Archive for February, 2009

Us & Them

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

Us & Them
The Big Issue, February 2009
By Heather Brooke

Not one to believe hype, I was sceptical when I popped in the first series of the much-acclaimed TV series The Wire. For those who haven’t seen it, this is a series that breaks all the rules of TV drama and yet the hype is merited: it is the best thing on television.

Each episode is like a chapter in a book and the stories build across the season. The first deals with the police closing in on a drug dealer which is common enough in a cop show, but what makes The Wire different is that it focuses on the lives of the dealers and users as much as the police. There is none of the easy morality common to other police dramas. Instead there is reality. The writers know their subjects inside out. These are not champagne socialists writing about the lives of poor kids in Hackney, they are veteran newspaper hacks and homicide detectives who know the gritty scenes they describe.

I used to cover crime for a newspaper in South Carolina in a city with a large concentration of projects that were infested with drugs, and I often wondered why the people in these sink estates didn’t clean up, move out, get a better life. What did I know? A college girl from an English family? But at least I could talk to the vice squad who filled me in on what was happening. The stories the police told me didn’t always fit into the newspaper format, focused as it is on the end result: who got shot, when and why. The ‘why’ being the least explored part of the story. It wasn’t until I saw The Wire that I understood how these stories could be told. If you want to understand the cycle of poverty and addiction look no further.

The realism of The Wire is due in no small part due to the ability of the writers to get inside the institutions they cover. David Simon spent a year in Baltimore Maryland’s homicide division. Such inside knowledge informs the series and gives it the needed reality that makes it so powerful. Could such a show be written in the UK?

I’m not a crime reporter anymore but I am a freelance journalist and so I asked the Metropolitan Police if I could visit my local police station. In the US I went ‘round back’ all the time, even did shifts with various cops as a ‘ride-along’. Some forces in the UK offer this insight to members of the public, but not the Metropolitan Police. Even the full-time crime reporters in London aren’t allowed in. The only way I’m getting into my local police station is if I’m arrested.

Frankly that’s a cost I’m not willing to bear. It strikes me as counter-productive for the police to fortress themselves against the public whom they are meant to serve and protect. By refusing to let us in, they foster an attitude of ‘Us and Them’. Both for themselves and for us. The tie that might link us is broken.

I had another encounter with the ‘Us and Them’ attitude in Tottenham Court Road tube station. The escalators were shut but none of the guards were telling anyone why or when they might resume. When I went over to ask, the guard pointed to a gang of teenagers and said: “Your colleague there pressed the emergency stop.”

My colleague? What did he have to do with me?

In the mind of the TfL official it was clear all who were not TfL were some ‘other’: that great repulsive organism – the public.

Aren’t we the reason for TfL’s existence? If it wasn’t for us paying our extortionate fares this official wouldn’t have a job. And yet he views us all as one amorphous mass comparable to an enemy.

All institutions are susceptible to this type of thinking, but the danger is even greater when there is no competition. Where there is a monopoly on service the best solution is higher levels of transparency. We should be allowed into our local police stations, we should be able to see crime incident reports. It may not be easy, but an open door can bring many rewards, not least the best show on television.

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Posted in Articles, Crime & Justice | 6 Comments »

Investigation into Police Chief Bonuses

Friday, February 13th, 2009

I worked with the Times Crime Editor Sean O’Neill on an investigation into police chief constables’ bonus schemes. The first part of this investigation was published on 24 January 2009.

Police chiefs net thousands from secret bonus scheme

A secretive bonus scheme set up to reward the country’s top 300 police officers is paying out hundreds of thousands of pounds every year.

The police service refuses to disclose either amounts paid to individual officers or total payments from the Chief Officers’ Bonus Scheme.

But The Times has learnt that senior Metropolitan police officers shared more than £190,000 in one year, while the top ranks at Greater Manchester collected more than £53,000.

Scotland’s most senior officer, Stephen House, the Chief Constable of Strathclyde, was paid a bonus for his first six months in post.

In some cases the bonuses are awarded on the basis of “self-evaluation” by chief constables. Critics claim that the payments are further evidence of what has been called a “gravy beat” at the top of policing. There is also concern among the top ranks that the bonus culture damages the image and integrity of the police.

* COMMENT: what have they got to hide?

