2 October (Part 1) - Bexley Council’s LGO failures with more to come
For the past couple of months I have been keeping an eye on the Local
Government Ombudsman’s website because a reader tipped me off that after a year
or more of fruitless struggling with Bexley Council he took his case to the Ombudsman and won.
My LGO site monitoring has taught me nothing so far except that the LGO refuses
to accept most of the complaints made to it and of those that it decides to accept,
most are rejected. If any are progressed to the point that Bexley Council is
found guilty of maladministration you can be sure that things must have been pretty serious.
The three that went against the Council in the first three months of 2023 are tabulated below.
However the BiB reader’s complaint is yet to appear on the LGO website and I
have the impression that the complainant will be reluctant to allow it to be
further detailed here. To those who follow Bexley politics closely, particularly
on X, his is a name that will be well known.
Not for publication, not yet anyway, he told me about the meeting at which his lawyer called out a Bexley
manager’s lies and she began to scream hysterically about being patronised and
threatening to close the meeting if challenged again. Such is the quality of Bexley’s senior management team.
I only ever made one complaint to the LGO. It was about Teresa O’Neill reporting me to the police for the unforgivable
crime of being critical of Councillors.
it was rejected on the grounds that anyone can make a crime report to the police and it
is up to them to sort the wheat from the chaff. I suppose there is logic in
that but it breaks down somewhat when the police are under some sort of obligation to
the complainant, as they certainly were back in 2011.