Category Archives: Whitehall

Leveson, “secret arrests” and the rights of suspects: a question of balance – Hugh Tomlinson QC

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This is the alternative view by media barrister Hugh Tomlinson,QC to my piece on why APCO should tighten its guidelines on releasing the names of those arrested.I put it up for debate for those who are interested.

INFORRM's avatarInforrm's Blog

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThe Mail on Sunday and the Daily Telegraph are alarmed about ‘secret arrests’ – which, as usual, they blame on Lord Justice Leveson.  The complaint concerns proposed new guidelines from the Association of Chief Police Officers under which “forces will be banned from confirming the names of suspects”. The Mail calls it “a chilling new threat to the right to know” and holds out the prospect of people being swept off the streets in the manner of North Korea and Zimbabwe. The Telegraph says that critics are condemning the proposal as an attack on open justice.

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Shamed by Japan: Britain’s pot holed roads to ruin

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Pothole in London borough of Haringey: Pic Credit: Alan Stanton -Creative Commons

Pothole in London borough of Haringey: Pic Credit: Alan Stanton -Creative Commons

You couldn’t make this up. Britain’s potholed and noisy roads have such a bad world-wide reputation  for damaging new cars that a Japanese manufacturer has  replicated a British road  to test them before they can be sold in the UK.

Yes Honda has built four miles of rough British road -including British road signs and a roundabout -in Takasu, Hokkaido in Japan because they cannot find a main road bad enough to test car suspension in the 5500 miles between Japan and London.

Evidently  Britain is unique in building roads with porous surfaces which mean that every winter  they crack, break up and create pot holes. Nobody else in Europe would dream of building such roads which are noisier and can’t cope with bad weather.

As  a spokesperson for Honda  put more diplomatically: “The road surface in continental Europe, especially in the North, are paved with hard material which doesn’t absorb water. This is because in severe winter, absorbed water in the material may freeze turn into ice and destruct the roads.

“In England, we don’t tend to suffer with this severe winter and so the surface is made with softer materials with many pores to absorb rain to prevent a slippery surface. As a result, UK roads have a rougher surface which creates more road noise than other European roads. What Honda wanted to replicate in Takasu was this type of road surface. Rough does not mean badly maintained or pot-holes. It means the different material.”

Honda has also created roundabouts because as Honda put it:” In certain rural UK areas, roundabouts create a situation where high stopping power, agile acceleration response and high manoeuvrability is required. There is no such situation in Japan as there are hardly any roundabouts.”

So now we know why we are having to put up every year with multi million pound bills, legal claims for compensation from councils. Instead we need to buy cars which have to be tested abroad on replicated British roads because they can’t find any like ours in  their country.

The full story is on the Exaro News at http://www.exaronews.com/articles/4921/japan-recreates-rough-uk-roads-in-test-track-for-new-cars . If you want to see the spiralling costs of pot holes see February’s Which/ magazine (http://bit.ly/11T0Lfn) . The outstanding bill for repairs is £12.93 billion.

Or if you are really fed up why don’t you e-mail the roads minister, Norman Baker at norman.baker@dft.gsi.gov.uk and tell him to start bitmac ( the replacement for tarmac) roads with surfaces that are bound to crack up every winter.

Why a dangerous police chief ban on announcing arrests will be an own goal for justice

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Suspects arrested already in former Elm Tree Guest House investigation Pic courtesy: Exaro

Suspects arrested already in former Elm Tree Guest House investigation Pic courtesy: Exaro

A furore has broken out rightly on  daft and dangerous proposals by the Association of  Chief Police Officers (Acpo) to refuse to release the names of people they arrest in the course of  criminal investigations. As the Mail on line reported this weekend (http://bit.ly/12BhfaN )  the proposal has been condemned as secret justice and produced angry responses from Index on Censorship and the Society of Editors. The police seem to be using Leveson as cover to do this.

But it smacks of the worst kind of justice where people disappear after being taken off the streets in countries like Russia, Zimbabwe and tinpot dictatorships.

