5 November - It seems I am Billy No-mates

It was mentioned here a few days ago that when the unmentionable Reform UK candidate demanded £4,800 compensation and the removal of what little General Election coverage there was from Bonkers there was quite a lot of dithering on my part on how to respond. Over the years quite a lot of Bexley Councillors have given me insights into the candidate’s modus-operandii and as I formulated my response I wondered about using some of that information. It seemed appropriate to let them know the direction in which my mind was drifting.

When Ms. F. last got litigious one of my Labour Councillors asked for a copy of all the legal documents that led to her downfall and the other offered a great deal of support in other ways. Neither responded to my email although their Leader Stefano Borella did when he heard about recent developments thus confirming his reputation as Mr. Nice Guy.

Rather more Conservatives had rallied round when I was accused of harassing the aforesaid and charged by Kent police. More than one was secretly telephoning support right up to the day before my Court appearance and their numbers remain on my phone contacts list to this day.

One described the litigious lady in graphic terms and has continued to do so in recent months. So I wrote to all the probable supporters to let them know that I might in anonymously vague terms refer to their support when responding to the solicitor who was demanding the £4,800.

When one considers that I only mentioned the candidate’s chequered past in Bexley because I was asked to do so by local Conservatives it didn’t seem to be much to ask. In the event I did not say anything about history except to suggest a search of Bexley Council’s website might be productive.

Not a single Conservative Councillor replied to my email (caveat below).

Not the Councillor who sent me a load of emails and was in contact by phone too when I was charged with harassment. Not the Councillor who was phoning me monthly to discuss local issues. Not the Councillor who called on me at home seeking advice and assistance. Not the Councillor who had emailed in a different context to the effect that he was always ready to help and certainly not the small number who pretend to be friends when I go to Council meetings.

Were they under instructions not to reply? It has happened before.

This poses something of a dilemma. Will I be impartial when reporting on their activities in future? Will I find some subtle way of naming them?

Ahh, the caveat…

Three Conservative Councillors contacted me in secret by alternative means. One supportive, one very helpful with a few choice words that he might use if in my position, and another who undertook to check over my draft response before it was sent.

It is more than three months since the response was posted; six pages of letter and two more of appendices. I didn’t include, but referred to, my two hour audio recording of the interview I did with a couple of knowledgeable property businessmen. No one has ever heard it apart from myself and I doubt publicity would be welcome in certain quarters.

Since then there has been total silence. My dossier of inside information may have proved to be too much of an obstacle. I might have relished making it all available but i seems it isn’t going to happen

Note: For the record I was charged, unusually perhaps, by the police but the CPS dropped the harassment charges when they read what I had said fewer than 24 hours before I was due in Court.

 

3 November - Vexatious or not? We have the definitive answer

The argument has been going on for a couple of years now and I haven’t always been 100% supportive of @tonyofsidcup who asks Bexley Council an awful lot of questions; sometimes in person but more often via Freedom of Information Requests. Quite how many it is hard to say but in the region of 100 over a couple of years.

Supportive or not I have been pleased to report the answers and his even more frequent non-answers because without people like @tony how would anyone know what our Council gets up to?

On reflection I was probably being a bit too critical with the X Direct Message seen here and originally sent to a Councillor friend six months ago but it illustrates how my support for his questions was occasionally strained. There were a lot of them and sometimes I felt @tony was flogging a dead horse and should learn when to give up. One thing I have learned over the years is that Bexley Council revels in intransigence and it will absolutely never admit to being in the wrong.

My loyalties were similarly divided when the Council Leader delivered her rant against @tony exactly a year ago. From past experiences I know that Bexley Council encourages follow up questions because they do not completely or honestly answer the first one. It is frustrating for the questioner and expensive for the taxpayer and I have never been sure if the reluctance to give a straight answer is one of political direction or management incompetence.

In the following audio clip the Leader illustrates perfectly her lack of understanding of how badly the Council answers difficult questions if it answers them at all.

Everything is marked by the stench of arrogance and infallibility.

