Sheila Oliver
Editor, Romiley Gazette
Also by this author
The “Vexatious? Moi?” series:
Book 1: Harcourt Street and Vale View Primary School
Book 2: Padden Brook
Book 3: The Bent Bypass (the A555/SEMMMS Manchester Airport Relief Road)
Book 4: Sandringham Road
Book 5: Offerton Precinct
Book 6: Marple Money (the Marple Active Communities Hub)
Book 7: The Wall of Silence — How Stockport Council Blocks the Questions It Doesn’t Want to Answer
Book 8: The Foggbrook Files
Book 9: Arms Length — The Story of Stockport’s Own Companies
Book 10: For Hire — The Consultants Councils Can’t Refuse
And, outside the series:
Learning Law From a Lawless Council (Stockport) — the Michael Parnell case
Contents
Introduction: The Price of Civic Duty
Chapter One: Tea, Sandwiches and the Nodding Dogs
Chapter Two: The Council Pravda
Chapter Three: The Lease Car That Wouldn’t Die
Chapter Four: Hotels, Whiteboards and a Free Breakfast
Chapter Five: Paying to Be Told How to Save Money
Chapter Six: What Got Cut While This Went On
Introduction: The Price of Civic Duty
A Manchester Evening News headline once put a figure on it: “£934,000 — the price of civic duty in Stockport.” This book is my attempt to show what that figure actually bought, year by year, invoice by invoice, Freedom of Information response by Freedom of Information response.
None of what follows is, on its own, a great scandal. A lease car here, a hotel stay there, a set of committee sandwiches, a refurbished office. Taken individually, each item is the kind of thing any organisation might reasonably spend money on. Taken together, over years, set against what the same council was simultaneously telling residents it could no longer afford, they add up to something else: a picture of an institution that found money remarkably easily for its own comfort, and remarkably reluctantly for almost everything else.
I have put one plain question to every figure in this book: would you spend your own money this way? And a second question, just as plain: what did Stockport Council say when I asked exactly that?
Chapter One: Tea, Sandwiches and the Nodding Dogs
Start small. Committee “teas” — samosas, sandwiches, delicate cream cakes, laid on for councillors and senior officers — cost Stockport council taxpayers £23,000 a year, a figure I have had unconfirmed reports has since risen to £31,000. Some committee meetings start at 6pm and are finished by twenty past; at a pinch, some run to 7pm. Many of the councillors attending are not in full-time work. Some do not work at all. The obvious question — why can’t they eat before they leave home, the way most people due somewhere for an hour do — has, as far as I can establish, never been satisfactorily answered. I have myself declined to check whether the £31,000 figure is accurate, for fear of being branded vexatious. That I should have to weigh up whether checking a council’s own spending figure might get me formally labelled a nuisance is, itself, a finding worth sitting with.
Not every councillor treats public money this way. Some, in my experience, work hard and take the role seriously. Others I would describe, in blunter terms, as nodding-dog freeloaders who treat members of the public with contempt and consider themselves unaccountable. Councillor Wright’s attendance at the Liberal Democrat party conference, funded by the council taxpayer, sits in this second category — a party political event, not a local government duty, paid for as though it were one.
A Children & Educational Services payment of £7,825.25 to The Jockey Club Racecourses in March 2011 raises a similar question mark, though this one remains genuinely open: an FOI request I filed into what the payment actually covered was still outstanding at the time of writing. Jockey Club Racecourses’ own promotional material — 81 function rooms, 230 syndicate rooms, seating for more people than the Royal Albert Hall, 40,000 free parking spaces — describes exactly the kind of venue capable of hosting a large council event. Whether that is what happened here, or whether the payment covered something more modest dressed up in an impressive invoice, is a question I leave open until the answer arrives. A council that had already spent £41,000 fighting the sale of a failed City bid, and would not say what a further payment to a racecourse was for, is not a council in the habit of making its own spending easy to follow.
EXHIBIT: FOI response, ref 5550, Stockport MBC
“The reasons recorded for using facilities included ‘good conference facilities’, rooms available and could cater for numbers involved. The people who have authorised the bookings have been a senior member of staff either at Head Level of Service level/Service Manager level or above.”