But there is a practical aspect of this policy that has been completely overlooked. It is  because Acpo have taken the view that they are a news supplier which gives the media stories and  forgotten that it is two way traffic. The investigative media also uncover crooks and give the police grounds for prosecutions.

All this will fall  apart under this new directive from Acpo when both the police and the press are pursuing the same long term investigation and their paths cross. If the police don’t tell the press and the public who they have arrested they will be a very grave danger that when these people come to trial – the prosecution case will collapse because vital information to be revealed to the jury will already been published.

The reason is simple. At the moment if the police announce arrests have been made in a long term investigation – the media take a decision to no longer publish information about that individual which could prejudice their trial. But if the media don’t know or the police won’t tell them they have been arrested they can at the moment quite legitimately publish what they like within the libel laws.

Lord Justice Leveson: Used as excuse by ACPO Pic courtesy of Leveson inquiry website

Lord Justice Leveson: Used as excuse by ACPO Pic courtesy of Leveson inquiry website

The only way round this would be for the media to refer every story  that involves criminal activity to the police to check whether they thought of arresting anyone. This would amount to a police state – with the police telling editors what they could or could not publish.

This is not theoretical. At the  moment through Exaro News(http://www.exaronews.com)  a team of journalists we are involved in a very long and complicated investigation – over 40 stories so far – into an historic paedophile ring which operated partly through the London borough of Richmond and at Elm Guest House in the 1980s.

The police have arrested two people John Stingemore,  who ran Grafton Close children’s home in Richmond, and  Father Tony McSweeney, a Roman Catholic priest ,so far and are continuing investigations into other people, including highly placed VIPs, peers and MPs.

Anyone reading this blog or following Exaro  would have noticed there has been mighty little written about this two individuals since their arrest. It is not that we don’t know stuff about both of them. But we are not putting it on line because we KNOW from the police there have been arrested and we don’t want them to escape justice by wrecking a  fair trial.

But imagine we didn’t know. the whole police case  against them could collapse. No not too melodramatic.

What Acpo fail to appreciate is that investigative journalists  work like detectives. They gather information through painstaking inquiries, trace contacts from witnesses to victims and  often find out the same information  as the police about  suspects. Sometimes they are ahead, sometimes it is the police.

To decide not to announce the names of arrested suspects will in these cases be a spectacular own goal for the police. What we need is co-operation  and dialogue  not a wall of silence.

Exclusive: The shy mandarin who gave back half his redundo to the Treasury

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This is an unusual story for our time. Just when the snatch it all culture from money grabbing bonus seeking bankers and utility bosses, and golden goodbyes for multi billionaires dominate the media, someone has a conscience.

In July 2012 Mick Laverty was made compulsorily redundant when the government axed West Midlands Advantage as part of the government’s closure of  all  the regional development agencies. This little bureaucracy bashing exercise  supervised by Vince Cable, the business secretary, has led to an amazing £60m in payouts to the 2300 staff. According to a report from IPPR North (http://www.ippr.org/images/media/files/publication/2013/03/UKfirst-northern-FDI_Mar2013_10500.pdf ) it has contributed to Britain’s downturn outside the bloated London and the South East with inward investment dropping drastically,particularly in the North and Midlands.

Mick Laverty: the shy mandarin who gave back half his redundo; Pic reproduced with permission Student Loans Company

Mick Laverty: the shy mandarin who gave back half his redundo; Pic reproduced with permission Student Loans Company

Among the super size redundo package was an award of £14o,772 to Mick Laverty – and the last accounts of the agency record he got some £351,000 (including the redundo) in the last 15 months in the job.

At the time the Department of Business Innovation and Science said none of these highly paid mandarins were going to get any new jobs in Whitehall.

And yet just six months later he was appointed as the new chief executive of the Students Loans Company to replace Ed Lester – a name familiar to this website after his amazing deal where he avoided paying tax or national insurance at source led to a huge crackdown across Whitehall when Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury, discovered 2500 civil servants were doing the same thing.

