York Council has paid out £8.2 million in redundancy costs since 2011

546 staff made redundant – 41 sign “compromise agreements”

A Freedom of Information response has revealed the costs of cutting staffing levels at the York Council.

FOI response Redundancies table 2

The figures don’t include teaching staff.

In total 546 have left the Council with average pay-outs of around £15,000 each. Over 80% of the redundancies were voluntary.

The figures reveal that the largest number of redundancies occurred in 2011/12 when 212 left the Council. This has fallen gradually each year to a figure of 66 during the last financial year.

A total of £8.2 million has been paid out of which £4,554,000 was the cost of statutory payments, £3,339,000 early retirement costs and £352,000 pay in lieu of notice.

Only three former staff were subsequently re-employed directly by the Council.

The authority says, though, that they don’t record whether any of their agency or contract staff have previously been employed by the Council.

Individual redundancy proposals are reported to a small group of Councillors who meet each week in a “behind closed doors” decision session.

The Council has specifically said in its response that it “has made no enhanced redundancy or pension payments”.

Compromise agreements

The Council has also confirmed that 41 “compromise” agreements have been signed with staff. Usually these involve some sort of compensatory pay.

A compromise agreement is a legally binding agreement made either during or following the termination of employment. It is recognised by statute and is the only way an employee can validly “contract out” of their employment law rights. It usually provides for a severance payment, in return for which former employees agree not to pursue any claim or grievance to an Employment Tribunal.

A leading law firm says that the major reasons for using the compromise agreement (other than to settle an existing claim) are to “remove an employee on the grounds of poor performance or misconduct, to avoid legal challenge in redundancy situations and to make it easier to remove senior staff without embarrassment”.

The Council has so far failed to explain what the reasons were for the compromise agreements that it has been party too.

While such agreements usually involve a confidentiality clause, there is no reason why the main reasons for the high level of use of the system in York cannot be made public.

We’ll press the Council to provide taxpayers with more information about this policy.

More Councils signing up to “Fix My Street” and What do they Know”

The Harrogate Council has become the latest to purchase the class leading software which gives local residents access to vital Freedom of Information files as well as an easy, and monitored way, of reporting issues.

Their approach contrasts with the attitude of the York Council which persists with an “on line” issue reporting system which is just not “fit for purpose”

York should cut its losses and follow Harrogate’s lead.

Details here

Fix My Street

What Do They Know

Meanwhile the York Council’s proposals reqarding the future of its “on line” reporting systems have been removed from its “Forward Programme“.

Instead, the controversial new system is due to be debated under a generic “Cleaner City” report in the New Year. The latter report has also been delayed by 2 months but is currently due to be considered on 25th January.

2.6 million visits to York Council web site

The Councils web site had over 2.6 million visits during the last year.

The bounce rate (the proportion of visitors who read only one page before leaving) was around 50%.

Perhaps surprisingly the majority of visitors were using desktop PCs.

By way of comparison, a website like this one receives around 40,000 visits each year with a bounce rate of around 70%. Not surprisingly over 40% of our visitors are located in York. Most of our visitors are aged under 35 and are split almost equally between male and female.

York housing waiting list falls to 1546

The number of residents on the social housing waiting list in York fell from 2311 in 2014 to 1546 in March 2015.

During last year 241 people were rehoused by Housing Associations in the City.

That figure compared to 209 in the previous year.

454 people from the housing waiting list were offered accommodation in Council houses.

That is down from a high of 551 which was seen in 2012.

10 Ombudsman complaints against York Council upheld

“During the year there was a case where the council’s handling of a particular complaint was extremely poor”

More evidence, that the York Council had become seriously dysfunctional by the end of last year, has been provided in the annual report from the Local Government Ombudsman

The organisation received 91 complaints about the York Council during the year ending March 2015.

Of thes,e 10 were upheld with 35 referred back to the Council for local resolution

The majority of the complaints concerned planning, transport, benefits, adult social care and environmental issues.

One case prompted the Ombudsman to label the Councils response as “extremely poor”

The report says that it took “emails, phone calls and finally two threats of a public interest report (sent by special delivery) to see any action taken”.

The complaint related to social care and the York Council, having accepted it was at fault in December 2013, took until October 2014 to remedy the complaint.

The Ombudsman’s letter was sent to the York Council on 18^th June 2015 but has not yet been scheduled for cosideration by any of its committees.

There is likely. in the future, to be a single Ombudsman’s office covering all public administration organisations.

Hopefully the new organisation will also have a role in relation to the growing number of Quangos being established in York and elsewhere. Residents, who at least partly fund organisations like “Make it York”, York Museums Trust and York Libraries, need to have a route to independent arbitration if they are unable to get a local resolution for a problem.

