Monthly Archives: February 2017

PROPERTY-MANAGEMENT COMPANIES, MY ARSE! SLUM LANDLORDS MORE LIKE …

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You’re in the boozer and someone you don’t know proposes a business idea to you.

“Hey mate, a dicky bird told me you got an empty garage. You know it could be broken into by squatters or vandals and you wouldn’t want that, would you? I’ll tell you what, my security company can protect your property. Pay me a fee for protection and I’ll fill your garage with people who need somewhere to live. I’ll call them ‘property-guardians’ and they’ll pay me rent. If the garage gets any leaks or if the door gets broken off then my handy-man Jim’ll fix it for a fee which you pay me. Whaddya say? A win-win for both of us, and and everything’s sweet!”

If someone suggested this across a pub table you would just laugh (or punch them) in their face. “You take over my property, charge me for the privilege and then extort rent from others staying there? Hahaha. You’re a fucking Del Boy taking the piss.”

But this is exactly the business model used by over forty companies, operating across the UK as ‘Property-Management’ enterprises. Ironically the brain-child of some ‘entrepreneurial squatters’ in Amsterdam, Property-Management companies and their ilk have become as common as flies on shit in contemporary, austerity-ridden Britain.

After the economic crash of 2008, property prices fell – leaving empty offices, factories and warehouses all over the UK. In Bristol it was estimated that half the city-centre office space was ‘To Let’ in 2010. As the recession continued the Tories came to power and began a brutal set of cuts to local government budgets that led many councils to close down fire stations, police stations, elderly people’s homes and council offices to save money. Any attempts to build social housing were halted, and some councils (like Bristol) even began to sell their own social-housing stock off to raise money. This process continues today.

As well as this, the Tories also attacked welfare benefits, reducing them or even forcing people off them altogether. As wages stagnated or fell, particularly for the young, rents began to rise as the demand for housing grew, while middle-class kids with ‘Trustafarian’ inheritances gentrified the inner-cities.

This triple whammy of high rents, no available social housing and plenty of empty buildings should be the perfect environment for ‘squatting’, an immediate and traditional solution to a housing crisis for the less well off. After World War 2, and once again in the 1960-70s, working class people took over empty buildings to solve their housing problems.

However, in 1994 and 2001 the law was tightened up, making ‘squatting’ more difficult and in 2012, thanks to the Tories (again) – squatting in residential buildings became a criminal offence subject to arrest, fine and imprisonment. This meant that empty commercial properties became the only remaining possibility for the homeless, creating the perfect environment for a new swarm of parasites to emerge from the neo-liberal swamp…‘Property-Management’ companies.

IT’S A FUCKING SCAM

These cheapskate corporations offer ‘security solutions’ for big property owners, providing ‘guardians’ to protect ‘vulnerable empty properties’ from ‘squatters’. But this is complete bollocks. Instead, their business model is based on taking over privately or public owned buildings and letting them out to people desperate for accommodation at a lower rent.

Costs are minimal, run through a single office, a website and a maintenance worker or two to do (or not do) minor repairs. With no normal business liabilities like rent, mortgages, insurance, loans or maintenance and on average twenty ‘property-guardians’ paying rent to them in each building, they can just rake it in. Add to this ‘cash cow’ the fees levied on the real owners for ‘security services’ and repairs, the stage is set for MASSIVE profits!

However, vital to the entire con was to get round tenancy laws – which after a long series of protests and legal battles in the 20th Century provided tenants with environmental and health & safety regulations, and also protections against illegal evictions, threats and extortionate rent increases. So ‘Property-Management’ companies hired lawyers to find loopholes in the web of laws protecting tenants. Central to this tactic was to never mention the three terms, tenant, landlord or rent in any contract. Instead the tenant became a ‘property-guardian’, the landlord became ‘the property management company’ and rent became a ‘fee’. On top of this, the tenancy agreement mutated into a ‘licence’.

