15 March - Coincidence or cause for optimism?
Members of the Bexley Council Monitoring Group (BCMG) have suggested to me that something must be afoot with Bexley council’s perverse policy, no, I mean rule book issue, by which their consent to allowing a question at a Full Council meeting is conditional on them publishing the questioner’s name and address on the world wide web. It’s probably unwise for anyone to assume anything where Bexley council is concerned and the BCMG’s advice to me when I first bumped into them to remember that Bexley’s default position is to “lie and cheat” has too often been correct. Nevertheless they point to the following recent developments.
• A letter seeking the reason for the address policy sent to chief executive
Will Tuckley on 11th December 2012 was answered on 4th January but only to the
extent that he said “The Council's agreed protocol currently requires the names
and addresses of individuals submitting public questions to Council meetings to
be published in the agenda” which strongly suggested that he had no reasonable answer.
A follow up question remains unanswered.
• A
telephone enquiry to the Information Commissioner at the beginning of
February extracted from them the opinion that Bexley council’s cavalier attitude
towards data handling was was “a clear breach” of the Data Protection Act.
• By the middle of February the BCMG had submitted at least two questions
for the next Full Council meeting which included a request for them not to
publish their addresses. A definitive response is still awaited.
• By the end of February Bexley council had
withdrawn its Constitution from its website. It is still unavailable.
• On 1st March at my
meeting with former Bexley police Commander Victor Olisa,
his DCI, expressed shock when learning of the council’s policy having
previously pointed out that releasing addresses not normally in the public
domain can have unfortunate consequences.
• On 4th March the BCMG asked Bexley council why its proposed questions to council had
not been either accepted or rejected. By then one was two full months old, the others nearer six weeks.
• Ten days later the BCMG was once again advised by the Head of
Committee Services that he was not yet in a position to give an answer.
The
ICO’s formal response to Bexley council’s probable law breaking will be a long
time coming as such decisions always are and the Constitutional Review Panel has not
sat for 23 months and no future meeting is planned.
According to the Head of Committee Services “the Constitution Review Panel has delegated
authority to officers to make such changes”. It must be hoped that freed from the malevolent
intentions of council leader Teresa O’Neill the officers will feel they are able to take full
account of all the relevant laws of this country. Something that O’Neill too often in the past
has felt does not apply to her.
Or maybe the BCMG is guilty of counting too many chickens.