In the submissions made in a recent report on ethics in local government commissioned by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), I can hear the frustration and anger in this councillor's voice echo my own; "many parish or town councils are run extremely badly. This can range from incompetence to people trying to run councils as their own personal fiefdom to cronyism to various degrees of corruption and in some cases out and out theft of public money."
The moral failures of councillors and charity managers run a gamut of reasons, from criminal convictions for 21 Doncaster councillors to the five year rudderless voyage of Walberswick Parish Council because of their failure to keep its records properly and the recklessness of charity Kids Company in spending £42 million of public money driven, its defenders argue, by a crisis in the care for young people and the failings in government policy they exposed.
Someone with experience in local government might agree that the problems of ethical standards and transparency are not just within national institutions, elected councils or in big charities but in many un-elected and self-appointed bodies who do so much of the the heavy lifting in communities. Most are unincorporated associations or small charities collectively called Voluntary Community Organisations (VCO) and many are in effect local quangos. The declining independence of the Third Sector from government over the last decade under Conservative central government policy has concerned many in the Third Sector. There has been a shift from flexible funding towards contracting-out to deliver specific outcomes and it is argued that this has created a competitive ‘race to the bottom’. Since so many community projects are realised by forming partnerships between VCOs and councils, and as such statutory bodies usually mandate and supervise such voluntary bodies, we could examine the opportunities for malfeasance in them together.
Who oversees those VCOs and what can be done if they do wrong? Actually not a lot in my experience. The guidance like the 'Nolan Principles' for standards in public life is advisory, though charity trustees should have agreed to them when taking their posts but these standards are not universal nor legally required.
The charity Transparency International found there is a vacuum of national responsibility in combating corruption in local government. Their 2013 report 'Corruption in UK Local Government - The Mounting Risks' is succinct at unpicking the complexity of the problem: "With the abolition of the Audit Commission and Standards for England, the potential abolition of Audit Committees within local authorities, and the downgrading of officials who deal with corruption, it is unclear who owns the problem both nationally and locally. Under the new arrangements in England, the police are the main body with the responsibility to investigate corruption allegations. Yet this is fraught with difficulties, such that it is unlikely to work."
Investigating and proving corruption is one of the hardest tasks in criminal prosecutions which is why investigating authorities usually require specialist teams and units to deal with it armed with the appropriate investigative powers.
Under the new arrangements, an external auditor risks being sued if it tries to fulfil a similar role, even if the auditor had the appetite to do it, which is less likely given their commercial priorities and the expected relative reduction in the scope of audits.
There is strong reason to doubt that the police will devote resources to investigating possible violations or that the Crown Prosecution Service will consider it worthwhile to prosecute, especially in smaller cases. Police forces may not be able to justify an investigation as a good use of limited resources when, for example, it might turn out that a member simply forgot to declare an interest. Further, police investigations will be much more difficult to initiate in the absence of evidence gathered from the external audit, and such evidence is less likely to be gathered as the scope of audits reduce. This is in addition to the police’s reduced capacity to investigate fraud and corruption in general as a result of austerity programmes affecting a range of police services.
Basically since there is no more National Audit Office, such malfeasance is too hard and too expensive to investigate let alone prosecute for very little beer. Down in the trenches I found myself that the enforcement officers of the Charities Commission and the DCLG were notoriously hard to contact, let alone get interested. The Charity Commission is often overwhelmed with complaints. Their response is usually to issue guidance to the trustees and very rarely is a charity is shut down. The National Council of Voluntary Organisations has guidance for volunteers which only addresses personal concerns such as health and safety. The Charity Commission only regulates charities, there is no body regulating the voluntary community sector and so there is very little recourse apart from public questioning by individuals taking up a cause and prepared to invest a great deal of energy and time to get to the bottom of something, which will in all likelihood will pop up like a gopher elsewhere shortly after.
There are over 9,000 parish councils in the UK who need only to open their books for examination for one month a year, and nearly 60,000 registered charities whose income falls below the reporting threshold but even so the annual accounts I've seen posted don't reveal any incriminating evidence, until you can find evidence that contradicts it.
A difficulty in exposing corruption in local government and the Third Sector is it is not a crime that leaves much evidence. Unlike a bank robbery there are usually very few witnesses, the injury is very slight and the robbery usually takes place over time. However a few pounds here and there over time can add up to tidy sums. The National Fraud Authority (NFA) undertook a survey of 10,000 registered charities in 2010 in order to produce an estimate of fraud against the charity sector. It estimated that charities lose on average 2.4% of their annual income to fraud, equating to around £1.3 billion a year for the sector as a whole. The NFA also concluded that there is a substantial under-reporting of fraud by the charity sector. But this is just the cost of fraud against charities. There is also fraud by the VCOs, or at very least poor practise in the way they get and spend public money and how they report the outcomes. In 2011 the Charity Commission found serious concerns about fraud, theft and other significant financial and fundraising issues in 26% of 1900 compliance assessment cases.
It is the slow corrosion of the trust in communities and so erosion of the willingness of people to help others in their community, which in turns devalues "social capital" which is the most significant loss. This erosion of trust, as Sir Anthony Seldon warns, is very hard to repair.
The dishonesty in this arena is not always the theft of money but also the misuse of power which is used give an enterprise or an individual an unfair advantage by the insidious process of patronage. A VCO's effectiveness in local communities stems from two sources; the funds it has to achieve its aims and the agreement of the community for it to be the agency to deliver those aims. As an example scenario; a VCO in the form of an ad-hoc committee is set up to organise a street fair to increase footfall in a town centre to benefit traders and raise money for local charities. Ideally such a committee would have representation from various interest groups but this is far from practical every time. Busy small retailers don't have much time for meetings after work. Such a VCO could, by a motion of their town council, be given the authority to apply for street closures, undertake publicity, collect stall rents while the town council assumed the public liability. The organisers of the event now have considerable power to advantage themselves or their associates. Usually local councillors are keen to have just one person shoulder the burden of day to day organising of an event, as ensuring everyone is 'in the loop' and signed-off by the council takes additional work and slows down decision taking so they rely on updates to the partners from the organisers.
Thus such VCOs can become a small select group or a single person with very little oversight or accountability. The organiser is authorised to use public money to hire performers, pay for staging and insurance and permits, but nobody notices that their associates can keep the takings from the bars beside the stage. The money they raise and how they distribute it gives them influence with those who expect to benefit. The charity-bucket takings are added to the stall rents then the publicity and organiser's costs are generously deducted along with some held over pump prime the next event. Headline figures of the amount raised for charity are announced, but a detailed breakdown of the accounts are sometimes not forthcoming but the event is profitable, since the local taxpayers met the significant costs of the licenses and street closures and insurance. The town council, acting as the supervisory authority, signs off the consolidated accounts with very little diligence as everything is apparently a huge success.
In ten years of involvement in local communities I have discovered a few deceitful people running VCOs but for my legal protection I declare that any similarity to actual persons or organisations in the scenarios I discuss is entirely coincidental.
When I was a town councillor one of my goals was to ensure that anyone getting any funding from the town council filed with the clerk their governance documents such as the names of their principals and their accounts with for the relevant financial year but this motion did not pass the council and the argument against was "what was the need?" After a few iterations of my street festival scenario, the brand name of the festival, the mailing list of the stallholders and other such intellectual property can become valuable business assets that would unsurprisingly be owned by an individual rather than the loosely constituted VCO. If the event is successful and grows, there may come a time when the original purpose of the event is questioned against the litter, congestion and inconvenience to the rest of the townsfolk, but if such fundraising is successful and popular with the townsfolk there few would want to be seen to rock the boat in a community, and one day there might be a nomination for an honour for the organiser. I will save for another day the manipulation of the honours system that I have observed.
It is very hard in these circumstances to obtain hard evidence of abuses of power and it is also easy to hide such corruption as simple mismanagement. There seems to be no sanction if you can convince people that you are stupid rather than dishonest. Corruptible institutions can also have a scrutiny role for others, so if they are incompetent, corruption can flourish unimpeded. Even the appearance of probity can be corruptible. In one instance I encountered the financial accounts of the VCO were correct but the appointment of the auditor and payment of their unusually high fee was suspected to be a back-hander or patronage to a trustee's associate.
We should be very mindful of the power of patronage regardless of the scale of the organisation. In a report by Transparency International on corruption in local government it found that "Council leaders have considerable patronage power, which can facilitate corruption. They are able to appoint the members of their cabinet and award chairmanships – all roles which bring financial gain for the recipients in the form of ‘special responsibility allowances’. This may lead to situations where councillors are unwilling to challenge a leader because they fear losing one of these roles, or where they feel obliged to provide informal favours, such as offering information or ‘turning a blind eye’ to misconduct.