LICENSED TYRANNY

The typical property-guardian ‘licence’ issued by a property-management company is an interesting document indeed. You’d expect a ‘security company’ hiring ‘security guards’ to have contracts with their employees that clearly stated their duties in the building, such as – clear guidelines on their power to deal with intruders, how to interact with police, fire and ambulance services etc etc. Instead, what you do find on the front page is ‘This is not a tenancy’, followed by pages of weird and wonderful ‘rules’ aimed at getting round tenancy law, interspersed with illegal threats of fines and evictions for not following them. In order to keep the so-called property-guardians isolated from the outside and from each other the following ‘rules’ are common:

    • The Guardian will not hold meetings, parties or other similar gatherings in the property
  • The Guardian will not permit any other person (other than other Guardians) to stay overnight in the property
  • The Guardian will not display any sign, poster, document or sticker without property-management company’s consent
  • The Guardian will not attempt to contact the owner of the property
  • The Guardian will not speak to the media about the owner, the property-management company or the property
  • If the Guardian becomes aware that anyone else is doing something prohibited by this clause, the guardian will inform the property-management company immediately he Guardian will notify the property-management company if they cease to be employed
  • The Guardian will not seek to claim housing benefit, job-seekers allowance or any related benefit without the prior consent of the property-management company

Apart from sounding like regulations issued by a crazed fascist-dictator, these rules are in place to prevent Guardians from organising by creating a climate of fear, to isolate and ‘gag’ them and to hinder contact with a local authority who might uncover the shit conditions they’re living in. In Bristol, property management company Camelot used its gagging clauses to threaten tenants with eviction if they spoke to the local council or their political representatives! It was also these draconian rules which allowed Camelot to get away with putting Guardians in Bristol City Council properties without licences for Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) for several years. HMO’s are there to ensure residential properties meet certain health and safety standards, particularly in relation to fire. It seems many property-management companies like Camelot (and City Councils) ignore HMO’s to save money whilst putting the Guardians at risk.

Not satisfied with flouting laws which are there to protect tenants, property-management company ‘licences’ are also full of extra penalties and ‘administration’ fees which along with the ‘damage security payment’ (the deposit in other words), add up to hundreds of pounds of extra costs for the ‘Property-Guardian’.

In the final paragraph of the endless pages of loopholes and threats in the ‘licence’ come the two statements which give the whole game away:

  • It is hereby expressly acknowledged by all parties that the Guardian has NO security responsibility as defined in the Private Security Industry Act 2001
  • The Guardian expressly acknowledges that they only have the powers of an ordinary citizen and they will not assume the powers of security officers or the police or any governmental authority

So the ‘Property-Guardian’ is NOT there for security purposes and has no powers as such. So despite all the pseudo-legal flannel in the licence it’s fairly obvious the Property-Guardian is actually just a tenant paying rent to a landlord. The disguise these companies use to hide this obvious relationship is compounded by the use of corporate legal devices to protect them from legal challenges and compensation claims by tenants.

SLUM LANDLORDS (ON SOMEONE ELSE’S PROPERTY)

Camelot has used (at least) four different companies to run their ‘property-management’ operations in the UK. Typically, this involves creating asset-less corporate entities in the frontline of dealing with ‘property-guardians’, and to protect the owners and core business from claims if, say, a building burned down, killing and injuring the residents. It was precisely this kind of slum landlordism that the tenancy laws were brought in to deal with in the 1960s and 70s and which these companies are flouting.

Property-management companies profit from the numerous empty local authority buildings – particularly elderly peoples’ homes and to a lesser extent schools, fire/police stations and public offices, all produced by austerity. In Bristol, Somerset and Gloucester in 2017 there are more than 40 local council owned properties ‘run’ by property-management companies, bringing in millions of pounds of rent from ‘Guardians’. Like leeches sucking blood from an injured animal they have exploited ‘cuts’ to local government spending and the concurrent housing crisis. And they have done all this whilst unbelievably harping on in the media that they are some kind of charity ‘helping the homeless’ out of the goodness of their hearts!

***

However, on Friday 24th February 2017 a groundbreaking legal judgement was made in Bristol County Court, where Guardians were established for the first time as tenants and NOT licensees by the judge ruling on a dispute between two aggrieved guardians and Property-Management Company Camelot. This a massive victory.