Chapter Two: The Council Pravda
Some of the money in this book was spent on the council’s own comfort. Some of it was spent on telling residents how well the council was doing — and specifically, how well its Liberal Democrat leadership was doing.
The vehicle for this was the Stockport Review, a council-produced freesheet I have taken to calling the Council Pravda. A letter published in the Stockport Express some years ago, from a resident who had separately written to then-Council Leader Dave Goddard, made the case against it better than I could myself. He had suggested to Goddard that the Review was nothing more than a vehicle to promote his party, and that its frequency — six issues a year — had no practical logic behind it; two a year, he argued, would do the job. Goddard’s reply was, in the letter-writer’s words, “quite condescending,” amounting to little more than it being nice to hear from local residents. So he went and got the numbers to prove his point.
They were worth getting. Across the six issues published in 2010, running to 112 pages including supplements, and excluding the “Your Council” pages entirely, Dave Goddard appeared in 17 photographs. Councillor John Smith appeared in eight. Councillor Helen Foster-Grimes was, in the letter-writer’s phrase, “not too far behind.” The same story and photographs about “getting active” — John Smith included, spade in hand — ran in both the January-February and the March-April special editions, months apart, as though nobody involved in producing it had noticed, or minded, the repetition. Not a single Conservative councillor or minister appeared in its pages throughout. A freesheet funded by every council taxpayer in the borough, regardless of how they voted, photographed only the councillors from one party.
A Freedom of Information request obtained the cost of those six 2010 issues: £147,000. The letter-writer did the arithmetic on what halving the frequency might have saved: something in the region of £1 million over ten years, money that could have gone toward services rather than photographs of councillors with spades.
This was not a one-off complaint from a single disgruntled reader. I raised the same question myself, prompted by something Councillor Mark Weldon had mentioned to me about the scale of savings the council needed to find. I asked the council’s FOI officer directly what the annual cost of the Civic Review actually was, copying in both Weldon and journalist Peter Devine at the Guardian Media Group’s Manchester title — the same Peter Devine whose reporting on council conduct appears elsewhere in this series.
EXHIBIT: FOI response, ref 1922, 9 June 2009
“I am writing in response to your request for information below (ref 1922). The total budget allocated is £147,538.” — Claire Naven, Data Protection & Freedom of Information Officer, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council
The Stockport Review has since been discontinued. I count raising the question, at the time, among the matters that contributed to my being branded vexatious — a label the council found easier to apply than an answer to why it was spending £147,538 a year on six issues of what was, by any fair reading of the evidence, a party political publication with the council’s own letterhead on it.
It is also worth setting this local story against the national picture at the time. A cross-party House of Commons committee, chaired by the Conservative MP John Whittingdale, was simultaneously investigating council-run freesheets across the country, warning that publications such as Hammersmith and Fulham’s H&F News “pose as, and compete with, local commercial newspapers and are misleading to the public,” and that it was “unacceptable that councils can set up publications in direct competition to local newspapers and that act as a vehicle for political propaganda.” The Audit Commission had already concluded, separately, that council publications were not technically a misuse of public funds — a verdict that says more about the narrowness of that test than about whether spending £147,538 a year on a party-favourable newsletter was a sensible use of a cash-strapped council’s money. All of this was unfolding against a backdrop in which around 60 regional newspapers closed in a single year, and media analyst Claire Enders warned that up to half the UK’s 1,300 regional titles could close within five years — the very papers, unlike the Stockport Review, that might actually have held the council to account.
Chapter Three: The Lease Car That Wouldn’t Die
No single item in this book better captures the gap between how the council spent and how it explained itself than the lease car scheme.
In 2011, Stockport Council spent over £1.284 million on lease cars for its staff. The figure was £1.287 million in 2008-9, and £1.347 million in 2009-10 — three years, three near-identical million-pound-plus totals, through a period the council was telling residents money was tight. Of the 284 staff using the scheme, roughly a third did not need a vehicle to do their jobs at all; for them, it was a straightforward added perk. The cars on offer were not modest runabouts: top-of-the-range BMWs, Mini Cooper Cabriolets, Audi TTs. And the majority of those 284 staff claimed an average business mileage of just 26 miles a week — not much more than a single round trip to a supermarket, for a car the council taxpayer was leasing, insuring, and maintaining. The scheme was eventually scheduled to close by September 2014, with transitional arrangements protecting existing users. “Well, that’s all right then!” is about the only honest response I have to offer.
