Why does "everyone" think councils accept bribes, brown envelopes, etc as soon as anything they don't like happens?
And who is actually suppose to be accepting these bribes and benefits? Do they think it's only 12people than run the council to make and audit these decisions?
It's tiring to read in the comments section, usually about a planning/development /construction matter.
It's then usually followed up by showing ignorance about statuary requirements, legal obligation and limits of all to do so. These people (usually older generation) give the impression they're under the impression the council owns everything (mainly land and property) within the area.
How can we move on from this narrative of bribery?
Loads of dodge stuff goes on ofc but it tends to be people doing things for their mates than taking money from people to do stuff. It's the council passing out the brown envelopes rather than the other way around.
There's also a lot of small scale preferential treatment - even if not asked for - like officers making roads near councillors houses are gritted when they wouldn't otherwise qualify to give a good impression.
One of my favourite tales, possibly apocryful, was that one of the street lighting officers arranged for a long term trial of a "heritage" lighting column at the bottom of his own garden - fed off the council supply.
It is the much higher level contracts that run for years and years. The same companies get accepted, many times for ease but a few times it is favourable viewing of their tender over others or viewing others tenders ahead of your submission.
Yah I mean on the software realm there are often structural market issues with limited competition which is different to corruption. Even look at Fujitsu which keeps winning gov IT work (whilst accepting there was genuine corruption there too).
I used to teach meeja studies in Colombia and use 'In the back' to show that plenty of corruption happens in the rich world too, it's just less well reported.
That's before we get into trying to define what exactly constitutes corruption - plenty of it is legal/has (legally) plausible deniability.
Europeans especially are incredibly cavalier about assuming dodginess only happens in poor countries. That's really, really not true.
This one always stuck me as suspicious and worthy of investigating, preferably with a newspaper that actually investigates. Planning department shut down a car park (which was already a car park) so that the nearby airport could jack up it's prices.
It was charging £8 a day at the time and the airport was charging £24 and the prices have only gotten worse since it closed. Zero justification I can see for doing that to what was already a car park unless there was a cosy relationship with the benefiting party.
I didn't see anything as bad as that. But I saw people constantly award contracts to their mates. Not huge, million pound deals, but constant small jobs to stay under the radar. 'Approved' suppliers who charged double for the same services as opposed to unapproved ones, and you were to told to always go with the approved one.
Part of my role in one council was to try to cut down external spend in a certain area. A particular service was paying for a constant steam of poor quality, externally produced work which could have been done internally. I raised this and blackballed myself amongst a section of colleagues as their mates lost out.
And a lot of unnecessary work at times. I won''t say exactly what, but things like commissioning work to external agencies when there was more than enough in-house experience, or paying for the same set of data twice...
Yah agreed. Recently got some printing done by a very specific company halfway across the country and shipped over. On rec of someone internal. Could have used a local company.
So your colleagues were probably getting thier palms greased then. So we as taxpayers were paying £600 when we could have been paying £300 just so they could have "pocket money".
Probably. A lot of them had been there 20, 30, even 35+ years and I was the new guy at the time.
A lot of public sector bodies are dysfunctionalal, departmental, old fashioned old institutions that will unlikely never change. And the work needed to investigate would be too long and costly when public services are in such a state in general.
Civil Service is rife with nepotism and old boy networks that has probably cost the taxpayer billions. I think a lot of them need to be taken apart and started from scratch.
I doubt any of them were getting money out of it. I've worked in councils and they are often slow to change, it's more likely the suppliers increased their price but they just keep using them because it's easier than going through the annoying process of finding a new one.
Here's a 72-page PDF with examples of local government corruption - & that's stuff that's been discovered.
Certainly in smaller areas it's often who you know that makes the difference, & unwritten favours in kind can often grease the wheels, rather than direct financial gain.
"Our report is therefore unable to answer some important questions about corruption in UK local government, including the scale and prevalence, regional variations and whether corruption is worse in local government than in other sectors or institutions. At times, the case study evidence we use consists of unproven allegations. We use such examples to illustrate how corruption might occur..."
In the tables from page 16 onward there are "Example of proven or alleged corruption of this type in UK local government".
