To Councillor Clark, Chairman of Overview and Scrutiny Committee, from Councillor Wainwright:
Please will Cllr Clark tell members of the progress made by the Scrutiny Committee into the investigation of alleged bullying of employees of Ryedale District Council?
Minutes:
1. Councillor Wainwright submitted the following question:
To Councillor Clark, Chairman of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee:
“Please will Cllr Clark tell members of the progress made by the Scrutiny Committee into the investigation of alleged bullying of employees of Ryedale District Council?”
The Chairman of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee, Councillor Clark replied
I thank Cllr Wainwright for his continued interest in this subject considering that he had a non-interest in it for a long time, followed by not supporting Scrutiny looking into it at this point. However, we had, as I reported to Cllr Wainwright question last time, been unable to appoint in November as the meeting was cancelled. The next possible meeting and I did try for the Scrutiny Committee was into January. At that meeting we appointed Prof Raine from Birmingham University, Local Government department and he has started work on working with the Sub Committee and the Committee to look into the allegations of bullying.
Councillor Wainwright asked the following supplementary question:
Cllr Clark you're the Chairman of the Audit Committee so naturally you must have the role of ensuring that the Council spends the public's money wisely. In the minutes of the Scrutiny Committee of the 13 July 2017 you're quoted as saying the Overview and Scrutiny Committee will report to Full Council as a matter of urgency. In the pre-meeting this evening we heard you talking about a matter on the agenda as Alice in Wonderland, if you read what you see, it isn't necessarily true. Seven months have now passed, the Council allocated a sum of up to £10,000 to undertake the review if that sum was required. Can you tell me how much of this money has already been spent in Council Officer time, is there a paper trail of the money being paid to the organisation, in this case Prof Raine doing the investigation and is there a paper trail of why Prof Raine was chosen before others and why some organisations whose names were put forward were not even interviewed?
Councillor Clark replied:
The question of urgency - I first raised this question four years ago, certainly three plus. I raised it in Full Council - was there, could there be, did anybody know? 18 months ago I brought in a motion to it because we were getting nowhere, calling upon Full Council, calling upon the Chief Executive to look into it and the vast majority of Council voted against it. That was 2 years plus to get nowhere, so down to seven months and getting somewhere strikes me as not just urgent, it strikes me as the speed of light compared with what various Councillors within the Council were voting for before i.e. it doesn't exist and we're not going to do anything and therefore by definition the speed was unbelievably slow.
Money spent so far - none, so that's been relatively cheap and hasn't required a lot of auditing because up until now we have been expecting people to pay their own travel expenses to come here and Councillor Acomb and I and other members of Overview and Scrutiny have interviewed people to find the best in our opinion to recommend to Overview and Scrutiny. There is paper trail of the appointment, it was discussed in exempt in Scrutiny that the Chair, myself and the Vice Chair signed a summary of that to go to the s151 officer in confidence because it is exempt and because we need to protect everybody in the Council - employees - because I repeat we do not know a. if there's been any bullying, hence the need for the inquiry, if anybody has been bullied right through from the key holders to the loo right through the Chief Executive, if anybody's doing the bullying from the key holders to the loo through the Chief Executive and probably the most invidious group of all, the group that are wrongly accused of bullying between those two extremes. On that basis we've done what we've done so far without involving officers so which ever one of those three categories they may or may not fit into we're not putting any pressure on them whatsoever. So we've done the absolute minimum in paper trail that was needed to approve the appointment.
We interviewed three, we would have interviewed more but we had the time delay, which we've now covered twice and on that basis the one that we didn't look into, again back to the speed, was found in August and was brought to the Committee, was brought to me after the Committee meeting on 5 October and the reason for not interviewing and not discussing with them because we couldn't do a straight tender because we didn't know what we needed. We needed to discuss with people what they would offer in relation to looking at our problem.
This particular group that had a two month delay in finding its way through to us actually had a whole range of opinions as to what was happening in Ryedale Council without having discussed it with Overview and Scrutiny or Full Council etc. On that basis we decided that somebody as biased as that, it would probably be most sensible not to proceed. I believe, though I could be wrong, that this may be the letter that you'd seen a copy of two Council meetings back. If it isn't, I did ask you at the time if you'd like to bring the letter to me I could tell you if it was the same one that I had. If it is the same one then we considered it to be biased, if it isn't the same one then I can't help you because I don't know what letter you've got that I haven't seen.