Angry parish councillors in Northumberland have accused the county council of reneging on a promise to consult them properly over the establishment of a key umbrella organisation.

A cluster of parishes claim they were not allowed effective input to the process which led to the formation of the North Northumberland Area Partnership (NNAP) – which covers from Morpeth to Berwick.

They say the NNAP board only includes one parish council representative for its huge geographical area. In addition, the parish councils claim that NNAP chairman – Brenda Fordy-Scott – was not eligible for the post.

They allege there has been ‘unethical’ behaviour by the county council during the formation of the NNAP.

The parish councils – in Longhirst, Widdrington, Widdrington Station and Stobswood, East Chevington, Cresswell and Ulgham – set out their grievances in a formal complaint submitted to County Hall last November.

Now they claim it has not been properly investigated.

The NNAP – part of the wider Northumberland Strategic Partnership — comprises representatives from agencies such as councils, police, NHS, business and the voluntary sector, and helps shape policy aimed at benefiting local communities.

Longhirst Parish Council chairman Bob Jackson said: “In 2008 the county council said all partners would be consulted about the formation of the NNAP.

Our parish councils simply didn’t get the opportunity to participate.

“As it is, with only one representative on the board, we get no information as to what it is doing. It is impossible for one parish councillor to cover that whole area.”

A county council spokeswoman said: “We are aware that there were some administrative oversights which took place during the local government transition period and have apologised for these.

“All issues regarding the area partnerships have been debated openly and fully, and all decisions taken with the full knowledge of all parties concerned.

“We are confident we have fully investigated the complaints and issues raised by Mr Jackson and responded appropriately. We have suggested that if he is still not happy, then he takes up the matter with the Local Government Ombudsman.

“The area partnerships are currently undergoing a full, independent review.”

Source: Widdrington.Journallive.co.uk

INVESTIGATIONS into the mysterious theft of nearly £1,500 from Harrow Civic Centre – which auditors said had an ‘indication of staff involvement’ – have failed to uncover a suspect.

Harrow Council had fought to keep the report into the incident confidential, but the Information Commissioner’s Office backed the Observer’s Freedom of Information request and ordered it to be disclosed this week.

Just after the start of business on June 5, 2009, a key to a strongroom within the offices of registration services at the Civic Centre in Station Road, Harrow, went missing.

Staff could not access the room or its contents, including the marriage register.

The door remained locked until 1.20pm the same day when another member of staff discovered the door inexplicably open, with the key in the lock, by which time a locksmith had been called to replace the lock.

At 4pm that day, envelopes containing the week’s takings, which should have been on a shelf in the strongroom, were found to be missing – a total of £1,406.50 in cash and cheques – even though, the report reveals, a £50 float ‘that was in a more obvious position in the room was untouched’.

The report says: “While this theft indicates involvement of staff because of the knowledge of the location of the key and the amounts that were stolen, there is no clear evidence that indicates an individual or even that it was a member of this section.

“Unfortunately it has not been possible to determine who carried out the theft as there is a clear-cut lack of evidence for this.

“The police initially showed some interest in investigating the incident, so internal audit delayed investigating until it became clear that no further action was being taken by police.”

Cashing-up procedures were changed as a result of the theft and the council submitted an insurance claim to recoup the money.

A Harrow police spokesman said: “We can confirm that Harrow Council informed police on June 5, 2009 of a loss of £1,400 from the register office.

“The matter was investigated by police and forensics officers. However, due to insufficient evidence, no further action is to be taken.

“Recommendations were made to the council’s register office regarding tightening security procedures.”

Source: Harrow Observer

A PENSIONER who was told her parking ticket had been quashed by council chiefs has been left shaken after a bailiff turned up on her doorstep to demand more than £200.

Elizabeth Hughes, 69, from Anglesey, had already endured “months of hell” after a mix-up over a £30 parking ticket she received at Llandudno’s Venue Cymru from Conwy council.

This saw parking bosses threaten to send the bailiffs round to the home of the widow.

It was only after she called the council offices in tears to explain it was an innocent mistake the fine was quashed in May.

But yesterday a bailiff arrived at her Holyhead home to demand £223.

She said: “It left me totally shaken, I was told this was over and now this.

“I can’t believe it after all they had already put me through. I don’t know how this has happened.

“He wanted money or the equivalent amount in items, I was nearly in tears trying to explain but he made me feel like I was the guilty one.

“It is not right to put a pensioner through this.

“I had already had months of hell from the ongoing worry about the ticket.