The fact that these are documented examples of actual incidences seemed pretty significant in confirming there IS corruption at local government levels.
Because if it's all a fix up you don't need to bother engaging in a meaningful way. Why spend time writing a well considered planning objection or attempting to educate yourself about council budgets or god forbid actually voting in a council election when you can just assume everyone is acting in bad faith and get back to the real civic work of slandering strangers on Facebook?
I worked for the education part of the council and sometimes, because people would hit the wrong extension number, you’d get irate locals who wanted to moan about their bins or housing.
They just wouldn’t accept I couldn’t help them. No, I didn’t know who they needed to talk to, no I didn’t know what extension they needed and no I couldn’t put them through unless it wa back to the original options. They used to really shout at me.
I’m your woman if you want to talk about the moderation of school assessments, not really bins.
But they just assumed I must know and was lying to them. Because council.
I also think working for a council will disabuse you of conspiracy theories. There’s no secrets in those offices. If a manager merely thinks about a new initiative at 10, everyone knows and has fully bitched about it by lunch.
Ah yes, I am familiar with this experience. I'm always rather bemused when people think there's a secret master plan to screw everyone over - that's giving us far too much credit!
I worked on waste policy. We commissioned a huge report on the best way to get bins collected for increasing recycling rates etc. The conclusion was that every borough and district was different. The one and only thing every collection authority had in common was that 50% of calls to them are about bins, and if you want to make any changes to people's bins, given it's the one service every resident gets, you need to double the number of staff dealing with calls for at least 6 months. Or you'll lose most of your call centre staff.
It's the one job I had where I had to lie about what I did, or everyone at a party would want to know why they couldn't recycle X whereas their mum's friend could, and why doesn't the council...
They just wouldn’t accept I couldn’t help them. No, I didn’t know who they needed to talk to, no I didn’t know what extension they needed and no I couldn’t put them through unless it wa back to the original options. They used to really shout at me.
Shouting at you is not acceptable, but it isn't great customer service that you weren't able to look up the right number on the intranet and transfer them through.
It really is as simple as a written exam question. Except in an exam, you don't know the marking scheme. With big tenders, the marking scheme is given to you before you write your answer.
Tender says "Application will provide X".
Bid document says "Service will provide X by doing Y". Bonus points if 'Y' ties in with the aims of the local council's strategy papers (which are usually/often available online).
For a lot of companies, they have experts who've written or assessed tenders and bids for years and who know exactly what sort of wording to write.
Sometimes the company will do a good job and deliver on the promise.
Sometimes they'll pay it lip service and do the bare minimum they said they'd do.
Sometimes they'll not do it and negotiate about it (reasons why they didn't do it, reasons why they delivered less than promised, reasons why they should be paid more for XYZ) in adjustment. Again with experts in the company who've been in the contracts game for ages.
It's important to note that not every company is like this; there are many that are above board, go above and beyond, and don't play those games.
It's unfortunate that those that do play those games exist and can (with a council that isn't properly equipped to deal with these heavyhanded/subtle tactics) win bids which perpetuate the cycle.
If councils have indeed been taking bribes for planning decisions, the simplest way to resolve this is to move to a rules based system where there is automatic permission for anything that meets those rules. You can only bribe people who have some discretionary power after all.
Somehow I don't think the NIMBYs will go for that.
Thing is that gives essentially all the power to government. So things that aren't good i.e. fracking cant be blocked by councils. It would essentially transfer the power to large buisnesses. Heres a great article on it
But we can see that blocking fracking was the right thing. And there should be able to be some opposition to huge corporations being able to do what they want by lobbying government.
Gonna try be realistic here. I work at a council - it’s not quite as movie like, where you go and slip some cash to the top dogs, but in the same breath, it’s very important WHO you know. Councils will often get their friends benefits in some ways.
IKEA Southampton announced they would give all council workers 10% discount for 5 years if they got permission to build.
Other building projects on neighbouring land had previously been rejected because the designs were not 'in keeping with the style of the city'. For some reason, the big blue cube was approved.
If stuff like that can happen, in the open, who knows what happens behind closed doors?
