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Turning a Blind Eye. How West Yorkshire Combined Authority Helps Local Police to Evade Accountability.

In this blog post you will learn how local authority organisations tasked with holding the police to account will fail to do so. Because even when there is significant evidence of misconduct on the part of the force, including attempts to suppress a reasonable investigation, the supervisory organisation will ignore this and prefer instead their own tick box review of police misconduct which fails to address or examine the police’s deliberate mishandling of a complaint.

The issues raised concern West Yorkshire Police and West Yorkshire Combined Authority.

One of the issues we continue to return to in this blog is the inability of supervisory organisations to be able to hold other organisations lower down the food chain to account.

This occurs for a number of reasons. In this matter it is both historically the case that locally based organisations tasked with holding West Yorkshire Police to account are incapable of doing so, but also when such organisations commit an error in their own review of an investigation they ignore the error in any subsequent correspondence. At all stages the emphasis is maintenance of public confidence in the police complaint system, which results in a failure to properly examine and investigate complaints raised with proper rigour.

This matter concerns West Yorkshire Combined Authority and their inability to be able to hold West Yorkshire Police to account when the police’s Professional Standards Department Standards Dept. fail to properly investigate a complain. Indeed even when they appear to have deliberately scuppered a complaint investigation WYCA do nothing. The authority’s website states that one of their functions is “holding the Chief Constable to account” categorically this is not true. When an instance of abuse of power or process occurs WYCA look the other way.

Alison Lowe OBE is the West Yorkshire Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime (DMPC). She is pictured below. The supervision of the local force is her responsibility and ultimately that of West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin.

Alison Lowe is currently the person next in line responsible for supervision of police after the local mayor.

But first let’s travel back into the mists of time. 

Prior to West Yorkshire Combined Authority taking over supervision of police complaints in relation to West Yorkshire Police there existed a Police and Crime Commissioner. This was Mark Burns-Williamson.

During his time as police and crime Commissioner for West Yorkshire he proved not only significantly gaffe prone but also incapable of holding West Yorkshire Police to account.

The reason for this inability to hold the force to account is widely known. Burns-Williamson was involved in a messy love triangle in which he wrote an unfortunately worded letter to his rival. This matter was suppressed by West Yorkshire Police DI Simon Bottomley and since then until the end of his tenure in post in 2021 Burns-Williamson would avoid using PCC powers to hold the force to account. He was literally caught by the nuts by West Yorkshire Police who because of their suppression of the complaint about the letter had a significant hold over him. This prevented the Police and Crime Commissioner from fully exercising their reasonable duties in holding Police to account.

The Burns-Williamson inaction figure is available in bearded and clean-shaven variants. Optional dodgy contents of his office safe play set also available!

Burns-Williams time as commissioner was characterised by a series of notorious exposures of misconduct in public office on the part of the organisation he was tasked with supervising. West Yorkshire Police have an international reputation for incompetence and dishonesty practiced even on those in their own ranks and the period of a Police and Crime Commissioner supposedly supervising them was characterised by a new intensity of incompetence, corruption and smearing from all levels of the force.  

Now let us move forward to the present. 

The College of Policing publishes a Code of Ethics, which is routinely ignored and in fact the subject of of humour amongst many police forces. It also provides a series of guides of behaviour and conduct that it deems reasonable for officers to be able to show in the course of their duties. This covers a number of different aspects of policing and is in effect a Code of Conduct broadly similar to The Highway Code in that it provides a structure of behaviour that would give the public confidence they are being policed correctly. The more an officer adheres to what the College of Policing guidelines are in a situation the less likely it is that they will go off on their own tangent and open themselves and their Chief Constable to a charge of misconducting themselves.  

One of these guidelines covers how officers should conduct themselves when undertaking visits to the home of a member of the public. The code is clear in how officers should behave when on home visits.

This isn’t photoshopped.
A lot of modern Plods really are this out of condition!

In an October 2020 visit to a member of the public’s home two officers of West Yorkshire Police attended. One of them breached the guidance in a clear and obvious way. So clearly in fact that the breach was obvious to all, including the colleague they attended with. This was subject to a complaint to West Yorkshire Police made shortly afterwards.

Complaints to West Yorkshire Police are examined and considered – although more often than not dismissed on spurious grounds – by their Professional Standards Department. The logic of allowing police to investigate themselves is perhaps better left to others to explain.

In this matter they did three things to dishonestly skew the complaint in their favour. The three facts below represent a salutary warning to anyone who makes a complaint regarding the police that they will seek to loose evidence not in their favour and misdirect the investigation.

One

A complaint of the breach of the Code was made shortly after the visit. The officers in attendance wore body worn video, which could have proved the substance of the complaint to be factually accurate. But the body worn video was allowed to be destroyed before being viewed by Professional Standards Department at West Yorkshire Police. No attempt to retain the material for viewing was made. Thus the first piece of clear evidence that misconduct occurred on the home visit was lost. Likely deliberately.

Two

Significantly also a witness present at the home address during the visit was not questioned or approached in any way by police investigating the complaint. Again as with the loss of the body worn video footage this likely occurred to skew the process of the complaint investigation in favour of West Yorkshire Police exonerating the officer whose conduct had been highlighted. In the same way police failed to interview the other officer not subject to the complaint of a breach of the Code. Again this is deliberate action to skew the complaint investigation in the police’s favour.

Three

Then in the most devious manipulation of the complaint process West Yorkshire Police misdirected the complaint by investigating the officer who had not committed the breach of The College of Policing guidance rather than the one who clearly did. This together with the destruction of body worn video footage – which would have proven the complaint was factually sound – and the refusal to approach a witness to the facts are suggestive of an organisation which has attempted to suppress an investigation which would have found against one of their officers.