“I am a law abiding person who always checks everything, so for this to happen was awful for me.”

The bailiff left the house without payment after pleading from Mrs Hughes that this had been an error on the part of the local authority.

The row over the parking ticket dated back to last November when Mrs Hughes received the fine outside the Llandudno theatre after taking disabled friend Norman Harris, 84, on a trip to see a musical.

Mrs Hughes, a musician, wrote two letters appealing the ticket, explaining she’d made an innocent mistake by not correctly setting the time on Mr Harris’s disabled badge, which was displayed in the camper van.

The local authority initially said they had no record of the letters but after seeing proof from Royal Mail had to later admit they had signed for Mrs Hughes’s second letter, sent to them by recorded delivery.

However, it had been lost in the council offices, and this led to months of anguish for the pensioner and the cost of the fine rose from £30 to £93. The letters to pay up continued.

It was quashed at the eleventh hour in April after she phoned the council in floods of tears.

This was confirmed to the Daily Post by Conwy council at the time who said it could been resolved earlier if Mrs Hughes had written again to them with her appeal.

A spokeswoman for Conwy County Borough Council said yesterday: “We have checked our files and can confirm that this ticket was definitely cancelled on May 14.

“We can only offer our sincere apologies to Mrs Hughes for this incident.”

Source: DailyPost.co.uk

A HAMPSHIRE council has been found guilty of maladministration causing injustice after it withdrew travel tokens for the elderly and disabled.

An ombudsman report states Eastleigh Borough Council axed the scheme without proper consultation or assessment and did not deal with complaints properly.

Until the concession was cancelled travel tokens could be taken instead of a bus pass and would enable the over 70s and disabled people to use taxis and community transport to make vital trips.

However, the council stopped issuing tokens when the national bus pass scheme came in 2008 Protestors against this cut say people who used the token scheme are too infirm to get around by bus.

The report recommends the council should take another look at the token scheme with proper consultation and assessment, make sure future decisions adhere to the Disability Discrimination Act, apologise to a couple and the Eastleigh Southern Parishes Older People’s Forum.after their complaints were badly dealt with.

Source: ThisIsHampshire.net

In his emergency Budget this week, Chancellor George Osborne announced he was cutting public sector expenditure by 25 per cent.

Unions have declared the cuts irresponsible. But are they? Here, one employee for a large inner London authority lifts the lid on the culture of inertia and incompetence at his workplace. The Mail knows the true identity of the man – a graduate who has been a planning officer for eight years. But to protect his job, he is writing under an assumed name.

Monday morning, it’s 10am and I’m late for work – but there’s no point hurrying because even though I should have been at my desk 30 minutes ago, I know I’ll be the first to arrive at the office.

Sure enough, the planning department is a ghost town.

Our flexi-hours policy means that employees can start any time between 7.30am and 10am, but council workers like to treat that as a rough guideline rather than the contractual obligation that it is.

I’m a senior planning officer: it’s my job to inspect buildings, grant planning approval and to guide members of the public looking to alter their homes.

Our department has 60 employees and – until last Tuesday – a budget of £22million.

I’ve been there for two years and in that period the only time I’ve ever seen every employee present and correct was at the Christmas party.

At least ten people will be off sick on any one day. The departmental record holder is Doreen – she has worked a grand total of eight days in 14 months.

Doreen must be the unluckiest woman in the country.

In the past year and a half she claims she has: fallen victim to frostbite; been hit by a car; and accidentally set herself on fire.

But she’s really pulled out all the stops with her latest excuse: witchcraft. That’s right, Doreen believes somebody in Nigeria has cast a spell on her and that it would be unprofessional of her to attempt to do the job she is paid £56k a year for while under the influence of the spell.

She has already been off for four months on full pay. I’ve no idea how long this spell lasts, but my guessing would be six months to the day – the exact amount of time council employees can take off on full pay before their money is reduced.

But having just eight weeks of full pay left won’t be a problem for Doreen and the rest of the council’s sickly staff – they’ll simply return to work when the six months is up, put in a day or two’s work and then go off sick for another six months on full pay again. Easy.

Of course they have to provide sick-notes from a doctor, but as you can buy fake ones online for £10 it’s never proved a problem.

There are procedures in place to address attendance, but nobody ever follows them through – chances are the person whose job it is to monitor sickness is probably signed off himself.

Some human resources managers, usually new to the job, do try to take action – but it mostly backfires.

All credit to the bright-eyed young HR manager who, last year, wanted to dismiss a senior employee who had been off sick for three months.