The BRISTOLIAN says:
Paul Smith (BCC Housing) must now DISMISS ALL Property-Guardian companies from their contracts with Bristol City Council AND FIRE THE BCC OFFICIALS like Chris Woods and Rupert ‘Spunkface’ Orett who signed them up in the first place. He must ALSO DEFEND ALL TENANTS (as Guardians are NOW ESTABLISHED IN COURT to be) on YOUR PROPERTY, allowing them to FORM CICs or self-managing collectives wherever possible and if this is their wish, or rehouse them if not. Furthermore, we call on BCC to introduce a CITY WIDE RENT-CAP on the runaway private sector, START A MASSIVE REGENERATIVE SOCIAL HOUSING PROJECT, and REPOSSESS all BCC properties leased to Property Management Companies

LIES, DAMN LIES AND MARV’S MANIFESTO

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Number four on the Rev Rees’s list of ‘Our seven commitments to you…’ contained in his expansive and farcical ELECTION MANIFESTO of around 168 proposals was “WE WILL PROTECT CHILDREN’S CENTRES”.

So what’s this we find hidden away as proposal number 97, aiming to save a cool £1.5m, in the ‘Saving proposals recommended for approval‘ document the Rev’s PERSONALLY signed off to balance his Tory budget?

“Reshape Children’s Centres’ services,” it says here. “We will review management structures and combine some services to create EFFICIENCIES. We hope to keep 18 CHILDREN’S CENTRES open and find alternative ways to provide some of the existing services.”

There’s currently 23 CHILDREN’S CENTRES in Bristol, which means the Rev Rees is CUTTING Children’s Centre provision by 22%. Although the upbeat liar claims, “this proposal keeps our commitment to those services and the value they bring, and recommends a change to the way that we organise our offer.”

Not quite what the Rev’s manifesto promised is it?

FAKE HISTORY BISHOP QUITS

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Bishop Mike the Mercenary

Bristol’s slave trade apologist Church of England chief vicar is finally throwing in the towel. Cambridge educated Bishop Mike “THE MERCENARY” Hill will finally retire in September.

Mike the Mercenary became engulfed in controversy in 2014 when he was recorded LYING to a congregation of schoolchildren. During a private ‘Charter Day’ celebration of EDWARD COLSTON at Bristol Cathedral, Hill told the children that Colston had “lived a life of significance” and there “may be still some speculation on some of the circumstances around his business roots”.

This is, of course, a load of bollocks and FAKE HISTORY. There is no speculation about Colston’s role as a major 18TH CENTURY SLAVE TRADER nor in his role running the Royal Africa Company, which had a monopoly on the Atlantic slave trade during much of his tenure.

Between 1672 and 1689, Colston’s company transported around 100,000 enslaved Africans to the West Indies and America. This included children as young as six. Each slave BRANDED with the company’s initials, RAC, on their chest.

To maximise profit, Colston’s ships divided their hulls into holds with little headroom so they could transport as many slaves as possible. Unhygienic conditions, dehydration, dysentery and scurvy KILLED MORE THAN 20,000 enslaved Africans during the crossings. Their bodies were thrown overboard. None of this is speculation.

Hill attempted to brush Colston’s slave trading under the carpet during a private ceremony at Bristol Cathedral. The venue – along with a useful idiot senior Church of England Vicar – is hired by the city’s super-rich Society of Merchant Venturers every year to promote their FAKE NEWS version of their hero Edward Colston to school children attending Venturer funded schools.

Anyone wishing to throw a bucket of piss or rotten tomatoes over this old establishment racist, liar and fraud should note his last service will take place at Bristol Cathedral on 23 September at 3.30pm.

BUNDRED REPORT: ARE THE WHEELS COMING OFF?

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While the rest of the media produced a PERFUNCTORY news report and crawled back under their stone; while councillors acted DUMB and couldn’t even be arsed to demand a debate about it and while the public continue to be UP IN ARMS about it …  The BRISTOLIAN is driving forward the agenda around the Bundred Report.

And the Rev Rees knows it! Following our demands for an investigation into the conduct of his chief officers and managers over their handling of last year’s budget – especially THE CONSPIRACY identified by Steve “Sticky” Bundred to provide councillors with deliberately MISLEADING savings figures – the Reverend has conceded that further investigations are necessary.