Freedom of Information legislation should also apply to those types of organisation.

York Council spends £204,811 answering Freedom of Information requests in one year

Numbers up by 34% to a peak of 1864 cases last year

The rise in FOI requests to the York Council continued to increase last year. A report to a Council meeting suggests that 94% were responded to within target times.

However significant numbers were referred for “review” because respondents were dissatisfied with the response that they received.

FOI appeals click to access

38 of the 85 review appeals were upheld.

Most of these concerned “no responses” although some responses were considered to be incomplete while in other cases the Council had incorrectly claimed that the information was exempt from the legislation.

The position was worse on cases referred to the Information Commissioners Office. There, 30 of the 39 cases referred resulted in a finding against the Council.

Although the Council claims that their new web site is now easier to trawl for FOI responses, most serious researchers would question that statement. The information is not updated quickly and is more difficult to search now that it is not assembled in date order.

The report makes no attempt to consider how the – frankly alarming – costs of this process can be reduced.

The most obvious reform would simply be for the Council to publish, on its web site and on a regular basis, the kind of information which generates repeat FOI requests. These would include items like “deaths with no next of kin”, new Business Rate accounts and monthly quality of service stats (at the moment the Council publishes its performance data – such as it is – 6 monthly, in arrears).

While there are no doubt some vexatious requests for information made by disillusioned service users, most simply reflect the fact that the last Council tried to throw a veil of secrecy over their activities.

It seemed that they almost enjoyed playing a game of “catch me if you can” when repudiating requests for information.

The new Council needs to encourage a major culture change on “openness” and transparency.

The Council has asked the Information Commissioners Office to conduct a review of how personal data is used by the authority

York Council publishes list of discipline cases

In response to a Freedom of Information request the York Council has published a list of over 60 offences that their staff have been disciplined for.

The offences include fraud, theft, maladministration, drug misuse as well as abusive and threatening behavior.

Many of the cases resulted in dismissals.

Click here for full list

click for full list

York Council “doesn’t know” how many litter complaints it is receiving.

A response to a Freedom of Information request has revealed that the York Council stopped counting the number of complaints it was receiving about litter 18 months ago!

Litter complaints admitted by York Council (click to enlarge)

Monthly figures have been provided only up to November 2013.

The decision not to record complaints co-incided with Labour’s cuts in the number of litter bins provided in the City.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that litter problems are worsening in many parts of the City.

The new Council which will be elected on May 7th will certainly expect not only performance volumes like these to be gathered but also to have them published routinely on the Council’s web site

The Council recently announced further cuts to litter bin provision in sub-urban parts of the City including Foxwood Lane.

York Council secret meetings still taking place

It seems that the newly “balanced” York Council still has a lot to do to lift the curtain of secrecy that descended in 2011.

Two meetings took place last week for which no notice had been given. Supporting papers and the decision taken were published on the Councils web site within minutes of each other.

Although not of concern to large numbers of residents, those who are affected did deserve the opportunity to make representations

We can see no reason why the agenda for any formal delegated decision cannot be published on the Council’s web site 7 days before the matter is considered. We would expect that written representations would be welcomed with the formal decision then being published with a link to any written comments.

The Councils governance committee will consider the issue of transparency at its meeting on Wednesday.

It includes a list of demands, by opposition Councillors who now hold a Council majority, on transparency issues together with a response by the Labour Leader

The first item on the list covers decisions delegated to Councillors

An end to Cabinet Member behind-closed-doors decision sessions – all reports to be published in advance, a date set for meetings (not a one month window) and residents should be able to feed into the decision process.

Although the Council Leader has apparently supported this proposal, it seems that delegation to officers is now being substituted. No notice of pending decisions of this type is being given.

The two decisions taken in private this week were:

Closure of an alley between Stanley Street and Warwick Street because of complaints about anti social behaviour
Allocation of “free” days for the use of the Barbican. Here the report fails even to mention the criteria used to determine that the days should be allocated to the “York Irish Association” and the “Prima Vocal” ensemble. It is also unclear how, or even if, the Council advertised the availability of these days.

Mansion nightclub to open until 6:00am

NB. The decision of the licensing committee to allow the Mansion club on Micklegate to stay open until 6:00am will raise eyebrows. Given the increasing problems with public order in the city centre, and an objection by the Police to the proposal, most would have expected the application to fail. The owner of the club is the Tory candidate for Heworth Without in the forthcoming Council elections. The three members who sat in judgement were all Labour Councillors (surprisingly no LibDem, Green or Independents were asked to take a view). The proposal was apparently aimed at accommodating the needs of “racegoers” although, so far, only a local student magazine has welcomed the decision. Strangely the Council chose not the “web cast” this controversial meeting.