Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
A fresh thread on secrecy
I'm happy to begin a new thread, as Cllr. Alan Stanton suggested, on the subject of municipal secrecy.
IMO, this shouldn't necessarily be focused on our own Borough, because the same formal and informal restrictions apply, I believe, to most if not all local councils. I don't think this is a party political issue, either; I think it mostly relates to the overweaning power of unelected "officers".
Much of it the secrecy appears to be habitual, unnecessary and counter-productive. Because it restricts open debate, it frequently leads to poor, un-rounded and hugely expensive decisions. I'm happy to provide examples.
As an aside, when Alan says:
I'm happy to debate secrecy and whistle-blowing. (But please, please not Ally Pally;
... this overlooks the fact that all Haringey councillors are trustees of this big charity, whether they like it or not. By statute law, our local council is sole Trustee of AP.
It is an administrative convenience cooked up by council employees, that a sub-set of our councillors rotate through the council committee known as the Trust Board. Most councillors don't understand this and are told what to think about it by council staff. In consequence, much responsibility is avoided.
Tags for Forum Posts: Council, blowing, exempt, municipal, secrecy, suppression, whistle
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Clive, this isn't about the production of paper - it's about control.
For the benefit of people who may be puzzled, Clive is referring to a discussion he and I have about how to stop the Council posting reports online as graphic files. In other words, electronic files are printed-off and then scanned as pictures of the pages, to create many of the files posted on the Council's website.
I am not making it up!! This clowning really goes on at the top echelons of Haringey. And it's not just a waste of time and paper. As Clive points out, scanned graphic documents are far harder to search and index. You'd need dedicated software which is not cheap and almost certainly not something most residents have. The files created are also hugely bloated - taking longer to download and more space to store.
I've protested about this for years - to little avail. Competent, helpful, polite officers agree with me - but are unable to stop the practice. Haringey's head honchos have learned the phrases "outward facing" and "customer focus". The words "resident engagement" trip off their tongues. But that's as far as it goes.
I'm told that to keep control of the report process, senior officers feel they must physically sign the final paper copy of a report. Clive has a suggestion for retaining security and integrity of documents using the PDF format instead of ink on paper.
But let's count our blessings; it could be worse. Decades ago, working as a lowly clerk in a solicitors' office, one of my first tasks was to take the final versions of documents, typed on parchment-like paper, and sew them up with green tape.
Whereas, notwithstanding and heretofor, my efforts were as nothing compared to the beautiful copperplate handwritten documents locked away in the firm's basement.
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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>> it's about control
Let's be pragmatic Alan. What can we actually acheive, in practice?
I suggested a step towards helping LBH be better, which would have the side-effect of diluting their control - is there a more effective approach we can take?
BTW (by the way), most wordprocessors nowadays have a character recognition feature that works OK for some things, translating photos of documents back into the text that appears in them.
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"... translating photos of documents back into the text that appears in them".
Can't believe you wrote this, Chris. Yes it's possible. But every step is another unnecessary hurdle to jump. Another gauzy curtain between residents and the information which their money has paid to be produced.
It also risks the introduction of errors and "noise". Blessed are the cheesemakers.
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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Optical character recognition software has been around for many years and I don't doubt its built into some word processors. But ...
works OK for some things
... is not good enough when we are talking about governance, and ways to improve it.
Besides, attempting to convert images (because that is what scans are) back to text, in some rough way (with the omissions, misspellings and misunderstandings) makes no sense.
It amounts to a crude, imperfect attempt to undo the damage and distortion done in the first place to clean plain text characters!
The extra work is unnecessary. Why not always create PDFs direct from the original text?
I do find it hard to believe I still feel the need to ask that in the 21st century.
(this backwardness is not the sole preserve of the council offices. One city bloke I used to deal with related the example of a branch office up north. For them, "networking" was printing out a document, walking the paper over to another desk, where it would be re-keyed in).
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Let's not make OCR into OCD guys.
>>What can we actually acheive, in practice?
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I don't doubt that councils find FoI requests irritating and possibly time consuming. In some ways the (valuable) Freedom of information ACT is a blunt instrument. The need for it came about because institutional information was not freely available in the first place.
It's likely to remain a valuable tool for the press and public, but there would be less need to use it if information were more available in the first place.
When the council wants you to know something, it goes into their PR propaganda magazine delivered to every household, whether its wanted or not. When the council doesn't want you to know something (to which your're entitled to know) it is buried deeply.
For example, bundled with a large amount of other documents (this is greatly aided by scanning paper, making the text unsearchable).
One way a start could be made, would be a municipal web site that was better laid out and searchable.
It is an indictment, when Google is able remotely to search an organisation's websites and find things, that the tools provided by the website itself, fail to do.
When the only way to excavate a poor decision is action in the High Court - where a Judge can force all necessary documents into the public domain - that too, is a testament to a failure of the system. It should not be necessary.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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I wish there was something that interesting to delve into - as a local government employee it would perk up my day.
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Ali Pally is an ugly blot on the landscape of north London - discuss. What does it really add?
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Permalink Reply by StephenBln on
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My Opinion too Michael.. As I've commented before, I think it's great as a backdrop.. but close up looks hideous. The only bit I do like architecturaly is Clive's BBC 30's extension !
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A massive mixed use block towering over north London. Imagine what that would look like. Ally Pally just takes up space for no real return to us as far as I can see.
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