, but the neurosyphilis definitely did the job…
Will it be shown on the webcam? It’s going to be a long week for some at County Hall.
Hi Welshman, I see no reason why it won’t be webcasted.
At our 9th May 2013 meeting, council resolved: “That a one year pilot for the filming of Council meetings be undertaken (with an option to renew for a further period of 12 months), with the tender submission by Public-i being accepted in that respect.”
I don’t think anybody in County Hall would – or could – claim that “council meetings” as resolved, confines the webcasting to just regular council meetings with the exclusion of extraordinary meetings.
But then again, this is Pembrokeshire County Council, so nothing should surprise us.
I think we will probably be discussing “exempt information” (the legal advice provided by Timothy Kerr QC) so there will be a recommendation by the Monitoring Officer that the public (and the webcam) are excluded.
That will require a resolution by the council, so it is always possible that the opposition could propose that the meeting continue in open session and force the matter to a vote.
I wonder if the Chief Executive will be present and if the other benefactor will be disclosed.
Hi Mike, it is my understanding that Mr. Barrett will be there to present his report – a report which he produced “to draw the public’s attention to a decision of Pembrokeshire County Council,” because, he said: “I believe it is important that the public has a full and proper awareness of the events concerning the Council.”
Surely, then, anything the appointed auditor has to tell the meeting is entirely for the public’s attention, and any suggestion from officers to go into private session should not be made until the report has been presented?
Jacob,
With regard to Mr Barrett’s report being taken in public session, you are probably right.
Had to happen sometime, I suppose!
Good news that this meeting is finally taking place, I bet certain members of the hierarchy wish it could take the form of that other infamous meeting – IE in BPJ’s private office with BPJ, Adams and their cronies as the only participants!
I am anticipating an informed debate on the intricacies of the law pertaining to the Local Government Pension Scheme between the Welsh Auditor and our very own expert on fiscal law, Councillor Jamie Adams.
I am puzzled by the expression “exempt information”.
John T Davies said on Pawb a’i Farn that this was a policy decision which was applied to a group of employees, in this case 25 senior executives.
If this is to be regarded as “exempt information” then it would follow that all discussion relating to the pension arrangements of council employees would be “exempt information”. Surely not?
Hi John, the original committee in September 2011 went into private session (I believe wrongly) because members were told that the ‘Pensions Arrangements’ matter on the agenda contained exempt information (it didn’t.)
The ‘exempt information’ Old Grumpy referred to in his recent comment is the content of the legal advice/opinion received by the authority on the pensions arrangement, which councillors might be given ahead of the meeting.
I say members might receive this advice, because, having consulted the council’s monitoring officer, I am told members are only likely to receive anything of the sort in redacted/summary form, which will be confidential and for councillors’ eyes only.
Hi Jacob. Do they make these rules up as they go along?
How they can possibly argue that a legal opinion which was taken to justify their actions cannot be made public, let alone given to elected members, is beyond reason.
This council hides its mistakes and the errors of its officers behind a veil of secrecy. Is this maladministration? If so a petition needs to be sent to the Ombudsman and the First Minister. I would think the latter must be close to sending in a team to administer the County Council anyway. What a mess.
Hi John,
The classes of “exempt information” in the the Local Government (Access to Information) (Variation) (Wales) Order 2007 are as follows:
Whenever exempt information is likely to be disclosed the council/committee may resolve to go into private session.
At the senior staff committee in September 2011 the committee went into private session based on Paragraph 12 above.
Some months ago, I asked the council’s legal department if this complied with the statute because there was no “Information relating to a particular individual” involved in this item on the agenda.
Indeed, because it was designed in part to aid future recruitment, the identities of some of the potential beneficiaries of the scheme simply couldn’t have been known.
You will not be surprised to learn that I never did receive a reply.
It is likely that Paragraph 16 will be invoked during next Friday’s extraordinary meeting, though that only applies to the information being disclosed to the public, not elected members.
Mike,
I would have thought any decision to go “private” would need to be considered against the wider public interest consideration.
It is well known that the pensions case has given rise to very wide public debate and interest.