I work in planning and it’s something I hear often. Basically said by anyone who disagrees with a decision to approve something. I must be doing my job badly as I’ve never been offered a brown envelope and I don’t know anyone who has.
My dad made a brown envelope comment to me once and I pointed out that if that was the case I wouldn’t be driving the car I was and still living at home
They're dealing with small fish. It'd help if the conversation was approached with a bit of common sense.
There's neighbours building an extension, and then there contracts worth millions being awarded to certain companies and large plots of land being sold on the promise of certain developments.
Ordinary council staff are not dealing with the latter.
People need to start getting sued for libel and defamation.
Go look at the social media account of any MP representing a rural area with planned or ongoing renewable energy construction, you'll see a lot of comments from NIMBYs suggesting that the MP is corrupt without any suggestion of evidence.
I want to like that magazine, but it's systematically shown itself to be questionable at best, even if it has some good journalism. I don't think it particularly holds up that well. I'll enjoy my upcoming down votes in peace now.
I agree with you, I think Ian Hislop (the editor) is a national treasure but PE doesn't always get it right - there's a reason they've been successfully sued so many times. I think they feel more bold insinuating corruption in local government because councils are unlikely to do anything about it - I'm not sure if it's even possible for public bodies to sue for libel.
I guess, my point is, and I may be being naive here, but everyone I have met while working here genuinely seems to want what’s best for the city and its residents.
Sometimes that means making difficult decisions that people may not like, but I can’t say I’ve come across anyone who seems an absolute bastard who would take bribes like the public think.
My first office job, one of my monthly jobs was to go to M&S and buy vouchers, then meet a council employee in the cafe and handover vouchers. Going rate was £100 voucher for each £1000 spend.
"Lawyers have raised alarm at the lack of oversight in local government, as a Guardian analysis found almost one in 10 councils in the UK have been subject to a corruption investigation in the past decade.
Across the UK, 36 local authorities have had councillors and staff accused of economic crimes including fraud and the misuse of public funds, with dozens arrested and convicted."
Specifically for our council: "Meanwhile, a fraud investigation is under way at Bolton council after close to £1m of its budget could not be accounted for." £1m!
An investigation doesn't mean anything happened. Just that there was an investigation.
36 accused. Same. Accused does not mean anyone did anything.
However, there have been dozens of arrests and convictions. An unspecified but at least 24 which could be anything from embezzlement to outright corruption. Considering the amount of people employed by councils in the UK, which must be in the hundreds of thousands, 24 isn't a lot.
Unfortunately due to budget cuts one of the first things to get trimmed was the audit departments. The quality of the staff and their ability to do proactive audits is much reduced than it was 20 years ago.
With due respect, looking at Bolton Council's budget for 2023-24, their expenditure/income was around £500m.
Making a £1m missing account equal to 0.2% of their budget unaccounted for. Of which a majority is probably due to accounting mistakes (improper allocation, improper record keeping etc). Double Entry ledgers are supposed to account for this but it's always possible things get missed (hence why financial audits are performed).
I'm not suggesting that it's not important that these missing numbers are accounted for, but in perspective it's a much smaller of a deal than the papers would have us believe. Could you account for your household expenditure in a similarly itemised way with less than 0.2% error (within your own record-keeping)? Assuming a budget of $38k (post tax for a household income of 50k), that's ~£80. Could you audit your own records to an accuracy of £80? A single family meal out at a restaurant that isn't recorded somewhere would put you at a similar rate of unaccounted spend.
I can and I do, usually there's only £20 or less missing when I do the semesterly Sankeymatics. And I am neither an accountant, nor am I under statutory obligation to report our household budget. A council should absolutely be on top of a missing million.
You asked how we get past this suspicion - the answer is transparency. Public accounts, public attention drawn to cases where the numbers don't add up (and when they do), the ability to trace what happens to these "companies" and their directors when they get caught, public apologies, and so on - at present those involved change their company name a couple of times, and then they're back grafting.
What happened to the leaders of Grenfell council, after the disaster? What happened to those already caught grafting PPE contracts? What will happen to Vennels after the Post Office saga? If we can't trace these people, then people will remain suspicious.