Rees agreed to our demands today after he was confronted by protestors in the Council Chamber during his budget meeting.  He promised the protestors a new inquiry into “how the failings actually took place” and admitted his senior bosses knew that the savings they presented in last year’s budget were “UNACHIEVABLE”. Most significantly Rees admitted last year’s budget was “ILLEGAL” just days after his Monitoring Officer told us, “the report does not imply any criminal act”!

Will the Reverend call the cops then? Regardless – we’re winning! But rest assured we’ll keep the pressure up and get this whole current shower of dishonest, disreputable overpaid and underperforming council management crooks and tosspots investigated.

Watch this space …

THE LORD MAYOR OF BRISTOL, JEFF LOVELL, IS A CUNT

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Jeff “CUNT” Lovell: Nazi

Today, the Bristol Labour Group’s Lord Mayor, Jeff “CUNT” Lovell, called people protesting his Labour Group’s right wing £100 million cuts budget “A DISEASE”!

Oh dear. Well, at least they’re not an extreme right wing cunt like Lovell is. After all, which end of the political spectrum is associated with trying to dehumanise their opponents?

We’ll give you a clue Lord Mayor Cunt … It ain’t socialists, it ain’t social democrats. In fact it’s nobody on the left of politics at all. Ever.

The bigger question here is why the hell is there an extreme right winger not only in the Bristol Labour Group but leading and promoting them?

Are they all Nazis? Or do they just tolerate references to the the Untermenschen in their ranks for a quiet life?

 

 

 

BUNDRED REPORT: FIRST COAT OF WHITEWASH

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We have our first response to an email regarding the Bundred Report into Bristol City Council’s latest financial shambles. The Reverend Rees’s ever-fragrant and competent Monitoring Officer, Shahzia “DIM” Daya has replied to Avonmouth resident Ian Robinson. The correspondence is published in full below.

Ian wrote to the council’s Section 151 Officer – who’s legally responsible for the sound financial management of our local authority – saying, “It would appear to me (a reasonable man) that there would appear to have been a co-ordinated attempt to influence the election results by SUPPRESSING the scale of the BUDGETARY DEFICIT.”

Despite not being the Section 151 Officer, Ms Dim has replied anyway, which raises a further question. Does Ms Dim have a CONFLICT OF INTEREST here? Because Ian’s querying the conduct of the council’s ‘CHANGE BOARD‘ from the summer of 2015 through to May 2016 and, according to our research team, Ms Daya was a member of this very board!

A minute from a Bristol City Council Cabinet Meeting from 1 July 2014 explains, “the Change Board has been working since 1 October 2013, initially consisting of the Senior Leadership Team and Service Director Project Leads and is now expanded to include ALL SERVICE DIRECTORS as of February 2014.” While Bristol City Council’s staff structure table for DECEMBER 2015 clearly indicates that Ms Dim was SERVICE DIRECTOR: Legal and Democratic Services at the time.

QED: Ms Dim was a member of the ‘Change Board’ when they were involved in the budget-setting process in question.

But have we got this all wrong? As it’s only a month ago that Steve “Sticky” Bundred published his FIRST REPORT for Bristol City Council into its crap management of the Green Capital fiasco. The one where he criticised Mayor No-More Redpants and Chief Exec No-More Nicola “Lady Gaga” Yates over their CONFLICTS OF INTEREST!

What hope do we really have for Bristol City Council learning the lessons of Bundred’s LATEST REPORT if they haven’t even learned the lessons of his LAST REPORT?

Anyway, given Ms Dim’s intense PERSONAL and PECUNIARY interest in a positive outcome for senior city council officers in regards to this emerging scandal, it’s hardly surprising she’s quickly concluded to Ian that, “the [Bundred] report does not imply any criminal act had taken place or that there was any attempt by any officer or elected official to influence the election.”

Her EVIDENCE for this claim is that Sticky Bundred says on page 21 of his report, ” it appears that there was a tacit understanding within SLT that contentious decisions should not be asked of politicians before the Mayoral and Council elections scheduled for May 2016. Although I have seen no evidence that the Mayor or council Members were explicitly conveying this message.”

All very interesting, but what does what MESSAGE wasn’t being CONVEYED by the MAYOR or council Members regarding “contentious decisions” have to do with whether politically neutral SENIOR BOSSES “co-ordinated [an] attempt to INFLUENCE the election results by suppressing the scale of the budgetary deficit”?