* Knife-crime czar’s £200,000 ‘gravy beat’ job

A few days later the president of ACPO wrote to the paper seemingly in favour of full transparency of police bonuses. However, I’ve yet to see any of these figures disclosed and the forces continue to refuse my requests for this information.

Posted in Crime & Justice, Freedom of Information | 2 Comments »

Article: Police Bonuses

Friday, February 13th, 2009

From The Times, 24 January 2009
What have they got to hide?
By Heather Brooke

Investigation is a little like psychiatry where the most telling details are often those kept hidden. When only one police force is willing to tell the public what it pays its Chief Constable in bonuses curiosity is piqued. What do they have to hide?

The police chiefs who accepted bonuses not only refused to reveal the amounts, but also declined to say what they were for. Some Chiefs told us they refused bonuses ‘on principle’ which makes one wonder what principles are at stake? We can’t know that until we know the details of the bonuses.

They cited the Data Protection Act, claiming that it would be an invasion of their privacy for the public to know the details of their salary and benefits. This may interest chief executives of public companies who must disclose this information in their annual reports.

It’s a topsy turvy world when the public have more rights to find out how the heads of corporations spend their shareholders’ money than the public do the heads of their public services.

The Data Protection Act is a badly written law. It is understandable that no one can understand it, but it is the implementation of a European Directive designed to protect the privacy of private individuals not to help public officials avoid public accountability.

The law hinges on a fairness principle and a balancing test is used to compare personal privacy interests to the public interest in knowing the information. Under this test, if the information is determined to be private, it can be released anyway if it is found that the public interest in release is more important than the privacy interest. There have been several cases now, including a High Court case on MPs’ expenses, where this balancing test has been done and the public interest found to outweigh the individual privacy interests.

In the case of Chief Constable pay there is clearly a valid public interest in this information. The public pay this money. They have a right to know how much and what it is for. Are the bonuses for cutting particular types of crime? Has this resulted in changes to the way crimes are recorded? Until the bonuses are published we just don’t know how they are affecting policing.

Another issue of concern is the massive non-compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. Of the 57 requests sent out at least 38 forces failed to answer legally. They simply let the deadline come and go failing to provide a legal reason for their continued delay. The police enforce the law, so what does it say when they don’t obey it themselves?

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Posted in Articles, Crime & Justice | 1 Comment »

Obama-style activism in Britain

Friday, February 13th, 2009

Obama-style activism in Britain
The Big Issue, January 2009
By Heather Brooke

Are British people disengaged with politics? I don’t think so. It’s simply that the man in the street is relatively impotent in the British political system, whereas in the US, where politics is much more open and competitive, politicians must be responsive to the electorate or face imminent extinction.

There aren’t enough avenues for change in British politics and the few that there are rely on patronage more than merit; who you know rather than what you know and particularly what school you attended. Someone like Barack Obama would have zero chance of being selected as an MP in this country, let alone get to the leadership. MP selection isn’t voted on by the people, nor even the party, but a handful of party apparatchiks. Until the system of selecting candidates changes, we have only the illusion of choice.

But there are ‘green shoots’ of hope. In the same week the press was saturated with coverage of Obama’s inauguration, another event received substantially less publicity though it involved our very own elected officials. On January 22nd, MPs planned to exempt their expenses from the Freedom of Information Act.

I fought a 3-year legal battle for transparency of MPs’ expenses. In my High Court victory in May 2008, the judges ruled that transparency in this matter was of the most vital public interest and essential to the health of UK democracy. So what do our highest elected officials do? They lie numerous times about the date they will publish these claims and then sneakily slip in a Statutory Instrument that allows them to keep their expenses secret without having a full debate.

Every other citizen in this country must keep receipts for expenses claimed for five years or they are in breach of HM Revenue and Customs rules. Yet our MPs are intent on creating for themselves a privileged arena where they are exempt from the laws they force the rest of us to live under.

It was only due to the sort of Obama-style grass-roots campaigning that this rot was stopped and a last-minute u-turn was made by Gordon Brown on Wednesday (January 21) shelved the law. Groups such as Theyworkforyou.com, Unlock Democracy, Taxpayers Alliance and other activists spread the word. Thousands joined a Facebook protest group, or rang or wrote to their MPs expressing their outrage.

