Metropolitan Police Fails to Respond to Seventy Percent of Personal Data Requests

More on the magical mystery tour I've embarked upon to prise personal information from the hands of the Metropolitan Police.

 Back in June, I wrote a piece explaining how campaigners, if they believed they may have been targeted for undercover surveillance, could submit a Subject Access Request under data protection legislation to find out what personal details are held about them by the police. My own initial submission to the Metropolitan Police, whose Special Demonstration Squad targeted the Lawrence family, their supporters and police custody death campaigners during the 1990s and who are now responsible for the National Domestic Extremism Unit, apparently went missing but a second request was formally acknowledged on 25 July.

Five months ago, when I said that despite an entitlement under the Data Protection Act to receive an answer within 40 days, no-one ever receives a response in that time, I had little idea just how prophetic that would prove to be. After chasing the Met's Public Access Office, I finally received a letter from them three months later, on 25 October, which apologised for the delay in responding but gave absolutely no indication when, if ever, it planned to respond to my request. I therefore complained to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), who told me in early November that they had written to the Met asking them to provide me with a full response by 9 December.

The ICO's deadline is today. It has been 138 days since the Metropolitan Police received my request for personal data, it has still failed to respond despite repeated prompting and now it has ignored the independent regulator set up to promote openness by public bodies.

Curious to discover whether police resistance to providing the data it holds about me is less wilful non-compliance and more staggering incompetence, I also submitted a Freedom of Information request asking for the number of Subject Access Requests received by the Metropolitan Police during the six months from 1 April 2013 to 30 September 2013 and how many were completed within the 40 calendar day limit. Remarkably, the Met replied last week refusing, initially, to answer these simple questions on the grounds of cost, because I had asked for the number of successfully completed requests. It claims it has no internal systems in place to monitor this and insisted it would need to check each of the 480 submitted in the six month time period that were simply completed. Eventually, however, the Met did manage to admit that it received 1600 requests between April and September this year.

So now I know my request is one of the staggering 70% (1120 out of 1600¹) that the Metropolitan Police has failed to respond to within the required 40 days during the six months from April.

This degree of repeated failure to provide adequate public transparency by any public body is shocking but to put it into some context, it's worth remembering that  for the first three months of the period from April, the ICO said it was monitoring the Met over concerns about its timeliness.

I have now asked the ICO to again intervene on my behalf but, when it is evident that the Metropolitan Police is neither transparent or accountable on the personal data it holds, the time has surely come for the Information Commissioner to begin regulatory enforcement action.

The Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) has produced a detailed guide to writing and submitting Subject Access Requests to check what information is held by the National Domestic Extremism Unit. It is available to download or online here.

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Note
¹ This includes any Subject Access requests received by the Met right up to 30 September: my FoI request was made exactly 40 days after that date.

Update On Accessing Newham Council's Accounts

On 19 July, I reported that Newham council has broken the law by failing to publish details of the period when local people have the right to inspect its draft accounts. This failure included both details on its website and a notice in the local newspaper at least 14 working days before the start of public inspection. An e-mail I have seen, from the council's Chief Accountant Barry Stratfull, explains that "following a technicality", meaning a lack of forethought that no-one managed to catch when it happened last year, "we will be reissuing the required public notice detailing when the accounts will be available for inspection".

The council has now managed to post the correct notice online and an advertisement is tucked away on the bottom of page 44 of this week's Newham Recorder. Residents will be able to inspect any and all contracts, invoices, receipts and bills and make copies from 9 August to 7 September 2012.

This remains one of the most powerful rights available to citizens in the UK to uncover the details of how local councils are spending public money. Therefore, if there are burning questions that residents and local campaigners have wanted answers to, from expenditure on the council's headquarters, its payments to consultants or indeed, how exactly the Preventing Violent Extremism budget has been spent, now is the time to pop along to Newham Town Hall on Barking Road, between 10am and 4pm, to try and find out.

The draft Statement of Accounts for 2011-12 can be found here. Happy hunting!

