In a recent case at the Information Rights Tribunal (which settled pre-hearing) some curious facts came out concerning the procedures at Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council (SMBC) legal department, headed by highly controversial Monitoring Officer, Surjit Tour*.
Tour was re-employed by SMBC and specifically tasked, inter alia, with “doing a number” on local blogger, Julian Saunders. To this end Tour has tried various tactics and also set up a £300,000 fund of taxpayers money to crush Saunders financially and to destroy the blog (as reported in The Times and mentioned in Parliament). He also authorised the unlawful funding of a claim by an employee, Lisa McNally, against Saunders in respect of her personal Twitter account which ended up costing the taxpayer £100,000.
Saunders, a former Solicitor, has presented a number of matters to the Information Rights Tribunal which has usually resulted in a deluge of documents being provided to him which he had previously been told didn’t exist or were somehow “unavailable”.
At a small number of hearings involving Saunders - including at the striking out of McNally’s claim at the High Court in London - he noted a curious thing. Tour was sending not one but two senior in-house Solicitors to sit behind Counsel. Given the low-level nature of the litigation it was unclear to Saunders why the taxpayer was (a) paying for two senior in-house lawyers to attend, and (b) whether both lawyers were claiming travel and subsistence to attend hearings, notably the one in London. He duly made a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.
A defence of vexatiousness was made by Tour but died on the vine. But SMBC maintained a defence under s.12 FOIA (Cost of compliance exceeding the appropriate limit). As usual, the Information Commissioner upheld Sandwell’s s.12 interpretation.
Mr Saunders had left the law in 2004 but was quite familiar with computerised case management systems even then. He imagined that the technology would have come on by leaps and bounds, but this is not the case with the Sandwell system.
SMBC confirmed that they had used the CIVICA Legal system for part of the period covered by the FOI request, but had then changed to the iCasework system.They informed the Tribunal that neither of these systems maintained records accessible to managers or other third parties relating to the time spent travelling to, and attending at, hearings. Thus there was no way of correlating whether more than one person was out of the office (or away from home if working from there) and attended hearings with another. Such information is recorded on individual files and so, for FOIA purposes, it would be necessary to physically inspect every single litigation file (over the FOI period of two years) to try and puzzle these things out. Yet even without the data SMBC were somehow able to confirm that double attendance was rare.
Mr Saunders was astonished by this, remembering ghastly weekly meetings when senior partners came armed with computerised sheets and analysed fee earners' time and cost performances. That was in 2004. He responded to the SMBC submissions that it was admitted (at least in respect of attendances) that the records were “held” - within the FOI meaning of that word. Of course, it is hard to see how they could not have been noting that SMBC keeps internal time recording details for each fee earner at “the internal charging rate”, and this also forms the basis for claiming inter parte costs should that become applicable. (Bizarrely, the Civica and iCasework systems operated by Sandwell are also said to be incapable of recording travel and subsistence costs on any records available to management and these are “only contained on individual files”.)
SMBC said it was pivotal that there was no need to record if more than one taxpayer-funded solicitor attends a hearing, and there is no reason to do this. Mr Saunders countered that management needed to know (a) where lawyers actually are, and (b) why taxpayers’ money was being unnecessarily wasted by double attendances.
Neither CIVICA nor iCasework can be searched (say SMBC) to show whether hearings actually took place on individual cases (whereas back in 2004 Mr Saunders specifically remembers time recording “hearings”). As above, neither can travel and/or subsistence be “searched” across the system say Sandwell.
Mr Saunders asked why fee earners could not simply be asked whether they recall attending any hearings in the previous two years in the company of a colleague particularly when the number of such occasions was somehow known to be very small. SMBC thought this a wholly unreasonable request saying it was unfair to ask fee earners to recollect such incidents and the results might be “inaccurate”. Further a fee earner may recall that s/he was involved in a double attendance but not whether s/he time recorded it on the file! Despite this they did physically “interrogate” one of the files specifically mentioned in the FOI request (the McNally fiasco) even though this had already been the subject of a separate FOi request which the Council had answered.
Incredibly SMBC initially stated that they had no record on file of two Solicitors attending the McNally hearing (in London) although when they investigated the file they found an email showing that another solicitor had emailed to say she was going to attend (and, according to the other FOI, there were substantial rail fares incurred). The email would, of course, constitute a record within the ambit of the original FOI request. In another bizarre twist SMBC told the Tribunal that the second fee earner had voluntarily gone to London on "a non-working day" so that - apart from the train fare - the taxpayer suffered no loss!
Incidentally SMBC has form for this sort of nonsense. Maria Price - a solicitor formerly employed by SMBC and now at Devon Council - "represented" the Council political Leader at a police interview in respect of a purely personal matter. Sandwell doctored her records - seemingly with her knowledge - to show that she was on holiday that day and claimed that she had been present at the police interview as a gesture of goodwill to the political Leader.
Despite the obfuscation SMBC finally admitted that (1) there had been double attendances only on very rare occasions; (2) at least two of those occasions were hearings involving Mr Saunders: (3) Other than any records on individual files there was no management of central billing records showing double attendances and (4) SMBC did pay for the train fare for a second solicitor to attend the McNally hearing but she went in her own time and there was no “cost” to the taxpayer for her attendance. Curiously Sandwell belatedly admitted in a consent order that this double attendance was “authorised” by management although seemingly without any record being kept that would be disclosable under the FOI.
Comment
Although local authorities claim to model their operations on commercial firms it is clear that one, at least, is an absolute shambles in respect of time management. Tour has no idea where his senior solicitors are nor that they are sometimes wasting taxpayers’ funds for no reason. Tour also wasted taxpayers money on paying for a second solicitor to travel to London when she was not actually working.
It is an amazing coincidence that the only known examples of doubling-up occurred in incidents involving Mr Saunders during a period when Tour and his colleagues have been pursuing a vendetta against him.
Clearly the case management systems utilised by Sandwell (at least) are not fit for purpose as a management tool. It seems bizarre that modern systems cannot record time spent in travel to, and attendance at, hearings.
Now that people are increasingly working from home it is maybe not so important for fire safety and/or management purposes to know where staff actually are. Most firms have logging in and out records for their offices but it does seem odd that Council management would have no record if a solicitor was attending a hearing - either from the office or from home.
On a brighter point - at least if you are a SMBC Solicitor - “Big Brother” is not watching you!
* Further details of Tour's approach to the position of Monitoring Officer can be found at "Monitoring the Monitoring Officer - A Case Study" at:
https://crowmultimedia.blogspot.com/2021/12/monitoring-monitoring-officer-case-study.html
rottencouncils@gmail.com
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