Very occasionally, we can and do make a difference and this was one of those times. But it’s worth noting that this activism completely circumvented traditional politics. In the minds of most citizens the British Parliamentary system is archaic, elitist and woefully out of touch. MPs must open up and make themselves relevant again to their constituents. If they don’t, then the only people they have to blame for voter disengagement, is themselves.

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Posted in Articles, Freedom of Information | 1 Comment »

As the economy recedes, the pressure for FOI should grow

Friday, February 13th, 2009

A couple of weeks ago, Lord Digby Jones said the Civil Service could function on half the staff and today, a report from the Taxpayers’ Alliance has drawn attention to massive nationwide growth of the remuneration packages council middle management receive.

The TPA report, which contains figures for every council in the country, can be read in full here. It shows a 22 per cent increase in the number of staff receiving remuneration packages of over £50,000 a year. All this in the context of a recession, when taxpayers are cutting back or losing their jobs.

In her last blog post, Heather said that Brown should follow Obama’s lead on FOI policies. So he should. Relatedly, he should hear what Obama said about Washington aides: “During this period of economic emergency, families are tightening their belts and so should Washington.” That message doesn’t seem to have reached Town Halls or Civil Service Departments in this country yet.

Ultimately, as Obama knows, public sector elitism and freedom of information are part of the same debate. Full and easy disclosure, by breaking down the barriers to information, enables greater scrutiny across the private and public sectors so that there can be greater equality and efficiency of state action. In scrutiny is accountability and in accountability is better government.

Full disclosure would make it very difficult for one rule to apply to the public sector, while another one applied to everyone else. The fact that council remuneration is on the up at the same time as the private sector has been in crisis demonstrates the lack of equality that FOI must remedy.

It won’t come easily, of course. There was a story a couple of weeks ago about delayed FOI requests in the Times . I missed it because it was a very brief note in the middle of the paper. It reported that the Ministry of Justice, which is responsible for enforcing the proper administration of FOIs requests, itself commonly fails to reply to them on time.

But freeing up information is a growing moral imperative as the recession looms. Even if the headlines belong to financial collapse, let’s hope that the ongoing campaign for freedom of information continues to gather momentum. With a recession looming, it is more important than ever to distribute the nation’s resources appropriately and govern wisely.

Posted in Freedom of Information | No Comments »

The end of the argument about expenses? I have my snouts.

Friday, February 13th, 2009

You might have thought the expenses row was over when the highest court in the land ordered MPs to reveal them (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7404031.stm). But it wasn’t.

The problem is that when MPs can bring themselves to agree about something the law is a very vulnerable thing. And that’s why, in spite of Wednesday’s climbdown, the expenses saga is likely to go on. And on.

1.2 million receipts dating back to 2004 will now be published once the House of Commons authorities have finished with them. After that the best indicators of future prevarication are Harriet Harman’s proposals, agreed by the Commons yesterday.

Amongst other things, these measures broaden the fourteen categories used for the automatic reporting of expenses to a new total of twenty six. That will include mortgage and rent costs on second homes.

Not only is this far from full disclosure, it also leaves the door open for future exemptions to the law. Why not just start publishing receipts and have done with it? Now taxpayers will have to file (painfully unreliable) FOI requests in order to have any hope of accessing a proper breakdown of how their money is being spent by their elected representatives. Harriet Harman suggested that full disclosures MIGHT continue to happen under these circumstances. It doesn’t bode well.

The Government was forced to back down this time because it was clear that the Conservatives, the Lib Dems and the Lords were against them. But there remains the murky business of the alleged cross party deal between the Conservative backbench and the heavily whipped Labour Party (http://timesonline.typepad.com/politics/2009/01/expenses-why-th.html). Such a deal could well have seen the FOI exemption for MPs’ expenses through the Commons.

So the agony will continue. I can’t understand how MPs can bear the shame. What on earth do they manage to record on their receipts that so desperately needs covering up? Harriet Harman’s hilarious example was small, private expenditures, such as a Valentine’s card. I have to say MPs would shoot up in my estimations if they showed such normal human emotions – their recent activity has made it difficult to see the snouts for the troughs.

If you want to read an entertaining parliamentary sketch of that clumsy day in Parliament, have a look at Turtles will tango before chat sorted from chits at the Times online.

Posted in Freedom of Information | No Comments »