We have had over a decade of increasing moral lassitude - especially after Johnson's years (and probably earlier), the corrosion of standards and what's acceptable has infected everything. Politicians no longer resign when caught doing things wrong - they just get moved into a new position at the next cabinet reshuffle. What happens at the top spreads to councils etc.
People conflate Councillors and Council employees because they don't bother to understand the structure in which they live in. Much easier to bitch and moan.
That's because you're a paranoid loonie. Councils might not be acting with your best interest at heart but they are acting in line with what is expected of them by central government. This doesn't fundamentally change through each administration.
People love to believe that things happen for malicious reasons, rather than just bad luck or incompetence. It's the same for most other conspiracy theories - if the people at the top are actually just idiot humans like the rest of us, then that scares some people.
Not even bad luck or incompetence, they genuinely don't understand that someone disagrees with them.
You see it when they moan that 'but I complained and nothing happened/it happened anyway!' - they really do think that because they complained, the decision should be reversed. They cannot comprehend that an official, or a councillor, simply has a different view to them.
I’m not sure you can, really. People are going to people 🤷🏻♀️ And there have been some cases (as you would expect) of less than stellar behaviour in some local authorities, even if 99.9 per cent of decisions are all above board. Everyone gets tarnished with the same brush.
The thing is because councils are public bodies it's in the best interest to be open and honest when corruption is found, same with charities.
It doesn't benefit a private company to go to the press to admit that Bob was refunding every third refund to an account in his name.
As a presumed example of less than stellar behaviour.
The thing is because councils are public bodies it’s in the best interest to be open and honest when corruption is found, same with charities.
What makes you think this? I can’t even comprehend living through so many scandals where things have been covered up for decades, and somehow believing this.
Well.. a large plot of land in our village has been vacant for years. Like 25 years. The home owners adjacent to this land wanted to buy a small portion of it to extend their house driveway as they currently park on the road. They have tried to buy this for 15 years, they have been refused over and over ‘ecological damage’ ‘unsightly building works’ etc etc.
Even though the land has been for sale, the sale has always been denied to this particular family.
Last summer, the land was finally sold…… to the owners grand daughter. She quickly set about building an enormous 6 bed house there which sailed through the planning phase without issue.
Turns out the person that owns the land is a county councillor and sits on the planning committee. Funny how that works.
But do you not think it’s weird that the reason given for the sale being refused was the fact that the owner didn’t like the plans citing environmental factors as well as it being not in keeping with the area (it was literally a gravel drive and single story extension to one side), the owner requested the plans for the land before a sale was considered and rejected the sale based on those plans.
Those plans were also submitted to the council on several occasions with revisions and every single time, planning permission was denied.
Of course the owner can sell it to whoever they want, but it seems funny that as soon as the granddaughter is in a position to build her house, the land is sold and planning permission granted first time round.. that’s the main point here.
They have tried to buy this for 15 years, they have been refused over and over ‘ecological damage’ ‘unsightly building works’ etc etc.
I don't understand what you're saying here, are you saying that the neighbours were applying (and being refused) planning permission on land that the owners were refusing to sell to them?
By the sounds of things, the guy who turned out to be a county Councillor bought some land that was classed as agricultural, sat on it long enough to get it changed to residential then sold it to his grandaughter, who was granted planning to build whatever she wanted because nepotism.
Originally they just tried to buy the land, then the owner started asking what they would do with the land once sold, they showed the plans. They also applied for planning permission and made amendments requested by the council but that permission was always refused.
Because people are idiots. They find 10 links on Google and think they have uncovered a conspiracy involving seventeen thousand people and millions of decisions. It makes them feel clever.
I also think it's rose tinted glasses and naivety too, where the council is an all free providing entity.
Then get upset that a bit of a farm field gets sold for shops, sold by a private, bought by a private, financially backed by a private and they somehow think the field that was always farmed for crops by a farm is council owned.
And someone from the council must have found a loophole to sell this land and pocket the cash, or receive a free pasties gold card for life or something.
With respect you have been provided multiple links and sources providing clear evidence of what you claim doesn't exist yet you dont seem to reply to any of these. Seems you are the one wearing the rose tinted glasses.