For Second Year, Newham Council Breaks The Law on Citizens' Inspection Rights

For the second year running, Newham council has broken the law by failing to publish on its website the details of the period when the local electorate has the right to inspect its draft accounts under the Audit Commission Act 1988.

Every year, for around 20 days, local people have the right to see detailed contracts, invoices, receipts, and bills, make copies and raise points of interest with the district auditor. Since October 2010, this has included the right to examine local authority contracts, including those relating to Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contractors. There are many local campaigners who would find this last requirement extremely useful.

From March 2011, every local council has been required under Regulation 10 of the Act to place a copy of the statutory newspaper notice, the one that is usually buried in an obscure corner of the Newham Recorder, on the authority's own website, at least 14 days before the public may examine the documents and files. As I pointed out last year, Richmond-upon-Thames council was forced to revise its inspection period because the original was illegal, as it had failed to comply with this (then) new regulation.

 Inspecting the real detail of council spending is one of the few powerful tools available to us as citizens, so we can find out how public bodies are spending public money. But guess what – transparency-averse Newham council, who failed to comply last year, has failed all over again in 2012.

Apparently Newham's period of inspection opened on 2 July and continues until 30 July. However, I have checked and as the screen shots taken this morning show, there is no record of the legal requirement for a statutory notice on its website, which may explain why so few people will even know about their rights.

If anyone wishes to inspect the council's original documents – and PFI contracts will be fascinating to examine – then they are currently able to visit between 10am and 4pm at Newham Town Hall on Barking Road. If you want to inspect particular documents, arrange that in advance by calling 020 3373 0694 or emailing chief.accountant@newham.gov.uk

Meanwhile, would someone from the London Borough of Newham care to explain why it has failed to understand the new regulations, why it has failed to publicise an important citizens' rights on its website – and whether, when facing the possibility of a judicial review, it plans to now comply with Regulation 10 and restart the inspection period from a future date?

UPDATE

Not only has Newham council failed to publish a notice on its website at least 14 working days before the start of public inspection, but it didn't even manage to get a notice onto page 11 of the Newham Recorder until 20 June - only 8 working days beforehand. Anyone want to guess how much of a council priority it is to publicise the public's right to access?

The Ongoing Battle Over PVE Transparency

Whilst I was away, Newham council responded to the Freedom of Information request I submitted on 20 February, which asked for "a detailed breakdown of the council's 'Preventing Violent Extremism' (PVE) spending in 2010-2011, including expenditure on PVE supported projects, information on salary costs, project expenditure, publicity or other budgeted items".

Unsurprisingly, their reply [PDF] did not included a detailed breakdown but rather a 'spending overview', which showed the following information:

Once again, this tells us very little. There is no detail on how the PVE-supported projects totalling just over £100,000 are broken down, although this represents (after staffing costs) the lion's share of the expenditure. It will also be necessary to submit a further FoI request to find out how many times the council's graffiti control officers responded to extremist vandalism and for what purpose - I know only of the incident in Plaistow where a Jewish resident 's home was daubed with swastikas and racist abuse and this was outside of the period covered by the PVE spending above. It would be helpful to know if the money was simply used instead to subsidise the council's overall response to graffiti and vandalism and if not, whether specific incidents of extremist graffiti indicate a more significant threat from the far-right than from Islamic fundamentalism. If this is the case, is this also reflected in other areas of PVE expenditure?

Getting information out of Newham council on PVE is still like trying to get blood out of a stone. The Freedom of Information Act makes clear that people requesting information have a right to all the relevant recorded information a public body holds and yet again, Newham has failed to provide it. A request for an internal review has now been submitted.

Why is this important? Because close to £400,000 of public money was spent on tackling local radicalisation, an issue that no participant in the research by the Office for Public Management mentioned in the spending overview (a report published in September 2010) said was "a particularly significant issue in Newham, especially when compared to wider issues of socio-economic deprivation in the borough".

As the Office for Public Management also reported, "mistrust of the agenda is also a function of people feeling that there has been a significant lack of information and communication about Prevent funding and delivery at the local level". As far as I can see, that significant lack of information and communication is still an ongoing issue.

