LBWF’s glaring failure to obey official – and mandatory – transparency rules: an update

Slowly, and through persistent questioning, the full truth about LBWF’s disgraceful disregard for the mandatory Local Government Transparency Code (LGTC) is beginning to be revealed.

My initial focus was on LBWF’s failure to publish, as the LGTC demands, information about tendering and contracting.

But LBWF’s Monitoring Officer, Mark Hynes, was having none of it, telling me:

‘The London Borough of Waltham Forest publishes all requirements under the LGTC regarding its Procurement Information, as stated in Part 2.1, in real time and ahead of the quarterly requirement. This information is publicly available without registration via the web pages of our e-tendering platform, the London Tenders Portal, and the government mandated notices platform Contracts Finder, accessible through the Council’s webpage’.

This showed, I believed, that he didn’t understand the LGTC, or perhaps hadn’t even read it, so I sent him the following about his comments, and added some details about other dimensions of LBWF’s non-compliance:

‘30 July 2024

Dear Mr. Hynes,

Thank you for your latest e-mail regarding LBWF website’s Transparency pages.

Councils are required to publish procurement (tendering and contract) data on a quarterly basis, and the LGA [Local Government Association] strongly recommends that this is done in the form of registers (I have previous supplied you with the relevant references).

Reputable councils provide these registers. If, as your e-mail reveals, LBWF declines to do so, and ignores the law, it must take the consequences.

Leaving that general point aside, the current arrangements are anyway flawed:

1. The Local Government Transparency Code (LGTC) pp. 25-6 requires that councils must publish data on tenders and contracts with a value that exceeds £5,000.

Currently, the organisation that LBWF employs to publish procurement data, Proactis, publishes procurement data with a value that exceeds £10,000.

By the use of the wrong cut off value, LBWF is not compliant.

2. The LGTC requires at p.13 notes 20 and 23 that data on procurement must include tenders and contracts ‘for staff who are employed via consultancy firms or similar agencies’.

Proactis does not publish such material, so again LBWF is not compliant.

Turning to some of the other LGTC requirements, I note that:

3. though the LGTC requires LBWF to publish data on its land and building assets annually, the last such data published on the LBWF website’s Transparency pages dates to 2018-19;

4. though the LGTC requires LBWF to publish data on grants to voluntary, community, and social enterprise organisations annually, no such data is published on the LBWF website’s Transparency pages;

5. though the LGTC requires LBWF to publish data on social housing assets annually, the last such data on the LBWF website’s Transparency pages dates to 2016-17; 

6. though the LGTC requires LBWF to publish data on parking finances and spaces annually, the last such data on the LBWF website’s Transparency pages dates to 2018-19 and does not cover spaces; and

7. though the LGTC requires LBWF to publish data on corporate credit card expenditure quarterly, the last such data on the LBWF website’s Transparency pages dates to 2016. 

Again, this confirms that LBWF is not compliant with the LGTC.

All of this is very disappointing. I note that, in a recent Freedom of Information Act case where you had considerable personal involvement, the Information Commissioner concludes that ‘the Council and the Commissioner both had to expend significant time and resources on dealing with a matter that could have been resolved very quickly by the Council’ [emphasis added].

Through failing to properly administer its Transparency pages, LBWF inevitably wastes further public money, by requiring residents who seek information on key topics to go through the rigmarole of using the Freedom of Information Act, with the costs to LBWF that this imposes, rather than simply looking it up, as is of course their right.

I look forward to your timely response’.

In response, Mr. Hynes has just sent me the following:

‘Mr Tiratsoo

I am sorry that it is proving more difficult than I envisaged to provide you with a substantive response to your queries. Please be assured that this is being worked on at the highest level to ensure that we are compliant. I have had recent discussions with both the Chief Executive and our Strategic Director or Resources Rob Manning about where we need to improve on our compliance. Our Head of Internal Audit Gemma Young is also doing a separate review on compliance.

I hope to be in a position to come back with more information in the coming weeks.

Thank you for your continued patience whilst we seek to make the necessary improvements’.

Mr. Hynes’ change of tone is amusing.

To sum up, it is now established that:

1. LBWF for many years has wilfully failed to respect most requirements of the LGTC, despite the latter being mandatory;

2. this has clearly disadvantaged residents, by denying them a range of key data;

3. it also has likely wasted public money, for the reasons noted in my letter, above;

4. despite the LGTC having been in place since 2015, neither Mr. Hynes (salary £130,001 to £135,000), who as Monitoring Officer is of course responsible for all aspects of legal governance in the Town Hall, nor LBWF CEO Linzi Roberts-Egan (salary £217,671 p.a.) have done anything about this situation until my recent challenge; and

5. senior Labour councillors, particularly LBWF Leader Grace Williams, must be judged culpable, too, because, either through indolence or ignorance, they have remained silent about the LGTC, and also, needless to say, are ultimately responsible for how council officers function. 

The whole episode illustrates, once again, that though LBWF continually claims to put residents first, too often that is a hollow promise.