This is not however a new thing for West Yorkshire Police. Their Professional Standards Department standards department has dozens of different ways of minimising, trivialising, diffusing and reducing a complaint to the point where, however reasonable and valid it may be, the matter will not be investigated or assessed with rigour due to it. The point of this is of course the maintaining of professional reputation.

What price police reputation and integrity? Well at the moment about the same as this old badge goes for on eBay.

The 2021 independent report into the murder of journalist Daniel Morgan and the failure to solve the crime by the Metropolitan Police defined institutional corruption as:

“Concealing or denying failings, for the sake of the organisation’s public image, is dishonesty on the part of the organisation for reputational benefit and constitutes a form of institutional corruption.”

In circumstances large or small the police are prepared to manipulate cynically the complaints system in order to get officers off the hook. And in such situations the need for reasonably effective and careful supervision of police Professional Standards Departments is clear.

However staff at West Yorkshire combined authority specifically the Deputy Mayor’s office, who are tasked with supervision of police complaints where the complainant seeks review, seem to be suffering an unfortunate hangover from the days of Mark Burns-Williamson.

Police failed to find in favour of the complainant. The mishandling of the complaint worked rather well for them. So the matter was referred to the Deputy Mayor’s office at West Yorkshire Combined Authority. This is the next stage in the procedure of the complaints process. 

The matter was initially assessed and investigated by Karen Grey of West Yorkshire Combined Authority. 

And important fact to remember in relation to any complaint that you may refer to such as a Police and Crime Commissioner, a local authority, or The Independent Office of Police Complaints is that the matter that was originally under investigation by the police’s Professional Standards Department will not be investigated again.  

This means that police can misdirect any complaint made about their behaviour at the initial stages of that complaint and that the later appeals stages will not look for or attempt to correct those errors. The complaints system is being tactically gamed therefore to maintain the police’s professional reputation. Local authority organisations and IOPC are assisting in this.

The body tasked with review of the Police findings in respect of a complaint will conduct a tick box exercise which is essentially to review if the police have fulfilled their own tick-box exercise within their earlier complaint investigation. There will be no investigation into egregious breaches of procedure or abuse of process.

In keeping with this the investigation of the wrong person was missed by Karen Gray. The destruction of body worn video footage barely warranted a mention and the failure to interview a witness or the other officer present likewise. In short the means by which West Yorkshire Police had skewed the investigation, by dishonest means and to evade finding against one of their own officers for a breach of the College of Policing Code, were ignored by the review process.

This does not in anyway represent effective oversight of the police’s own handling of complaints. The same personnel who were present when the organisation was the Police and Crime Commissioner up until 2021 have moved to the new Combined Authority / Mayor’s office. Given that the reasons PCC Mark Burns-Williamson was incapable of holding police to account are well-known I’m forced to ponder what the WYCA’s excuse for the same lamentable lack of diligence is?

The suboptimal nature of the Combined Authority’s review of the police handling of a complaint, the critical facts of West Yorkshire Police’s own purposeful mishandling of the complaint in order to draw conclusions that police had handled the complaint in line with their obligations

A further review by Julie Reid, Head of Policing and Crime at West Yorkshire Combined Authority, failed to acknowledge that Karen Grey had made any errors in the handling of the complaint. So in effect then while the original complaint was subject to malfeasance from police, the complaint to WYCA about Gray’s mishandling of the original matter was also covered-up.

The ultimate price of this is paid by the public of course. While police are able to cover up misdeeds with impunity and the review organisation also fails to admit it has failed to spot key errors in its own investigation the standard of policing will never improve

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A Culture of Concealment: National Probation Service and Complaint Mishandling

National probation service has a history of apathy, obfuscation of truth, lack of accountability and an unwillingness to learn from its failings.

One of the easiest ways to see this is in the way complaints about NPS services are handled. This is a three stage process.

The initial stage is communication with a person’s probation officer, who will attempt to settle the issue informally. The next step is what is known as a stage one escalation. This is where a formal response is received and the matter investigated by a local office. In this case this is Yorkshire and The Humber Regional Hub which can be found based at West Offices, Station Rise, York.

If issues are still unresolved following this matter moves to a stage two escalation. At this stage, the complaint is examined by a panel made up of people who work for National Probation Service and the results reported back to the complainant.

This procedure for dealing with complaints is outlined in a document in public circulation. This is Probation Service Instruction (PI) 51/2014.

Here is a link to that document:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/handling-complaints-pi-512014

I mentioned earlier that NPS has a tendency towards unaccountability, and willingness to learn from its failings.

One of the of the most pernicious aspects of this organisation is the degree to which it will attempt to protect probation officers, and their supervisory staff from the effect of their own misconduct.

Pauline Forbes Williams works for National Probation Service based in York. Her job title is Head of Complaints Team for NPS Yorkshire and the Humber.  

She is effectively the first line of defence for NPS when a stage one complaint is raised. The purpose of her intervention very often is seen in early-stage attempts to get a complaint dismissed without any form of examination and more often on questionable grounds.

It would appear from evidence obtained that the means of her doing this include misrepresenting Probation Service Instructions on handling complaints. For example, she may say that a complaint is time barred from being examined when in fact, no such time bar exists. She may say that a complaint is has already been dealt with in other matter when in fact this is not the case.

All of these are ways and means by which NPS – often with knowing and deliberate dishonesty – seeks to evade proper examination of complaints brought to it.

As a consequence lessons regarding poor service are never learned and the service fails to improve.

It appears NPS don’t like complaints much and this relates back to the matter of lack of accountability and willingness to learn from failings. It may also be the case that NPS is aware that the service provided is in many ways wholly inadequate to the point being on the verge of collapse.

Consequently, there is a massive incentive on the part of NPS to minimise, trivialise, diffuse and fragment any complaints put to it and to do so via any means at its disposal. Even if it means the methods for discontinuance of a complaint are contrary to the duty of care and PI 54/2014 instructions for handling complaints.

Or contrary to the truth, as in this matter.

This brings us back to Paulette Forbes-Williams.

