Day 4 of my experiment

Time for an update on The Blogger’s great e-democracy experiment to get rid of Heather Tomlinson.

On Friday The Blogger fired off an email to the council’s e-democracy department requesting some simple information on their confidentiality arrangements with regards to people signing their petitions and providing them with personal information.

So far there’s been no reply – not even an acknowledgment. Presumably the fact the council spend a small fortune of our council tax constantly banging on about ‘customer services’ does not mean they’ll actually provide some by, say, acknowledging the receipt of an email within two days.

There’s three obvious reasons for this lack of a response to such a basic enquiry:

1. Their £100k a year senior managers have instructed them not to cooperate with The Blogger on the basis that it’s not in their interests to do so. Unfortunately this is a strategy doomed to fail as it relies entirely on all of us being totally fucking stupid and not knowing that virtually everything a local authority does is in the public domain whether they like it or not. It’s actually against the law for them not to give us information!
2. The council’s e-democracy department has been happily harvesting people’s names and addresses for years now without having any kind of confidentiality policy or arrangements in place. This is quite likely.
3. Nobody in the department actually looks at the consultation@bristol.gov.uk email address they provide on their website.

The Blogger unfortunately has to wait five working days to pursue this further. Watch this space . . .