And guess who approved his appointment none other than the Department for Business. Furthermore as is reported in Exaro News, his salary is £160,000 a year plus up to £25,000 in bonuses, some £45,000 more than his predecessor. See http://www.exaronews.com/articles/4902/ed-lester-to-depart-from-student-loans-company-this-month

But there is a rather nice silver lining – at least for the taxpayer. To his credit Mick Laverty decided to return £82,117  redundo to the Treasury entirely as a voluntary gesture since he is entitled to the money under the Civil Service Compensation Scheme. I tried to talk to him about it but he seems very publicity shy and wouldn’t comment. People around him say he believes it was the right thing to do as he was only six months without a job.

If only some of our other big fat cats in Whitehall,local government  and the banks thought the same Britain might be a fairer place. But sadly the National audit Office tell me that is very rare in Whitehall, they didn’t know of another instance.

Politics of the madhouse:Lunatic law to regulate the blogosphere

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Lord Justice Leveson: Blog Regulation was outside his remit

Lord Justice Leveson: Blog Regulation was outside his remit Pic courtesy: Leveson Inquiry website

Rushed legislation is bad legislation.  Proposals in the current crime and courts bill  to extend regulation to the blogosphere at the switch of a clause without proper debate or consideration  is daft and dangerous.

I have seen the detailed clauses put down for debate when Parliament returns this month – and frankly the only use for them is to swell the already well lined pockets of m’ learned friends. Taken together they are neither use nor ornament and if they became law all they would do is spread confusion and clog the courts with hours of pointless legal argument.

The aim is to try to bring the completely unregulated blogosphere within the new  regulated press and media. The proposal was neither sought nor demanded by Lord Leveson, whose inquiry concentrated on big media. Leveson probably didn’t understand the blogosphere and as far as I know isn’t on Twitter.

The amendments tabled in the House of Lords just before the recess on March 27 can be seen here (http://bit.ly/14AyRHO). It looks as though it is in  response to a letter from a number of bloggers from Paul Staines and Tim Montgomerie to Laurance Durnan and Sunny Hundal  to the Guardian  who objected to even more drastic measures (see http://bit.ly/XTs84y ).

But I still have enormous problems with the amendment. It is still not clear whether this blog should be covered by the law or not. On the one hand  it is primarily a news blog ( should be covered then) but written by one person ( shouldn’t be covered then). It involves some editorial control – either pre moderation or post moderation of comments – depending on rules set  by WordPress.com not me.(could be covered or not depending on your view.)

I can just imagine the arguments in a courtroom between lawyers on this blog and others. What will be the definition of incidental news ( how many stories do have to have to qualify) – what happens when a subject -like the current police investigations into paedophiles becomes news (do sites that write this up become news when it is the headlines, and not news when it is not).

When is a blog like  Broken Barnet  by Mrs Angry considered a community asset (exempt) or a news blog (not exempt). What is the definition of a small blog – one of the weird Lords amendments ( is it the number of hits, unique visitors, blog followers? Or as one person has suggested is it registered for VAT and does it pass the threshold for VAT?)

The main proponents for these new controls appear to be the Media Reform Coalition who have written this blog ( see http://bit.ly/13Mgr7S ) . They appear to be a self-appointed group of academics and lawyers. Their  argument is that I  should be registered to save exemplary damages being awarded against me by the rich and powerful and to avoid paying my opponents’ legal costs.

Since this blog appeared the Media Reform Coalition have today (Thursday) launched an on line consultation and more detailed explanation of the proposed changes. Those interested can find this at http://fb.me/2z6xrP6qz 

Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy says this is not the case and there will be  three weeks of consultation to try and get un registered bloggers the same privileges as those who are registered and define properly what is a small blog. (See http://liberalconspiracy.org/2013/03/27/bloggers-to-get-three-week-consultation-on-regulation).

It remains to be seen how successgful this will be.

In the meantime  I am not swayed by the exemplary damages argument – it costs £1600 alone just to take out a libel writ at that level – so it would be beyond most people’s means. And also I suspect that many small bloggers caught in this trap wouldn’t employ lawyers – they would be become litigants in person – and clog up the courts just as the famous pair who took on Mcdonalds.  And they won’t have the money to pay the other sides legal costs anyway – so whoever took them would end up out-of-pocket themselves. The case would also become a cause celebre.