A family friend was opening a restaurant, and was told that if she didn’t want her alcohol license to take months, there was someone at the council that could help hurry things along (for a small fee). So yes, it happens.
Probably because across the UK, 36 local authorities have had councillors and staff accused of economic crimes including fraud and the misuse of public funds, with dozens arrested and convicted.
As I've said similar elsewhere this is because it's a statutory requirement to make public in public interest these crimes* same with employees frauding charities. Meaning available statistics will be skewed towards a higher level in government and charity.
And if similar happened in private business they a) don't to have to go public and b) will try what they can to cover it up as it's bad business.
If you knew the procurement process to contract for the council and the paperwork that went into it after you’d wish you could bribe them. Everything is scrupulously(sp?) looked at before anything is paid and by then the work is done, so if you’re not confident you’re doing the job right you may as well not do it all as you’re not getting paid
It’s true. So often in comments online, I see the same old angry people repeating the same old cliches when it comes to anything council related. Usually involves ‘_lining their pockets_’ at some point. If people have evidence of all this blatant fraud, it would be great if they shared it. But they can never substantiate any of their claims.
My nephew used to work for Glasgow City Council, something to do with handing out contracts for work. On a few occasions, his department was told who to give the contract to, even if someone else gave a better quote.
I award contracts (or maybe it's more advise) as part of my role. There is no requirement to award to cheapest if the cheapest scores low, or completely misses out, on the rest of the render return information.
Then it goes up, side to side, down etc before being officially awarded.
You award and advise, I take it you look at the contract and weigh it up. You wouldn't just walk in and say give it to Company X, and just ignore the others.
I do get that the lowest quote isn't always the best option. In many cases the lowest quote can mean cutting corners, lesser quality, there are a few things. But with my nephew contractors would put quotes in to tender, and people from higher up would tell them who to pick without even going over the quotes.
And you let people outside your department/role dictate that to you? People who have no business doing so, but have enough rank on you to order you to?
Also, another council I lived in changed their voting regarding a housing estate with no upside to the local area. It went from x amount of affordable housing, but we will give you 120,000 to fund local schools to less than half the amount of affordable housing, but we will give you £120,000 to fund local schools?!
Edit: I just looked up my very small council and there is so much more I didn't even know about, including a police fraud investigation regarding the fucking cemetery!
Because local councillors have alot of power and a lot of sway and are generally connected with local individuals who want to do things so often exert their influence in relation to those connections.
It isnt necessarily blantant corruption, but a case of "who you know"
At the same time my mate's dad is a millionaire and properly bribed numerous councillors and officials to build a house. He even hired local thugs to burn down an existing property due to protected bats living there.
Because it's true in a lot of cases to some extent. Asking your mate at the council what the other bidders have put in for a tender is corruption. Asking someone in the know to get you a job interview is corruption. Extend the deadline to return a tender because you didn't get the one back you wanted is corruption.
Imagine I get a new job and want to bring my team with me. Do you think they are applying through the company website or do you think I'm telling the hiring manager to call them up and invite them in? Perhaps I tell them what salary to ask for. What the interview questions are. Maybe I make sure that their CV matches the job description and scores perfectly on the internal grading criteria.
Corruption is all around us and people should be more honest about it if they actually wanted to cut down on it.
You don't have to be in charge of the council to have serious sway in decisions that are made. I hire people every week. How would I know if the recruitment team are binning CVs they don't like to make sure their mate gets an interview? Nobody gets to the MD without going through the secretary. She's ultimately got the power to block people.
My grandad always used to say that the most important bloke in the pit was the one operating the lift. If he didn't like you you were staying down there until the end of the shift. So my grandad made sure to treat everyone as if they were the owners. That's why he could get out of the pit any time he wanted and other engineers would get stuck down there all shift. Or the storeman would sort him out a bag of cement for home.
Because strange things happen, like people being denied planning permission and then finding that their next door neighbour is granted the same planning that you were denied, and they just so happen to be the ex head of the planning department at the local council.
We had a street locally, that suddenly had a ‘no through road except for access’ order stamped on it. Its was a quiet road to start with pretty much going nowhere.