Ian’s enquiry was also about the conduct of officers, not just politicians. And the evidence against these officers in the Bundred Report is OVERWHELMING. Here’s ten examples we’ve plucked out of the report [with our comments in brackets].

Rest assured there’s many, many more examples:

Page 4: “Substantial non-delivery of the £112m agreed MTFS [Medium Term Financial Strategy] savings was wholly predictable.”
[So why didn’t officers predict it to councillors then?]

Pages 13 – 14: “I believe the most charitable construction that can be placed on the confusion in formal reports on the progress of the Change Programme is that several senior officers outside the Finance Directorate simply did not understand the budgetary management implications of slippage in the delivery of Change Programme savings, or the underlying assumptions on which the budgets which authorised them to incur expenditure had been prepared.”
[How about the uncharitable construction? That confusion in formal reports provided to councillors was deliberately misleading to disguise losses.]

Page 14: Yet the 2016/17 budget, agreed by the full Council only three days earlier, had assumed delivery in full, not merely of the planned £35.4m additional savings to be achieved in the coming year, in respect of which there was a clear statement at paragraph 3.61 that: “the combined budget reductions from the various savings streams total £35.4m in 2016/17. It is assumed that these savings will be delivered in full.”
[An outright lie by senior officers to the Full Council Budget Meeting]

Page 14: Similarly, the Quarter 3 Finance Report for the 2015/16 financial year, presented to Cabinet on 1 March 2016, only two weeks after the 2016/17 Budget report had explicitly assumed delivery in full of the savings agreed as part of the 2015/16 Budget and with less than a month of the financial year remaining, contains a table which shows that of the £31.005m savings agreed by the Council a year earlier, the delivery of some £16.2m was rated by the relevant managers as amber or red. Yet the Executive Summary, which I have been told was not written by the person who was responsible for the body of the report states: “The net savings proposals for the year, agreed by the Council in February 2015 totalled £31m and are on track to be delivered.”
[Misleading report to Cabinet doctored by manager unknown]

Page 44: I have seen other evidence too of delivery risks associated with the Change Programme being understood but not reported. For example, on 11 June 2015 the Service Director, HR and the Service Director, Business Change and ICT met with the then City Director and the Strategic Director, Business Change to express concerns that benefits from the Change Programme were “drifting”. As an outcome of this meeting the Service Director HR then drafted an approach to a second tranche of workforce reductions which was eventually put to the Change Board for approval in September 2015, but I have been unable to locate any report to the Mayor or Council Members informing them of this.
[Outright evidence of officers withholding information from councillors (and the public)]

Page 29: “In the case of the 2016/17 budget there were initial discussions within SLT and the Change Board on 4 August 2015 which identified a likely significant budget gap.”
[Evidence that officers knew about the budget gap in August 2015, six months before they allowed an inaccurate budget to be set]

Page 30: “Politically sensitive proposals which officers nevertheless considered to be necessary were excluded from the budget consultation document.”
[Evidence that unknown officers tampered with the budget consultation process for the public]

Page 31: “it was not made clear to Members that, as indicated above, the 2016/17 budget included unallocated savings of £32.1m
[Wholly misleading budget information supplied to councillors by officers]

Pages 33 – 34 Highly unusually, the minutes of this meeting are headed “CONFIDENTIAL – CHANGE BOARD ATTENDEES ONLY” and the minutes do not record either of the two interim s.151 officers who held that post on that day as having been present.
[Minutes from January 19 2016 outlining the true situation with regard to the budget are kept confidential and away from councillors, the public and the legally responsible Section 151 Officer]

Page 34: “a presentation was made to the Change Board on 8 March 2016. This identified under-delivery of previous years’ savings targets totalling £18.9m, which together with the target of £35.4m included in the 2016/17 budget meant a requirement for in-year savings of £54.3m against a budget of £342.0m. This was therefore known within the Council before the commencement of the 2016/17 financial year. The Change Board six monthly monitoring report to Cabinet on 5 April 2016 acknowledged the difficulties for the first time but did not mention that the savings requirement had risen to £54m and it remained optimistic in its tone.”
[Post budget ‘optimistic’ finance reports being produced by officers in the lead up to the election]