When VCOs undertake regeneration projects such as renovation of derelict buildings with government grants, people can leverage their voluntary roles in a public-private enterprise to gain advantageous positions, such as buying for themselves neighbouring property or otherwise exploiting planning intelligence gained from their position as well as directing paid work like building, surveying and legal conveyancing to favoured associates and then extract tribute or distribute largesse with tenants of the completed project. Once people smoke the crack pipe of small town corruption they are hooked, either by their avarice or compromised by guilt to be exploited thereafter.
There must be complete transparency in local community voluntary support services because what sometimes happens is that services from VCOs such as driving people to hospital appointments or help with shopping are given preferentially to those who support particular councillors or causes, especially when local need exceeds resources. This benefit-steering capability is usually achieved by the overlap in management of the VCOs and local government. While it might be useful to the VCO to have a local councillor or prominent person on their board, they must be careful of what is expected in return for the largesse of their discretionary budget. Largesse creates loyalty and loyalty creates power. It's basic feudalism. It's the management philosophy of Al Capone.
Raising your head above the parapet in small communities to question their institutions often comes at considerable emotional cost. The common truth in every whistleblower story is a tiring slog against disbelief, denial, delay and obfuscation. The whistleblower also immediately becomes an outsider and may have to sacrifice cooperation from others in their own ambitions in the networking it takes to get things done in communities. For practically everyone who has invested their time trying to open a youth club or improve their local playground this is too high a price to pay. You learn to keep your mouth shut, eyes closed, take their cheque and move on.
A study by the charity Protect found that 20% of workplace whistleblowers subsequently lost their jobs. A further 21% experienced informal reprisal, including ostracism by co-workers, verbal harassment or unreasonably close monitoring by superiors. This kind of retaliation often caused stress and anxiety. Whistleblowers often found it difficult to gain new employment in the same sector. Whistleblowing is legally protected by the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 (now incorporated in the Employment Rights Act (ERA) 1996 however volunteers, trustees and non-executive directors are excluded, yet they may be the first to know about wrongdoing in their charity or business.
Case history 1
Who would have thought that a little community lunch club was as corrupt as Tammany Hall but once there was a village where preference for places in a local pensioners' club was given to those who voted for particular councillors, who also ran the club. The lunch club would also organise minibus trips and collect people on voting day. Members and families knew who they had to vote for to keep their places in the club. This quid-pro-quo was impossible to prove but the behaviour of the councillors was so inexplicable in resisting the starting of a second more inclusive lunch club by a group of local women that many people in that village came to this conclusion.
This is a 'wicked' problem I have seen in many VCOs. There is no overt abuse of power but subtle and discrete moral weaknesses in the management. Many social clubs or voluntary day centre schemes can become 'in-groups' managed by cliques and exclusive as demand exceeds its service capacity but there is a resistance to enable access to all by rationing as this will break up social bonds between the 'regulars' and their loyalty is counted to support the club and the mutual support for the benefactors of the club. These may be local councillors or prominent business figures who fund the club, either by public means such as their locality budget or through town council funding, and who have a role influencing the benevolence of private charity, such as Lions, Rotary and Masonic organisations and wealthy individuals and community grants from businesses, so they are keen to be seen as the club's benefactors if only in reputation and not substance. In every act of charity there is a quid-pro-quo. There is no harm in that. It is to what ends that it matters.
Many practitioners in community development have experience of VCOs resisting change and defending their turf when new initiatives are presented to them. Usually it is not the users or the volunteers who are resistant to change but those who see their role, such as being benefactors, conferring on them status in the community in Pierre Bourdieu's 'Social Capital' model.
There may be very good reasons for embracing novelty with caution but in one case examined; the sinews of passive resistance of a local councillor snapped at a public meeting to launch a new lunch club. The councillor was also the chairperson of partner organisations but they spoke out to their parishioners with blatant hostility to oppose it. The elephant in the room was also that the new initiative wanted to address the exclusion of local BAME and migrant people. The local vicar, who backed the new initiative, was drafted in to act as an intermediary. They reported that there were fears within the hostile organisation over service turf, the potential diversion of funding from the local authority, their preferential access to minibuses for transport and competition for occupation of premises. While the hostile local councillor had been engaged in consultations with the new initiative and had expressed support, they had not played their hand until the last moment because they knew their self-interest was unreasonable and they had hoped the idea would not gain traction. The principals of the new initiative pressed on and their project survived for three years but the driving personality eventually stepped down as they did not get the cooperation they needed in the community and the initiative folded.
Case history 2
A Westminster think-tank obtained almost three-quarters of a million pounds from a county council with a report stuffed with bogus research to pilot a new approach to community social care. Its glossy pitch claimed it had consulted with many voluntary groups in the area but these groups were in uproar when they saw their names cited in a presentation by the local authority as no one could recall meeting the researchers. They were also concerned as it was obvious many of these VCOs would lose their funding and they could not see the sense of the local authority commissioning a whole new body to start from ground-zero to do exactly what they were delivering already.
The commissioning officer responsible in the local authority silenced objectors by implying anyone speaking out would not be treated favourably in forthcoming funding cuts, as the country was then in the grip of austerity. It was plain to everyone that the local authority needed a new idea in social care for the 'Big Society' and as the think tank promised cost savings, it was already a done deal. Three years later the experiment was an abject failure and it had damaged many voluntary bodies who provided such care by diverting their funding. Another earlier experiment by the same think-tank collapsed too.
I wonder how you do pitch an idea like that to a local authority? Does someone in a think tank just call up the head of the local authority and sell them a new idea like double glazing? The opacity of where and why local authorities buy-in outside advice is quite astonishing. Is it old-school ties or is there a trade show where social architects show their wares? If so, can the public come?
Case history 3
A local authority commissioned a researcher to undertake resource mapping, that is find out what services existed in which places in the Voluntary Community Sector to see what gaps there were in provision and to see if there could be synergies. There was a VCO in a small town that that provided volunteers to take people to doctors appointments, or go shopping or even undertake small handyman tasks. At this it performed well but this VCO was also funded to be the local volunteer resource centre for other VCOs. So if you were a person who wanted to to find a local volunteering opportunity, they promised to match you up to a suitable placement and cover the cost of CRB checks and so forth. However this brokering service was never provided to anyone, though it was touted on their website as a service for several years and presumably one reason why the local council funded them.
There were plenty of local VCOs who needed volunteers but they never found any though their resource centre. When the researcher asked to see records of what referrals or placements they had effected, thinking it was reasonable there was perhaps one or two a month, they found that in two years there had been none. The manager of the volunteer centre on a part-time salary of £18,000 p.a. stalled for weeks about sharing that information by saying the information was "being reviewed". Then said that disclosure would have to be a decision for their trustees. The researcher found out that their headline figure of doing over 500 tasks a month included the number of photocopies done for the town clerk in the office next door. This convenience for the clerk was costing the council the rent of the office and the salary of the manager plus the tea and biscuits, yet in the same county there were dozens of schemes providing the same service to the vulnerable for a couple of thousand pounds a year in insurance and mobile phone credit. It would be harsh to say this was deliberate fraud. It was more a case of organisational entropy. There hadn't been any new blood in their volunteer pool for years and they were very comfortable in their little bubble but they were not good value for money and they grossly overstated their value in their reports. This truth was not wrung out of them but found by simple analysis of their annual reports, which begs the question of the competency of those who should have been reading them. Under new management the VCO greatly expanded its services and volunteer numbers though it didn't broker volunteer recruitment for other VCO anymore.
Case history 4
A young unemployed person enrolled in media training courses provided by a national charity but they questioned why in the induction session they had to fill out the the course evaluation form before they even started the course. "It's a formality" was the reply to their question why it was necessary. They said in that case they would fill out the evaluation form when they finished the course, as surely they can't evaluate a course before they have completed it. The instructor said that in order for the charity to get paid they had to do it now. The student stood on principle and refused. The instructor said it would not be possible for them to enrol in the course without the required paperwork. The next day by registered letter the student was told they were no longer enrolled in the course for "disruptive behaviour". Such an accusation is extremely easy to pin on a NEET or a young person of colour.
The student found the funding that provided the course was from the EU however the fraud prevention agency in Brussels weren't interested in any fraud that is under a million euros. The student couldn't prove it was fraud but nobody at the charity or the funder was interested in taking up a small matter of improper procedure, especially if it was just the student's word against theirs. The student appealed to the chair of the charity who stood by their officer's version of events but the student suspected the knowledge of this practise would have to be known at the very top. The student didn't have the resources to make a further case of this. There was no agency to appeal their barring from the training course - no independent educational ombudsman - to investigate the instructor's accusations either but they couldn't find anyone who had actually completed the training course on social media either. The charity concerned has since rebranded its name and closed its local office.
Case history 5
A voluntary body announced it had obtained a £10,000 grant under a new government flagship scheme to increase footfall in market towns, the much heralded Mary Portas initiative. However the application form, which wasn't seen by any of the so-called partners, falsely claimed the steering committee had endorsements to be the lead agency from several partners, including the town council and local MP, without their knowledge. Not only was it a cut and paste from a different application; many of the other alleged partners were defunct bodies or bodies on which the principals in the scheme were also in control of.