A complainant who we will call Mr X for the purpose of this article made a complaint which was dealt with at stage two. The complainant requested details of the appeal panel, and who sat upon it.

This is not an unreasonable request for information!

The fact that the information was not provided by NPS at the conclusion of the second stage of the complaint response suggests that they were seeking to hide details of who was sat upon the appeal panel, possibly, because there was some conflict of interest or prior knowledge of Mr X by one of the persons sat on the panel that may have prejudiced their opinion and the way they approached the complaint.

The response of Paulette Forbes-Williams is seen below.

So in short the reasons Mr X was not provided with a copy of the names of the appeal panel – according to Forbes-Williams – was because Mr X posed a medium risk to staff.

This is clearly wrong because Mr X obtained a copy of information from National Probation Service around a month prior to the letter seen above from Paulette Forbes-Williams.

Two extracts from this are seen below.

These clearly state that Mr X was not in fact a risk to NPS personnel as stated by Forbes-Williams. That he was classified in fact as a low-risk offender. That the risk presented to probation staff was low and a risk presented to the public was low.

Therefore, in her grounds for refusal to provide the information requested, Forbes-Williams wholly misrepresented the situation in order to deny access to the information.

It’s reasonable to imagine that prior to issuing this complaint response Paulette Forbes-Williams would have checked the records of Mr X and the level of risk he supposing presented before making such broad comments as appear in the letter.

Or maybe not!

When the facts were put to Forbes-Williams from NPS’ own documents this response was received:

As stated there are clear grounds for why NPS might have sought to withhold information on the composition of the appeal panel from Mr X and it would appear on past form based on evidence seen that Forbes-Williams will utilise any means to avoid either progressing a complaint or providing information.

In any case, it is beholden upon someone whose job title is Head of Complaints to be able to provide the correct information in complaint responses and data access requests and not to act in bad faith to unfairly disadvantage Mr X in the pursuit of information he has requested.

Some hope of that here!

Given Paulette Forbes-Williams, history of malfeasance, misfeasance, and purposeful misconduct in public office in relation to complaint handling I favour, the explanation that the data was knowingly & deliberately withheld forming a breach of Section 77 of The Freedom of Information Act as well as misconduct in public office on the part of Forbes-Williams. S.77 of FOI makes it a criminal offence for a person to do anything with the intention of preventing the disclosure of information pursuant to an FOI request. You can read more about this Act here:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/section/77

All quite predictable so far. You’ll recall the opening lines of this article discussed apathy, obfuscation of truth & lack of accountability.

Here’s where these factors come into play in relation to this matter.

Lynda Marginson CBE. Presume that stands for Can’t be Bothered Explaining!

Paulette Forbes-Williams’ supervisor for the purpose of such matters as this is Lynda Marginson CBE. She is the Regional Director for the Probation Service in Yorkshire and the Humber. You can find her on Twitter @lyndamarginson where she relentlessly bangs the drum that all is good in the world of NPS.

The matter of Forbes-Williams misconduct in relation to this and other matters was put to Lynda Marginson. The response as seen below.

Bland assurances that a proper investigation was carried out fall somewhat short of the Probation Service Instructions for how a complaint should be actioned. You will recall that PI 54/2014 for dealing with complaints specify a three stage process. Mr X wrote back to state:

…and expressed concerns regarding the rigor of the investigation into Forbes-Williams for what clearly amounts to misconduct to try to retain data. A stage one complaint is supposed to provide some explanation of the means by which a matter has been investigated. In this case it looks likely that with a senior member of NPS being caught out the proper procedure and process has been skipped.

What Marginson has sought to do is to stop the matter proceeding on to being a stage two complaint response by herself deciding that there is no further aspect of this complaint that needs to be examined. You can see for yourself, the paucity of a response given by Marginson and the lack of rigor by which the matter was investigated.

It is clear that the process by which investigations are conducted into complaints about NPS is designed to block any reasonable investigation into a complaint made by such as Mr X by any means possible. Paulette Forbes-Williams being the first stage gatekeeper in that.

However when she is found out for misconduct don’t count on the likes of Lynda Marginson offering appropriate oversight: organisations such as NPS need people like Forbes-Williams to limit, restrict and deny legitimate and reasonable complaints by all means possible. This means someone like Forbes-Williams – because they are prepared to bend the rules to protect NPS – must themselves be protected by their immediate superiors when they do so.

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Attempted Fraud by Age UK?

Age UK used to be a charity. Used to be.  

Now only the London headquarters is a charitable organisation that gives help, guidance and suchlike to the elderly.

Like so many other organisations over the last forty years or so Age UK have given away much of their power to businesses seeking predominantly profit. This has led to significant injustice for many as services become harder to access. The example given below is a good illustration of how far things have fallen.

The social care crisis has enabled some unscrupulous activity in the care sector. As employees become harder to find firms need to be more creative about ensuring their sources of income. Some are a little too creative!

Therefore if you have an Age UK local office it is more likely this is a business run for profit as a limited company with Directors and suchlike. But they will trade with the Age UK logo and name which still makes the public think of it as a charity and not a business.

You can of course look up your local Age UK office on the Companies House website, it will be styled as Age UK Stevenage, or Age UK Bolton and so on to distinguish it from the charity and the multiple other for-profit bodies run under the same title. This will provide a list of the local Directors of the business and other useful data.

This is of course fundamentally dishonest and close to misrepresentation. It is not however the most dishonest thing about these companies which use the Age UK name, as this article will show. 

My mother is elderly, housebound and has severe medical needs. Care needs to be provided for her and we used our local Age UK for this for a period of six months or so. The service provided was… adequate. But not spectacular.

This was for home care in which carers would attend twice a day to empty commodes, make her food etc. This was of course in addition to family attending to her on a daily basis also.

The Age UK visits were to “top up” the care already being provided by relatives.