Teresa O’Neill speaks: This is a long clip. At the very least listen from 3:15.

I am not going to repeat previous reports on the saga - those interested can look through the Index - except to say that new broom Kate Bonham, presumably anxious to make a good impression with the Leader, decreed @tony to be vexatious on 1st December 2023. See below.

She had been in post for just two months on a salary of £113,749 plus an allowance of £5,415.

Kate was backed by the Information Commissioner who was less than impressed with FOI responses being reproduced on BiB. Let the public know about Bexley Council? That will never do!

So undeterred, @tony went to law. On 24th October the Court gave its verdict.

Is Bexley Council every bit as bad as we imagined and has it broken the law yet again? And what will our Teresa think of her Kate if it has?

To be fair I have been of the opinion that Kate Bonham has in some ways been a breath of fresh air and I will offer the guessed excuse that she was badly advised by the legal team which in the past has been extraordinarily incompetent. Losing in Bexley Magistrate’s Court and getting its Team Leader reported to the CPS.

Management in Bexley has always been poor and I’d guess some parts of it still are.

Kate Bonham, Deputy Director, Finance & Corporate Services, 1st December 2023.

@tony was given a clear run in Court because Bexley Council, arrogant as ever, didn’t bother to show up.

According to the Court Judgment @tony made a bit of a thing about him providing a public service through this blog. He may be right but it would have been nice if he had told me first. However @tony’s real opposition came from the Information Commissioner who provided a 262 page evidence bundle.

@tony told the Court that with no real journalists operating in the area it was up to amateurs like him to dig up the facts. The ICO contended that some of his questions were “manifestly unreasonable” and the remainder were “vexatious”. There was a single exception but @tony was not really interested in that one so I won’t complicate matters by detailing it here.

The Court said that the difference between manifestly unreasonable and vexatious was “vanishingly small”.

The ICO/Bexley case that @tony’s questions were “self-serving” was thrown out despite Bexley Council saying they were because it had seen no evidence that @tony made the information available elsewhere. (Maybe if Bexley didn’t block Bonkers on their web servers they might be better informed.)

The Court said that none of the FOIs appeared to be “burdensome” and the number was large mainly because @tony chose to break them down into small bites rather than submit a massive one as a regular journalist might do.

The one question which Bexley Council deemed too expensive to answer (£630 in connection with ULEZ) was deemed to be an exaggeration. The Court estimated that reviewing 526 short emails would average just a handful of seconds each against the Council’s contention it would be at least three minutes.

You can see which way the Court was going can’t you?

I have had a copy of the Court Judgment for a few days and spoken about it to a couple of Councillors. Feedback from within the Ivory Tower is that there is a good number of red faces and not a little annoyance. I hope it is with the Legal Team who may have shown the level of competence to be expected of lawyers who have failed to make their way outside a public service sinecure.

The question now is; will Teresa O’Neill apologise to @tony for the broadcast attempted humiliation delivered a year ago?

Note: As this report has been published later than I would have liked, another blog has already published a summary. It is not correct in every detail and @tony submitted corrections.
The alternating use of @tony’s pseudonym (X handle) on Bonkers and his real name is at the direction of the man himself. I am sure you must know who ‘both’ are by now and there is no point in going against his wishes.

 

2 November (Part 2) - Everything comes to he who waits

It possibly helps to be very close to the Planning Committee Chairman’s wife but Bexley’s favoured developer has been getting his way with things for far longer than that. So maybe it is no more than a very bad look.

Quite often applications have initially met with refusal but all have been successful later.

The last time that Mr. Singh and his site at 238 Woolwich Road were featured on these pages was just over five months ago. 238 Woolwich Road is where Mr. Singh built his notorious concrete bunker which strayed just a little into Lesnes Abbey Woods and succeeded in driving his neighbour out because they could stand the eyesore no more. Singh was their only possible buyer.

Despite the initial knuckle rapping by Bexley Council, permission for the bunker to stay came a couple of years later.

An application to rebuild the associated house (238) was made in 2023 and a variation submitted in May 2024. (24/01647/FUL.)