Such a grant application would normally have to be voted on by the town council for the council's name to be included in it, but the named leaders of the project did not actually make the application though its publicity said it had. The grant application and Service Level Agreement with the District Council were actually signed by trustees of another local regeneration charity without any outsiders' knowledge. The trustees of that regeneration charity were also members of the town council but made the grant application without informing the other members of the council.
The regeneration charity who actually received the grant spent it to refurbish a building which they got on a peppercorn rent, by virtue of telling the owner the public-facing voluntary body were the lead agency, but they then sublet it to a private business and kept the proceeds, meantime everyone thought the voluntary body cited as the lead agency was steering the project, since it said so in the slick website created by a designer related to one of the trustees and paid for by the grant. However the public committee were just the patsy in case anything went wrong. There were layers and layers of obfuscation to uncover before the facts were known and could be reported to the relevant authorities.
Case history 6
A private sports coaching business claimed it was a sports club to obtain £5000 to repair their premises from a supermarket chain that makes community grants. The so-called sports club is not registered with national sports bodies, there is no constitution or election of officers, it is in fact a franchised business based in the USA. This was discovered by an anonymous tip-off after questions were put to the club via social media on what their status was. There was marked hostility to the question from members of the 'club' though the question of its status went unanswered.
The supermarket benefactor did not offer any way to report these concerns that protected the enquirer but after the social media spat, unusually there was no press release and 'big cheque' photo-op about the stores' grant to the club though that was done every previous year.
The same 'club' also benefits from occupying premises on land owned by a charity so what is in fact a limited company which charges each of its hundreds of pupils around £40 per month, pays no business rates on its premises. The bogus status was ignored by the trustees of the charity because the principal owners of the business are also trustees of the landowning charity. The charity recently rewrote its constitution so it no longer holds the land in trust for the community but has become the sole owners and so can benefit from any sales of land with very little notice of this by the community.
This became critical because several years before the charity had different trustees who consulted with the community and got an overwhelming vote of support to merge with another charity and then dispose of surplus assets to build a new leisure centre for the town. However if that happened; then the 'club' occupying the land would lose its sweetheart deal as it would become a tenant of the new leisure centre and so have to pay the going hire rates, like any other activity class that supports such facilities. The 'club' principals suddenly became very active within the affairs of the holding charity and several long-standing trustees resigned and were replaced. In public the trustees said nothing but in private their despair was palpable but one way or another their acquiescence was obtained by the social influences acting on them. The holding charity obtained a grant from the town council to cover its legal fees to ostensibly expedite the merger but mysteriously, after two years of prevaricating blamed on solicitors, the agreement between the charities to merge was off. The leisure centre plans were set back several years and greatly reduced in scope.
I have seen many surprising things occur when people have started asking online about the affairs of community groups and quangos. There are many defensive techniques used to prevent scrutiny of what can't be otherwise hidden. Rather than respond to a question with a simple answer, people with questions are invited to potentially hostile and inconvenient meeting some time in the future with a promise that "all your questions will be answered..." though with experience that is not the case. I have witnessed obstruction of questioners on procedural technicalities and even bare-faced denial by a chairman that the public AGM of the VCO was an appropriate place to ask, which they could get away with as no members of the public had attended. While town councils meet in public, the public very rarely attend council meetings. Only people with an agenda so to speak, good or bad, turn up with any regularity but the issues dealt with by town councils are rarely presented and settled in one meeting but can go to sub-committees before coming back to the full council. Giorgio Vasari must have gone to Florence City Hall.
Case history 7
In a town council sub-committee meeting a debate between two councillors (one an ex-MEP) and the chair about the governance of a local VCO erupted into the ex-MEP threatening the chair with violence and leaving the room with "let's take it outside..." This meant the meeting wasn't quorate so the meeting was closed. While the public gallery was usually empty at such meetings, today it had four people, all ex-councillors and known associates of the bully who had all resigned from the council after that chair, then a member of the public, stood to ask them questions a few months before. To the chair it seemed to be a planned disruption so the council could not vote on important motions relating to ex-councillors which needed to be passed. Another councillor who was also a district councillor and who had been co-opted onto the council because of those resignations then resigned shortly after too. People supposed it was a case of 'job done'. The press said this was because of the "lack of cooperation" between councillors, as if it was the council's fault. There was no mention of the threats made but the new council's reputation was tarnished. After a complaint was filed, the district council Monitoring Officer acknowledged there had been previous complaints about the behaviour of the ex-MEP but councillors in public life should "have a higher level of tolerance for abuse" than the public.
Most of the small scale malfeasance I have encountered is perpetrated by individuals who have accomplices bound to them by personal relationships or featly created by economic or political blackmail. I find dishonest trustees are usually connected to enabling trustees on another body by marriage, blood or economic interests. If you are working to achieve something in your community but you start asking too many questions, suddenly formerly cooperative partners can give you the cold shoulder. Their enthusiasm for your ideas may cool. The web of social or familial relationships is natural in a small community but the attack dogs unleashed on critics on social media are often spouses or life-partners of the principals being questioned. The Charity Commission first suggests that people address their concerns to the charity first, but in a small community simply asking such questions will signal you are a potentially hostile threat, especially if the answers are unsatisfactory and you persist.
In nearly every case where I encountered people acting in ways that gave me or others concern, I found those people were highly active on other bodies, such as being trustees of other charities or committee members and many had oversight of each other so were being policed by themselves. Sometimes their trustee role was an obligation. When I was elected a councillor I had to take up trusteeship of four local charities as the council representative on that charity's board. But I recall in my motion to remove resigned ex-councillors from their posts as the council representative on other boards was resisted, even objected to, and legal advice had to be sought to clarify whether a representation role is the gift of the council or the body requiring it in its constitution as many do. It seemed that the councillors who resigned did not want to give up the reigns of power from seats in other institutions their election to a town council had handed them. Some troublesome trustees I have encountered had as many as 15 seats on various unincorporated or constituted bodies. The scope of their charity with their time and energy was impressive but many electors had concerns that this matrix of connections were used to create a self-referring and self-evidencing network where a claimed wide representation of different community interests was actually just a few "controlling minds". I find as well those minds often have a inflated sense of importance. I don't recall ever at university or at an academic conference being reminded that I was talking with someone who was a PhD., but a sharp reminders from people to use their honorific titles in addressing them has been a memorable feature of my experience of the voluntary sector.
The charity Transparency International found there is a vacuum of national responsibility in combating corruption in local government. Their 2013 report 'Corruption in UK Local Government - The Mounting Risks' is succinct at unpicking the complexity of the problem: "With the abolition of the Audit Commission and Standards for England, the potential abolition of Audit Committees within local authorities, and the downgrading of officials who deal with corruption, it is unclear who owns the problem both nationally and locally. Under the new arrangements in England, the police are the main body with the responsibility to investigate corruption allegations. Yet this is fraught with difficulties, such that it is unlikely to work."
Investigating and proving corruption is one of the hardest tasks in criminal prosecutions which is why investigating authorities usually require specialist teams and units to deal with it armed with the appropriate investigative powers.
Under the new arrangements, an external auditor risks being sued if it tries to fulfil a similar role, even if the auditor had the appetite to do it, which is less likely given their commercial priorities and the expected relative reduction in the scope of audits.
There is strong reason to doubt that the police will devote resources to investigating possible violations or that the Crown Prosecution Service will consider it worthwhile to prosecute, especially in smaller cases. Police forces may not be able to justify an investigation as a good use of limited resources when, for example, it might turn out that a member simply forgot to declare an interest. Further, police investigations will be much more difficult to initiate in the absence of evidence gathered from the external audit, and such evidence is less likely to be gathered as the scope of audits reduce. This is in addition to the police’s reduced capacity to investigate fraud and corruption in general as a result of austerity programmes affecting a range of police services.
Basically since there is no more National Audit Office, such malfeasance is too hard and too expensive to investigate let alone prosecute for very little beer. Down in the trenches I found myself that the enforcement officers of the Charities Commission and the DCLG were notoriously hard to contact, let alone get interested. The Charity Commission is often overwhelmed with complaints. Their response is usually to issue guidance to the trustees and very rarely is a charity is shut down. The National Council of Voluntary Organisations has guidance for volunteers which only addresses personal concerns such as health and safety. The Charity Commission only regulates charities, there is no body regulating the voluntary community sector and so there is very little recourse apart from public questioning by individuals taking up a cause and prepared to invest a great deal of energy and time to get to the bottom of something, which will in all likelihood will pop up like a gopher elsewhere shortly after.
There are over 9,000 parish councils in the UK who need only to open their books for examination for one month a year, and nearly 60,000 registered charities whose income falls below the reporting threshold but even so the annual accounts I've seen posted don't reveal any incriminating evidence, until you can find evidence that contradicts it.