The idealised image of social care. But as the care crisis grows more severe it appears some companies are prepared to prey on the elderly.

As the service levels were not especially wonderful we said goodbye to Age UK after a time. Less impressive than anything they did to care for my mother was the tendency for workers to sit around for ten minutes in a half hour appointment after all the essential jobs were done.  

All payments to the local Age UK were of course up to date and bills were settled in good time. However when we said we no longer required their services two additional bills arrived which were over and above the work already paid for. These bills amounted in total to around £1,200 being requested when clearly all the due invoices had been settled and no additional work had been carried out. This was queried by me with the office who were adamant that the invoices represented monies due.

The local branch continued to press for payment of sums not owed. They even claimed in a letter to me that they were a charitable organisation and this is the reason the invoices should be paid, which I was able to quickly disprove by a check on Companies House, as I described above.

Eventually the matter was taken up by the firm as a civil action with my mother named as the Defendant and Age UK’s local business as the Claimant.

And this is where things start to get interesting and murkier still.

An initial hearing was due to take place in the matter in August 2021. Directions were issued by the Court that Age UK failed to comply with, in other words they failed to supply evidence, documents, a Statement and so on to the Court. The hearing was by telephone. No-one from Age UK took part in the hearing and the Court’s efforts to contact the Claimant by phone for the hearing failed. 

As a result of this the Claim was struck out by the District Judge. 

However Age UK applied to resume the claim and a further hearing date was set for September 2021. Age UK’s application for the case to be re-heard sounded impressive and worrying: in short if you believed what was written in the Application the business was tottering on the edge of bankruptcy due to the non-payment of these supposed sums owed.

What cost dignity in old age? Well if you deal with the businesses that trade under the Age UK name it could be higher than you think!

Again prior to the hearing in September 2021 Age UK had failed to enter any Statement and failed to comply with the directions of the Court. The fact that on the second go around they were still failing to produce any evidence showing that any sums were owed is telling: the claim was an abuse of process to try to obtain payments Age UK were aware were not owed, and the misuse of the civil system was to make my mother fearful of the proceedings such that she paid up to stop them.

What’s more a day before the hearing they issued a Notice of Discontinuance to stop all proceedings, recognising that severe costs would be awarded against them for their vexatious misuse of the civil court system.

And vexatious misuse is exactly what the local branch of Age UK tried.

They had no intention to go forward to a hearing with this matter but rather by the threat and then the issue of civil proceedings they sought to frighten an elderly lady in ill-health into paying sums they were fully aware were not owed.

Nor do I think my mother is the only elderly person or their family that businesses operating under the Age UK title have tried this sort of thing with: its a nice little earner when a client says goodbye to try squeezing them for funds one last time. Perhaps this is common practice in the care sector?

Had my mother not been so frail that she pushed all financial matters to family to sort out she would likely have seen those final two duplicitous invoices and paid them without thinking.

In any event she would likely have paid the sums they claim were owed at the threat of Court action. And she would certainly have paid them at the receipt of papers from the Court. In this way Age UK sought to misuse the civil court system to obtain around £1,200 they were not owed from a vulnerable elderly lady.

In a way the most disturbing thing about this is that no evidence was laid before the Court to show the sums were due. Even when their case was struck out Age UK considered it worth a punt to apply to re-start the case on the off chance this forced a payment from fear of proceedings without them having to show evidence of it being due.  

However we kept our nerve and called their bluff right up until the second hearing, just before which they folded.

Does this not raise some interesting questions?

That the charity based in London’s good name is being abused by organisations focused totally on profit, often by underhanded means. I am certain that there will be some financial kickback to the charity for this in the form of a ongoing licence to private businesses to use the name.

More to the point that the businesses who licence the name Age UK are at least partly presenting themselves as charities and not businesses.

Finally of course are the actions of the local office which are clearly bringing themselves and the charity into disrepute.

This is very much the way in modern Britain: rapacious companies prey upon the vulnerable, use intimidation and misuse the law to try to enrich themselves.

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Active Discrimination by Ministry of Justice?

I have been contacted by the carer of a disabled lady who has detailed a level of misconduct from such as The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), HMCTS, Judicial Conduct Investigations Office & others that makes for shocking reading.

The lady concerned has learning disabilities and for the purpose of this blog entry and to preserve her anonymity we’ll call her Liz. She required ICO to modify their communications with her in order to assist her disabilities. ICO failed to do this, which if course made communication with them very much more difficult, and so she launched a Judicial Review. This brought her into contact with the civil court system where arguably she suffered worse discrimination than originally from ICO.

The Equality Act 2010 and the United Nations Convention on disability rights are supposed to help to enforce, protect and promote the rights of disabled people to access public services and promote equality of access to such.

However as is so often the case in modern Britain the aim falls far short of the reality. As I’ve said Liz’s issues began when The Information Commissioner’s Office failed to communicate with her in a format she could read and understand; she has limited reading and comprehension skills.

Things frequently go from bad to worse when an organisation fails to make adaptations to assist the disabled. This is true of ICO but the same issues were experienced in Liz’s dealings with The Ministry of Justice.

I should add at this point that all of the organisations mentioned in this blog entry will also have guidelines in respect of how to treat everyone equally. They have all fallen far short of this leading to mistreatment and injustice.

An email to me from this lady’s carer shows that further injustice happens from HMCTS…

“When she has attempted to request accessibility from HMCTS, regarding Judicial Reviews against The Ombudsman’s refusing to send her written correspondence, refusal to contact her by phone and when she phones their services to request accessibility, complaints responses and S.A.R’s.”

When Liz called HMCTS she was apparently verbally abused by their staff over the phone. Liz has communication difficulties and it is easy for someone to misinterpret these in a phone call. There are recordings of such calls to Manchester Civil Justice Centre.