It is a matter of public record that specified named individuals’ pension arrangements are required to be disclosed in the Council’s Accounts which are open to public scrutiny.
It is a matter of public record that one individual has been identified in an Auditor’s Public Interest Report.
My understanding is that the same plus another individual has benefited in the current financial year, but that such payments may not be allowable, depending on the outcome of the current fiasco.
I have never known Cabinet or a committee to go against an officer’s view that a matter is exempt, but then again I have never seen advice from an officer that the wider public interest test should be considered/applied, let alone complied with.
I do hope that at the meeting, if it is recommended to chuck the public out, the officers’ advice will be fully recorded in the Minutes, as will be a recorded vote on any decision to exclude the public.
I note however that any such recommendation to go into private session is expected to be published, with reasons, in advance with the Agenda.
What would have happened if the public refused to be removed?
John,
You are correct that, since 2007, the Welsh legislation also requires the “proper officer” to determine whether the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in non-disclosure.
However, to the best of my knowledge, since the introduction of this public interest test, PCC’s “proper officer” has never found that the scales came down on the side of disclosure.
I have visited the websites of other local authorities in Wales and I have yet to come across an example where openness has triumphed over secrecy.
It may be of interest to Jacob’s followers that, on that other St Valentine’s Day, the alarm was actually raised by the howling and whimpering of a dog, which had been tied to a vehicle at the scene of the massacre.
Within the bloody carnage lay a fast-fading gangster who, when asked for the names of the assassins, rigidly stuck to the criminal code of silence. Even, despite the fourteen bullets in his body, declaring with his dying breath: “nobody shot me”.
Over in the Kremlin the system that has developed, governing the control of public information, has much greater complexity.
It’s a sort of black-is-white code that involves slight changes according to the circumstances of the moment. Any laid-down procedure, law or even the simplest logic, is at the whim or mercy of its politburo.
One day it’s re-interpreting the rules relating to pensions and taxation; another it’s mis-translating critical WAO reports; then there was the investigation by our very own Elliott Ness, into possible maladministration of grant funding in Pembroke Dock into which phantom structures suddenly appear and long years of success in the building industry mis-characterised as fruitless and incompetent.
Now we learn that a “proper officer” will decide whether certain information, vital to the public’s understanding of the real issues concerning illegal pension payments, may be discussed.
I wonder, will the “proper officer” have the strength of character to behave properly or improperly when interpreting the 2007 Welsh legislation?
Don’t, as they say, hold your breath.
Having read the latest press release from County Hall, you have to wonder about the sanity of those involved.
Most commentators, on this website and those who have responded to The Pembrokeshire Herald AND The Western Telegraph, show they are well aware that the Auditor has not suggested the commission of a crime (an illegal act.)
The fact the Council CANNOT use its powers to help employees avoid tax is an entirely separate issue than the non-question about whether it can give employees pay rises (or “pay supplements” as Jamie Adams now calls them).
The narrow legalistic approach to this matter adopted by the IPPG simply demonstrates further that they are focused on the welfare of senior officers and their own SRAs than the welfare of the people of Pembrokeshire.
The release from the County Hall Führerbunker – yet again – ignores the moral question of whether it was right to assist very highly paid officers to avoid tax on their pensions, and illustrates how far from reality Jamie Adams is.
It’s not a question of legal or illegal, or even one of lawful or unlawful. It’s a question of right and wrong.
I fear Keanjo is right.
I spent some years in Nigeria at a time when just about anything could be deemed legal, probably still can. It is corruption, one result of which is great poverty in a land endowed with great wealth.
Incidentally the main suspect for the St Valentine’s Day massacre was one Jack McGurn, otherwise known as machine gun Jack. It was also fair to say Al Capone had cops in his pocket, again, that was corruption.
I presume the ‘proper officer’ is employed by the County Council, wouldn’t that mean his boss is the Chief Executive? If so how is that going to work?
I presume Keanjo is referring to the Monitoring Officer. I would not put much faith in his advice as it has been proved wrong in the past.
I would suggest in the future this becomes a full time position.