Purdah Options

[Simon Kirby]

Story here.

"The council has been awarded a £5.07m grant from the Department for Transport on the basis that it agreed to fund the remaining 30 per cent – or £2.17m."

As I understand it our government, national and local, are supposed to respect this period of purdah and not publish this kind of news. If this really is WBC putting this news out there then it really is very poor form.

[user23]

I would guess a local paper reporting what happened at a meeting of a council’s executive is within the rules.

You've been banging on about openness and transparency for ages, as soon as you stand for political office it's a different story.

[Simon Kirby]

I would guess a local paper reporting what happened at a meeting of a council’s executive is within the rules.

You've been banging on about openness and transparency for ages, as soon as you stand for political office it's a different story.

You (wilfully) misunderstand purdah. There is no restriction on what a local paper can publish, the rules apply to the council, and I stand by my comment, it is poor form for the council to put this information out there in the week before polling.

[user23]

You (wilfully) misunderstand purdah. There is no restriction on what a local paper can publish, the rules apply to the council, and I stand by my comment, it is poor form for the council to put this information out there in the week before polling.

I thought you just successfully fought to get a one council to publish a report, now you're complaining another shouldn't be publishing information about its meetings

You simply can't please some people. It's like they're just being contrary for the sake of it.

[Andy Capp]

I thought you just successfully fought to get a one council to publish a report, now you're complaining another shouldn't be publishing information about its meetings

You simply can't please some people. It's like they're just being contrary for the sake of it.

And you're being obtuse. You know the difference in principles here.

[user23]

And you're being obtuse. You know the difference in principles here.

From what I can see, he's saying that a newspaper shouldn't publish something because he thinks it might affect a decision making process.

Wasn't this the reason the Town Council gave at one time for not publishing their hydrological report?

[Simon Kirby]

From what I can see, he's saying that a newspaper shouldn't publish something because he thinks it might affect a decision making process.

Wasn't this the reason the Town Council gave at one time for not publishing their hydrological report?

No, like I said, newspapers can publish what they like, it's local and national government administrations that need to respect purdah as I understand it. I believe that the restriction is to prevent politicians using the apparatus of public administration for their own political advantage and gaining a credibility advantage by speaking as the administration rather themselves.

More about it here.

I stand by my criticism and I don't believe it was appropriate for WBC to announce the grant funding in purdah.

Another questionable press-release is this one from NTC in which JSH defends the Council's actions. Council publication should in any case be neutral and even-handed and this missive fails to represent the contempt which which the tribunal demolished the council's argument, calling it "bizarre and self-contradictory" at one point.

JSH says: "The Council had sought to keep the documents confidential to avoid jeopardising its hardfought legal case, but we are of course doing what is now required of us, and we are doing it without delay."

If it is true, as JSH says, that the Council sought to keep the documents confidential to avoid jeopardising its legal case (which it has conspicuously failed to start) then I suggest the Council rather profoundly lied all the time it was telling us that the "confidentiality agreement" was the reason it couldn't disclose the reports, and JSH might usefully have summarised the Tribunal's judgment where it ruled that, not only did the Council utterly fail to support their unfounded assertion that disclosure would jeopardise their case, but that the public interest was in any case so strong in favour of disclosure that, even were the reports subject to legal privilege, the Council should still have published them. It is utterly depressing that JSH's Liberal Democrat administration has so completely failed to grasp how wrong-minded they were ever to try and keep this vital piece of information from the tax-paying parishioners.

And in point of fact JSH's statement is not true. What was required of the council was that they publish both the hydrogeological reports, and their closed submission made to the Tribunal. The council has indeed disclosed the reports, but not only has it failed so far to disclose the closed submissions which it clearly expects to be embarrassed by, it has submitted further argument to question the sense of the Tribunal's order and clarification on the need to publish - JSH says nothing about that, and that in no way is "doing what is now required of us, and ... doing it without delay".

NTC 24 April: "We would seek to query whether this is correct and the Tribunal DOES require the council to disclose the Closed Annexe. We would be surprised if our client is required to disclose the Closed Annexe as well as the reports as this would appear to defeat the whole purpose of the Annexe being closed."

Tribunal 27 April: "It remains closed unless and until the Tribunal rules otherwise. It is normally closed because it contains material that is only disclosable if the disputed information is to be disclosed. Once the Tribunal rules that that information must be disclosed, there is normally no justification for withholding the contents of the closed annex. The appellant and the public generally are entitled to see what arguments NTC advanced under the cloak of confidentiality. Litigation is conducted openly unless there is a powerful justification for secrecy. For That is the position here. Indeed the case for disclosure is still clearer in this case since this annex contained material that should never have been submitted in a closed annex anyway.

If the content of such an annex remained confidential regardless of the result of the appeal, a public authority could include within it any argument, however unfounded, in the safe knowledge that the requester would never see it, whatever the outcome."

JSH is entitled to defend his and his administration's management of CrackGate, but I don't agree that he should be doing it in this pre-election period in an NTC press-release.

Of course I may be mistaken, but that is my understanding of the purdah convention.