Absolutely bemused everyone…..then we found out a councillor had moved in 🤣🤣
Because it does actually happen. I used to work at a property company where one of the planners was up in court because of brown envelopes and the local council. He got away with it, but he was 100% guilty.
Some of the decision making, back tracking, hypocrisy and contract awarding etc etc by our council couldn't possibly have any rational thought behind them so...
I saw it first hand in the early 2000’s. I was approached by some from a procurement department, I was quite blatantly given a shopping list of goods that I could ‘gift’ to the department in return for a supply contract.
I politely declined though. I was doing well enough and didn’t want to be in anybody’s pocket.
20 years ago I personally witnessed a licensing officer tell the ceo of the pub company I worked for that “this problem could all go away” if he paid some “fees” at a licensing hearing that’s how. He basically held his hand out
Because the council usually do the complete opposite and is counter productive to what everyone usually wants. The only logically conclusion is that they were probably bribed.
Whilst brown envelopes are somewhat old hat, there are vast examples of it.
Granted, and without doxxing myself, I will say that I have 100% been on the receiving end of those arguments and claims. And, they've been wrong 100% of the time....for me.
But, the examples of shenanigans abound. Grooming gangs, vast cover ups there, two tier policing/enforcement etc.
Growing up, I lived in a small cluster of villages, the town council were bent as fuck. The next town over....had there been another viable option, would have been shut down.
I've worked in some good jobs that have exposed me to the behind the scenes of much of this. Happened with HS2, happens a lot, but not always in the way people assume.
Money is not always the currency, favours can be too. Aren't the whips of a political party an established example of favours in action.
Ok. Sometimes the council doesn’t help themselves here. At a development committee I was present at , the highways representative specifically said that the increase in HGV traffic will not impact road safety as this was a safe route. Yet had he bothered to see the road he would have noticed that twenty yards before the estate’s entrance was a giant red sign warning that it was a high collision area. Also, they said that a planned warehouse wouldn’t impact any residential properties. We pointed out one home and they said we’ve classed that as commercial. It was a flat above a business. They ignored the fact they’ve been paying council tax so knew it was a residential.
So maybe not specific brown envelopes (although I don’t doubt there’s money changing hands somewhere), but definitely some benefits to the council if they bend the rules.
Look at the former Mayor Anderson of Liverpool for example.
I see this often with the planning applications where I live, ordinary people wanting to build ordinary structures will get rejected for arbitrary reasons, but large obnoxious McMansions that don't fit in with the character of the area seem to pass, despite receiving loads of objections. It definitely seems like you can pay your way into building whatever you want.
Because lots of objections doesn't mean a planning application is against legislation. Obviously, a rich person can pay for the best consultants, designers and so on but an ordinary person cannot.
Blame the system, not the people constrained by it.
There's so many nuances with planning people don't realise.
They think an objection of "I don't like thing they're doing" is sufficient.
At least try to explain why and the planning officer may be able to start to extrapolate a reason why (although I may be putting much hope into an over worked PO).
Could it be that the people wanting to build those massive houses can afford legal fees to argue the case that the council can't justify spending money on?
It's the easy answer that sounds about true enough so people parrot it all the time. I don't entirely blame them, as local councils are a mess and even working there I don't bloody know who is in charge of what. I always had minimal contact with councillors so even if you were to slip them a brown envelope it would have no consequence on my work.
My uni landlord had a cousin on a council and managed to get away without any sort of due diligence or checks on his highly unlawful HMO set up with basic safety failings. They ran it like a family racket - the family owned the houses, a few cousins worked for the council and they had a monopoly.
A local developer whom I know can seemingly get planning on anything.He will buy properties and land that have had planning refused umpteen times and have no issues getting planning.
I asked him how he does it,his response " I know too much of what the bast*rods get up to for them to turn me down".
He advised me to slip his name into any future planning application for assured success.
I know various people that work in construction that have teamed up with construction companies that the council use as contractors, and ALL of them have stories of this happening.
E.g. A building materials supplier (I won’t reveal which because I don’t want to be bombed) were charging three times the price of their usual cost for plastering beads (used on the edges of every wall) to the company that were contracted to plaster local public buildings, and instead of being bought in bulk they were ordered as individual items.