The employee had still been using his company mobile phone, from Marbella.

However, the employee was able (with a little help from the mighty Unison union) to argue that there’s no reason why ‘sick’ people can’t rent villas in the Costa Del Sol.

I’ve been told by colleagues that I don’t take enough sick leave – when I protest that it is because I’m in good health they look confused. What’s that got to do with anything?

At my borough a worker can take two weeks before having to produce a doctor’s note (fake or not).

With the five weeks’ annual leave plus bank holidays, even the most conscientious worker in my department is easily taking 12 weeks a year off.

To add insult to injury, some London boroughs recently introduced a new scheme whereby anybody who did an extra 15 minutes’ work a day for 20 days could take an extra day’s holiday.

But when you can so easily take six months off, who needs official holidays?

Back to the day’s business. Jerry is the next to arrive at 10.25am – before he takes his jacket off he performs his morning ritual of taking both his phones off the hook.

God forbid that any resident and council tax payer should be able to speak to him and get some of the advice he’s paid £64k a year to dispense.

Jerry is 63 and two years from retirement. He is what is known in the civil service and local government as an ‘untouchable’ – he’s been at the council for more than 40 years, does no work, but would cost an absolute fortune to get rid of.

So he’s left alone to play online poker, Skype his daughter in Florida and take his two-hour daily snooze at his desk, no doubt dreaming of the day when his gold-plated public sector pension will kick in.

If you think Jerry’s pay is generous, consider this: the head of my department is on an annual salary of £170k plus bonuses, his deputy nets £99k and even the office PAs are on a very respectable £38k – just two thousand less than I get.

I listen to my answerphone and, as usual, there are about 20 messages from people trying to report faulty street lights or complain that their rubbish hasn’t been collected – calls that have been misdirected by our useless call centre.

When I first started here at the council, I tried to pass these messages on to the right department, but eventually gave up – nobody answers phones, nobody listens to voicemails, and emails go unread.

There’s no point showing any initiative. I once wandered down to the ‘Streetcare’ department to ask why the hell nobody was answering the phone.

But only two staff had turned up that day and they were both in the prayer room.

Yes, you read that correctly, all large council offices now provide prayer rooms, primarily for their Muslim employees whose faith requires them to perform devotional prayers at midday, in the afternoon and at sunset.

Although it’s two years since I started working for this authority I’ve also worked for two other London boroughs in various capacities over a period of 12 years. In that time I’ve never known anybody be sacked, no matter how inept and unprofessional they may be.

I’m not sure what it takes to get fired in local government. I’d say ‘murdering the CEO’ but, even then, you’re more likely to be sent on an ‘anger in the workplace’ course.

Councils love their workshops, training courses and seminars. This week alone I’ve been invited to attend: A cycle hire and efficiency course; a traffic and pollution briefing; and a training course on offsite health and safety.

Next week there is a two-day course on ‘letter writing skills’ – I dearly hope that Jackie, our departmental PA, will attend this one. I’ve given up using her and now type my own correspondence and reports.

The last time she typed a letter for me (to an architect) she misspelt ‘accommodation’ and ‘environment’ throughout.

I gently pointed this out to her and asked her to redo the document. But she went sick for two weeks with stress, complaining that she was being bullied.

When my boss called me in to discuss this I, jokingly, said: ‘Well I’ll just let her misspell everything in future, shall I?’ To which he replied: ‘Yes, I think that’s best for now.’

I’m not sure what workshop I was asked to attend for that particular misdemeanour, but I do recall the ‘cultural awareness and sensitivity’ one following an incident where I outrageously asked a black colleague if I could open a window behind her desk.

It was 88 degrees outside and our offices have no air conditioning. This lady was born and bred in North London but claimed her Caribbean heritage meant she felt the cold and opening a window by six inches would cause her to suffer.

I did the workshop and wrote her a letter of apology as recommended. I actually began to question whether I was racist or insensitive.

That evening I saw Sean, my oldest friend who is black. I ran the window story by him – he eventually stopped laughing after about 20 minutes.

You can’t be made to attend these workshops but, surprisingly, the take-up is remarkably high.

Not because those going want to improve their skills, but because a full day’s training comes with a full day’s free catering.

‘Fact Finding Missions’ are another great favourite within the public sector. The last one I attended was a two-day trip ( transport and four-star accommodation included) to a football club in the Midlands.

Supposedly it was to understand how other inner cities tackle sporting events in areas of high population.

However, the only ‘fact’ I discovered was that it takes about 11 pints and two whisky chasers before my boss keels over.