A difficulty in exposing corruption in local government and the Third Sector is it is not a crime that leaves much evidence. Unlike a bank robbery there are usually very few witnesses, the injury is very slight and the robbery usually takes place over time. However a few pounds here and there over time can add up to tidy sums. The National Fraud Authority (NFA) undertook a survey of 10,000 registered charities in 2010 in order to produce an estimate of fraud against the charity sector. It estimated that charities lose on average 2.4% of their annual income to fraud, equating to around £1.3 billion a year for the sector as a whole. The NFA also concluded that there is a substantial under-reporting of fraud by the charity sector. But this is just the cost of fraud against charities. There is also fraud by the VCOs, or at very least poor practise in the way they get and spend public money and how they report the outcomes. In 2011 the Charity Commission found serious concerns about fraud, theft and other significant financial and fundraising issues in 26% of 1900 compliance assessment cases.
It is the slow corrosion of the trust in communities and so erosion of the willingness of people to help others in their community, which in turns devalues "social capital" which is the most significant loss. This erosion of trust, as Sir Anthony Seldon warns, is very hard to repair.
The dishonesty in this arena is not always the theft of money but also the misuse of power which is used give an enterprise or an individual an unfair advantage by the insidious process of patronage. A VCO's effectiveness in local communities stems from two sources; the funds it has to achieve its aims and the agreement of the community for it to be the agency to deliver those aims. As an example scenario; a VCO in the form of an ad-hoc committee is set up to organise a street fair to increase footfall in a town centre to benefit traders and raise money for local charities. Ideally such a committee would have representation from various interest groups but this is far from practical every time. Busy small retailers don't have much time for meetings after work. Such a VCO could, by a motion of their town council, be given the authority to apply for street closures, undertake publicity, collect stall rents while the town council assumed the public liability. The organisers of the event now have considerable power to advantage themselves or their associates. Usually local councillors are keen to have just one person shoulder the burden of day to day organising of an event, as ensuring everyone is 'in the loop' and signed-off by the council takes additional work and slows down decision taking so they rely on updates to the partners from the organisers.
Thus such VCOs can become a small select group or a single person with very little oversight or accountability. The organiser is authorised to use public money to hire performers, pay for staging and insurance and permits, but nobody notices that their associates can keep the takings from the bars beside the stage. The money they raise and how they distribute it gives them influence with those who expect to benefit. The charity-bucket takings are added to the stall rents then the publicity and organiser's costs are generously deducted along with some held over pump prime the next event. Headline figures of the amount raised for charity are announced, but a detailed breakdown of the accounts are sometimes not forthcoming but the event is profitable, since the local taxpayers met the significant costs of the licenses and street closures and insurance. The town council, acting as the supervisory authority, signs off the consolidated accounts with very little diligence as everything is apparently a huge success.
In ten years of involvement in local communities I have discovered a few deceitful people running VCOs but for my legal protection I declare that any similarity to actual persons or organisations in the scenarios I discuss is entirely coincidental.
When I was a town councillor one of my goals was to ensure that anyone getting any funding from the town council filed with the clerk their governance documents such as the names of their principals and their accounts with for the relevant financial year but this motion did not pass the council and the argument against was "what was the need?" After a few iterations of my street festival scenario, the brand name of the festival, the mailing list of the stallholders and other such intellectual property can become valuable business assets that would unsurprisingly be owned by an individual rather than the loosely constituted VCO. If the event is successful and grows, there may come a time when the original purpose of the event is questioned against the litter, congestion and inconvenience to the rest of the townsfolk, but if such fundraising is successful and popular with the townsfolk there few would want to be seen to rock the boat in a community, and one day there might be a nomination for an honour for the organiser. I will save for another day the manipulation of the honours system that I have observed.
It is very hard in these circumstances to obtain hard evidence of abuses of power and it is also easy to hide such corruption as simple mismanagement. There seems to be no sanction if you can convince people that you are stupid rather than dishonest. Corruptible institutions can also have a scrutiny role for others, so if they are incompetent, corruption can flourish unimpeded. Even the appearance of probity can be corruptible. In one instance I encountered the financial accounts of the VCO were correct but the appointment of the auditor and payment of their unusually high fee was suspected to be a back-hander or patronage to a trustee's associate.
We should be very mindful of the power of patronage regardless of the scale of the organisation. In a report by Transparency International on corruption in local government it found that "Council leaders have considerable patronage power, which can facilitate corruption. They are able to appoint the members of their cabinet and award chairmanships – all roles which bring financial gain for the recipients in the form of ‘special responsibility allowances’. This may lead to situations where councillors are unwilling to challenge a leader because they fear losing one of these roles, or where they feel obliged to provide informal favours, such as offering information or ‘turning a blind eye’ to misconduct.
When VCOs undertake regeneration projects such as renovation of derelict buildings with government grants, people can leverage their voluntary roles in a public-private enterprise to gain advantageous positions, such as buying for themselves neighbouring property or otherwise exploiting planning intelligence gained from their position as well as directing paid work like building, surveying and legal conveyancing to favoured associates and then extract tribute or distribute largesse with tenants of the completed project. Once people smoke the crack pipe of small town corruption they are hooked, either by their avarice or compromised by guilt to be exploited thereafter.
There must be complete transparency in local community voluntary support services because what sometimes happens is that services from VCOs such as driving people to hospital appointments or help with shopping are given preferentially to those who support particular councillors or causes, especially when local need exceeds resources. This benefit-steering capability is usually achieved by the overlap in management of the VCOs and local government. While it might be useful to the VCO to have a local councillor or prominent person on their board, they must be careful of what is expected in return for the largesse of their discretionary budget. Largesse creates loyalty and loyalty creates power. It's basic feudalism. It's the management philosophy of Al Capone.
Raising your head above the parapet in small communities to question their institutions often comes at considerable emotional cost. The common truth in every whistleblower story is a tiring slog against disbelief, denial, delay and obfuscation. The whistleblower also immediately becomes an outsider and may have to sacrifice cooperation from others in their own ambitions in the networking it takes to get things done in communities. For practically everyone who has invested their time trying to open a youth club or improve their local playground this is too high a price to pay. You learn to keep your mouth shut, eyes closed, take their cheque and move on.
A study by the charity Protect found that 20% of workplace whistleblowers subsequently lost their jobs. A further 21% experienced informal reprisal, including ostracism by co-workers, verbal harassment or unreasonably close monitoring by superiors. This kind of retaliation often caused stress and anxiety. Whistleblowers often found it difficult to gain new employment in the same sector. Whistleblowing is legally protected by the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 (now incorporated in the Employment Rights Act (ERA) 1996 however volunteers, trustees and non-executive directors are excluded, yet they may be the first to know about wrongdoing in their charity or business.
Case history 1
Who would have thought that a little community lunch club was as corrupt as Tammany Hall but once there was a village where preference for places in a local pensioners' club was given to those who voted for particular councillors, who also ran the club. The lunch club would also organise minibus trips and collect people on voting day. Members and families knew who they had to vote for to keep their places in the club. This quid-pro-quo was impossible to prove but the behaviour of the councillors was so inexplicable in resisting the starting of a second more inclusive lunch club by a group of local women that many people in that village came to this conclusion.
This is a 'wicked' problem I have seen in many VCOs. There is no overt abuse of power but subtle and discrete moral weaknesses in the management. Many social clubs or voluntary day centre schemes can become 'in-groups' managed by cliques and exclusive as demand exceeds its service capacity but there is a resistance to enable access to all by rationing as this will break up social bonds between the 'regulars' and their loyalty is counted to support the club and the mutual support for the benefactors of the club. These may be local councillors or prominent business figures who fund the club, either by public means such as their locality budget or through town council funding, and who have a role influencing the benevolence of private charity, such as Lions, Rotary and Masonic organisations and wealthy individuals and community grants from businesses, so they are keen to be seen as the club's benefactors if only in reputation and not substance. In every act of charity there is a quid-pro-quo. There is no harm in that. It is to what ends that it matters.
Many practitioners in community development have experience of VCOs resisting change and defending their turf when new initiatives are presented to them. Usually it is not the users or the volunteers who are resistant to change but those who see their role, such as being benefactors, conferring on them status in the community in Pierre Bourdieu's 'Social Capital' model.
There may be very good reasons for embracing novelty with caution but in one case examined; the sinews of passive resistance of a local councillor snapped at a public meeting to launch a new lunch club. The councillor was also the chairperson of partner organisations but they spoke out to their parishioners with blatant hostility to oppose it. The elephant in the room was also that the new initiative wanted to address the exclusion of local BAME and migrant people. The local vicar, who backed the new initiative, was drafted in to act as an intermediary. They reported that there were fears within the hostile organisation over service turf, the potential diversion of funding from the local authority, their preferential access to minibuses for transport and competition for occupation of premises. While the hostile local councillor had been engaged in consultations with the new initiative and had expressed support, they had not played their hand until the last moment because they knew their self-interest was unreasonable and they had hoped the idea would not gain traction. The principals of the new initiative pressed on and their project survived for three years but the driving personality eventually stepped down as they did not get the cooperation they needed in the community and the initiative folded.
