Dear Mr Tuckley,
You have complained in your three page letter dated 4 December of the expense
involved in its preparation but it was your decision to explore avenues of very
little interest to me and ignore the opportunity to resolve the complaint the
honest way. I suggested more than once that you simply interview those
councillors best able to observe proceedings at the Public Realm meeting, a
course which may have led to a quick and inexpensive resolution.
I know that some councillors would be happy to be interviewed because I have
written assurance of it but it would seem that you prefer to listen only to the
subject of my complaint. Perhaps you did not notice that the witnesses
supposedly supporting councillor Bacon have not reported the disruption she
claims to have seen and two of those three witnesses have told me, one in
writing, that they did not authorise the statements attributed to them.
Not being at the meeting and relying
for evidence on the subject of the complaint who had no clear line of sight to me looks very much like deliberate
malfeasance on your part but before I pass the evidence to outside bodies I would
be obliged if you could state clearly if you have found anyone who disputes that
I sat alone and silent from just before the meeting began until it was taken into
Closed Session. If I am to report your failure to investigate my complaint properly
it is important that I should do so free of the possibility that you merely missed the
main point accidentally, hence my final request.
Another interpretation of your letter is that the truth is of no consequence as
exclusions are acceptable if one person fails to comply with your rules but
every member of the public present is known to each other. A dangerous precedent
which only a thoroughly corrupt council could contemplate.
You have said that if I wish to avoid such perverse rulings in future I
should take steps to disassociate myself from other regular attendees at
meetings. May I remind you that I and the group to which you refer were all
sitting exactly as directed by committee officer John Adams. I was as far from
the group as it is possible to get without encroaching on councillors’
territory. What additional steps do you suggest I take?
You have accused me of making trivial complaints which may suggest that an
incompetent has drafted your letter. Apart from a couple of requests to
photograph a meeting and a response to an email initiated by a council officer, my
correspondence in the past three years has related only to criminal acts
committed by Bexley council. I long ago decided that it would be too time
consuming to involve myself with anything less.
The first was the matter of the obscene blog (May 2011) traced to a
councillor’s IP address which you said at the time was “a serious criminal
offence” prompting your own letter to the police, albeit one in which you
attempted to pin the crime on me.
From 2011 to recent times I made no further complaint, not even after councillor
Bacon so spectacularly mismanaged the Public Realm meeting last June and would
have continued my no comment policy had I not discovered Bexley council
distributing libellous material under the Freedom of Information Act. It was the
untruthful content which prompted my complaint not the data protection issues.
Your suggestion that placing the material on my website negates your data
breach is child-like in its naivety. As your FOI officer is fond of saying when
refusing requests, a response under FOI is not private to the recipient, it is
in law a public distribution. Even if it were otherwise, my own publication is
not comparable because I allowed the reader to see everything in context. It is
called total transparency, a concept you may find alien.
Councillor Bacon’s account supported by a long covering letter was an almost
wholly untruthful set of fabrications she hoped might conceal her mistakes. It
libelled several members of the public and had I taken your advice to dissociate
myself from the recipient I might never have learned of it.
My complaint is that the information distributed was false, the procedural
errors are minor incidentals and that remains my view.
Your letter says it is a Stage 3 response to my email of 28th October but I
fail to see how it is. That email asked you to enlighten me as to which part of my
original complaint was “hostile, abusive, offensive and unreasonable”. It was
clearly none of those things. The email received no Stage 1 response and your
Stage 3 makes no reference to its content whatsoever.
In addition to the confirmation sought in my third paragraph, please tell me
how that complies with your own Code of Conduct on complaints handling.
Yours sincerely,
Malcolm Knight
10th December 2013