A Letter to the Editor from MARTIN CLEMENTS of Teesside, who has been conducting his own enquiries into questionable assertions (i.e. false claims?) on the Potto Parish Council website.
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Dear Editor,
I have been following your articles about the shenanigans at local Councils for quite some time. I wonder if you (and my fellow readers) would be interested in my tale.
I became intrigued by an apparently bizarre item 4.4 in the minutes of a Parish Council meeting at Potto, held in February 2023.
My guess was that there wasn’t any supporting information. This would mean the agreement was unsound and quite a serious example of bad practice, especially for addressing a very serious and rare Public Interest Report.
Potto Council’s replies to me have been very unhelpful, to say the least.
So I made a complaint to the Information Commissioner (Case Reference: IC-249871-B0K5).
Potto Council still didn’t answer my request and even started to query my identity, but the Senior Case Worker knows this was a scam (I sent him a copy of my driving licence).
This ploy is used regularly by Potto Council as a tactic of delay and obstruction. I see your reporter is already on to this.
The good news is that the Senior Case Worker has told me the Commissioner is intending to exercise a power he apparently very rarely uses – writing to a Council with some ‘good practice’ advice about how to improve its unacceptable conduct. For the geeks, this is explained in Section 47 of the FOIA.
I shall be watching like a hawk to see what Potto Parish Council does next, though I expect your reporter may be ahead of me.
Yours, etc
Martin Clements
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