A FEW weeks ago I noticed that for one of our local councillors a link to the register of members’ interests was replaced by the words 'Not shown on website'. Why not I wondered; what’s the big secret?
Naïvely on 21 April 2021 I sent off an e-mail to the Chief Executive of Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council (RMBC) to find out more. It read; I note that Section 7 Securities: contains the words 'Not shown on website'. Could you please clarify whether this conforms to what is commonly known as 'Best Practice' which is usually taken to mean a standard way of complying with legal or ethical requirements? I assume that in the interests of open government RMBC would normally wish to be seen as implementing 'Best Practice'. If there is a reason for 'Best Practice' not being followed in this case could you please inform me of the reason?
No response was forthcoming and on 5 May I sent a reminder and repeated my queries. Still no response, so on 20 May I sent a second reminder which once more repeated my queries, but this time I included the words ‘Am I to conclude from this delay that some officers of Rochdale Council have become corrupted and no longer act in a non-political manner?’
And with the speed of Zeus there came a reply!
‘The entries not shown on the website are due to the items being considered as sensitive by the previous Monitoring Officer of the Council. Any requests for such information should be submitted via the freedom of information process.’
Now my understanding is that any request for information should be treated as a request for information governed by the FOI Act even if that term is not expressly used by the requestor, so perhaps the second sentence in the reply is not quite true. Perhaps it is even intended to act as a further obstruction to enquiring minds?
I had dealings with the previous Monitoring Officer of the Council in late 2018 and early 2019 after I submitted a query about why a newly elected councillor had failed to comply with the requirement that pecuniary and other interests be registered within a set time period. Shall we just say that I found him monumentally evasive when pressed?
But what, you may ask, could possibly be so ‘sensitive’ about a councillor’s entries in the register of interests that a council officer thought it necessary to put an obstruction in the path of anyone wanting to know what they are? Was it the councillor that thought up this wheeze to avoid scrutiny or did the Monitoring Officer dream it up all by himself? Or, perish the thought, perhaps they conspired to keep this councillor’s business activities away from the gaze of prying eyes of the electorate? We shall never know! After all, this is Rochdale!
One might have hoped that a councillor from one of the other two parties would have noticed this and queried it, seemingly not. Perhaps they are hoping that they too can avoid scrutiny when the need arises courtesy of a similarly compliant Monitoring Officer?
Sadly that’s how things are in my home town. If Rochdale isn’t a town where council related matters seem to be a bit dodgy at times, it’s certainly giving a good imitation of one. The motto seems to be ‘Let them vote every few years to give a semblance of democratic accountability and between times don’t let them know too much about what their councillors are getting up to’. You know what they say about mushrooms, keep them in the dark and at regular intervals cover them with … So Mushroom Town it is from now on!
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