POSTSCRIPT

I have tried to see whether the PVE 'overview' makes any more sense by comparing it to the budget that I eventually managed to drag out of Newham council last year. These are the results, based on guesses on what the different areas of expenditure actually relate to ( for example, I've assumed that the 'resettlement project' relates to work with prisoners, which was tendered to St Mungo's Trust).

Either the information provided is incomplete to a staggering degree, or the council had a major underspend in 2010-11. My view is that it simply misleading -yet again.

'Preventing Violent Extremism' - More Wilful Obfuscation By Newham Council

The battle to try and persuade Newham council to explain how it has actually spent hundreds of thousands of pounds allocated for its ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ programme has been rumbling on since February 2010. In July this, as I reported at the time, a series of specific questions put to the senior officer responsible for PVE, following a meeting in May 2011, had still not been answered. But yesterday, after more than three months, a reply finally appeared: an eighty one word e-mail of more wilful obfuscation.

Up until now, I haven't named the council officer who is stonewalling questions about the council's lack of openness, but considering how insulting and evasive his latest response has been, I feel it only right that I now do so. As council tax payers, we fund the salaries of senior officers after all and, as the campaigner Heather Broke points out in her book The Silent State, the ability of bureaucrats to hide behind anonymity often contributes to an even greater lack of transparency. So anyway... the official in this case is Geraint Evans and he is the 'Community Resilience Manager' within the Safer Newham Partnership Team.

In May, Evans had been asked two questions about the way Newham council had consumed a large chunk of its PVE funding – what had happened to £200,000 for projects in 2010/11, what they were and what their intended outcomes had been; and exactly how an allocated £67,425 in 2010/11 to “undertake a programme of communications and events to improve community cohesion throughout the borough” was actually spent. Unfortunately, my 2010 Freedom of Information request (PDF) had failed to elicit any detail, which makes Evans’ response all the more infuriating:

"As for the questions on budgets and spending, I would refer you to the Freedom of Information section on the Newham website, where similar questions have recently been answered".

But sadly, they haven’t been answered. It is impossible to comprehend why these questions couldn’t just receive a straight answer, instead of requiring a trawl through pages and pages of the council’s FOI Disclosure logs. But I have searched through them – and the FOI requests on PVE budgets are my own and they did not answer the specific question on how huge sums of council money were actually spent. That was the point of asking for more detail in the first place – and Evans’ response is nothing short of utter nonsense.

Evans was also asked about the PVE ‘Channel’ programme, which identifies those who are allegedly vulnerable to recruitment by extremists and then seeks to channel them in a different direction. Newham has one of the largest ‘Channel’ caseloads in the country. In May’s meeting, Evans had dodged the opportunity to confirm the proportion of Muslims caught up in the programme, insisting there is no discrimination and that the council is concerned with all forms of terrorism. We still have no way of checking how true this is, for Evans has found a new and imaginative way to avoid giving an answer, saying:

“I should also remind you that any questions regarding Channel should be put to the Police, rather than to LBN, as they are responsible for such things”.

So despite insisting that Prevent doesn’t target the Muslim community, Evans now insists that Channel has nothing to do with him. How, then, can he claim to know?

Finally, Evans was asked for a copy of the London Borough of Newham’s current strategy document for delivering the Prevent programme locally. A simple request, surely? Sadly not, for the response simply said:

“LBN are currently working on a new delivery plan."

You will note that there is no indication when the new plan might be ready or whether it would ever be made publicly available once it has been finalised. Neither is there what was asked for: not even an invitation to spend hours searching through the council's website for its current strategy document. It's hard to imagine how this reply could have been any more unhelpful.

The only potentially useful information provided was a copy of an external assessment of the delivery of the PVE programme in Newham, conducted by the Office for Public Management (OPM). This report is interesting, for it raises serious questions about why Newham has such a huge PVE caseload, as many of those questioned by OPM felt that Muslim radicalisation in Newham “was nonexistent, limited or ‘moderate’ at worst”. I’ll cover the 108-page document in a further blog post soon.