When Liz asks for responses to her complaints due to her communication difficulties staff fail to respond appropriately or make proper allowances for her disabilities. This is of course the nub of her original complaint to the Courts in the first place! She has also been supplied the personal data of another HMCTS service user, although this is not unusual given that organisation’s haphazard approach to data protection & privacy.

Most damming of all is the response of Customer Investigations at the MoJ’s head office.

This is the final port of call to get a complaint response outside of referring a complaint against HMCTS to civil action. There are also apparently call recordings retained where Richard Redgrave, the head of Customer Investigations starts laughing and finds it funny that his original land line is inactive and been inactive for the 18 months this lady has attempted to phone him on it. There has been a similar inappropriate responses from The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman.

The courts have failed to provide the lady with any adaptation and assistance with access to their services with the seeming result that her civil claim failed and there are presently costs against her. Any correspondence from the Court is problematic as this lady cannot read. Again a required adaptation has not been made. Rather more cruelly a Civil Restraint Order was made against her and this of course results in further disadvantage.

I have a list of several named Court staff who have apparently treated this lady appallingly on the account given by her carer.

The adaptations that are needed for her to be able to deal with the Court effectively and understand the process are not extensive but are clear and evident. The level of learning difficulties experienced means that the Court has a higher level of duty of care towards someone who has such restrictions in their everyday life. Indeed there is a simple moral duty here also.

I don’t know why the Courts have failed Liz so badly.

I suspect that it would be more time-consuming and awkward to make the adaptations she needs and that because of speech issues phone calls from her would be very difficult to understand. This requires time and patience. It is not beyond the ability of any organisation however! It is equally not beyond the ability of MoJ to ensure that all service users are treated equally and fairly.

What looks like deliberate cruelty from several members of HMCTS staff takes considerably more explaining though.

That they have not treated Liz kindly, made appropriate adaptations to accommodate her disabilities and even at times shown outright cruelty is an indication of how they would treat the rest of us if they thought they could get away with it.

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Unfit for Public Office?

The Labour Party has just finished having its annual conference by the seaside.

Amidst all of the in-fighting, lunatic fringe groups and hapless idealism there’s a purpose the Party is trying to work towards. It is trying to give the impression it is a party that is electable to Government. The party’s own website states that its aim is “To build a future that everyone in Britain can be proud of.” The party considers itself as a democratic fair-minded social movement as well as a political party.



Let’s take a look at the kind of future that The Labour Party would have us live in by examining the behaviour of one of their MP’s today, and the party’s response overall to the MP’s repeated failures to act on behalf of a constituent. It’s clear that The Labour Party does not like dissenting voices: this can be seen in the way significant numbers of members and their views have been marginalised within the party in the last few years.

I am unfortunate enough to live in the constituency of Yvette Cooper MP. Elected originally in the Labour landslide of 1997 she has been MP for Castleford, Pontefract and Normanton since then. She is married to former MP Ed Balls.

Early warning signs regarding the quality of the representation the constituency was saddled with came in 1998 when The Daily Mail revealed that in her wedding to fellow MP Ed Balls local party members who wished to go to the reception were charged an additional fee on top of their overnight accommodation for their attendance at the wedding. This additional fee was used to pay off the costs of the venue hire. In 2014 it was reported that Balls and Cooper used the unreformed expenses schemes to pay £655,000 for a house in Stoke Newington. The pair were subject to various claims during the expenses scandal, the most notorious of which was the fact they ‘flipped’ the designation of their second homes THREE times within two years. More details on this can be seen here: Microsoft Word – CRC 4th ver Balls-Cooper _Rev_ _4_.doc (parliament.uk)
The pair were also found to have claimed for 375 journeys taken by their children between Yorkshire and London over a three year period, totalling more than £14,000. This exceeded the allowance, which stood at a maximum of 30 journeys per year per child (or 90 journeys as they have three children). They were not sanctioned for this either.
In 2007/08 Yvette Cooper claimed £152,659 in expenses and allowances alone on top of her MP salary.

Now fast-forward to today. If you have a complaint regarding some public services such as the NHS the final destination for the complaint is The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, or PHSO. In order to use the PHSO one has to firstly get a form from the PHSO signed by your MP, who then sends this in to the Ombudsman.

On several occasions in the last few years I have requested Cooper do this. On each of those occasions there has been a very considerable delay, sometimes of several months, before the forms are signed and sent to PHSO. On one occasion lack of communication on the matter this prompted me to attend at her offices where Labour Party members (clearly trained in shouting down complaints of poor service) took a bullish and aggressive attitude. It was amusing to see how they’d been trained in standing one to either side of a complaining constituent to add an element of physical intimidation to the utter nonsense they were spouting justifying delays of several months.

This MP’s is happy to profit from her Parliamentary position but not so keen to assist in the day-to-day business of being an MP. Lethargy towards getting things done for her constituents has become so familiar to PHSO that in May 2021 they forwarded a form to her themselves and requested she sign it rather than the other way around! I note of course that Cooper is also not shy at garnering publicity for extravagant gestures around the constituency, particularly if it means getting her face in the newspaper or on television. And why not indeed as such things greatly assist in re-election? Quiet, patient endeavour on behalf of individual constituents generally does not.

However going back a little further in time; in January 2021 a form for signing and forwarding to PHSO was emailed to Cooper by me. Nothing was heard in relation to this and so the matter was chased in March and more intensively from July onwards. At no point was any response back received from Cooper or her office to either phone calls or emails, which invariably went to answer-phone.

One of the reasons Cooper’s husband Ed Balls was ejected from his seat of Morley and Outwood in 2015 is colloquially said to be because of his deficiency as a constituency MP. Balls used his time in Parliament to strut on the national stage and build his own profile but did little to assist his electors, hence his losing in 2015. Cooper’s present strategy appears broadly similar: to swan around as chair on Select Committees in Parliament and write books on women’s history. Neither of these directly benefit her constituents and if my own experience is anything to go by she’ll shortly be joining her husband on TV dancing shows, only without Ed Balls looks and ability to gyrate unconvincingly.

