Here’s an interesting one.
There’s a meeting of the council’s Audit Committee on 3 April 2009. And here’s item 14:
A pretty straightforward finance report you might think. But what’s this underneath?
[Exempt paragraph 7 applies – information relating to matters which could prejudice current or potential future legal proceedings]
Blimey what have they been up to now at the Counts Louse that they don’t want to tell us about?
The committee will also be considering the Annual Audit Report and Inspection Letter (pdf) for 2007/08 from the Audit Commission.
This contains a bit about the Redland Green School fiasco:
Review of the Redland Green School Project
We identified a number of weaknesses in the Council’s processes in relation to this project. These included:
• the need for the Council to formally assess the risks its faced as the project progressed and ensuring it addressed all the risks;
• limited Council overview of all the roles and responsibilities of the many parties involved;
• inadequate project management arrangements;
• inadequate cost reporting; and
• failure to adhere to the financial regulations of the Council.
These are all pretty serious findings and demonstrate the utter incompetence at the top at the Counts Louse. But the one that really catches the eye is this:
• failure to adhere to the financial regulations of the Council.
This is a straightforward staff disciplinary matter. It is gross misconduct and the perpetrator should be dismissed.
And the perpetrator is?
Why Head of Finance, Carew Reynell, who’s currently sat about fully employed on a six-figure salary awaiting a huge early retirement deal when the council eventually gets round to employing his replacement.
What exactly would it take for our councillors to actually sack one of these dodgy, scrounging, incompetent fuckers they employ on six-figure salaries?
Did they ever explain how Heather Tomlinson got kicked out ?
Ha, ha, ha …
Didn’t you know? She chose to take early retirement and accept a gold-plated pension after all her glittering successes.
Typically, all our spineless councillors chose to offer up gushing praise when she went rather than admit the obvious truth.
This was that she was an idiot who lacked even basic social skills and was a complete and utter waste of time and money.
Indeed so enamoured are our councillors with this model of senior officer failure they’ve brought two new ones in – Jan the Ormon Droid and that copper from Sheffield who doesn’t know where Easton is on £180k and £140k pa respectively.
So far all they’ve done is come out with a load of marketing shite; keep Reynell in post while they finalise his gold-plated pension provision and cover David Bishop’s arse at all costs for deliberately breaking council policy in favour of his multi-millionaire developer friends.
Talk about looking after your own …
Bit off topic. have been reading this blog with plenty of smiles for some time, and spent the day at work reading BristolKRS’ blog.
The follwing should raise a few smiles:
http://ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bullshit/
The full list of BS words here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7949077.stm
Just tried Bristol CC website frontpage with 5 items of BS…..my local authority north somerset scored just 1, but then they have their own issues.
I’m sure the more eager among you will find higher scores the deeper you sift through Brizzle.gov
Excellent. Just scored 14 on the Bristol CYPS Equalities and Inclusion Team pages:
http://ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bullshit/check/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bristol-cyps.org.uk%2Fservices%2Feit%2Feit.html