In fairness, there are some very hard workers at the council, but they are so massively outweighed by the work shy that they’re fighting a losing battle. The culture is very much one of getting minimum done for maximum pay.

Even when a reasonable proportion of the staff turns up for work (for our office that would be about 60 per cent) very little gets done because the officers cannot be bothered with the fiddly paperwork that goes with
the job.

When residents contact the office because they want, for example, a loft extension or to replace windows in a conservation area, they hit such a wall of inefficiency and apathy that many simply give up or go ahead without permission.

I recently received a letter from somebody looking for the plans to a building that was erected ten years ago.

I passed it on to Jackie the ever-efficient PA, who claimed she couldn’t find them. I went to look and located them in 30 seconds.

The only time the department ever really jumps into action is when architects complain.

They know planning inside out and won’t be fobbed off with delaying tactics that ordinary citizens have to contend with.

You can’t even give them the old council favourite of claiming that you can’t answer any of their questions because of ‘data protection’. We love that excuse – nobody really knows what it means, but we use it all the time.

Bosses of local authorities have bonuses dependent on not getting high numbers of complaints.

But the only way complaints can be recorded is if they are dealt with – if they’re ignored or mysteriously lost then they never existed and won’t be counted.

Despite all this, my department makes a huge amount of money – mostly from private developers.

If they want to build something it costs them £2,300 just to have an initial planning meeting with us.

What they don’t know is that we’ve already had a meeting and decided they probably won’t get permission – unless they agree to a ‘planning gain’ – a dodgy but perfectly legal practice whereby a developer who wants to build, say, a hotel, will be told that he can have his planning permission, but only if he also agrees to build a community centre too.

It’s a way for councils to improve local amenities, without having to pay for them from public funds.
Some might call it bribery. For us, it’s everyday business that ensures our budgets are protected for our vital work – like protecting our pay rises and perks.

So can anything be done to curtail this greed, waste and chronic incompetence?

George Osborne clearly thinks so, with his bold promises to tackle the bloated public sector head-on.

We had a meeting on Thursday to discuss the Chancellor’s proposed cuts – there was talk of strike action among the younger workers, but much rubbing of hands among the ‘untouchables’, many of whom could walk away with six-figure golden goodbyes.

The cuts and pay freezes are desperately needed, but the one thing Mr Osborne will never be able to control is the culture of inertia and inefficiency that is rife throughout the public sector.

Of course, when I tell my friends in the private sector about my working conditions, they can scarcely believe it. As the recession bites, they consider themselves lucky to be holding on to their jobs, and are willing to work extra hours or take a pay freeze to ensure their firm’s survival.

In the public sector, though, there is no competitive edge; no incentive to cuts costs or improve efficiency. Few genuinely fear for their job security, protected as they are by threats of union action every time the axe looks likely to fall.

It’s the same story across the world: when a nation’s public sector is allowed to expand into a bloated behemoth, it is almost impossible to cut it down to size, still less to change the culture of waste and laziness that sets in.

I don’t know what the solution is. Even those, like myself, who join with the best of intentions are soon worn down and end up subscribing to the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ school of thought.
Of course the real scandal is it’s your money that’s paying for the jollies, the prayer rooms and the never- ending workshops.

In my authority’s borough, the average householder pays £1,330 a year in council tax. I’m sure they’d be thrilled to know that they’re funding Jerry’s internet gambling and Doreen’s never-ending sick pay.
Good luck Mr Osborne – you’re going to need it.

Source: Daily Mail Online

Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles has launched a review into council-funded free newspapers, telling Channel 4 News’s Stephanie West they are “propaganda on the rates dressed up as local reporting” that could damage the local newspaper industry.

Local newspapers are already under the cosh of recession and of keeping up with technological advances, with 100 closing in the last two years.

1200 remain, but editors and journalists fear that the rise of council-funded freesheets could be a death knell for the industry.

Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles has launched a review into the practice.

He told Channel 4 News: “It’s a growing trend. It’s not the revenue, it’s not the advertising that worries me. It’s the unfair competition against newspapers and i think it is very important that we have an independent voice bringing local government to account.

“I have seen newspapers that are frankly masquerading as local papers when it comes from the council. How can the council hold itself to account?”

But some suggest that the declining circulation seen by local newspapers is more of a societal trend than a an issue to lay at the door of councils.

Lynne Anderson of trade body the Newspaper Society told Channel 4 News: “I should stress we’ve got no complaint whatsoever with the traditional type of council publication which gives taxpayers valuable information about council services.

