North Lanarkshire Update

Back in December (2014), the Scottish Information Commissioner (SIC) upheld my FoI appeal against North Lanarkshire and directed the Council to provide me with a formerly secret report to the Council's Corporate Management Team (CMT) dated 11 August 2005.  

I have published several posts about this document already, but it really is a shocking piece of work which reflects very badly on the Council if you ask me, so much so that I have been forced to write to North Lanarkshire again regarding crucial pieces of information that are still missing.

Now I have seen a lot of council reports in my time although never one quite as poor and ridiculous as this CMT document which is missing financial information about the Social Work Department where all the Home Carers are based, of course.

Is it just me or does anyone else find that to be a bit peculiar, very strange or just downright unbelievable? 

Because I really can't imagine how the highest paid officials in Scotland's fourth largest council could sit there reading a hugely significant report which has blank boxes and missing information about the costs of equal pay in the Social Work Department, for example - where the largest single group of equal pay claimants are based.   

So let's hope that NLC can clear up the mystery soon because I can hardly sleep at night for wondering whether the Council will send its chief executive (Gavin Whitefield) and head of human resources (Iris Wylie) to the Employment Tribunal to explain and defend this shambles. 

I have to admit I'd pay good money to see that spectacle and so the Council has a big decision to make on Monday (16 February) after the latest inconclusive round of settlement talks.

Maybe it's all just delay and obfuscation which is why I favour the whole business going back to the tribunal where these issues would be dragged out into the open for once and all.

As Lord Nolan once said, "Daylight is the best disinfectant!".  

P.S. 

If any readers have ever heard of another public body producing a such major report, complete with such glaring 'errors', omissions and poor advice (and two Paragraphs both numbered 2.5), please do let me know as I'm planning to submit a suitable entry to the Guinness Book of Records.          

Dear NLC,

Scottish Information Commissioner Decision, Reference: 201402173

Thank you for your letter dated 27 January 2015 and for your attempt to clarify the position with regard to the CMT report and its various Appendices.

I completely accept that you are not responsible for the appalling state of these documents which were, of course, written and considered by the most senior officials within North Lanarkshire Council.

Nonetheless I think it is fair to say that the documents are of a shocking standard and they appear to have been put together by someone struggling with basic numeracy and literacy skills.  

The body of the report is littered with incredible mistakes (e.g. two Paragraphs numbered 2.5), but curiously the report does not contain a list of the enclosures which would explain exactly how many appendices existed at the time the CMT considered hugely important new pay arrangements affecting many thousands of employees back in August 2005. 

Four of the original seven appendices appear to have been annotated incorrectly and the pages of the various appendices have not been numbered sequentially which is the administrative standard I would expect expected in any professional, well-run organisation. 

So while I appreciate your efforts to bring some clarity to the chaos in recent days, I would be grateful if you could respond to the following points:

1 Appendices 2 and 3

Paragraph 3.3 of the original CMT report makes specific mention of an Appendix 2 and an Appendix 3. In other words these were two quite separate documents addressing different issues. I reproduce the wording of Paragraph 3.3 below for easy reference:

Paragraph 3.3

"A breakdown of the proposed costs for pay model NLC5C for the council overall and by department is attached as appendix 2, together with a departmental report for the green and red circles at year zero in appendix 3."

Appendix 2 (as it currently exists) does indeed provide costings for the council overall and there is also a further breakdown of these figures by the various council departments which is exactly what Paragraph 3.3 describes, in terms, before going on to say that there is an additional and separate departmental report on the green and red circles in Appendix 3.

The words "departmental report" are not used in connection with any other Appendix and must relate, in my view, to a document which contains a narrative, possibly one explaining the concentration of "green and red circles" in particular departments or the movement of "green and red circles" in response to the different pay models under consideration by the CMT. 

Paragraph 6.7 of the CMT report (which is reproduced in full below) also refers to a separate Appendix 3 and the content, as you can read, is about "amendments to the departmental hierarchies" which is a quite different issue from the "breakdown of proposed costs" which is the subject matter of Appendix 2.

Paragraph 6.7

"The cost changes, as a result of amendments to the departmental hierarchies, are outlined in appendix 3."

In light of the Council's bizarre and cack-handed handling of this whole affair, I think the only logical conclusion to draw is  that the original Appendix 3 is missing and has been deliberately removed from the body of the CMT report sometime after August 2005.

2 Appendix 5

For some reason the financial information relating to Social Work is missing from Appendix 5. The columns dealing with TOTAL SALARIES APPLYING 1BV15C and TOTAL SALARIES (PLUS 2.95% PAY AWARD) are empty unlike all the other departmental and sub-departmental headings.

Social Work represents one of the largest groups of equal pay claimants and includes Home Carers, for example. Clearly this information must have been provided in the original CMT report, presumably via the council's Finance Department. 

So my question is when and why this information was 'redacted' from the report and by whom.

3 Appendix 7

Again in Appendix 7 the same financial information relating to Social Work is missing which I find quite extraordinary. I cannot believe the Council's Corporate Management Team approved a report with such a serious omission in the financial data, so I can only conclude that the details were again removed at a later date which raises the same questions: when, why and by whom?      

I would be grateful if you could now investigate these matters and provide the missing information as quickly as possible. 

I would also like to see a copy of the documents submitted originally by North Lanarkshire Council to the Employment Tribunals as this might help to explain what has been going on with the numbering of Appendices, so please regard my email as a formal FOI request for this specific information to be released. 

I intend to share this email with the Scottish Information Commissioner and look forward to your reply. 

Kind regards

Mark