Stalled. By the Men who would be Mayor.

Both requests should have been easy and straightforward. But it's more like pulling deeply embedded teeth.  Is it just council habit?  Or is there something more sinister?

At this evening's Cabinet, I'd tabled a question to Jon Rogers about the suppression of 'public forum statements' from the on-line record of council meetings. They've been doing it for over a year now.

Yeah, I know, it sounds (and is) pretty dull. Until, that is, you read the powerful and well-informed Statements submitted to the same meeting, in a last ditch attempt to dissuade the Cabinet from selling off old peoples' homes and the like, while contracting out the whole range of 'care' services to the private sector. By tomorrow, those statements, part of the decision making process, will be all but invisible. The only 'evidence' for the Cabinet's decision will be the barely comprehensible reports from officers, in the language of officers.

I was told that the Statements are 'disappeared' because there have been occasional complaints from their authors, or from people named in them, that they never wanted them to go on record. When I suggested that maybe they could be redacted (they wouldn't be the first council papers with heavily blacked out details!) Jon Rogers agreed to look at that possibility. Presumably it hadn't occurred to whoever decided to suppress the whole documents in the first place.

My trump card should have been a test sentence in a Public Forum statement made to a recent Neighbourhood Partnership meeting – it included a request to be be kept on the public on-line record. An easy decision, you might think - but Jon Rogers ducked it (and he's a wannabe Mayor?) For some reason the Head of Legal Services had not given Jon the benefit of his advice on this part of my questions, so instead of an answer, the buck just got passed back to the Head of Legal Services to consider and reply.

So.... simple matter, still waiting.

…....................

“I have checked with the law, and I have checked Standards, and I have checked with our officers, and it is perfectly in order for me to be the Chair” 

So said Cllr Peter Abrahams (another aspirant mayor) as he dismissed any question of his own prejudice, at the start of the PROWG meeting last year that decided to split the Ashton Vale site into part Town Green, part stadium/development site. The rest is history. The Committee's decision is now thoroughly discredited, and we're all back at square one - and a few thousand quid worse off.

Wondering whether the advice was that he was relying on was as flawed as the meeting he chaired, I put in an FoIrequest for the advice that he cited. On the last of the 20 statutory days for reply, I got a response of sorts. It invokes 'Legal Professional Privilege” as a barrier to disclosure. To a lay mind, that might not make much sense – after all, what on earth could the problem be, the advice has already been summed up in a public meeting ?

I'm promised a clearer reply in a few days. I won't hold my breath. In Bristol, The Road to FoI responses is paved with emptypromises .

So.... simple matter, still waiting.

[The FoI request (though little else!) is in the public domain here  . If you'd like to follow it, there's an option to be emailed about any developments]