My gut feeling is to rely on the new Defamation Act – which will restrict libel cases against anyone – as the  rich and powerful will have to show the story has caused major damage – not just any damage.  I think all sides would benefit if any proposals to include blogs were dropped from the remit of the regulator – until at least there is a considered debate. As I said making law on the hoof is a disaster. You have only to look at the Dangerous Dogs Act to see this. This is the equivalent of the Dangerous Bloggers Act!

How bungling ministers are closing down specialist help for child abuse victims

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Graham Wilner: Picture reproduced courtesy Rory Wilmer Photography

Graham Wilner: Picture reproduced courtesy Rory Wilmer Photography

Last week  I wrote a blog showing how David Cameron had failed to implement immediate help for people who witnessed child abuse. Downing Street responded by saying that there was £10.5m was available to help.

Not only has this proved to be wrong . But the situation  is far worse than I could have imagined. The government is closing down what specialist support that might be available just when the police led by the  Metropolitan Police Paedophile Unit are expanding their investigations so people all over the country  are being contacted about historic child abuse – whether over Savile or the Fernbridge and Fairbank operations or  further allegations against music schools or Roman Catholic priests.

Now I have learned from Graham Wilmer, pictured above, that we are just a week or so away from the closure a pioneering project in Merseyside, the Lantern project. This project ( see http://www.lanternproject.org.uk) is unusual since it is run by a person who was sexually abused in his youth. It is also a specialist site.

Mr Wilmer is alarmed about  the situation facing people now being contacted by the police who cannot get help. See my article in Exaro News (http://www.exaronews.com/articles/4909/child-sex-abuse-groups-offering-support-services-face-closure)  for the full story.

But his experience of government support under the coalition is appalling. First the funding of his centre was halted by the justice department under Ken Clarke. Then he was advised to apply through the Cabinet Office under Francis Maude who pushed him to the Big Lottery. But the Big Lottery would not fund him for bureaucratic reasons – and only the use literally of the old boy’s network – did he get any cash.  He rang Gus O’Donnell, then Cabinet Secretary, who used to be head boy at his old school to explain the situation. An hour later,he says, £29.000, was promised to the charity.

The money was given to put on a course to train health professionals in giving proper support to people who had been abused as children. But the NHS re-organisation under then health secretary Andrew Lansley, meant that the local primary care trust, was being abolished and did not send anyone on  the course. Its successor body may have some money under Jeremy Hunt next year, but by then the centre will be closed.

As he said: “We will be closing down in two weeks time. The outgoing government did promise to set up a national strategy which would include funding for child sexual abuse but this was cancelled by the new government.”

His will not be the only none. Fay Maxted, chief executive of the Survivors Trust, said: “A significant number are going to have to close as they are funded by private trusts and money from the lottery and this is not forthcoming.

So far from the government supporting victims and witnesses to child sexual abuse – they are actively  hindering any help. Cynics might think the ministers might not care because after all some of the alleged paedophiles are linked to the Tory  and Liberal Democrat parties in the past. I do not think this is case but people could be forgiven for thinking it.

This situation is a disgrace and the present coalition government has not got a grip on the scale of the problem. Hang your heads in shame Francis Maude, Jeremy Hunt and the present justic secretary, Chris Grayling. You don’t seem to have clue about what is happening.

Why Eric Pickles will allow councils to fiddle your cash – MPs’ damning verdict

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Eric Pickles:will he make it easier for councils to fiddle your cash?

Eric Pickles:will he make it easier for councils to fiddle your cash?

Do you believe your council spends your money wisely? Are you sure none of your council tax is wasted through incompetence or fraud? Do you trust all your local politicians to be honest? Probably the answer to all three is no!

Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, has a flagship policy of scrapping the body that  tries to protect you from all of this – the Audit Commission. His passionate belief is that this body of highly skilled auditors and officials  is a load of bureaucratic nonsense – and has produced figures to claim that the public will save  over £1bn in a decade by scrapping it.

