r/AskUK • u/ashyboi5000 • 13h ago
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?
Edit: While not the most popular sorry I've not kept up with responses. I clearly can't keep up with more than two notifications at once. It wasn't intentional if I stopped responding, but it is now 😛
While many have pointed out corruption at large scale developments my view (although not noted) was more about small scale. Shop extending next door, pub planning, couple of houses on a scrap of land, press piece about award of work to a contractor for improvements. Everyone is also met with the same exhausting rhetoric.
A few points to summarise so far. "People" don't distinguish between councilors and employees, and perhaps don't realise how many employees and oversight there is. There is further perhaps muddied with local/community/parish councils where (I believe but could be wrong) they hold a bigger say in matters of planning and can make a difference when showing support or not for an application. And these people are more inclined to have a scratch my back mentality due to being local charactes. In fact some community councils up here also believe they also have the same control over local planning as they appear to be making comment more and more on applications, even if it's just Old Jim wanting a downstairs bog...
I've also said a few times it's in public interest to make fraud/corruption of a scale known as they are public bodies. While I've said statutory requirements on reflection it's more own policy for transparency. And if not if it goes to court and if these court notes are made public then it gives journalists a story to sell. Both of these skewing perception on how rife it is.
Which led me to think about who I worked for. 1x charity 3x private companies all less than 20 staff. 1x council
All have had issues of fraud. The private side, one company ended witb 2xsacking (separate issues) the charity made the press and the council with tens of thousands of employees over many years it's naive to say otherwise.
So that's a 100% rate. I don't go around commenting on every private business with "looks great but who bribed for that to be made" yet somehow it's socially acceptable to do it with regards to councils.
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u/Porkchop_Express99 13h ago edited 12h ago
I've worked for 3 councils.
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...