Access Newham Council's Accounts

The freedom of information campaigner Heather Brookes, whose dogged persistence led to the full disclosure of the MPs’ expenses scandal, has posted the following useful reminder on her website:

For 20 days in June, July or August, every council is legally required to open up its draft accounts for public inspection. Under the Audit Commission Act 1988 you have a legal right to see detailed contracts, invoices, receipts, books and bills, the right to make copies and the right to raise other points of interest with the auditor. This is one of the most powerful rights citizens in the UK have to uncover the nitty gritty details of how public bodies are spending public money.

Chances are if you rock up to your council office you may be the first one to do so in years. But don’t be put off. You have every right to be there and too few citizens make the effort to hold local councils accountable for the money they spend in the public’s name. Certainly as local newspapers disappear it could be that the local nosey parker is all that stands in the way of a corruption scandal continuing undetected for years.

The Orchard News Bureau has provided a helpful list of Public Access to Local Authority Financial Information in London boroughs and as yet, Newham has not published details on inspection dates, unlike neighbouring Barking & Dagenham, Hackney, Redbridge or Waltham Forest. Access for the previous financial year was between 13 July and 9 August 2010, so clearly there has been a delay. However, Newham's draft Statement of Accounts is available online.

So if you have a hankering to more closely inspect Newham's accounts and related documents (comprising books, deeds, contracts, bills, vouchers and receipts) I'll provide an update as soon as I hear when it plans to open its books.

Let's hope that the council remembers - poor old Richmond-upon-Thames council was forced to revise its inspection period because the original was illegal, as it had failed to comply with new regulations from March 2011 that required it to post a copy of the public notice on its website at least 14 days in advance of the commencement. Luckily that problem is now fixed.

In October 2010, the Court of Appeal ruled that voters are entitled to examine local authority contracts, including those relating to Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contractors, unless there is a there is a 'strong public interest' against disclosure.

Newham Pledges Not To Screw Up on Release Of Council Spending Data

At the beginning of October, the Guardian published an article revealing that, despite pressure from central government, only 66 local authorities had already managed to publish every item of their spending over £500. By the end of this year at the latest, all 326 councils in England must have systems in place to provide this data.

In September, the government published its guidance for local authorities, which states that "data should be published in a timely manner and with a licence that allows open reuse" and that "files are to be published in CSV file format". Both these requirements are mandatory. However, as Chris Taggart of OpenLocal highlighted at the end of September, many of the initial batch of 66 councils have already managed to completely ignore these instructions, by publishing insufficient or incomplete information in PDF format and therefore making the data extremely inaccessible.

At least there is time for these councils to fix their failure to follow the guidance. We can expect the new England-wide system that starts in January 2011 to include many more examples of data that does not indicate department names, identify suppliers or describe what different payments were actually for.

Needless to say, Newham wasn't one of the 66 authorities that has made a start. Out of curiosity, I therefore dropped the council a line, asking whether it was able to confirm whether it intends to make its spending information available earlier, as a number of other councils have done. For some strange reason, this simple query was treated as a Freedom of Information request and the council then proceeded to take the full 20 working days to reply. And its response? This is what took all that time:

London Borough of Newham will comply with the regulations regarding publication of payments set out by Government.

I guess that's an abrupt 'No' to earlier publication, then.

But at least this otherwise anodyne statement confirms something - that Newham council promises to publish its spending on a monthly basis, in CSV format, with the detail of "all individual invoices, grant payments, payments to other public bodies, expense payments or other such transactions", broken down into meaningful expense areas and including supplier names. That's what the regulations require.

Anything less from New Years Day 2011 - including the kind of evasiveness demonstrated by other local authorities - would be a breach of that promise. Fortunately, I'll be in the country for a change at the start of next year to check and see - but it's Newham, so I'm still obviously expecting the worst...

Thousands Unlawfully Stopped and Searched Without Authorisation

In another victory for submitting Freedom of Information Act requests, it has been revealed today that thousands of people have been unlawfully stopped and searched under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

This is the police power used in the the arrest of a press photographer covering climate change activists at London City Airport and the stop and search of a BBC photographer at St Pauls Cathedral. In 2008 it was used against a a 15-year-old schoolboy in south London who was taking photographs of Wimbledon railway station for his school geography project. Last year, the Tory MP for Croydon, Andrew Pelling, was stopped under section 44 after photographing a "long-neglected bicycle and pedestrian route" that had been of concern to his constituents. In January, European Court of Human Rights ruled that the London-wide blanket use of section 44 was unlawful.