“What we’re complaining about is the new breed of competing council newspaper trying to style itself as a local independent newspaper and going after third party revenues.”

Source: Channel 4 News

Plymouth City Council has been fined £8,000 for allowing unauthorised firms to remove and sell unwanted computers from its waste plants.

The council breached the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE) by letting firms take computers and other electronic items without checking that they were bona fide recyclers.

The Environment Agency took the council to court where it was also told to pay £3,742 in costs.

The agency is trying to stop councils and companies throwing their IT equipment away without checking where it’s going. The technology can end up dumped in developing countries where it causes health and environmental risks.

Charity Computer Aid UK takes unwanted IT, refurbishes it and sends it to developing countries for use in schools and community projects.

Anja ffrench, director of communications at Computer Aid, said, “We are pleased to see that the Environment Agency is moving to prosecute and fine organisations that do not comply with the WEEE Directive.

“This, however, highlights the continuing lack of knowledge and awareness of UK organisations who still do not know how to dispose of e-waste responsibly.

“Their ignorance also undermines the trust placed in local authorities by the businesses that send them electronic waste for disposal by potentially putting them at risk of having their valuable personal data ending up on a dump in Nigeria or Ghana.

“E-waste cowboys continue to operate, posing as legitimate reuse and recycling organisations, enticing unwitting businesses to use them for the disposal of their electrical equipment.”

Source: ComputerWeekly.com

THE recently departed Labour Government left an appalling legacy.

Endemic waste and mismanagement have almost bankrupted the public finances.

As the former Chief Secretary Liam Byrne breezily confess ed on his departure from the Treasury last month after his party’s long reign of profligacy: “There’s no money left.”

A key part of this spendthrift culture was Labour’s addiction to bureaucracy. Remorseless expansion of the state machine was elevated into a principleof governance. Organisational growth was seen as the solution to every problem.

The mania for institutional tinkering led to a proliferation of new quangos and managerial empires, all of them swallowing ever greater sums of taxpayers’ money to justify their own existences and give the illusion of action.

The obsession with bureaucracy is one of the reasons public expenditure has been so disastrously out of control.

Under Labour, the state payroll grew to reach 7.5 million employees, while an arrogant public sector elite came into being, full of jargon-spouting, self-serving pen pushers on obscene salaries. No aristocrats of the past exploited the public with the kind of grasping ruthlessness displayed by Labour’s breed of greedy executives.

There are now more than 800 state officials on over £150,000 a year, many of them doing routine jobs for which no special talent is required. This is the extravagant world that the new coalition Government must tackle if the deficit is to be reduced and sanity restored to the public finances.

But, for all the fashionable wailing about the “pain” of cuts, especially from the public sector trade unions, the truth is that Britain would gain enormously from a vigorous assault on state bureaucracy which is choking the life out of our nation.

Businesses and individuals would be freed. Taxes could go down. With officialdom in retreat, there would even be more money to put into frontline services like classrooms and hospitals. The coalition could make a start by reducing the size of the gargantuan Whitehall Civil Service, made up of more than 530,000 administrators.

Even a modest initial reduction of just 10 per cent in this workforce would save the Treasury £1.2billion a year, though the scope for long-term savings is far greater.

The endless tiers of management in the NHS, local government and education provide another large area for cuts. In the last two years alone, spending on management salaries and the NHS’s Primary Care Trusts has shot up by no less than 25 per cent, this at a time when the private sector was enduring pay freezes and redundancies because of the recession.

Too much public sector recruitment is nothing more than an employment racket for over-paid bureaucrats. Only this month, for instance, Barnet Council in North London has advertised for three assistant directors on salaries totalling over £300,000, while Brighton and Hove Council is to hire four new “strategic directors” on £125,000.

Arguably even the cuts exercise can be turned into another excuse for more prodigality. At Suffolk County Council, the £220,000-a-year chief executive Andrea Hill is spending £122,000 on consultants to advise on how to save money.

The quango state built by Labour is also ripe for the axe. The quangos spend more than £120billion a year and employ 700,000 staff, yet so much of their activity is of no benefit to the taxpayers who have to fork out for all this self-indulgence.

Outside the politically correct cocoon of metropolitan elitism no one would miss the £70million a year Equality and Human Rights Commission if it were abolished tomorrow. The shambles of further education is typical of the bureaucratic mess produced by quangos.