Case history 2
A Westminster think-tank obtained almost three-quarters of a million pounds from a county council with a report stuffed with bogus research to pilot a new approach to community social care. Its glossy pitch claimed it had consulted with many voluntary groups in the area but these groups were in uproar when they saw their names cited in a presentation by the local authority as no one could recall meeting the researchers. They were also concerned as it was obvious many of these VCOs would lose their funding and they could not see the sense of the local authority commissioning a whole new body to start from ground-zero to do exactly what they were delivering already.
The commissioning officer responsible in the local authority silenced objectors by implying anyone speaking out would not be treated favourably in forthcoming funding cuts, as the country was then in the grip of austerity. It was plain to everyone that the local authority needed a new idea in social care for the 'Big Society' and as the think tank promised cost savings, it was already a done deal. Three years later the experiment was an abject failure and it had damaged many voluntary bodies who provided such care by diverting their funding. Another earlier experiment by the same think-tank collapsed too.
I wonder how you do pitch an idea like that to a local authority? Does someone in a think tank just call up the head of the local authority and sell them a new idea like double glazing? The opacity of where and why local authorities buy-in outside advice is quite astonishing. Is it old-school ties or is there a trade show where social architects show their wares? If so, can the public come?
Case history 3
A local authority commissioned a researcher to undertake resource mapping, that is find out what services existed in which places in the Voluntary Community Sector to see what gaps there were in provision and to see if there could be synergies. There was a VCO in a small town that that provided volunteers to take people to doctors appointments, or go shopping or even undertake small handyman tasks. At this it performed well but this VCO was also funded to be the local volunteer resource centre for other VCOs. So if you were a person who wanted to to find a local volunteering opportunity, they promised to match you up to a suitable placement and cover the cost of CRB checks and so forth. However this brokering service was never provided to anyone, though it was touted on their website as a service for several years and presumably one reason why the local council funded them.
There were plenty of local VCOs who needed volunteers but they never found any though their resource centre. When the researcher asked to see records of what referrals or placements they had effected, thinking it was reasonable there was perhaps one or two a month, they found that in two years there had been none. The manager of the volunteer centre on a part-time salary of £18,000 p.a. stalled for weeks about sharing that information by saying the information was "being reviewed". Then said that disclosure would have to be a decision for their trustees. The researcher found out that their headline figure of doing over 500 tasks a month included the number of photocopies done for the town clerk in the office next door. This convenience for the clerk was costing the council the rent of the office and the salary of the manager plus the tea and biscuits, yet in the same county there were dozens of schemes providing the same service to the vulnerable for a couple of thousand pounds a year in insurance and mobile phone credit. It would be harsh to say this was deliberate fraud. It was more a case of organisational entropy. There hadn't been any new blood in their volunteer pool for years and they were very comfortable in their little bubble but they were not good value for money and they grossly overstated their value in their reports. This truth was not wrung out of them but found by simple analysis of their annual reports, which begs the question of the competency of those who should have been reading them. Under new management the VCO greatly expanded its services and volunteer numbers though it didn't broker volunteer recruitment for other VCO anymore.
Case history 4
A young unemployed person enrolled in media training courses provided by a national charity but they questioned why in the induction session they had to fill out the the course evaluation form before they even started the course. "It's a formality" was the reply to their question why it was necessary. They said in that case they would fill out the evaluation form when they finished the course, as surely they can't evaluate a course before they have completed it. The instructor said that in order for the charity to get paid they had to do it now. The student stood on principle and refused. The instructor said it would not be possible for them to enrol in the course without the required paperwork. The next day by registered letter the student was told they were no longer enrolled in the course for "disruptive behaviour". Such an accusation is extremely easy to pin on a NEET or a young person of colour.
The student found the funding that provided the course was from the EU however the fraud prevention agency in Brussels weren't interested in any fraud that is under a million euros. The student couldn't prove it was fraud but nobody at the charity or the funder was interested in taking up a small matter of improper procedure, especially if it was just the student's word against theirs. The student appealed to the chair of the charity who stood by their officer's version of events but the student suspected the knowledge of this practise would have to be known at the very top. The student didn't have the resources to make a further case of this. There was no agency to appeal their barring from the training course - no independent educational ombudsman - to investigate the instructor's accusations either but they couldn't find anyone who had actually completed the training course on social media either. The charity concerned has since rebranded its name and closed its local office.
Case history 5
A voluntary body announced it had obtained a £10,000 grant under a new government flagship scheme to increase footfall in market towns, the much heralded Mary Portas initiative. However the application form, which wasn't seen by any of the so-called partners, falsely claimed the steering committee had endorsements to be the lead agency from several partners, including the town council and local MP, without their knowledge. Not only was it a cut and paste from a different application; many of the other alleged partners were defunct bodies or bodies on which the principals in the scheme were also in control of.
Such a grant application would normally have to be voted on by the town council for the council's name to be included in it, but the named leaders of the project did not actually make the application though its publicity said it had. The grant application and Service Level Agreement with the District Council were actually signed by trustees of another local regeneration charity without any outsiders' knowledge. The trustees of that regeneration charity were also members of the town council but made the grant application without informing the other members of the council.
The regeneration charity who actually received the grant spent it to refurbish a building which they got on a peppercorn rent, by virtue of telling the owner the public-facing voluntary body were the lead agency, but they then sublet it to a private business and kept the proceeds, meantime everyone thought the voluntary body cited as the lead agency was steering the project, since it said so in the slick website created by a designer related to one of the trustees and paid for by the grant. However the public committee were just the patsy in case anything went wrong. There were layers and layers of obfuscation to uncover before the facts were known and could be reported to the relevant authorities.
Case history 6
A private sports coaching business claimed it was a sports club to obtain £5000 to repair their premises from a supermarket chain that makes community grants. The so-called sports club is not registered with national sports bodies, there is no constitution or election of officers, it is in fact a franchised business based in the USA. This was discovered by an anonymous tip-off after questions were put to the club via social media on what their status was. There was marked hostility to the question from members of the 'club' though the question of its status went unanswered.
The supermarket benefactor did not offer any way to report these concerns that protected the enquirer but after the social media spat, unusually there was no press release and 'big cheque' photo-op about the stores' grant to the club though that was done every previous year.
The same 'club' also benefits from occupying premises on land owned by a charity so what is in fact a limited company which charges each of its hundreds of pupils around £40 per month, pays no business rates on its premises. The bogus status was ignored by the trustees of the charity because the principal owners of the business are also trustees of the landowning charity. The charity recently rewrote its constitution so it no longer holds the land in trust for the community but has become the sole owners and so can benefit from any sales of land with very little notice of this by the community.
This became critical because several years before the charity had different trustees who consulted with the community and got an overwhelming vote of support to merge with another charity and then dispose of surplus assets to build a new leisure centre for the town. However if that happened; then the 'club' occupying the land would lose its sweetheart deal as it would become a tenant of the new leisure centre and so have to pay the going hire rates, like any other activity class that supports such facilities. The 'club' principals suddenly became very active within the affairs of the holding charity and several long-standing trustees resigned and were replaced. In public the trustees said nothing but in private their despair was palpable but one way or another their acquiescence was obtained by the social influences acting on them. The holding charity obtained a grant from the town council to cover its legal fees to ostensibly expedite the merger but mysteriously, after two years of prevaricating blamed on solicitors, the agreement between the charities to merge was off. The leisure centre plans were set back several years and greatly reduced in scope.
I have seen many surprising things occur when people have started asking online about the affairs of community groups and quangos. There are many defensive techniques used to prevent scrutiny of what can't be otherwise hidden. Rather than respond to a question with a simple answer, people with questions are invited to potentially hostile and inconvenient meeting some time in the future with a promise that "all your questions will be answered..." though with experience that is not the case. I have witnessed obstruction of questioners on procedural technicalities and even bare-faced denial by a chairman that the public AGM of the VCO was an appropriate place to ask, which they could get away with as no members of the public had attended. While town councils meet in public, the public very rarely attend council meetings. Only people with an agenda so to speak, good or bad, turn up with any regularity but the issues dealt with by town councils are rarely presented and settled in one meeting but can go to sub-committees before coming back to the full council. Giorgio Vasari must have gone to Florence City Hall.