This morning, police minister Nick Herbert finally acknowledged what most of us already know - that section 44 is routinely abused. An investigation by the Home Office has revealed that 14 forces had unlawfully used their anti-terrorism stop & search powers in forty different operations, by failing to obtain authorisation from a Home Office minister within the statutory 48-hour deadline.

However, as The Register rightly points out, Herbert's statement relates only to the continued, secretive use of ministerially approved stop and search sweeps, which are only one of many objections to the use of section 44. It "doesn't appear to cover coppers' alleged tendency to cite the Act to stop photographers, er, photographing".

In January the Tories promised to curb the indiscriminate use of anti-terrorism stop & search powers. Today, ITV's Crime Correspondent Keir Simmons claims the Home Secretary, Theresa May, is "spitting blood" over the misuse of section 44. So now is her opportunity to honour her party's promise.

LATER - 5.30pm

The extent of Ms May's ire becomes clear - she is so angry, she's actually writing for those 'leftists' over at the Guardian:

I have ordered the Home Office to conduct an urgent review of the systems currently in place. I am also writing to all police forces, requesting that they take whatever steps necessary to ensure that their own systems are robust. And we will go further: this government will put an end, once and for all, to Labour's abuse of our liberties...

So I would like to reaffirm what we set out in the coalition agreement – a robust review of counter-terrorism legislation, with the use of stop and search powers being just one part of this. Right now, we are considering the precise timing and scope of this important review, and I intend to provide details shortly.

Sounds good, no? But as Conor Geart pointed out in early May, "the Conservatives have a long record of deploying state power to crush dissent to which their attacks on the poor and on organised labour have invariably given rise". Understandably, I think we'll wait and see whether things have really changed.

Government Backtracks on Local Council Transparency

I should have know it was too good to be true. Less than a week after Cameron repeated an earlier pledge that from January 2011, all local government spending over £500 would be available online, his government has climbed down and offered secretive councils like Newham a convenient loophole.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has quietly announced that he will no longer introduce legislation to force local authorities to open their books, but only 'encourage' them to do so. This is rather different to 'requiring' them to become more transparent, as the government's coalition agreement promised.

In a shamelessly populist article in the Daily Telegraph, Pickles has instead focused on the issue of the bloated salaries of senior council staff - but this information is far less important than knowing how councils spend our money on front line services and much is already in the public domain. For example, we have known since October 2008 that the chief executive of Newham council, Joe Duckworth, receives a record salary of £240,000, double what his predecessor Dave Burbage was paid. This is already confirmed online by the council.

What we don't yet know is specific information on opaque areas of council expenditure - such as how Newham accounts for the funding it received for 'Preventing Violent Extremism' over the last year, for example.

The Local Government Association will be delighted by this U-turn by Pickles - its "open and comprehensive offer from local government to the new coalition government" announced on Thursday makes no mention of greater transparency.

All in all, it looks like we are back to using the Freedom of Information Act for the foreseeable future.

All Council Spending Over £500 Online By 2011

The BBC reports today on a development that has the potential to dramatically increase transparency within central and local government.

From November, information on central government spending over £500 will be made available to the public, with details of major government contracts published from September. Civil servants earning more than £150,000 will be named and their salaries disclosed.

Considering the problems I am having trying to persuade Newham council to release information on its 'Preventing Violent Extremism' expenditure last year, the really interesting news is confirmation of an earlier pledge that from January 2011, all local government spending over £500 will be available online.

I can already imagine the panic within Newham Council's inner circles. However, implementation of this new policy is still six months away, so meanwhile anyone interested in seeing how their local authority spends our money is reliant on the Freedom of Information Act.

To that end, I have set up a separate FoIA page on this blog, which I will add to gradually over the coming weeks - and I've put this simple presentation of how to pry information out of those public bodies who currently hold on to it.