The individual figures behind the scheme are, if anything, more revealing than the totals. A 2008 Freedom of Information request I filed established that the combined basic salaries of the Chief Executive, John Schultz, and the Assistant Chief Executive (Strategy, Performance & Governance) and Monitoring Officer, Jane Scullion, came to £210,129 for 2006/07 — with the Monitoring Officer role attracting a further 7.5% on top for those specific duties. Both posts came with a lease car, a taxable benefit, mileage, subsistence and a telephone allowance.
EXHIBIT: FOI response, ref 1178, 2006/07 benefits breakdown
Chief Executive (Schultz) — Telephone allowance: £134.40. Travel/subsistence: £917.99. Mileage: £103.72. Taxable benefit: £4,885.02. Lease car: £3,267.96.
Assistant Chief Executive/Monitoring Officer (Scullion) — Telephone allowance: £134.40. Travel/subsistence: £0. Mileage: £0. Taxable benefit: £2,045.79. Lease car: £1,177.08.
The obvious question followed the obvious figures: why did Ms Scullion have the benefit of a lease car if she claimed no mileage on it at all? Was she using it? If not, why was the council taxpayer paying for it? I put this question directly in May 2008, and the council’s answer was not an answer. It was a ruling that my request was vexatious under section 14(1) of the Freedom of Information Act.
EXHIBIT: FOI response, ref 1178, vexatious ruling
“This request is the latest in a series of requests relating to the salaries and benefits of John Schultz and Jane Scullion, some of which are very personal. We believe that the time taken to respond to this request and the resulting distraction of staff from their normal duties is disproportionate to any possible benefit in terms of the wider public interest. Your request has no serious purpose or value other than to you personally…”
A straightforward question about whether a named senior officer was using a taxpayer-funded car she claimed to never drive was, in other words, ruled to have no serious public interest attached to it at all.
The scheme’s broader monthly costs, drawn from later council records, show no sign of restraint even as the wider financial picture worsened: £308,935.37 in a single month in March 2012, £282,225.28 in December 2011, figures running into six figures in numerous other months across 2011 and 2012, and at least one month — April 2012 — recorded, without further explanation, as “nil apparently.” A scheme that can produce a £300,000 month and a nil month within weeks of each other is not a scheme anyone appears to have been actively managing.
Chapter Four: Hotels, Whiteboards and a Free Breakfast
Stockport Council owns two buildings with their own conference facilities: the Town Hall, and Fred Perry House. It has, nonetheless, spent substantial and repeated sums hiring space, and hospitality, elsewhere.
Councillors and senior officers stayed at the Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate — a well-appointed spa hotel — on at least three occasions (£549.00 for the LGA Conference, plus stays of £553.00 and £549.00), as well as at Holiday Inns Harrogate (£526.00), the Premier Inn at London King’s Cross (£631.80), the Rookery Hall Hotel in Nantwich (£580.00), and a Travelodge booking (£541.45). None of this, individually, is extravagant by the standards of national conference travel. Collectively, and set against a council that could not find £105,000 a year to keep its public toilets open, it reads differently: councillors and senior officers, luxuriating in the spa, returning to Stockport invigorated and refreshed, ready to carry on running our council in their own, inimitable way.
The pattern continues in the training and conference budget. A single Freedom of Information response (ref 5550) itemised over £16,500 in payments to Verve Venues (trading as De Vere Venues), Bredbury Hall Hotel, Alma Lodge Hotel and others — an OFSTED briefing here, a School Bursars Conference there, a Restorative Approaches training week costing £2,745.28 for 21 delegates, a Newly Qualified Teachers Conference at £1,535.58, an “IPL Conference” taking five rooms for 65 delegates at £2,395.33. A second response (ref 5482) added a further £2,667.50 in a single month for Children & Young People’s training, including a Primary Behaviour Support Service session at Cheadle House, and two payments totalling £3,600 at Bredbury Hall Hotel for a conference the council says was funded by delegate income rather than council funds — a fair point, and one I record without dispute, while noting that not every item on this long list came with the same explanation.