Case history 7
In a town council sub-committee meeting a debate between two councillors (one an ex-MEP) and the chair about the governance of a local VCO erupted into the ex-MEP threatening the chair with violence and leaving the room with "let's take it outside..." This meant the meeting wasn't quorate so the meeting was closed. While the public gallery was usually empty at such meetings, today it had four people, all ex-councillors and known associates of the bully who had all resigned from the council after that chair, then a member of the public, stood to ask them questions a few months before. To the chair it seemed to be a planned disruption so the council could not vote on important motions relating to ex-councillors which needed to be passed. Another councillor who was also a district councillor and who had been co-opted onto the council because of those resignations then resigned shortly after too. People supposed it was a case of 'job done'. The press said this was because of the "lack of cooperation" between councillors, as if it was the council's fault. There was no mention of the threats made but the new council's reputation was tarnished. After a complaint was filed, the district council Monitoring Officer acknowledged there had been previous complaints about the behaviour of the ex-MEP but councillors in public life should "have a higher level of tolerance for abuse" than the public.
Most of the small scale malfeasance I have encountered is perpetrated by individuals who have accomplices bound to them by personal relationships or featly created by economic or political blackmail. I find dishonest trustees are usually connected to enabling trustees on another body by marriage, blood or economic interests. If you are working to achieve something in your community but you start asking too many questions, suddenly formerly cooperative partners can give you the cold shoulder. Their enthusiasm for your ideas may cool. The web of social or familial relationships is natural in a small community but the attack dogs unleashed on critics on social media are often spouses or life-partners of the principals being questioned. The Charity Commission first suggests that people address their concerns to the charity first, but in a small community simply asking such questions will signal you are a potentially hostile threat, especially if the answers are unsatisfactory and you persist.
In nearly every case where I encountered people acting in ways that gave me or others concern, I found those people were highly active on other bodies, such as being trustees of other charities or committee members and many had oversight of each other so were being policed by themselves. Sometimes their trustee role was an obligation. When I was elected a councillor I had to take up trusteeship of four local charities as the council representative on that charity's board. But I recall in my motion to remove resigned ex-councillors from their posts as the council representative on other boards was resisted, even objected to, and legal advice had to be sought to clarify whether a representation role is the gift of the council or the body requiring it in its constitution as many do. It seemed that the councillors who resigned did not want to give up the reigns of power from seats in other institutions their election to a town council had handed them. Some troublesome trustees I have encountered had as many as 15 seats on various unincorporated or constituted bodies. The scope of their charity with their time and energy was impressive but many electors had concerns that this matrix of connections were used to create a self-referring and self-evidencing network where a claimed wide representation of different community interests was actually just a few "controlling minds". I find as well those minds often have a inflated sense of importance. I don't recall ever at university or at an academic conference being reminded that I was talking with someone who was a PhD., but a sharp reminders from people to use their honorific titles in addressing them has been a memorable feature of my experience of the voluntary sector.
Case history 8
A case was reported to me by the victim of an incident of bullying by a serial trustee and town councillor who was challenged by a very articulate citizen after a noisy public meeting that had been called by a "cabal" of town councillors, and also experienced trustees of other bodies, about the stewardship of a community hall by its own trustees. The "cabal" had mustered enough acolytes to demand, in their powers as the town council, an extraordinary general meeting and many neutral but concerned members of the public came along. A heated discussion had ensued and when one of the "cabal" ignored that member of the public's questions outside and went to walk away, the member of the public held them back by their arm. It was not an assault, both were middle-aged women, but an assault charge was brought by the councillor against their constituent. With the weight of hostile witnesses, the constituent was very poorly advised to accept a police caution, which then seriously impacted their employment.
It was alleged by several people that this councillor had taken early retirement from their role in education on condition they did not work with children again. Most of the details are locked up now in non-disclosure agreements but I found the reputation of that councillor for probity was scant for those who had dealt with them in the past, except amongst fellow councillors and close associates. This did not affect her political career as the "cabal" as they were know were regularly elected unopposed to the town council. In the May 2015 elections, 80% of England's parishes elected their councils unopposed.
I got to know this ex-councillor over a serious legal matter over a grievance brought by a council employee after their dismissal for a breach of trust and failure in their duty to their employer. Names are protected by an NDA but it was basically a case of a council employee using their powers and position to the advantage of friends, selected councillors and ex-councillors that prejudiced the effectiveness of other elected councillors. I became the referee of an already protracted boxing match by default as I was the only elected person who didn't have some kind of prior association or interest with the parties concerned. A councillor member of the "cabal" appeared as the only witness for the employee and four councillors appeared for the employer and while I realise that numbers should give no weight to the evidence, I found that the witness and the employee quite unreliable but the other councillors' evidence was robust. However, while I had no animosity towards that witness until then, I found their conduct towards me in this matter objectionable and so, to protect my reputation for probity, I gave in writing a detailed report of how I had considered all the evidence and so why I was upholding the council's dismissal, even though I didn't have to. My finding was not appealed. From then on I felt that they and their associates were forever hostile to me for simply shouldering my civic responsibility - which had consumed many hours of my unpaid time and energy.
Case history 9
So confident are the councillors in one town of retaining their seats, when a councillor moved into a new-build development and became annoyed by the noise of teenagers hanging out in a shelter in the park in front of their house, which had existed before their house was built, they had the shelter demolished and removed to the other side of the park at a cost of £4000 to the council, despite many other priorities. Everyone in the town was aghast but shrugged this what they they had suffered for years. The councillor led the debate on removing the teen shelter from outside her house and even tried to vote on it till the town clerk reminded her she could not.
Case history 10
There is a small charity in that town that positions itself as the local redevelopment body and claims on its website that it is a "partnership" of other VCOs and the three tiers of local government. However it is very hard to establish how the partnership works. It states a list of bodies that "send representatives" including the town, district and county councillors. But in the list of partners are non-existent or irrelevant bodies and when asked, several of those bodies do not recall having membership. They may have sent representative at one time to a meeting or worked jointly on a particular project in the past but say their membership is not anything more than informal. However, each time someone asks a body to confirm its membership, it identifies them as potentially hostile. In numerous grant applications and publicity the 'partnership' has claimed a lead role in delivering outcomes which have been done by others, as evidenced by their 'partnership' with them. It is political spin of the highest order.
In my experience it can be very difficult to interest the media in reporting or investigating such issues. There is no immediate story 'peg' in there being unanswered questions and the questioner invariably becomes the subject of the story instead of their cause and they become forever marked out to anyone with a keyboard as a 'troublemaker'. For journalists these issues are sometimes too complex to explain to readers. I have become fed up of reading reports of angry council meetings without an in-depth explanation of what the issues were. Concerned members of the public who write in to the local newspapers may be petty or vexatious or have their own axe to grind though such people are a gift for the letters page. I recall an ex-councillor who after resigning from their place on a town council would write letters to the local newspaper about their former council without copying in the clerk, then turn up to question the council about the letter in the local paper, of which the councillors had no knowledge. Associates berated the councillors on social media for not reading the local paper every day and not answering questions. I also consider the dearth of investigative resources in local papers and the unwillingness to bite the hand of advertisers sometimes makes them more an adversary or enabler than a friend.
When I was employed as a community development officer for a rural development charity there were several occasions when I was asked into my manager's office to discuss complaints directed at me because I was supposed to be 'neutral' on local affairs. In my personnel folder were print-outs of critical comments I had made on social media which had been sent to my line manager by people whose interests I had questioned.
It didn't matter that these were about issues that I was not professionally involved in my work but affected me personally as a resident of the town. I could see that as my knowledge of the situation was extensive, they wanted to ensure I remained silent and would not ask difficult questions or criticise them nor would I assist anyone else. I was thankful my employer saw that I had kept clear distinctions between personal and professional interests but I also knew that the people making the complaint were principals in other organisations that were a paying client of the charity and so they could exert some financial leverage on my boss. So this was plainly a warning shot across the bow designed to deter me.
Before I became a town councillor, and that was eventually because of this, by virtue of my role on a town's facility development body (mandated by the town council) I became involved in a nationwide town centre footfall project, a flagship policy of the government of the day.
I quickly became concerned that even though I had attended the initial meets, I was being shut out of the self-appointed management meetings even though my particular community development efforts were a much touted part of the footfall scheme. Another early enthusiast also had concerns because the steering body was supposed to represent the town's retailers but it had no shopkeepers on it.
They too felt they had been shut out of the committee meetings and all overtures for their input had been ignored so they became vocal on social media asking why none of the town's traders were represented in this footfall scheme. When the steering body got wind of it, the complainant was insulted on social media and intimidated into silence by ominous visits to their premises with inference that inspections would be made by authorities and other 'difficulties' might ensue.
The trader approached me for advice to see if I could do anything. They felt that as I did not own a retail business I had stronger defences and I agreed to shield them as they made further enquiries. As the body concerned was funded by the District Council but I could see overlapping representatives on the town council, I asked the District Councillor to get involved and they asked me to prepare a report for the Monitoring Officer.