EMAILS:

From: Shahzia Daya <shahzia.daya@bristol.gov.uk>
To: ‘ian robinson’; Mayor <mayor@bristol.gov.uk>; Editor at Bristol News <editor@bristolnews.info>; The Bristolian . <bristoliannews@googlemail.com>; Steven Norman <s-norman123@hotmail.co.uk>; Charlotte LESLIE <charlotte.leslie.mp@parliament.uk>; Councillor Donald Alexander <Cllr.Donald.Alexander@bristol.gov.uk>; Councillor Jo Sergeant <Cllr.Jo.Sergeant@bristol.gov.uk>
Sent: Thursday, 16 February 2017, 19:17
Subject: RE: Section 151 Officer – attempt to influence election

Thank you for your email. For clarity I am not the council’s Section 151 Officer which is the statutory post responsible for finance. I am the council’s Monitoring Officer which is a separate role concerned with conduct, legality and the council’s constitution.

I can confirm that Mr Bundred’s report was provided to senior police officials (the Chief Constable and Police and Crime Commissioner) for their information. There was no request to investigate as the report does not imply any criminal act had taken place or that there was any attempt by any officer or elected official to influence the election. You may be of the opinion that there was a ‘co-ordinated attempt to influence the election results’ but this is not what the report says. The relevant paragraph states:

“In the event, it appears that there was a tacit understanding within SLT that contentious decisions should not be asked of politicians before the Mayoral and Council elections scheduled for May 2016. Although I have seen no evidence that the Mayor or council Members were explicitly conveying this message, it is possible, but now unverifiable, that there was a complicit parallel failure on the part of politicians to ask challenging questions during that period which might have exposed some of the difficulties which subsequently came to light.”

If you believe a criminal offence has taken place my advice would be that you make a complaint to the police.

Kind regards

Shahzia Daya

Shahzia Daya
Service Director: Legal and Democratic Services
Bristol City Council
PO Box 3176
Bristol
BS3 9FS
Tel 0786 169 1636

 

From: ian robinson [mailto:xxxx]
Sent: 13 February 2017 19:43
To: Shahzia Daya; Mayor’s Office Mayor’s Office; Editor at Bristol News; The Bristolian .; Steven Norman; Charlotte LESLIE; Councillor Donald Alexander; Councillor Jo Sergeant
Subject: Section 151 Officer – attempt to influence election

Dear Shahzia,

I am writing to you to raise a concern that recent information released to the press regarding the £29 million deficit within council budgets was suppressed from the public, Mayor and Cllrs in the run up to both the Mayoral and local elections. It would appear to me (a reasonable man) that there would appear to have been a co-ordinated attempt to influence the election results by suppressing the scale of the budgetary deficit.

As I believe you are the Section 151 officer now for BCC can you comment on the councils position regarding this matter? Has any report been forwarded to Avon and Somerset Police of the situation with a request to investigate?

If you could avail me of the current situation I would be grateful,

Kind regards,

Ian

BUNDRED REPORT: MARV’S FINANCE UNDER-THE-CARPET MANOEUVRE CHALLENGED

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The Rev Rees’s only response to his ‘BUNDRED REPORT‘ into the state of the city council’s finances, released last week, has so far been a vague promise – delivered on-trend via Youtube – that everything will be sorted out by 2020.

“Don’t worry, there’s not much to see here really,” implies Marvin and his gormless gang of soft-headed Labour councillors.

BOLLOCKS. The Reverend is intensely relaxed only because he isn’t much interested in engaging with the DETAIL of his own report. Specifically he appears to be overlooking the fact that his 30 most senior officers sitting on something called ‘The Change Board’ withheld MATERIALLY SIGNIFICANT FINANCIAL INFORMATION regarding their ‘Single Change’ savings programme from councillors and the legally responsible Section 151 Finance Officer of Bristol City Council in JANUARY 2016.

This resulted in councillors setting an INCORRECT BUDGET last year. Councillors stated the council would need £345 million in 2016/17 to balance the budget when senior officers knew perfectly well that they would need £374 million to do this.