Two further items stand out for what they were for, rather than how much they cost. In October 2012, the council bought a breakfast buffet for 100 people at its Annual Developers Event, hosted free of charge in a vacant Grade A commercial unit and catered, for the first time, by Door 2 Door Brasserie — an event designed to showcase development opportunities in Stockport town centre to a hundred property developers and agents. The same year, the council had recently spent a further £41,000 fighting to prevent the redevelopment of Offerton Precinct, a real town-centre development opportunity already sitting half-empty a few miles away. Buying breakfast to attract developers to opportunities the council was simultaneously blocking is the kind of detail that does not need much editorialising from me.
And in January 2013, it emerged that the offices of incoming Chief Executive Eamonn Boylan had been given a £20,000 refurbishment — £15,000 on furniture, £2,500 on an interactive electronic whiteboard — obtained, like so much in this book, only because a Freedom of Information request I made forced it into the open. A memorial service for former councillor Maggie Clay, held in the Council Chamber in June 2009, cost a comparatively modest £502.50 for printing and refreshments, met from the Mayoralty budget — I include it here not as an example of waste, but as a reminder of how differently the council’s own money moved depending on who, and what, it was for.
Chapter Five: Paying to Be Told How to Save Money
Some of this book’s figures are simply wasteful. Others are something closer to absurd.
In 2008, with the council facing the need to find £7 million in savings, Stockport hired the consultancy firm Vanguard to teach its managers how to save money, through a business philosophy known as “systems thinking.” The bill for being taught how to economise came to more than £500,000. Whatever systems thinking actually achieved, it did not, on the evidence of the rest of this book, extend to the lease car scheme, the conference venue budget, or the Chief Executive’s whiteboard.
Legal spending followed a similarly circular logic. A 2008 Freedom of Information request I filed established that Stockport Council’s own Legal Services team employed 51 people, 26 of them with formal legal qualifications, at a combined cost of £933,870 a year — and that, despite this considerable in-house capacity, the council also retained external solicitors, including the firm Cobbetts, under a “best value” partnership arrangement. I asked why a council with 26 qualified lawyers on its own payroll kept turning to outside firms I considered to have a poor reputation, and to have already been proven to have lied. No satisfactory answer was given.
A separate Freedom of Information response revealed £836,054 paid in a single year in temporary staffing costs for Stockport’s schools — a category of spend that, by definition, exists because permanent staffing was not adequately planned or funded in the first place. And a 2007 request I made for the council’s total consultancy spend in 2005/06 and 2006/07 was met with the explanation that the council’s SAP accounting system had only gone live on 1 November 2006, so extracting the earlier figures would be “a huge task” — an answer that says as much about the quality of the council’s own record-keeping as it does about the figures themselves.
Chapter Six: What Got Cut While This Went On
None of the spending in this book happened in a vacuum. It happened alongside specific, named cuts to specific, named services — and the contrast is the whole point of setting the figures down together.
Stockport closed its last remaining public toilets — ten of them — to save £105,000 a year, leaving only the facilities in public parks, and rolling out a “community scheme” asking cafes, pubs and shops to let the public use theirs instead. £105,000 is less than the council spent on lease cars in a single busy month. It is a fifth of what it spent teaching its own managers how to save money. It is roughly what a modest refurbishment of a senior office, plus a year of committee teas, might cost put together.
Lollipop patrols became, as I have put it elsewhere, as rare as hen’s teeth. Transport for disabled children was cut. These are not abstractions; they are specific, named reductions in specific, named services that vulnerable residents relied on, made at the same time as the spending catalogued in the previous four chapters continued largely unexamined.
This is, in the end, what this book is about. Not any single lease car, or hotel stay, or conference booking — each defensible, in isolation, as the ordinary cost of running an organisation. It is about a council that found £1.284 million a year for lease cars without apparent difficulty, and £105,000 a year for public toilets a bridge too far. It is about an institution that ruled a question about a named officer’s unused company car too vexatious to answer, while spending £500,000 being taught, by outside consultants, how to save money it could not find in its own accounts. Every figure in this book came from the council’s own records, extracted one Freedom of Information request at a time, very often against resistance. That I should have had to fight this hard to establish how my own money was spent is, itself, the final entry on this book’s long list of what public money in Stockport has been wasted on.