Last year, the Labour Government admitted that the £12billion Learning and Skills Council (LSC) had failed so badly that it would have to go. Yet, far from reducing the burden of officialdom, Labour decided to create two new bodies in its place: the Skills Funding Agency and the Young People’s Learning Agency. No less than £42million was spent on the launch of these outfits which have been entirely staffed from the failed LSC and are certain to be just as useless.

The network of £1.7billion a year Regional Development Agencies is almost a microcosm of everything that is wrong with bureaucratic Britain.

Hopelessly inefficient, their entire effort is devoted to boasting of their importance in an attempt to justify their outrageous budgets. The East of England Development Agency, for instance, claims to have created 5,700 jobs in the local economy last year but given that it spends £144million, that works out at £25,000 per job, an absurd misuse of public money.

The picture is even grimmer at the South East Development Agency, where chief executive Pam Alexander, a former Whitehall civil servant, earns £218,000 a year. She trumpets the creation of 8,000 local jobs but, in the context of an agency budget of £245million, each of them cost £30,600.

This destructive nonsense has got to stop. We have never spent more on the machinery of the state, yet we have never been worse governed. The bureaucrats’ ineptitude and bullying seems to rise in proportion to their spending. Cuts, far from bringing pain, could be a source of liberation for the British people.

Source: The Express

Compensation paid out by Lambeth Council for its mistakes increased by 500 per cent last year, it has emerged.

The town hall paid out £118,812 in compensation in 2009-10 compared to £19,706 in 2008-09, according to a council report.

The increase comes as it emerged the council received about twice as many complaints about its service as comparable London boroughs.

It received 4,910 complaints last financial year, compared to 3,021 in Hackney and 1876 in Haringey.

The massive rise in cash settlements was “due to raised awareness of awarding compensation as a way of resolving complaints where injustice has been caused,” according to the report to the Corporate Committee.

The Corporate Complaints Digest report also states the dramatic rise was because of “several large refunds or debts that were written-off as a result of complaints.”

The report said the figures had been “skewed” by a £89,500 settlement the housing and regeneration department had to make after an Ombudsman ruling of “maladministration” involving a “right to buy” housing application.

The report showed a more than 650 per cent increase in the amount of compensation paid out by the council’s housing manager, Lambeth Living. It paid out £54,881 in 2009-10, compared to £8,370 in 2008-09.

The report said Lambeth received 250 very serious Level 3 complaints, compared to 118 in Hackney and 38 in Haringey.

It said the figures suggested while Lambeth was an improving council, as the drop in complaints showed, “significant improvements” were still needing to bring the council to the level of comparable London boroughs.

Source: StreathamGuardian.co.uk

COLCHESTER Council has been ordered – on pain of prosecution – to release secret papers about the building of the town’s controversial new arts facility.

The Government’s official information watchdog has severely criticised the council for trying to keep private information about the unfinished and hugely over-budget Visual Arts Facility.

An investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office has ruled the council was wrong to withhold details in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The request was lodged by an undisclosed person on March 10, 2008.

The request was for details of progress on the building – including how much it might cost the taxpayer if it all went wrong. It released some information, including selected details from health and safety reports, project timetables and a list of defects found in the building.

But a report showed other important details were withheld.

The council is currently suing its original builders and feared publication of the details might threaten its court action.

It claimed the information it withheld was commercially and legally sensitive, breached data protection laws and could discredit those involved.

But the Information Commissioner’s report dismisses the council’s arguments as invalid – and demands the rest of the information be made public within the next few days.

The commissioner also ruled the council was wrong to withhold the information and failed to respond properly to the request.

His report orders the council to release the missing information by June 16 – including details of builders and other project officers involved in the project, but not previously revealed. Failure to do so could lead to a prosecution.

Andrew Weavers, the council’s legal services manager, said it would now release the information.

Paul Smith, councillor responsible for the project, added: “I’m grateful to the Information Commissioner for clarifying exactly what the correct legal position is.

“We obviously didn’t want to prejudice the legal action, but if the commissioner says ‘do it’ that’s absolutely fine by me.”

Neither the council, nor the commissioner’s office has disclosed the identity of the person who requested the information in the first place.

Work to complete the outer shell of the building, off the High Street, should have finished two years ago and cost £16.3million. The latest estimate is £19million.

Last month, the council agreed to earmark another £1.1million for work on the interior. It is hoping to claim back £1.4million through legal action against former builder, Banner Holdings.

Essex County Council and the Arts Council have confirmed they are also considering requests to chip in £1.5million apiece to get the arts complex finished.

Source: Daily Gazette