Newham Council Increases Use Of Covert Surveillance

One of the pledges made earlier this month by the new coalition government was to "ban the use of powers in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) by councils, unless they are signed off by a magistrate and required for stopping serious crime."

What, one wonders, has been so problematic about a fairly obscure piece of legislation that has led to such a severe curtailment of its use? RIPA was introduced by Labour in 2000 to regulate the way law enforcement agencies carry out covert surveillance, supposedly in preparation for the duties imposed by the Human Rights Act of the same year. When the act was passed only nine organisations, including the police and security services, were allowed access to private communications records, but RIPA has become so controversial because its use has extended far beyond tracking terrorists, drug smugglers and organised criminal gangs. RIPA now gives 474 local governments and 318 agencies — including the Ambulance Service and the Charity Commission — powers once held by only a handful of law enforcement and security service organisations.

Because surveillance can be instigated with only the approval of a council officer, local councils have used the law extensively, for everything from spying on their own employees, dog fouling and enforcement of the smoking ban to littering, illegal tree pruning and selling alcohol to under-age children. As a report by Big Brother Watch launched yesterday shows, 372 local authorities in Britain have conducted RIPA surveillance in 8,575 cases since 1st April 2008. Councils around the country are carrying out over eleven covert surveillance operations every day for minor offenses that hardly warrant such an intrusion into citizen's privacy, but few ever result in prosecutions and fewer still are successful.

So how has Newham council used RIPA? The Freedom of Information Act requests submitted by Big Brother Watch show that Newham used RIPA covert surveillance powers 18 times in 2008-09, rising by 56% to 25 investigations in 2009-2010. In both years, the offences investigated were for suspicion of taking bribes, under age sales of restricted goods, suspected persistent breach of court injunctions, rogue traders and car-clocking. No information was provided for prosecutions.

However, at least three of these offences seem serious enough for police investigation rather than council surveillance and the remainder are trading standards issues. So is it really necessary for a local authority to have such disproportionately extensive and unaccountable powers - especially as it seems to be using them more and more often?

The Grim RIPA - Cataloguing the ways in which local authorities have abused their covert surveillance powers [PDF]

Newham Council - Where Has the Money Gone (Part 2)?

A follow-up to my earlier blog post on Newham council's issues with transparency - this time over considerable funding it has received from central government for 'Preventing Violent Extremism' (PVE).

PVE is part of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, known as CONTEST. It is supposedly community-based and intended to challenge the ideology behind violent extremism, primarily in areas with large numbers of Muslims. It is also extremely controversial - accusations that it has been used to spy on Muslim communities have, to give the most generous interpretation possible, hampered its effectiveness. Others (myself included) see it as thoroughly insidious. This controversy was acknowledged in March by the House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee.

The Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) says that "most Prevent funding is allocated to local authorities through the non-ring-fenced Area Based Grant (ABG). Not ring-fencing the grant gives local authorities the flexibility to decide how best to use it in their areas, and so helps Prevent to be delivered effectively at a local level." It is, however, clearly intended to be used to support specific projects through grant aid.

Like the Migration Impact Fund, nobody I know in Newham has the slightest idea how he money is allocated, so in February I submitted the following FoIA request:

Please could you confirm the amount of funding that the London Borough of Newham has received under the government's Prevent strategy for Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) in each year to date since the Pathfinder programme in 2007-2008 and provide:

• A copy of LB Newham's current strategy document for delivering the
• Prevent strategy locally
• A copy of the allocated budget for PVE spending in 2009-2010
• A copy of the proposed budget for 2010-11
• Membership of the PVE steering group
  
  

The answer, once again, was classic Newham. The council confirmed the names of the 17 people on the Preventing Violent Extremism Delivery Group and that the breakdown of government funding allocated to the London Borough of Newham was as follows:

• 2007/8 allocation Violent Extremism Pathfinder Fund, £30,000
• 2008/9 allocation, Area Based Grant allocation to Preventing Violent Extremism, £325,000
• 2009/10 allocation, Area Based Grant allocation to Preventing Violent Extremism, £400,000, a subsequent additional allocation of £18,292 was received from Department for Communities and Local Government.
• 2010/11 allocation, Area Based Grant allocation to Preventing Violent Extremism, £473,000, a subsequent additional allocation of £62,830 was received from Department for Communities and Local Government.