And so on we went into August with no word from Cooper’s constituency office regarding its intentions in respect of a matter put before them in January 2021. Could this be because the office was unmanned due to lack of funds? The Register of Member’s Interests show Cooper’s constituency office has been the recipient of considerable donations from various persons over the last few years to enable its upkeep and running. These include such as Peter Hearn who backed Cooper in the last but one Labour Party leadership election, but also backed the Tories at the same time. This is called hedging your bets. Some very substantial donations to the running of Cooper’s constituency office total tens of thousands of pounds over the last three years. Is all of this being spent in looking after the needs of constituents? I would suggest not. Clearly however there is enough funding going into the constituency office to make it a viable concern.

Once again in August 2021 I visited the constituency office to ask what on earth was going on. By intercom I was asked to leave before they even knew the purpose of my visit. That’s some customer service!

Consequently I made a formal complaint to The Labour Party of poor service this included a complaint of all the prior occasions I’ve communicated with Cooper’s office when service has been exceptionally poor.

A response came back from The Labour Party on 10.8.21.

Your complaint about Yvette Cooper MP has been assessed and we will be taking no further action at this time. This is because what you have complained about does not fall within what we can accept for investigation under our Complaints Policy, outlined in Appendix 1. Exclusions from the Complaints Policy, iv. Complaints about elected representatives that specifically relate to the way in which they carry out their duties as an elected representative.

To which my reply was:I appreciate your focus is to drop this complaint as quickly as possible without investigation. I refer to the points raised in the complaint, seen again below. Your grounds for non-investigation are that the complaint should refer to the way an elected representative carries out their duties.

Points 1-3, 5 and 8-9 deal specifically with the ability of Ms. Cooper to carry out her duties as an elected representative. Specifically these relate to the requirement for an MP to complete and return complaints for the attention of The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, which cannot be put to PHSO by any other means.

Therefore the complaint falls within the remit of appendix 1, sub para. iv of your complaints policy.

The Complaints Team The Labour Party is based at Southside, 105 Victoria Street, London. They wrote back to claim their own internal rules did not apply to the complaint made.


I wrote back again on 12.8.21 and stated:


“Please produce for me a complete copy of the relevant rules you refer to. This can be sent via PDF or you may wish to provide a link to an online document.”

I kept chasing a copy of this document over the next week. The suddenly… guess what? They wrote back to me again on 20.8.21 and stated:

“Your complaint about Jo Cole has been assigned for investigation.  This entails ensuring that all relevant information is gathered to allow a full consideration to be made” 


“As we understand it, your complaint(s) is about Bullying, Intimidation and harassment.  Please let us know as soon as possible if our understanding is incorrect.  It will not be possible to add further complaints once the investigation has commenced.   

Once as much evidence as possible has been gathered, it will be passed to a panel of the National Executive Committee (NEC) for their consideration.  Based on the evidence, the Panel will make a decision as to whether the complaint is upheld and then what the appropriate sanction should be.”  
“The process of investigating and deciding a complaint can take some time but we will update you at relevant points throughout.”

This seems pretty conclusive. Rather that providing a written copy of the articles and memoranda detailing how a complaint is investigated, the relevant rules for so doing and the grounds of acceptable behaviour for party members, MP’s and workers they simply decided to investigate the complaint. Fair enough. Presume Jo Coles is the employee at Cooper’s office who I spoke to on my visit in August. 

Not so fast though! This came in a few days later:

“Your complaint about Yvette Cooper MP/ Jo Coles that you raised on 1st March 2021 has been assessed and we will be taking no further action at this time. This is because what you have complained about does not constitute a breach of the Labour Party rules.”

Ignoring the fact that the complaint was actually in August, not in March I requested a copy of those same rules, as I had requested in mid-August. I’m still awaiting a copy. They reverted to the position held in mid-August 2021 that the matter subject to a complaint had not breached their rules but refused to prove a copy of what those rules were. Democratic movement much? Hmmm…
The party has failed to answer numerous emails requesting this data or a more comprehensive explanation as to why they have refused to investigate the complaint. 

Why should all this matter?

Presently The Labour Party is attempting to present itself as a party fit to make the next Government. The experience I have had of Cooper is that the normal running of her office is lethargic and indifferent. That matters brought to her which amount to simple requests are delayed for several months and require much chasing before any effort is made on her part. That there should be a wait of the best part of a year on a matter put to her in January 2021 is wholly unacceptable. Yet in a short while Cooper will be again presenting herself to the local electorate as an MP capable of forwarding their interests in Westminster. Much of the clear evidence from the last twenty five years suggests otherwise, however. 
My own experience is that Cooper is happy to take part in any event which will bring positive publicity or a photo opportunity but is uninterested in the needs of individual constituents. Since August 2021 Cooper has refused to sign the forms for PHSO sent in January 2021 and has clearly decided in relation to myself that I am not a constituent “worth” helping. The end result of this is that the ability to use the PHSO to resolve a complaint has been lost to me. 

The party’s mechanism for dealing with complaints suggests an organisation which is untrustworthy and slippery. Clearly this enables MP’s like Cooper to get away with exceptionally poor service towards constituents and the kind of financial sleight-of-hand described above. Taken together the performance of Cooper and The Labour Party when given the chance to act and put the matter right suggests that neither are remotely reliable or electable.

We Cooper presently has a majority of only around 1,200 enabling her to remain in office and must surely realise that the game is up for her at the next election. Perhaps this is why she is focused on writing books and appearing on Select Committees. Her majority has been whittled down over the years to this very slender margin. This suggests that constituents are indeed waking up to the level of poor service received. She has obtained a very nice living from her position since 1997 and it may well be that the constituents of Pontefract, Castleford and Normanton are now waking to the fact that that they need an MP who is prepared to act on their behalf occasionally

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How South Yorkshire Police Evade Investigating Crimes & Evade Accountability

On Tuesday 22nd of September 2020 I alerted South Yorkshire Police to a crime taking place in their area.

