A success for citizen scrutiny?

Plus: the futility of public participation, secret decisions and secret sales of Bristol assets under Green-led committees, and power.

It’s the end of the year and in this last edition of Joanna’s Newsletter, I have been pondering the format and the consistency. I aim for at least one story a month regardless of everything else that is going on. For a fleeting moment I had the idea of rebranding to something a bit more ‘news’ like. There are various new Substacks run as regional sites at the moment; there’s London Centric (set up by ex-Guardian media editor), The Mill (which has attracted hundreds of thousands in funding), the Edinburgh Minute, and a few more.

I quickly shut that thought down. My newsletter is aimed at showing what a member of the public can do with the laws and norms that govern what we can know about our council.

Local authorities are the lowest level of government to the public. They provide services and are governed by various statutes designed to make their work open to the public. We legally have the right to know what they do in our names and how they spend our money. This is not up for debate and yet the behaviour of our representatives often fails to provide the transparency they are legally obligated to provide.

My ethos is if I can do it, any member of the public can do it. I can’t write every day because I have more than full-time obligations right now. However, I persist in scrutinising the council every day.

I’m therefore sticking with Joanna’s Newsletter and not switching to fleetingly considered title of The Futility of Questioning Power.

Land giveaway by the ex-mayor, at Audit

In October 2022, I wrote about how the Rees Labour administration gave away council land for 999 years, at no cost, to a club the mayor was associated with.

The Monitoring Officer of Bristol City Council has a legal obligation to maintain a register of interests for all members. There had been no mention on the ex-mayor’s register of interests that he was an ambassador for the club. There was no verbal declaration at the meeting and no follow-up mention of his interest in the written decision.

I wrote on this Substack about the land transfer but also put a complain it to the external auditors Grant Thornton. Under the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014, residents have the right to inspect council accounts, once a year, and to put in complaints about decisions and spending.

The complaint could not be accepted for 2022 so, I put it in again in 2023 during the appropriate objection period. After several requests for a response, two years after the article, October 2024, I finally had an answer.

I was sent a statement of reasons (which I was reminded are confidential) and was told that a summary of the response would be sent to the council’s Audit Committee. I am allowed to publish and refer to the public response but cannot talk about what was sent in confidence. One must question who is protected by this restriction.

EXTERNAL AUDITOR - The auditor appointed by the Public Sector Audit Appointments (PSAA) to carry out an audit of the Council’s accounts. The current auditor is Grant Thornton UK LLP.

Ex-mayor Marvin Rees and Empire Fighting Chance are not mentioned together in the report by the external auditors. The recommendations for declarations of interest are —from what I can see— bundled together with the Stepping Up Leadership CIC case study.

The case study notes that the Stepping Up investigation occurred due to a Bristol resident’s objection. In fact it was two residents who combined their objections into one on the recommendation of the auditors. I was one of those residents; qualified auditor and accountant Mike Oldreive was the other.

I had been requesting information on Stepping Up — among many other things — for years. In 2022, I discovered that the deputy mayor’s company had been given a contract to deliver a council programme she had set up and with a consultant she had recommended and brought into the council.

I was then subject to an abusive pile-on on Twitter by the ex-deputy mayor Asher Craig and some other women whose organisation receive public funding. I outline a variety of abuse in the following post but it’s useful to note that one specific part was in relation to Stepping Up CIC. I put in a complaint about the abuse and an objection.

The result of the objection was in this year’s audit papers.

Note that I also put in an objection about the ex-mayor and EFC but that was not specifically named.

The inclusion of these recommendations, and the investigation into the objection — which happened only because Mike complained about the initial response — was a result. The publication of it meant that the local media finally wrote about a practice that had been going on for years, and councillors finally discussed it.

Asher Craig has now left the council, after not standing for re-election. Her company was given another contract by the council via the Bottleyard film production company. This was not addressed.

The FOIs for which I was insulted and abused revealed that her company had been given seed capital by the council-owned Bristol Waste. This was published in Companies House. When Bristol Waste were questioned, they clarified that the money was a ‘loan’ that arose from Bristol Waste paying invoices for a company run by the other director of Craig’s company. Repayments were requested only after this was questioned; and Bristol City Council provided no publication of relevant transactions to say that an executive member of the administration was being given money by a council company.

At times like this, I come back to the fundamentals of my role. I write about what is going on from the information I have, and the limitations of what a resident can do. I do what I can but without the knowledge of an auditor and accountant, I would have known a lot less. I believe the only reason the Stepping Up case study was eventually published was because Mike knew enough to question the processes.

