IN FULL: The Apology To Us From North Somerset Council Leader Councillor Steve Bridger on Our Investigation into Councillors In Council Tax Arrears

North Somerset Council

 

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As explained in our article naming the councillors and listing the delays to our five-month investigation, which was began in February 2022, North Somerset Council bungled their responses to our Freedom of Information requests.

The timing of the answers, the delay, the omissions of key information including the amounts of arrears and a councillor's name, and the fact that we had to ask twice, all aroused quite reasonable suspicions that there was something awry.

Here is the full apology from the Leader of North Somerset Council, Independent Councillor Steve Bridger, to the leader of our investigation, Andrew Pope. The name of the Council officer has been redacted, but the names of councillors have not been redacted:

Councillor Steve Bridger
Leader of North Somerset Council

"Dear Mr Pope

Andrew Pope
Leader of Somerset Independents

Many thanks for your email, and I understand you have also emailed the council’s Information Governance team with additional questions relating to the handling of your Freedom of Information request. For your convenience, I am, therefore, responding to both your email to me and the email to the Information Governance team. 

Firstly, to address why your first response was missing elements of what you had asked, here the Information Governance team can only express their apologies for the initial oversight. It is quite common for the Council to receive requests for details about Councillor council tax arrears, because, as you rightly say, there is public interest in this information. Subsequently, the information provided to you was what would normally be compiled in response to this request.

Unfortunately, the Council Tax team who compiled the information didn’t read the request thoroughly enough, and didn’t realise your request was asking for additional detail to the “norm”.

<redacted>, the Information Governance Officer who sent the final response, isn’t familiar with the finer workings of the Council Tax service, and wasn’t aware that the responses the service area provided didn’t fully answer your questions. As I said, I do wish to convey the apologies of the Information Governance team, and are grateful to you for highlighting this potential training shortfall.

As to why Councillor Goddard was missing from the original response, please rest assured this was in no way intentional. Council Tax accounts aren’t “flagged” in any way to highlight the fact they belong to Councillors. In order to compile this data, the Council Tax service have to go into each individual Councillors’ account< and do so using a list of the current Councillors. The list the service went by for the initial response was based on the list of Councillors compiled for the start of the 2021/22 financial year. Councillor Goddard was elected mid-year, and therefore missing from the original list. She was identified as absent when your request for a review was received, and the team cross-referenced using the Councillor list compiled for the current financial year. I fully agree that your response should have provided an explanation of this to you, rather than just sending the additional information, and I can certainly understand why this would raise questions over the legitimacy and completeness of the remaining information. However, I can only provide my assurances to you that the full and complete records have now been disclosed to you.

I note in your email to the Information Governance team that you are asking whether, and if so, why Councillors were advised of the request. I can confirm that no Councillors were made aware of the request prior to sending, nor immediately afterwards. We were first made aware of it following your email correspondence with myself. I hope this can go someway to re-affirming my previous statement that no information has been knowingly or intentionally withheld. Both the Information Governance team and the Council Tax service are delivered on behalf of North Somerset Council in partnership with third-party contractors, so their independence in these matters is guaranteed. 

I also understand that you have asked Information Governance for a reason why your revised response took a further six weeks for you to receive it.  Again, I can only apologise on their behalf. Our normal policy in these matters is to allow 40 working days for an Internal Review response, because they can be lengthy and complex. The team were optimistic that they could provide you with a full response a lot sooner than that, hence your acknowledgement email advising it would be received earlier. Unfortunately, the revised response did turn out to be complicated, as additional teams needed to be contacted, and this was exacerbated by officer sickness and annual leave. 

I would also like to clarify one element in your revised response regarding Councillor Jacobs. Councillor Jacobs only attended the 2022 Budget Meeting remotely via Microsoft Teams. Only Councillors who attend in-person are eligible to vote, so she did not vote in the Budget Meeting. While this information was provided to you in your response, I note whether she voted was not made fully clear to you, so I just wanted to clarify that. 

I note you have approached each of the three named Councillors for comment, and I admire and appreciate your tenacity and commitment to the transparency of wider council affairs. I fully understand that you want to ensure the council are fulfilling our democratic obligations, and I hope my explanations have provided you with assurances.

kind regards,

Steve

Councillor Steve Bridger

Leader of North Somerset Council
Independent councillor for Yatton ward"

Andrew Pope responds:

"I thank Councillor Bridger for his apology. Our investigation started before he became Leader of the Council. We have contacted the previous Leader Don Davies for comment. We have published his response on our website.

The apology from Cllr Bridger was definitely more than we got when we investigated other councils in Somerset. Over a year later, we are still fighting South Somerset District Council, with the help of the Information Commissioner. South Somerset are still trying to hide information and cover up for councillors, even now.

Our investigation into North Somerset has now concluded. We are now waiting for  responses from the rest of the Council's councillors.

We know that local residents are interested. There will be elections soon. 

I very much hope that the councillors that we named will not be standing for election."

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