This followed the original reporting of this matter via an online form for just such a purpose. The online form had not received a response some considerable time after being completed, so the appropriate phone call was made.

This call was to the non-emergency number and it took the duration of a trip from Leeds to Bridlington on the East Yorkshire coast for the police to pick up the call, so around one and a half hours.

Finally managing to speak with an officer he disputed that the incident being reported was a crime. In fact I was advised to call South Yorkshire Police in relation to this matter by two other agencies that I had already reported the crime to: they considered the seriousness of the matter sufficient to warrant police attention. The officer spoken to was a PC PC Marc Horsbrough.

In the call Horsbrough’s behaviour and attitude was lazy, gave the impression he couldn’t care less and was reluctant to record the crime even when the relevant legislation was pointed out to him. More seriously he later he called me back and the content of that call amounted to unwarranted personal attack on me and a flat refusal to record a crime.

I should point out at this stage that the crime has now been recorded and the suspect interviewed: further developments are awaited. This took place only after the completion of a futher online form, not via the non-emergency phone service to South Yorkshire Police.

A formal complaint was made to South Yorkshire Police Complaints and Discipline Team:

  1. A complaint of a crime was made. This was done via the online form. That the response from the online form took longer than the 72 hours it states online for any action to be taken in respect of the referral of a crime.   
  2. That the online form had still not been processed some 7 days later.   
  3. That from comments made by Complaints and Dicipline in their email of 2.10.20 it would appear that this online referral has been lost.    
  4. That a series of phone calls were made by me on Tuesday 22.9.20 and Wednesday 23.9.20 to SYP to establish what was happening in relation to the online referral.   
  5. That these calls were either cut off when transferred to the appropriate department or else rang out for an exceptionally long period.   
  6. That on eventually speaking to an officer he stated that he had no copy of the online form in front of him but proceeded to dismiss the referral to SYP as being not something that police would deal with. This is incorrect. CPS guidance has been quoted that clearly shows the activity being reported is a criminal offence. The officer was Marc Horsbrough. working in either the Comms dept or Crime Recording around 12:45 – 1.30pm on 23.9.20.    
  7. That the same officer rang me back several minutes later.  
  8. That his comments on the call back amount to harassment and intimidation. His manner during this second call was offensive, uncivil and harassing.    
  9. That the officer concerned did this solely for the purpose of causing harassment, vexation and distress. On the second call he refused to give his name or service number when asked which is usually indicative of an officer misconducting himself.   

    That overall the standard of conduct in relation to this matter is sufficient to cause loss of reputation for the force.       

The complaint was given the reference number CO/665/20.

Calls to and from police stations are recorded on a system called Airwave. When South Yorkshire Police later claimed that they could not trace the officer involved they were simply being disingenuous: the record of all calls will have enabled an easy trace of officer identity and indeed the identity of the officer has been found out by other enquiries.

From 5th of November 2020 to 13th of March 2020 no communication from police was received in relation to this complaint. They additionally failed to respond to emails requesting a progress update. The Police Reform Act 2002 states that police should keep complainants updated every twenty eight days with a progress update on the complaint.

So I wrote to The Independent Office for Police Complaints (IOPC). I have addressed the issue in prior blog entries that IOPC is very significantly staffed by former police officers, and provided the results of a data access request showing this, and so they cannot in any way claim to be “independent”. IOPC wrote back on 23rd of March to state:

“Upon receipt of your correspondence, we contacted the Complaints and Dicipline [sic]Team Department (PSD) of South Yorkshire Police to ascertain the status of your complaint. The PSD have advised that your complaint has been recorded under their reference CO/665/20, and that the investigation of the matter is still live. They stated that they have asked the case handler of your complaint to make contact with you.”

Around a month later still no response from South Yorkshire Police. IOPC cannot investigate a complaint when it is still with the relevant force, meaning that they cannot step in on this matter and compel South Yorkshire Police to act.
So I again wrote to IOPC who stated:

“I have contacted the PSD and asked them to make contact with you and provide an update.”


I then wrote to police a few more times to chase an update on the basis that they had failed to comply with the instructions of their professional regulator. On 15th of June, some three months after IOPC originally made contact with South Yorkshire Police on this matter the following came from George Henson at their Complaints and Discipline Team:

“I can confirm the receipt of your email and I have passed it onto the case handler of your complaint referenced above.”

…which tells me nothing about the progress of the complaint. This was the last communication received from South Yorkshire Police in relation to this matter.

A recent update to The Police Reform Act 2002 states that police are only obligated to inform a complainant when something has taken place in relation to the complaint investigation. As there has been no such update the clear conclusion is that there has been no proper investigation of this matter. We are now over one year elapsed from the complaint being made.

Likely this is because the Airwave system on which calls to and from police stations are recorded retains data for a set period. The failure to investigate this complaint is probably down to South Yorkshire Police attempting to “run down the clock” towards the deletion of this data which will show clear misconduct on the part of one of their officers. This will enable their Complaints and Discipline Team to then dismiss the complaint on the basis of lack of evidence.

The original crime was referred to an Inspector Stephen Fennell and has been investigated, albeit at a very slow pace.

The exceptionally poor service received before this investigation took place suggests anyone living in South Yorkshire who has a crime to report should really not bother. The delays and wasted time attempting to contact police on their non-emergency number and their lethargic attitude which attempts to actively put people off referring a crime are bad enough. However in my case the officer, because I had quoted the relevant section of law at him, took umbrage. His fragile police ego had been dented and his response was to abuse me on a call back and refuse to record the crime. The actions of South Yorkshire Police since have all been directed towards evasion of responsibility for the actions of this officer in a way which breaches their duty of care and obligations to investigate complaints under the relevant law.