Councillors have demanded an independent inquiry into links between Bristol’s former deputy mayor and three companies that the city council paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to provide diversity and leadership training. Bristol247

Secrets in politics

In December, the council leader, Green Cllr, Tony Dyer, was asked questions from members of the public. One was by Suzanne Audrey, about the vague replies received from public forum queries.

In response, Dyer said:

“The move to the committee system has meant that the decisions made by elected officials are far more transparent than in the past and offers a greater opportunity for the public to ask questions to us as elected officials.

“While this system is not yet perfect, I do believe that the quality of answers given during public meetings has improved since May, and that more people are engaging with the democratic process as a result.”

I found this an astonishing response, that the quality of answers given has improved since May. In fact, I have had more issues with getting answers than ever before.

For three months and two audit committee meetings, I have not even had my questions received, acknowledged or replied to. I finally managed to have a member of Democratic Services acknowledge that they had seen them three months after I first tried. It was by then too late supposedly for them to be answered so I asked for them to be published as a statement.

It is within the chair’s discretion to allow late questions or statements. The then-chair of audit, Tim Rippington, did not reply to my emails. The public forum items don’t seem to have been published at all for November 2024.

For Cllr Dyer’s committee, Strategy and Resources, public forum questions have been anything but helpful or clear.

In September, I asked to see financial information about a company which had millions poured into it by the public and was being sold off with little discussion. That was refused on the basis of commercial confidentiality. I also asked why the responses to a public consultation were hidden. This was also because of commercial confidentiality.

I asked to see a report which the Bristol public paid £444k for in relation to home to school transport. This policy failed and was being revised. That was refused because the policy had already been implemented — a nonsensical argument regardless of reality.

My question about the £444k report was initially refused until I pointed out that they were actually discussing the item and its policy agenda at the meeting.

The Green-led committee of S&R continues to sell of public assets, as Labour did before them. In December, the Greens disclosed they would also be selling off two buildings that would not be disclosed.

Two properties owned by the council could also be sold, however their details were kept secret. Councillor Tony Dyer said they were “subject to commercial confidentiality”. Bristol247

How could a secret sale be of benefit to the public who own the properties? The council holds these assets in trust for the public. They manage them for us. What they do with our assets should be of interest to everyone.

Various other questions to public forum by mothers affected by spying by the council have been refused more than once.

Mike Oldreive’s questions to audit were refused in what the then-Audit Chair admitted were unconstitutional grounds.

Secret Decision

https://democracy.bristol.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=664&MId=11222

In November, the Dyer-led committee of Strategy and Resources took a confidential decision that was so confidential, we the public cannot know what decision they took in our names and with our money and assets. We can’t know what the matter is related to at all.

The reasons are listed as “is exempt information if and so long, as in all the circumstances of the case, the public interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information”.

The people deciding whether something is in the public interest are the same ones who allowed Stepping Up CIC to benefit from public funds, the same ones who allowed the non-disclose of interest in a company before making a decision in its favour and the same ones who produced no formal complaint against members for years.

I am worried about even the pretence of a democratic process happening in Bristol.

Scrutiny

As I’ve been writing about for a while now, scrutiny is not as straightforward as picking up a local newspaper and trusting you’ll find out everything you need to make the right decisions.

The public need more tools, more information about what to ask and about which laws govern local politics.

I have put together a website where I monitor councillor interests. You can find it at the following link: https://stillawake.com/cllrDashboard.html.

I have been studying so as to pick up more tools for scrutinising local government. I graduated with a Masters in Data Science in November and I am currently studying a course in Accountancy with the OU.

One thing to note, if like me, you have thought of the media as manufacturing a type of consent for public behaviour. How does that work when the people in power don’t even get mentioned by the media? All the things I write about are mostly never published in the press. That’s why I write about them.

If they aren’t mentioned in the press, and the people behind the power being exercised are rarely mentioned publicly, then how does the media mediate for them?

We need to start looking beyond what is published. As Aeron Davis writes in The Mediation of Power, “many of the processes that significantly influence the shape of power involve multiple and intensive forms of private communication. Such processes and communication forms take place outside the public sphere and without the reference to the majority of consumer-citizens.”

As we proceed, “we need to attend to those aspects of power that are least accessible to observation: that, indeed, power is at its most effective when least observable” (Lukes, 2005: 1). What is meant by power? one definition includes “the power of actors to make decisions, and set the agendas for decision-making, that benefit themselves to the possible detriment of others” (Dahl, 1961; as cited in Davis 2007).

The decision makers at Bristol City Council are the ones who—naively, carelessly or on purpose—decide for us with our resources. They are ever-increasingly doing so in secret. That’s something to keep in mind.

And on that note, I wish us all a scrutineering 2025. Keep asking questions.