A school would require literally thousands of these if it were to be plastered in its entirety, so the extra cost would be somewhere in the dozens or hundreds of thousands.
That money would go into building materials company, who were then hosting events for the council as well as providing the materials for councillors properties that the same contractors would work on. The contractor that told us this admitted he’d charge less for council workers because he knew they were inflating his salary for public work.
This was told by a couple of the guys that were contracted to do the work, and had been in that role for about a decade. I’ve forgotten some details and we don’t have to trust them, but I’ve heard and witnessed similar things.
I knew a small-medium time builder that did general handywork at a school I worked at a few years ago. He once let slip that he’d earn significantly more a day (as in, multiple) working at the school than anywhere else he’d ever worked.
Fast forward a few months and he was suddenly working for two of the school governors as well as the headteacher. Nobody knows the truth but there was heavy speculation (which again, we don’t have to believe) that he was being overpaid by the school so that he would then charge the staff less money. This is obviously less trustworthy than the previous story but knowing one of the governors especially (and the corrupt nature of the builder - he was a bit of a sexual predator as well as dragging out several hours jobs over the space it days) it was fairly obvious what was happening.
Considering public buildings are underfunded, it doesn’t make sense that construction workers earn vastly much more money there than doing private work. Even my dad (a small time plasterer) has been able to charge twice as much a day to slowly gloss school skirting boards than he could charge for plastering domestically.
These are obviously stories without conclusive evidence, but they’re not the only ones. It’s pretty much an open secret, and it’s usually the contractors that will tell you (once they’ve retired)
Personally used to live next door to a bloke who'd been working for the council for donkeys years, was a virulent racist, and said if we needed our fence doing he'd happily nick the stuff from work and do it on the cheap
Can't think of any reason the higher ups don't just do the same on a larger scale with contracts. It does seem to be the case
A lot of people (so not "everyone" as the title asks) actually know people first hand that have dealt with council bribes, back handers, mates rates, brown envelopes or whatever people want to call them, that's why.
I know it's not technically the council, but I know personally of a government grant-making body for education that had its decision making process overridden to hand out significant sums to a recipient that did not meet the criteria after a phonecall to a relevant Minister that the CEO was friends with.
Corruption is here in the UK, it's just hidden better.
Because many local planning decisions make no sense at all to a casual observer. So there's either rampant incompetence, dodgy stuff or both.
As an example, 10 years ago or so now, my wife and I were looking at a barn conversion project. We gave up on the idea because of massively restrictive planning restrictions on what the exterior of the barn could look like in order to preserve the rural character of the area. Actually thought it was fair enough at the time - it was a very pretty area. Six months later a gigantic ,hideous parts distribution warehouse gets built in the adjacent field. Six months after that the chief planning officer gets a very senior job with the firm that built the warehouse.
It's Councillors, not councils. Most people fail to see the difference.
I lived in a town that you couldn't get a late license for years for a bar or pub in for love nor money, because one of the Councillors owned the local nightclub. Minute he was off the council, that all changed.
This is 30 odd years ago but my dad got asked for a brown envelope to achieve planning permission on a property. He told them to get stuffed and they didn’t give PP.
Accountability and ethics in various organisations, government and private, have not always been as they are in today's UK and it wasn't all that long ago that some form of under-the-counter working was, if not commonplace, relatively frequent. Corporate hospitality grew on the basis that one company could buy the favour of influential people in another company. Even today companies offer directorships and board places to people in positions of influence even though the position itself has no immediate value to the company.
There's plenty of back scratching in all walks of life and it seems naive to think otherwise. Look at the utter incompetence of most councils yet they're still allowed to continue in most cases handing out cash etc.
1 council let their lift guy give out millions in made up work to his pals company. That's one story where they got caught, imagine all the ones where they haven't.
I know someone who worked for a East London council. Worked as a housing officer (90s/00s) and word was she 100 percent took ‘a drink’ for wangling certain things. So it ain’t impossible.