That's a total of £1,309,122 since 2007 - a lot of money. More than three quarters of a million pounds of that money was allocated for the period since April 2009. However, the council said it was unable to provide budget allocations for the current and next financial year because Newham's action plan (which deals with these issues) was "undergoing review and change".

Whilst it may not have been possible in February to provide a copy of the budget for 2010/11, there should have been no reason not to provide - eleven months into the financial year - a copy of the allocated budget PVE spending in 2009-2010.

As I have said in my appeal, I would expect, particular because PVE funding is intended to be used to support specific projects through grant aid, to see a breakdown in detail of expenditure on PVE supported projects, including information on salary costs, publicity or other budgeted items. Instead, the review of the action plan has been used as a reason for providing no budgetary information at all. So where has the money gone?

So I’m no nearer to understanding how the council intends to "work closely with groups who are actively working to challenge violent extremism” – just like the £97,000 that Newham council received from the Migration Impact Fund, if anyone can offer any more revealing information, I would be very grateful.

The full response from Newham council is available on the What Do They Know website

Newham Council - Where Has the Money Gone?

Anyone who has noticed Newham council’s regular appearances in Private Eye will know that the local authority has problems with transparency. So this is the first of a couple of blog posts on the council receiving government funds and displaying a lack of openness about the way they have actually spent the money – even when responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request.

In February, I submitted a FoIA request about funding received from the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and its Migration Impact Fund. This was launched in March 2009 and was intended to target projects that “have identified innovative solutions to migration related pressures - where possible involving and benefiting a number of local services”. It is quite specifically not intended to replace mainstream service provision and DCLG said that projects “must be able to demonstrate that they bring benefits to the settled as well as the migrant community in an area. For example additional English language provision for migrants will mean reducing the cost to public services from translation and interpretation.”

As absolutely no-one locally who is involved in providing English language classes seemed to have any clue about how Newham’s proportion of the funding was being spent, I asked the following question:

Please could you provide a detailed breakdown of expenditure (including any under-spend) of the £179,000 allocated in 2009/10 by Government Office for London to London Borough of Newham under the Migration Impacts Fund?

The response was classic Newham council. DCLG’s own allocation table shows that it was awarded £179,000 but the council says it received only £97,000. Of this, £48,000 was transferred into the current financial year with the agreement of the Government Office for London and there was no detailed breakdown of the remaining £49,000 for 2009/10. All we know is that a member of staff was apparently recruited at what seems like a scale PO2 level and the only other expenditure was for recruitment. Even then, Newham council still under spent by £13,000. So where has the money gone?

I’m no nearer to understanding how the council intends to provide “innovative solutions to migration related pressures” – if anyone can offer any more revealing information, I would be very grateful.

The full response from Newham council is available on the What Do They Know website

Met Police's Press Bureau Releases (Some) Information on G20 Protests

Back in later October 2009, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Metropolitan Police, asking for “briefings, notes, e-mails or letters prepared by Metropolitan Police Press officers that were produced between 26th March and 8th April 2009 concerning the G20 protests.” It took over three months for the paperwork to arrive, but this week I received five lengthy documents (PDFs below) containing press logs, some e-mails and a couple of briefing papers.

Significant parts, especially around the death of Ian Tomlinson, have been redacted completely, most probably because of the complaint made by the Tomlinson family to the IPCC about the misinformation they had experienced. In November 2009. Ian Tomlinson's son Paul King said:

"We feel that there has been a cover up from the start. The first statement from the police was that they were trying to save Ian’s life while protesters were throwing missiles at them. Then the police liaison officer told us Ian died of “natural causes”. After the video came out, the City of London Police investigator told us that it may have been a protester in disguise who assaulted Ian. Now it has come to light that a senior officer in the Metropolitan Police has given the investigation misleading information. We are asking the IPCC for a full report on what looks like a cover-up."