All 30 bosses on the ‘Change Board’ – who are contractually (and ethically) OBLIGED to report MATERIAL MISSTATEMENTS in the council’s accounts and tell councillors the truth – knew this was the case on 16 January 2016. However they collectively decided to withhold this information from councillors, who proceeded to set an incorrect budget on 16 February 2016. Many of those same officers would have even sat in the very meeting where councillors set the wrong budget.

Of course, there was a MAYORAL ELECTION due to take place in May 2016 and it’s quite possible that this huge £29m deficit – run up under, then, Mayor Bent Redpants – could prove to be a massive electoral liability to the sitting mayor.

Did the council’s 30 most senior bosses (who are required to be POLITICALLY NEUTRAL) try to INFLUENCE THE OUTCOME OF AN ELECTION then? And is anyone going to bother to find out more or are we supposed to pretend it hasn’t happened and let this gang of high-earning council officer crooks off the hook?

The Rev Rees is also overlooking the incompetence and/or mendacity of his CHIEF INTERNAL AUDITORS, Alison “Mullet” Mullis and Melanie “Joe” Henchy-McCarthy too. These are the couple of oafs paid good money by us to ensure that financial wrongdoing doesn’t happen at the council.

So why did this pair of idiot auditors give the basketcase ‘Single Change Programme’ a clean bill of health and a ‘GOOD‘ rating in July 2015 when it was plainly apparent to anyone allowed to look that it wasn’t delivering the savings that it should be?

And why, in November 2015, did Mullet and Joe Henchy-McCarthy allow the bosses in charge of the ‘Single Change Programme’ to REWRITE a further Internal Audit report for the council’s Audit Committee so that that the committee was told in January 2016 that the Single Change Programme was operating at an ‘ACCEPTABLE’ level? In fact the programme was FAILING to the tune of £29 million as all the bosses and this pair of auditors knew perfectly well.

While the Reverend Rees waffles away on Youtube about 2020 and his Labour minions soil their pants over The Bristolian’s cover artwork, some of the city’s residents are now doing their jobs for them and starting to ask some PERTINENT QUESTIONS.

Especially regarding what was going on with senior council bosses (the overwhelming majority of whom continue to work at the council) and the council’s finances in 2015 and 2016?

There’s a selection of those questions below. What will the answers be we wonder?

 

Why not send your own email? Here’s the email addresses you may wish to send your enquiry to:

denise.murray@bristol.gov.uk – Finance Director and Section 151 Officer

anna.klonowski@bristol.gov.uk – New Chief Executive who’s promising to sort the financial mess out

shahzia.daya@bristol.gov.uk – Head of Legal Services and Monitoring Officer (responsible for all council legal matters and reporting matters to the police if appropriate)

mayor@bristol.gov.uk – Marvin Rees, the mayor

cllr.craig.cheney@bristol.gov.uk  – Cabinet Member for Finance, Governance and Performance (claims to be in charge of finances for the council)

Plus, include your local councillors in the email. Their email address can be found at: https://democracy.bristol.gov.uk/mgMemberIndex.aspx?bcr=1

And please copy in The BRISTOLIAN: bristoliannews@googlemail.com

From: ian robinson [mailto:xxxx]
Sent: 13 February 2017 19:43
To: Shahzia Daya; Mayor’s Office Mayor’s Office; Editor at Bristol News; The Bristolian .; Steven Norman; Charlotte LESLIE; Councillor Donald Alexander; Councillor Jo Sergeant
Subject: Section 151 Officer – attempt to influence election

Dear Shahzia,

I am writing to you to raise a concern that recent information released to the press regarding the £29 million deficit within council budgets was suppressed from the public, Mayor and Cllrs in the run up to both the Mayoral and local elections. It would appear to me (a reasonable man) that there would appear to have been a co-ordinated attempt to influence the election results by suppressing the scale of the budgetary deficit.

As I believe you are the Section 151 officer now for BCC can you comment on the councils position regarding this matter? Has any report been forwarded to Avon and Somerset Police of the situation with a request to investigate?