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HMCTS & The Two Year Delay

Anyone who’s been unfortunate enough to have to deal with HMCTS County Court staff will rue the day they ever did.

Customer services for HMCTS reply robustly to any complaint made!

Lazy, incompetent and incapable of even basic administration of claims. Their inability to do the job with promptness and accuracy is matched only by their wheedling and evasions when caught out.

Most of these people of course would not last five minutes in a commercial operation. But there’s no place else you can go to for civil court services.

The third rate service provided to court users therefore comes with a “like it or lump it” aspect.

So how long do you think a simple application in existing civil proceedings might take to be dealt with? Three weeks? Two months tops?

Try two years and three months!

Here’s how this came about…

An application was made in an existing claim to Sheffield County Court in May 2019.

Here is the proof of posting for this.

Note the date: 10.5.21

And here is the letter from Sheffield which states that this application has been received.

Again note the date. Also the claim number! Edited to remove my address.

And finally see the date on the Court Order which has resulted from this application…

All told this simple application has taken a period of two years three months to be actioned by HMCTS.

So what have they been doing in that time? Well the pandemic isn’t really an excuse as they had ten months pre-pandemic to sort the application. Then of course we’ve not been in lockdown for more than four months of the last year. So the pandemic isn’t an excuse.

I suspect as with most civil cases the file has been kept in poor condition with bits missing and documents lost. Again this comes down to the competence of civil court staff to do the basics of their job. A knuckle-dragging approach to fixing problems also doesn’t help.

They are – well it rhymes with mooseless pluckers – as there can be no possible excuse for a matter being left some two years three months before being actioned.

But of course anyone who’s dealt with County Court staff in the last twenty or so years knows what a set of mooseless pluckers they are.

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CPS Caught Out Lying. Again!

There’s few more enjoyable things in life than catching out a liar.

Senior CPS official and CPS Civil Legal caught out lying to the court and the public.

And with such as The Crown Prosecution Service you won’t have to wait long to do this. In the same way as Boris Johnson is capable of three lies before breakfast the CPS loves to try to mislead to cover up the incompetent and vindictive behaviour of its staff.

It’s all about maintaining a sense of professional reputation of course. This is the aim above all else. It comes below proving a professional, effective and efficient service and it leads CPS to try to bend the truth when they’ve been caught out. As happens here.

The joy of this is that they’ve been caught out twice over basically the same thing.

Here’s how this took place.

In a case in which I was involved at The High Court sitting at Leeds the CPS provided data for the Court and a copy was sent to me. The data supplied was factually inaccurate and highly damaging. CPS knew that the data was factually wrong but went ahead anyway on the basis that it would provide them with a tactical advantage in proceedings.

The data was supplied by a Tracy Wareham of CPS Yorkshire and Humberside. Oddly the wife of Gerry Wareham, the head of that division. If her relationship status has anything to do with her continued employment or not given the things she gets up to I couldn’t say.

Wareham supplied a copy of this data to me in advance of the hearing & was warned some weeks prior that the data was factually wrong, damaging, libellous and in need of urgent correction. She failed to make any effort to correct this in advance of the hearing or to research why the data was wrong in response to my emails.

Her actions amount to a breach of GDPR and The Data Protection Act.

The wrong data supplied was sufficiently damaging and serious to cause significant loss to me. The lie put before the Court was of epic proportions.

Nor was this a consequence-free lie. CPS misled the Court in order to gain tactical material advantage.

CPS Civil Legal dept. created an arguably bigger mistake when they tried to cover this up a few weeks later. In an email to me they claimed that the error was corrected pre-hearing and that this limited the damage caused.

This is of course another lie!

Copies of the emails between Wareham and the Court were supplied to me by Leeds Combined Court and show that no such efforts to correct the data in time were made.

Therefore CPS Civil Legal Services have lied to try to cover up the actions of a senior employee who breached GDPR and The Data Protection Act to try to gain material advantage within a civil hearing by misleading the Court.

Seen below is the email to CPS Civil Legal Dept. exposing their lie. Slight edits made to some lines of text to remove personal details.

Don’t assume that The Crown Prosecution Service is out to tell the truth, be open or is even competent enough to get the basics right. If the opportunity’s there to gain advantage in any situation staff will behave mendaciously and allow their internal departments to try cover up for their behaviour. In this instance both the original person and the department have been significantly caught out. The court has been invited to take action in relation to the supply of a misleading statement in proceedings and The Information Commissioner’s Office has been informed.

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A Sick Story About The Ministry of Justice

The Ministry of Justice. A building every bit as ugly and brutal as some of the people and things that go on inside it.

The Paul Foot Award 2021 has been won by journalist Jack Shenker for his article (link below) on cleaners at The Ministry of Justice, specifically one of their number called Emanuel Gomes.

Gomes was told to attend work at The Ministry of Justice at Petty France in London’s St. James daily during the early part of the pandemic in 2020.

He was paid just over £9.00 per hour.

The offices were empty. All Ministry staff had been relocated to work from home. The necessity of cleaning empty offices has never been satisfactorily explained.

Despite concerns no PPE was given to cleaners at MoJ. No sick pay was available and so Mr. Gomes continued to work regardless of contracting Coronavirus and becoming ill.

MoJ denied there had been an outbreak of the virus at the Ministry, despite compelling evidence to the contrary. This is of course standard for MoJ: deny, lie and evade.

Seven ancillary staff appear to have contracted the virus but still attended work due to lack of proper sick pay.

Emanuel Gomes died on the evening of 23rd of April 2020.

Ministry of Justice cleaning services are contracted out to OCS – “a facilities management company privately-owned by the Goodliffe Family, who are worth £191 million and appear on the Sunday Times rich list… taxpayers send the firm £17.5 million per annum, and in return OCS provides the ministry with security, catering, cleaning and other services.”

The full story can be seen at.

https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2020/07/06/the-reckoning-death-at-the-ministry/

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