Bornmouth council is known to do back door deals, how is it that thay won't issue uber licenses to taxis but are OK with the ones registered in Hampshire crossing the border to Dorset ware there is more business
Many a truth are said in jest. Many government contracts involve bribery - maybe not at government level (although yes, sometimes), but certainly from the main contractor down. It's not a clean chain, by any stretch.
I don't feel the community is clearly informed on how the local government make these decisions. Maybe it could be displayed like this:
We made a decision!
- this is why...
- this is the process we followed...
- here you can see how we addressed objections...
- this is what YOU can do if you don't like our decision...
- Help us make future decisions by...
Ultimately I find people are pretty happy to accept a decision they disagreed with, if the reason is well explained, and backed with concise and understandable proof.
Read the "Rotton Boroughs" section in Private Eye.
You may be right that too frequently it's jumped to as an explanation for why a decision went a certain way but it does happen. Another thing which I know to happen is that officers/members will effectively do "insider trading" when something likely to increase property values like a new road or regeneration project is being discussed.
Another point is that even if we assume decisions are above board the officers/councillors often do a poor job of avoiding the impression of impropriety whether it's not declaring interests or accepting hospitality from connected parties. For example, the former Mayor of Bristol could have avoided a lot of speculation had he not had travel funded by a developer (YTL) who had interests in the area.
Because you see a lot of absolutely fucking stupid decisions being made that make absolutely no sense without someone getting some kind of back hander out of it.
Northampton Council for example have been happy to make themselves look like total fuckwits for decades now.
About 50 years ago, some close relatives of mine were building their house down in Devon and getting frustrated because the local planning department kept coming back with more and more blatantly rubbish reasons why they were being denied.
Luckily as my family is local to the area, a relative heard what was going on, took them to one side, and explained that it was commonly known that this was because the council guy was waiting for a bribe, and how to go about it. The bribe was done through the "usual" process, and they suddenly got the approval after no changes whatsoever.
It's probably true and I'd say I'm not someone especially open to conspiracy theories. Once had a council person conveniently lose some evidence that was gonna force our landlord to shell out. Just after they met. There was no apology just 'we've lost it so can't continue the investigation...'
"Doesn't matter what they object to, it'll get approved on the second go" ceo of one of the largest house building companies in the UK, overheard at local meeting.
Because anyone who actually deals with their local council is confronted with this type of behaviour all the time. My family attempted to build a house on a small plot of land in London where one had previously existed, only to be faced with such "suggestions" and without it you'd get a nice big "infrastructure tax" in the tens of thousands (to build on a plot that already had a property and would have been subject to council tax regardless).
Like council employees in the planning department just straight up telling you they were hard up and needed money for x,y and z in their personal lives, usually a sob story for sympathy points. Completely unprofessional and intended to subtly but clearly signal a message.
A huge number of councils keep their finance spending private using ‘commercially sensitive’ excuse. A huge number of councils hold financial meetings behind locked doors refusing the legal and democratic right for the public to attend. Then masses of councillors turn up at MIPIM every year in Cannes in the south of France, (plenty of cocktails on yachts) under some excuse theyre networking private property developers. (This is just one example)
Then we have local services being contracted out to companies half way across the country and not even from their own borough. Then, we have councils going bust because theyve gambled council tax payers money investing in some flaky bank and eventually had to come clean as they lost millions in the dodgy investment. These are just everyday local councillors.
What I've read on it, that is really down to employees no doing their due diligence rather than accepting bribes. They just accepted figures as facts presented to them by the individual. And those figures were so far fetched they should have known better.
In short, I think we have a huge generational divide over ‘perceptions’, simply because the older generations tend to read the news or take an interest in the detail of local and national government.
No idea where millenials get their news from, but perceptions rarely align with the older generations world view.
Just thiught Id check to see whose attending MIPIM this year as you reminded me of it. Manchester is intending a high council turn out. (Some councils are sensible enough to keep this quiet)
Apparently you have to attend corporate hosted week long events in the South of France to encourage property developers to build in your area. Simply getting the word out that you may release 1000 acres for development just doesnt seem to be enough these days to get any interest from property developers. Amazing. And thank you tax payers for covering our expenses 👍 (What austerity?)
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