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Good riddance to Kafkaesqe board
Paul Dimoldenberg breathes a sigh of relief at the end of the Standards Board’s investigative powers
A SMALL cheer went round the local government world last week when the government finally announced that the much-criticised Standards Board will be stripped of its investigative powers and given a “revised strategic regulatory role”.
Councillors in Camden, Islington and Westminster, including me, will all breathe a collective sigh of relief to know that none of their colleagues will ever have to go through the Standards Board’s frightening, unnecessary and very expensive ordeal.
In my book, The Westminster Whistleblowers (published by Politico’s), I give a flavour of what it is like to be at the receiving end of a Standards Board investigation.
It all started in July 2003 when Westminster City Council claimed that I had “brought the council into disrepute” by leaking confidential details to the BBC Today programme of the council’s ‘go slow’ in collecting the £42 million surcharge owed by Shirley Porter for the homes-for-votes scandal.
Unhappy about the ‘go slow’ being made public, the council got its own back by reporting me to the Standards Board which has the power to suspend or disqualify councillors for up to five years.
This triggered a bizarre series of events. First, I asked the Standards Board for a copy of the council’s letter of complaint against me.
They refused. I tried again and again to get the details of the charges against me and the evidence from the council but on every occasion I was turned down. I finally received a copy more than five months after it was sent.
Second, the Orwellian-sounding Ethical Standards Officer assigned to my case appeared to have no experience of local government. His experience was from another world entirely – corporate fraud and insider dealing.
My heart sunk further. What did this man know about local government, local politics or Westminster? Had he ever heard of Shirley Porter or the district auditor? If I asked him about selling cemeteries for 15p would he think I was mad?
Thirdly, in November 2003 I was interviewed for three hours by two ‘heavies’ from the Standards Board. They spent a lot of time setting up the complicated tape recording machinery, similar to that you see in police dramas when they are interviewing murder suspects.
At the end of the interview, the investigator told me “nothing stops you from providing information to us in whatever format you wish to”.
His colleague added: “If you feel following today’s meeting there’s something new comes to your attention or, you think about, you’re entitled to provide us with that information.”
I took that as a genuine request for more information. However, as I took them at their word over the coming months and sent them a series of additional papers, I was later accused of repeatedly trying to justify my actions and therefore compounding my crimes.
It was truly Kafkaesque. Finally, in January 2004 I received a copy of the letter of the council’s July 2003 letter of complaint against me.
The covering letter informed me that the information “has been released in order to assist you to answer the allegations you face under the code of conduct”.
It is all too typical of the incompetence and unfairness of the Standards Board that I received this key piece of information nearly two months after I had been interviewed by the Standards Board’s investigating officers.
Happily for me, I was able to clear my name and raise most of the £46,000 it cost to mount my legal defence at two separate tribunals in early 2005.
Even more importantly, the BBC Today programme shamed the council into renewed activity, resulting in Porter paying £12.3 million – still £30 million less than she owed, but a welcome ‘down-payment’.
Ironically, one of the reasons for setting up the Standards Board was to ensure that the biggest ever local government scandal – Shirley Porter’s homes for votes – would never happen again.
Of course, high ethical standards in local government are absolutely essential. But, as the government has now recognised, the Standards Board is not the way to do it.
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