If you could avail me of the current situation I would be grateful,

Kind regards,

Ian

From: Editor <xxxx>
Sent: 13 February 2017 21:57
To: ‘ian robinson’; ‘Shahzia Daya’; ‘Mayor’s Office Mayor’s Office’; ‘The Bristolian .’; ‘Steven Norman’; ‘Charlotte LESLIE’; ‘Councillor Donald Alexander’; ‘Councillor Jo Sergeant’
Subject: RE: Section 151 Officer – attempt to influence election

Dear Shahzia

Given the volume of pro-George Ferguson articles & comment orchestrated by Bristol 24/7 and Mike Norton’s Bristol Post, which followed on the heels of this ‘willful forgetfulness’ by Bristol City Council Strategic Directors, Bristol News would be interested in learning more about what the council feels was the level of collaboration between Council officers, George Ferguson and his election campaign team  and the two ‘directors’ of these two intriguing local newspapers.

We could go through and count and list every single article but there are so many it would simply be too long a list.

We’d be keen to learn more about the level of collusion that may, or may not, have gone on, during the February to May 2016 period. Free and fair elections is not a lofty goal it should be the standard Bristol City Council are committed to achieve. BCC fell really short last May and we’d like an explanation as to the reason why.

Regards

Xxxxxxx

From: steven norman <s-norman123@hotmail.co.uk>
Sent: 14 February 2017 20:11
To: denise.murray@bristol.gov.uk; anna.klonowski@bristol.gov.uk
Subject: RE: SECTION 151 OFFICER – ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE ELECTION

Dear Ms Murray and Ms Klonowski

Perhaps someone could confirm whether Bristol City Council will be formally requesting that their external auditors conduct a Public Interest Investigation into the following:

– the 30 senior officers/Change Board that withheld information from councillors and the S151 officer that resulted in a material misstatement in the 2015 – 16 accounts and material misstatements in the budget for 2016 – 17 agreed by Full Council in February 2016.

– The Chief Internal Auditors who, in April 2015, found the Change Programme governance arrangements to be ‘good’. A perverse conclusion entirely at odds with the Bundred Report.

– The Chief Internal Auditors over a further Internal Audit report produced in November 2015 and finally published in December 2015 – ‘Change Programme: Financial Benefits Realisation” – that reported ‘acceptable’ levels of control across all areas of the Change Programme after the report was altered by the following officers: Change Services Manager, Service Director, Business Change & ICT, and Strategic Director, Business Change.

– The Chief Internal Auditors presenting the December 2015 report above to the Audit Committee in summary form and with no indication it had been substantially rewritten by officers/managers running the failing Change Programme.

Kindest Regards

 

Mr Stephen Norman

SCAM-A-LOT TELLING PORKIES (AGAIN)?

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‘Happy’ Property-Guardians pose at Coombe EPH with Camelot ‘Guardian Manager’ Mark Hurley (left) and Paul Lloyd Camelot ‘Regional Director’ (second right)

After a series of articles in The BRISTOLIAN and elsewhere uncovering the disgraceful and illegal conditions that Guardian-Tenants were living in Bristol City Council properties run by scam landlords CAMELOT, the so-called ‘security company’ has finally responded.

Late last year SCAM-A-LOT hired a PR company EMPICA from Canary Wharf in London to deal with the ‘truth crisis’ in Bristol and their expensive clanking PR machine has finally manufactured some ‘post-truth’ news in a Bristol Post article.

Several cringingly staged photos in the Post show unamed Guardian-Tenants ‘happily’ drinking tea with Camelot Guardian Manager Mark ‘Prize Wanker’ Hurley and Regional Director Paul ‘Porky Pie’ Lloyd at a Bristol City Council property Coombe EPH in Westbury-On-Trym.

There’s just one slight problem… it’s fake!

The BRISTOLIAN can exclusively reveal that the Guardian-Tenant pictured, Kofi Jamoa (far right) claims that at the time of the photo he:

  • wasn’t living in Coombe EPH
  • in fact wasn’t living in a Camelot property at all
  • he wouldn’t live in a Camelot property again after the way he was treated by them
  • was paid £1,500 by Camelot to do staged interviews with the BBC and the Bristol Post

So who are the other pretend Guardian-Tenants in the shot and where do they live? How much were they paid by Scam-a-lot? Readers of The BRISTOLIAN, lets name names!

And so ends another desperate, pathetic and expensive attempt to spin a story by the lying bastards at EMPICA and SCAM-A-LOT.