A two storey extension for which permission has been granted with a conditions. The building has to look satisfactory and in keeping with the existing building. Big deal! I had assumed that that would be a given.

This report is a little late, permission was granted in July.

 

2 November (Part 1) - Still aboard the gravy train

Every couple of months I meet what is left of the original BiB crew. One deaf, one nearly blind, (the other half of the group dead) and me as Uber driver. Last Tuesday one of the questions was “whatever happened to Will Tuckley, is he still at Tower Hamlets?” To which I could only add “no” and little else.

If you have been here for ever you may remember that Will Tuckley was the Chief Executive imported to Bexley from Croydon after the later jailed (suspended sentence) Bexley Council Leader fell for a sob story from Tuckley’s predecessor. He claimed that he had to retire on health grounds. Serious heart problems, so off he went with a reputed £300,000 Golden Goodbye and a £50,000 annual pension which you are still paying. A couple of months later he popped up in a senior position at Hammersmith & Fulham Council.

Tuckley came attached to a story that while in Croydon he ran over and killed a man in a Council car park notorious for being frequented by people high on drugs and it was all hushed up and not reported. It transpired that Tuckley was great mates with the borough Police Commander who managed to follow him to Bexley.

While in Bexley Will Tuckley became notorious for all sorts of things one of which saw Greenwich Police investigate him for Misconduct in a Public Office. They had so much evidence that they had no alternative but to send a file to the CPS.

While he was being considered for prosecution Will was recruited by the Government appointed Commissioner to run Tower Hamlets Council which was in big trouble. The aforesaid Borough Commander and his Deputy went there too.

Former Police Inspector Mick Barnbrook wrote to the Commissioner to ask if he knew that Will Tuckley might soon be in jail but he was dismissed as a lying racist. Tuckley was appointed while the CPS carelessly lost the Police file.

All was quiet for a couple of years until Will Tuckley was caught up in a Tower Hamlets scandal and reported in the Sunday Times. A property developer bribed the usual Tower Hamlets suspects with £2 million and the allegation was that the Chief Executive failed to notice and only tipped off the police when the news was about to break.

Despite that, Tuckley limped on in Tower Hamlets until March 2023 when £217,844 fell into his hands. The Council’s 2022/23 accounts show total payments at very nearly half a million.

Then what?

Enquiries reveal he has landed a plum job in Slough. A near bankrupt (billion plus pounds of debt and deficit) Council that could afford to pay Tuckley £1,100 a day.

BBC report.

One Council, two Chief Executives on the make. How do they get away with it?

 

1 November - Incompetence rules the roost in Bexley

As you will likely know, this blog began in 2009 because I discovered that Bexley Council was blatantly lying to hide the effects of management incompetence. I naively thought it must be a ‘one off’ but Council lies kept Bonkers in regular employment until 2016 at least when some tailing off was detected.

Way back in 2010 lying proved to be not the least of the problems and Bonkers borrowed the slogan Dishonest, Vindictive, Criminal from the pages of The News Shopper because it was a succinct summary of the attitudes displayed by Councillors and Management alike.

But that seemed to fade away too leaving only the persistent theme of management failure. Bexley has seen managers who led the borough to Inadequate OFSTED results, managers who failed to prevent a child death, another who, contrary to advice, made a staffing cut which led directly to the death of an old lady in their care. A legal team that lied to the extent that the police took a keen interest in their activities and a legal team who more than once took residents to Court and lost. The word used by the judge to describe their activities was “unconscionable”.

More recently new management conducted a staff survey which revealed the poorest of management styles within Bexley Council including bullying and remoteness. And how could anyone forget Kevin Taylor’s lame attempt to justify the blocking of a road by one of his staff members?

Even more recently we have seen @tonyofsidcup branded vexatious for a series of Freedom of Information requests the legality of which seemed to be more than a little dubious.

@tony is not a man to take things lying down and made a legal challenge. Over coming days the details will appear here but meanwhile it is fair to say that Bexley Council has been routed and humiliated and the principal reason is management incompetence. Heads should roll but of course they won’t.