Now an all party committee of MPs led by the indefatigable Margaret Hodge, scourge of  tax avoiding Amazon and Starbucks and chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, has come to some damning conclusions on what the government is about to do. There is a full report by me on the Exaro News website (http://www.exaronews.com).

Basically Pickles wants to leave it to local councils, health trusts and the new NHS commissioning bodies to police themselves by appointing their own auditors,taking away a whistleblower hot line to the Audit Commission, and allowing big accountancy firms  free rein to up their charges by picking off individual councils. It also allows  even more cosy relationships to be built between the auditor and the local council and leaves whistleblowers nowhere to go.

Given the present background of mass privatisation of services this plain daft. The most extreme example is Tory controlled Barnet’s plan to hand almost everything over to the private sector – see the Broken Barnet website for detailed coverage (http://wwwbrokenbarnet.blogspot.co.uk). Are locally appointed auditors going to be up to doing a tough job – already Grant Thornton missed the MetPro private securityscandal in the borough. How will they keep up with all the services being privatised?

Some amazing facts are comments in  the report. The government claim it will save £137m a year. The MPs say the figure is more likely to be £2.4m. They warn of a fragmented and more complex audit regime.

And on the appointment of local auditors they say: “The proposals for self-appointment of auditors risk compromising the independence of audit. The Government must intervene to ensure that existing governance structures within local bodies are not duplicated; existing contracts are managed proficiently; economies of scale in audit fees are not lost; quality of audit does not diminish; value for money can be measured comprehensively and consistently; fees, especially for smaller bodies, do not increase as a result of increased tendering costs and potential limitations to the market in audit and; processes for auditor removal, whistleblowing and public interest reporting are rigorous enough so that the regime is sufficiently robust in difficult circumstances.”

The link to the full report is: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmdraftlocaudit/696/696vw01.htm.

Pretty damning stuff. And they call on the auditor general, Amyas Morse, to  offer to take calls from whistleblowers as well as local auditors who could have a vested interest in not upsetting the council.

Otherwise they warn that whistleblowers will contact the media, and in Barnet’s case,it will be  the local bloggers. Too right if Pickles gets his way on this dodgy piece of legislation, your money is at stake.

Stuff the poor to help the elderly: Hunt moves to adopt Lansley’s bad plan for the NHS

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Hunt moves to redistribute NHS cash to benefit better off Tory areas at expense of inner city poor

davidhencke's avatarWestminster Confidential

Update: The new NHS Commissioning Board announced this week it was proceeding with scrapping the existing formula from next April – by adopting a flat rate increase  for funding this year. It also announced it will ” conduct an urgent fundamental review of the approach to allocations, drawing on the expert advice of ACRA and involving all partners whose functions impact on outcomes and inequalities.” This will come into force in 2014-15.

In fact this will mean a redistribution to areas with large numbers of elderly people at the expense of poorer areas like the North East of England, Central Manchester  and Salford and the London borough of Tower Hamlets. All this will be in place for the run up to the next general election.

Fresh from creating chaos as part of his so-called NHS ” reforms” Andrew Lansley has let slip another dastardly plan to cope with the genuine burgeoning costs of…

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Exclusive: Police re-open investigation into London political paedo ring

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Elm-Guest-House (1)

ELm House Guest House,Barnes as it is now : Picture courtesy: Exaro News

Exaro News ( http://www.exaronews.com) today reveals that for the last two months the police have secretly been scoping a new investigation into senior politicians and their involvement in a paedophile ring, involving  under age boys, that took place in the 1980s.

This is separate to the current Operation Yewtree  investigation into Jimmy Savile and other celebrities, which mainly involves under age girls.

They are looking again at a raid that took place in 1982 on a  guest house in Barnes, south London, which appeared to be being used as a gay brothel and was frequented by prominent figures including, I am told, ministers, Tory MPs, a Liberal MP and two Labour Mps. Under age boys in  the care  of Richmond council and other local authorities were  visiting or staying at the guest house.