All my attempts at contact with the regeneration body were ignored even though meantime they took credit for on their website for delivering outcomes I and others had worked on for several years before they ever existed. There was an opportunity to question representatives of the regeneration body at the annual town meeting. When I stood to question the representatives at the town meeting, they prevented the questions being asked on a technicality because I did not actually live in the parish.
The following month there was a town council meeting and I insisted that my questions were put on the agenda. However before the public questions could be asked, the five town councillors concerned stood up and resigned citing - without evidence - their "harassment on social media." The local newspaper was surprisingly in attendance that day and reported this mass resignation and the unsubstantiated accusations but did not report the questions being asked, even though I emailed them to the journalist immediately afterwards. The council was none the wiser about about getting answers as those who knew the answers could not be compelled as they were no longer councillors. However that left a quorum problem for the council and so it had to co-opt people onto the council, people who were acolytes of those recently departed. So the questions put on the agenda were never addressed.
I submitted my report to the town council and the district council's monitoring officer and after some delay came the promise of an investigation. But their investigative report turned out it was only concerned that there were proper receipts for the expenditure of the grant, as this was all they were responsible for overseeing. It did not concern itself with the matter of a patently false application or poor governance or that nine out the ten outcomes in the service level agreement never happened. The report admitted it had no idea who the principals signing the SLA even were. But it was satisfied the grant had been paid to legitimate vendors, which wasn't even the issue in question. In the end the Monitoring Officer agreed to a private meeting with myself and the original complainant but they were unwilling to put it in writing but were determined to impress on us that such malfeasance was not cost-effective to pursue and the case was therefore closed. And, to put a nail in the coffin; their finding in their report was cited as exonerating the regeneration body.
Throughout this episode various reports of income and expenditure were put in the public domain on the steering body's website (now deleted) with the claim that these accounts were being scrutinised by the regeneration charity but it wasn't disclosed these were one and the same and the figures published were budgets rather than actuals to anyone who looked. It also said the accounts would be signed off by the local authority, yet these were not. The local authority only verified the expenditure of the grant and not the income enabled by the grant. The regeneration charity produced merchandise which was sold but the cost of manufacture was reported but the income from sales were not.
To this day nobody seems able to account for the rent paid to this opaque body on the premises that were refurbished with the county council grant. There are still outstanding questions because from the income and expenses put on the website around £11,000 of known transactions remains unaccounted for. While one source says the peppercorn lease ended in 2016 there were until Covid regular events still held in the building. The building was occupied for a couple of years a single tenant. I have heard hires are effected by "donation" to the regeneration charity though I don't see it in their last accounts filed with the Charity Commission. They in turn will merely tell me to ask the charity.
My report given to the Monitoring Officer and their unsatisfactory response was sent to the Local Government Ombudsman who replied it had no jurisdiction on this flagship scheme across many towns and cities in the UK. That scheme has not delivered anything like its promise except take the heat off the government of the day to do something at the time.
The DCLG report on ethics states in its preface; "an ethical culture will be an open culture. Local authorities should welcome and foster opportunities for scrutiny, and see it as a way to improve decision making. They should not rely unduly on commercial confidentiality provisions, or circumvent open decision-making processes. Whilst local press can play an important role in scrutinising local government, openness must be facilitated by authorities’ own processes and practices."
It is said sunlight is the best disinfectant. While transparency appears promising to prevent corruption there are some downsides to it.
I think that at the very least the answers to Tony Benn's five questions must always be transparent in every VCO, though as I have shown, VCOs can function and do receive public money without even the names of the responsible principals being known to the public. Benn's questions are; what power do you have; where did you get it; in whose interests do you exercise it; to whom are you accountable; and, how can we get rid of you? Tony Benn's position was that anyone who cannot answer the last of those questions does not live in a democratic system.
One problem with transparency is that conflicting interests are able to object or influence to early-stage ideas before there is a chance to develop them fully. A negative reaction to a potentially good idea from a powerful adversary can end a conversation before it takes flight. Transparency can hinder the messy iterative process of creative solution finding. Issues become polarised into either/or debate just becomes left or right politics before a full slate of alternatives can be developed or a strategy articulated. Ideas become frozen and suggestions are stifled for fear of ridicule or a negative reputation if ideas are unpopular with the "peanut gallery", one councillor's words for the members of the public that attend meetings. Some ridicule the councillors as they debate on social media, sometimes in real-time, because they have conflicting interests. Transparency of early stage proposals enables nit-picking and a vexatious questioning over every detail, including the tactics I have observed such as a member of the public reading from a dictionary to councillors the definition of words or making long-winded opening statements and otherwise running down the clock of time available for debate.
Such predatory practise by opposition can lead to councillors or principals in community efforts holding de-facto meetings away from the public gaze by meeting together socially in private. This happens naturally but it can be used to force out and isolate unwanted or unpopular partners or just accidentally isolate them, leading to resentment and so causing isolation. I have shown that isolation and denial of participation such as by not publicising their meeting times and places and not inviting certain people or representatives is sometimes a coercive behaviour by the principals in VCOs.
A case was reported to me by the victim of an incident of bullying by a serial trustee and town councillor who was challenged by a very articulate citizen after a noisy public meeting that had been called by a "cabal" of town councillors, and also experienced trustees of other bodies, about the stewardship of a community hall by its own trustees. The "cabal" had mustered enough acolytes to demand, in their powers as the town council, an extraordinary general meeting and many neutral but concerned members of the public came along. A heated discussion had ensued and when one of the "cabal" ignored that member of the public's questions outside and went to walk away, the member of the public held them back by their arm. It was not an assault, both were middle-aged women, but an assault charge was brought by the councillor against their constituent. With the weight of hostile witnesses, the constituent was very poorly advised to accept a police caution, which then seriously impacted their employment.
It was alleged by several people that this councillor had taken early retirement from their role in education on condition they did not work with children again. Most of the details are locked up now in non-disclosure agreements but I found the reputation of that councillor for probity was scant for those who had dealt with them in the past, except amongst fellow councillors and close associates. This did not affect her political career as the "cabal" as they were know were regularly elected unopposed to the town council. In the May 2015 elections, 80% of England's parishes elected their councils unopposed.
I got to know this ex-councillor over a serious legal matter over a grievance brought by a council employee after their dismissal for a breach of trust and failure in their duty to their employer. Names are protected by an NDA but it was basically a case of a council employee using their powers and position to the advantage of friends, selected councillors and ex-councillors that prejudiced the effectiveness of other elected councillors. I became the referee of an already protracted boxing match by default as I was the only elected person who didn't have some kind of prior association or interest with the parties concerned. A councillor member of the "cabal" appeared as the only witness for the employee and four councillors appeared for the employer and while I realise that numbers should give no weight to the evidence, I found that the witness and the employee quite unreliable but the other councillors' evidence was robust. However, while I had no animosity towards that witness until then, I found their conduct towards me in this matter objectionable and so, to protect my reputation for probity, I gave in writing a detailed report of how I had considered all the evidence and so why I was upholding the council's dismissal, even though I didn't have to. My finding was not appealed. From then on I felt that they and their associates were forever hostile to me for simply shouldering my civic responsibility - which had consumed many hours of my unpaid time and energy.
Case history 9
So confident are the councillors in one town of retaining their seats, when a councillor moved into a new-build development and became annoyed by the noise of teenagers hanging out in a shelter in the park in front of their house, which had existed before their house was built, they had the shelter demolished and removed to the other side of the park at a cost of £4000 to the council, despite many other priorities. Everyone in the town was aghast but shrugged this what they they had suffered for years. The councillor led the debate on removing the teen shelter from outside her house and even tried to vote on it till the town clerk reminded her she could not.
Case history 10
There is a small charity in that town that positions itself as the local redevelopment body and claims on its website that it is a "partnership" of other VCOs and the three tiers of local government. However it is very hard to establish how the partnership works. It states a list of bodies that "send representatives" including the town, district and county councillors. But in the list of partners are non-existent or irrelevant bodies and when asked, several of those bodies do not recall having membership. They may have sent representative at one time to a meeting or worked jointly on a particular project in the past but say their membership is not anything more than informal. However, each time someone asks a body to confirm its membership, it identifies them as potentially hostile. In numerous grant applications and publicity the 'partnership' has claimed a lead role in delivering outcomes which have been done by others, as evidenced by their 'partnership' with them. It is political spin of the highest order.
In my experience it can be very difficult to interest the media in reporting or investigating such issues. There is no immediate story 'peg' in there being unanswered questions and the questioner invariably becomes the subject of the story instead of their cause and they become forever marked out to anyone with a keyboard as a 'troublemaker'. For journalists these issues are sometimes too complex to explain to readers. I have become fed up of reading reports of angry council meetings without an in-depth explanation of what the issues were. Concerned members of the public who write in to the local newspapers may be petty or vexatious or have their own axe to grind though such people are a gift for the letters page. I recall an ex-councillor who after resigning from their place on a town council would write letters to the local newspaper about their former council without copying in the clerk, then turn up to question the council about the letter in the local paper, of which the councillors had no knowledge. Associates berated the councillors on social media for not reading the local paper every day and not answering questions. I also consider the dearth of investigative resources in local papers and the unwillingness to bite the hand of advertisers sometimes makes them more an adversary or enabler than a friend.