Even the limited information released by the Met, however, helps to illustrate how the news agenda is set and subsequently how, but for video evidence from the public that contradicted these messages or 'lines', their agenda might have become the accepted version of events on 1st April. I haven't had a chance to read and annotate everything yet, but so far the documents show that:

• On 31 March, after Chief Superintendent Ian Thomas was doorstepped by the BBC as he left a meeting with Climate Camp representatives at Portcullis House in Westminster, a statement was prepared so that, 'if asked', the Met would say discussions were intended to "put to rest some myths about our policing style" and that "MPS tactics will be entirely proportionate to what we are policing" ¹
  
  
• On 1st April, at 12.57pm, the press bureau had received its first complaint from a journalist who had been refused permission to pass through the cordon around demonstrators outside the Bank of England, despite having official accreditation.² Around 15 minutes later Associated Press reporters had made similar complaints.³ After attacks on the Royal Bank of Scotland, a reporter was told on a 'not for publication' basis that "if people were being contained it was for their own safety, as it is believed missiles are being thrown." ⁴
  
  
• At 6.35pm, almost six hours after containment had begun, the press bureau offered a statement on a controlled dispersal of kettled protesters, claiming that "portaloos and water were made available" to them⁵. It also said that containment had been necessary to prevent "widespread disruption through breaking into splinter groups", although notes at 8.16pm from a press briefing by Commander Simon O'Brien quote him saying that "the vast majority of the time [the protest] was lawful" and that a small group "was trying to 'ramp up' the protest and hijack it into violence". O'Brien also claimed that the police were "careful, pragmatic and proportionate in our approach and response and tried to take the temperature out of the crowd dynamic".⁶
  
  
• At 10.15pm, a statement was offered saying that police had "found a man who had stopped breathing". It also contains the now notorious claim that "officers took the decision to move him as during this time a number of missiles, presumed to be bottles, were thrown at them".⁷ This comment was repeated the next day by papers like the Telegraph and perhaps surprisingly considering their later coverage, by the Guardian. The statement says that the IPCC was "in the process of being informed" - by 11.30pm this had been changed to "the IPCC has been informed".⁸
  
  
• At 11.35, press officers had e-mailed a statement describing a "slow dispersal" at the "peaceful" Climate Camp in Bishopsgate.⁹
  
  
• On 2nd April, the most important story for the Press Bureau was not the death the previous day but a raid on the RAMPart centre in east London, with embedded journalists from ITN and the Evening Standard in tow.¹⁰ Later that afternoon, there was a small protest for Ian Tomlinson at the Bank of England that was again kettled.¹¹ At 4.47pm, a note says that "Ch Supt Ian Thomas (Silver) will speak to officers at the Bank of England and explain that the media should be left to get on with their jobs".¹²
  
  
• On 5 April, the Observer rang an article saying that Ian Tomlinson has been assaulted prior to his death. By this stage, all comment had been passed onto the City of London Police and the IPCC to make. Apart from reproductions of news stories and IPCC press releases, most entries are redacted, although we know, for what it's worth, that the Commissioner saw the video of Ian Tomlinson's assault in the Press Bureau at 6.35pm on Tuesday 7 April.¹³

More analysis on the information when I have time. My earlier summary of a Freedom of Information release by the Home Offce on the G20 protests is here.

FOIA DOCUMENTS:

Part 1 [2Mb] Part 2a [890Kb] Part 2b [670Kb] Part 3a [525Kb]
Part 3b [640Kb] Part 4 [2Mb] Part 5 [1.1Mb]

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NOTES

¹ Part 1 - Action 4
² Part 2a - Action 26
³ Part 2a - Action 29
⁴ Part 2a - Action 34
⁵ Part 2a - Action 55
⁶ Part 2a - Action 66
⁷ Part 2b - Action 66
⁸ Part 2b - Action 74
⁹ Part 2b - Action 75
¹⁰ Part 2b - Action 23, 29, 30, 36 and 46
¹¹ Part 2b - Action 54
¹² Part 2b - Action 57
¹³ Part 3b - Action 7