The inquiry-under the title Operation Fairbank – will also examine whether there was a cover up which meant that the Met Police at the time and when complaints about it resurfaced twenty years later  never followed up the investigation. Nobody was ever charged with any offence, even though the place had been raided and people bundled into police cars.

The place – 27, Rocks Lane  in Barnes – is now a very respectable and none of the people living there now having to do with events when it was the Elm House guest house between 1979 and 1982.

Exaro News was put on to this inquiry by a former Richmond Council official and trade unionist and we took him to give evidence to the police who were already investigating similar allegations passed to Tom Watson, the Labour MP. He raised the issue of the 1980s paedo ring in the Commons.

Exaro News will be covering this scandal over the next few days, starting today, and are still investigating, these, and other more serious allegations in other parts of the country. I shall be blogging in more   detail about the difficulties facing the police in handling such a difficult and fraught investigation.

Suffice to say anybody who believes that Tom Watson has raised this issue for pure political gain and this is  a fabricated story better  think again very carefully. I know it has very wide ramifications and could  lead to a scandal even bigger than the hacking inquiry.

My Political Journalist of the Year Award: Praise be the Whitehall moles

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Revealed: My secret source in Whitehall Pic Credit:BBC

Revealed: My secret source in Whitehall Pic Credit:BBC

Today I am really thrilled to win Political Journalist of  the Year Press Gazette awards for Exaro News -award  last night.

But the real tribute should go to a couple of fearless Whitehall moles who put me on the trail of the story  of massive tax avoidance at the heart of Whitehall.

While journalists must never reveal  their sources, there is at least one good tip from this for journos pursuing questionable deals done in Whitehall.

And it came from first source. He was the originator of the suggestion that senior people in Whitehall had set up  highly complicated arrangements to avoid paying any tax and national insurance. And he had heard a rumour  that one of the most grotesque examples was a recent appointment to the top job at the Students Loan Company. A left of centre character who firmly believed in the ethos of public service  he was worried that Whitehall was being corrupted by the widespread tax avoidance. We now know it is rife.

But rather than leak information which breaks the Whitehall rules we devised a different strategy. Between us we drafted a targeted freedom of information request to the Student loans Company and Vince Cable’s Department for Business  which would make it very difficult for either department to deny. During our meetings at various hostelries across London – I won’t divulge his favourite malt  in case the Whitehall thought police try to trace him- we developed the story.

Sure enough after a suitable interval back came some 60 pages of complicated e-mail traffic between Bis, the Student Loans Company, the Cabinet Office and more surprising, the outside advice from private management consultants – one paper was volunteered because they were worried we would distort their opinions – and even letters from Revenue and Customs approving the arrangement. We spent further hours  at certain hostelries analysing the results which were far worse than he thought. We spent much more time chasing up every conceivable angle before Exaro and BBC Newsnight  were ready to go with the tale.

The result was immediate. Ed Lester, the head of the Student Loans Company, had his tax arrangement stopped and Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury who had personally approved his salary had to admit he didn’t even spot the tax avoidance. He ordered a Whitehall wide inquiry.

But it was not all over.  The inquiry identified 2500 civil servants on similar deals. But had they gone too far? Enter a new mole from another part of Whitehall.  Seeing Danny Alexander’s letter to George Osborne he was furious. He felt Alexander had caught too many in his net, including genuine freelances  having bona fide reasons for working this way. This guy, a mischievous right of centre social libertarian character who enjoy’s Guido Fawkes blog, decided the world should know before Danny had a chance. Hence another story for Exaro News and BBC Newsnight.

One might feel sorry for Danny – damned if he doesn’t, damned if he does. Except of course while we all suffer his cuts  paradoxically he has never been so wealthy in his life as a Cabinet minister. And he has lots of  dinners with his chum. George Osborne.

Good for him though in ordering the inquiry. But the greatest thing of all is that he couldn’t cover this up even if he wanted to – thanks to the use of freedom of information. No wonder Jack Straw and Tony Blair now regret giving the public and journos the chance to find out what is really going on government.