When I was employed as a community development officer for a rural development charity there were several occasions when I was asked into my manager's office to discuss complaints directed at me because I was supposed to be 'neutral' on local affairs. In my personnel folder were print-outs of critical comments I had made on social media which had been sent to my line manager by people whose interests I had questioned.
It didn't matter that these were about issues that I was not professionally involved in my work but affected me personally as a resident of the town. I could see that as my knowledge of the situation was extensive, they wanted to ensure I remained silent and would not ask difficult questions or criticise them nor would I assist anyone else. I was thankful my employer saw that I had kept clear distinctions between personal and professional interests but I also knew that the people making the complaint were principals in other organisations that were a paying client of the charity and so they could exert some financial leverage on my boss. So this was plainly a warning shot across the bow designed to deter me.
Before I became a town councillor, and that was eventually because of this, by virtue of my role on a town's facility development body (mandated by the town council) I became involved in a nationwide town centre footfall project, a flagship policy of the government of the day.
I quickly became concerned that even though I had attended the initial meets, I was being shut out of the self-appointed management meetings even though my particular community development efforts were a much touted part of the footfall scheme. Another early enthusiast also had concerns because the steering body was supposed to represent the town's retailers but it had no shopkeepers on it.
They too felt they had been shut out of the committee meetings and all overtures for their input had been ignored so they became vocal on social media asking why none of the town's traders were represented in this footfall scheme. When the steering body got wind of it, the complainant was insulted on social media and intimidated into silence by ominous visits to their premises with inference that inspections would be made by authorities and other 'difficulties' might ensue.
The trader approached me for advice to see if I could do anything. They felt that as I did not own a retail business I had stronger defences and I agreed to shield them as they made further enquiries. As the body concerned was funded by the District Council but I could see overlapping representatives on the town council, I asked the District Councillor to get involved and they asked me to prepare a report for the Monitoring Officer.
All my attempts at contact with the regeneration body were ignored even though meantime they took credit for on their website for delivering outcomes I and others had worked on for several years before they ever existed. There was an opportunity to question representatives of the regeneration body at the annual town meeting. When I stood to question the representatives at the town meeting, they prevented the questions being asked on a technicality because I did not actually live in the parish.
The following month there was a town council meeting and I insisted that my questions were put on the agenda. However before the public questions could be asked, the five town councillors concerned stood up and resigned citing - without evidence - their "harassment on social media." The local newspaper was surprisingly in attendance that day and reported this mass resignation and the unsubstantiated accusations but did not report the questions being asked, even though I emailed them to the journalist immediately afterwards. The council was none the wiser about about getting answers as those who knew the answers could not be compelled as they were no longer councillors. However that left a quorum problem for the council and so it had to co-opt people onto the council, people who were acolytes of those recently departed. So the questions put on the agenda were never addressed.
I submitted my report to the town council and the district council's monitoring officer and after some delay came the promise of an investigation. But their investigative report turned out it was only concerned that there were proper receipts for the expenditure of the grant, as this was all they were responsible for overseeing. It did not concern itself with the matter of a patently false application or poor governance or that nine out the ten outcomes in the service level agreement never happened. The report admitted it had no idea who the principals signing the SLA even were. But it was satisfied the grant had been paid to legitimate vendors, which wasn't even the issue in question. In the end the Monitoring Officer agreed to a private meeting with myself and the original complainant but they were unwilling to put it in writing but were determined to impress on us that such malfeasance was not cost-effective to pursue and the case was therefore closed. And, to put a nail in the coffin; their finding in their report was cited as exonerating the regeneration body.
Throughout this episode various reports of income and expenditure were put in the public domain on the steering body's website (now deleted) with the claim that these accounts were being scrutinised by the regeneration charity but it wasn't disclosed these were one and the same and the figures published were budgets rather than actuals to anyone who looked. It also said the accounts would be signed off by the local authority, yet these were not. The local authority only verified the expenditure of the grant and not the income enabled by the grant. The regeneration charity produced merchandise which was sold but the cost of manufacture was reported but the income from sales were not.
To this day nobody seems able to account for the rent paid to this opaque body on the premises that were refurbished with the county council grant. There are still outstanding questions because from the income and expenses put on the website around £11,000 of known transactions remains unaccounted for. While one source says the peppercorn lease ended in 2016 there were until Covid regular events still held in the building. The building was occupied for a couple of years a single tenant. I have heard hires are effected by "donation" to the regeneration charity though I don't see it in their last accounts filed with the Charity Commission. They in turn will merely tell me to ask the charity.
My report given to the Monitoring Officer and their unsatisfactory response was sent to the Local Government Ombudsman who replied it had no jurisdiction on this flagship scheme across many towns and cities in the UK. That scheme has not delivered anything like its promise except take the heat off the government of the day to do something at the time.
The DCLG report on ethics states in its preface; "an ethical culture will be an open culture. Local authorities should welcome and foster opportunities for scrutiny, and see it as a way to improve decision making. They should not rely unduly on commercial confidentiality provisions, or circumvent open decision-making processes. Whilst local press can play an important role in scrutinising local government, openness must be facilitated by authorities’ own processes and practices."
It is said sunlight is the best disinfectant. While transparency appears promising to prevent corruption there are some downsides to it.
I think that at the very least the answers to Tony Benn's five questions must always be transparent in every VCO, though as I have shown, VCOs can function and do receive public money without even the names of the responsible principals being known to the public. Benn's questions are; what power do you have; where did you get it; in whose interests do you exercise it; to whom are you accountable; and, how can we get rid of you? Tony Benn's position was that anyone who cannot answer the last of those questions does not live in a democratic system.
One problem with transparency is that conflicting interests are able to object or influence to early-stage ideas before there is a chance to develop them fully. A negative reaction to a potentially good idea from a powerful adversary can end a conversation before it takes flight. Transparency can hinder the messy iterative process of creative solution finding. Issues become polarised into either/or debate just becomes left or right politics before a full slate of alternatives can be developed or a strategy articulated. Ideas become frozen and suggestions are stifled for fear of ridicule or a negative reputation if ideas are unpopular with the "peanut gallery", one councillor's words for the members of the public that attend meetings. Some ridicule the councillors as they debate on social media, sometimes in real-time, because they have conflicting interests. Transparency of early stage proposals enables nit-picking and a vexatious questioning over every detail, including the tactics I have observed such as a member of the public reading from a dictionary to councillors the definition of words or making long-winded opening statements and otherwise running down the clock of time available for debate.
Such predatory practise by opposition can lead to councillors or principals in community efforts holding de-facto meetings away from the public gaze by meeting together socially in private. This happens naturally but it can be used to force out and isolate unwanted or unpopular partners or just accidentally isolate them, leading to resentment and so causing isolation. I have shown that isolation and denial of participation such as by not publicising their meeting times and places and not inviting certain people or representatives is sometimes a coercive behaviour by the principals in VCOs.
Another concern is that openness invites people weigh in on debate without relevant knowledge, or without any responsibility to see things through while meeting every demand for consultation and ensuring inclusion whether asked for or not are resource-heavy tasks. Transparent, open fair-dealing hands an advantage to adversaries who are not transparent in their agendas. If parties are negotiating a price or exchange of assets, the transparent partner is in a weaker positions as their openness enables dishonest parties to find ways to exploit the situation to their ends, such as in the proposed then aborted merger of the two charities I have related. In that case, those calling for transparency and fair-dealing in the other party were not supported because negotiations were by then very delicate. It turned out the opaque party used their time to find ways to delay the project and make scrutiny of them even more difficult before turning on their proposed partners and going on the attack.
I sincerely hope these stories are the exception rather than the rule and should be taken as a warning of what could happen, rather than what has happened. For brevity there has to be so many omissions of detail in this account and it is the sheer stodginess of procedure in local government and the Third Sector that I think shields many organisations from scrutiny as much as the culture of omertà in small communities. Sadly, unlike the Hollywood dramas of 'Erin Brockovich' or even 'To Kill a Mocking Bird', I find there are few triumphs of justice but so far I refuse to take the advice to Jake Gittes: "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown."
I sincerely hope these stories are the exception rather than the rule and should be taken as a warning of what could happen, rather than what has happened. For brevity there has to be so many omissions of detail in this account and it is the sheer stodginess of procedure in local government and the Third Sector that I think shields many organisations from scrutiny as much as the culture of omertà in small communities. Sadly, unlike the Hollywood dramas of 'Erin Brockovich' or even 'To Kill a Mocking Bird', I find there are few triumphs of justice but so far I refuse to take the advice to Jake Gittes: "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown."
