Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
MI5: their current operations & the Finsbury Park Stakeholder Group
IT WILL come as no surprise to anyone, that details of the current operations of M15 are not publicly available.
"Not publicly available" ...
was the official and remarkable description of the status of Minutes of the Finsbury Park Stakeholder group, a body that early in the year, was claimed would ensure that residents have a voice on the future of events in our park [q.v.]
I made a further Member's enquiry on 31 July; Councillor enquiries are supposed to provide a quicker response than a regular FoI request. Following a delay of one month – that included discussion with the Chief Executive of Haringey Council – I managed to extract copies of the formerly top-secret Minutes (attached).
I hope that in future we can avoid the nonsense of restricting public access to this group, that may yet benefit from more scrutiny and transparency.
Clive Carter
Haringey Councillor
Liberal Democrat Party
Tags for Forum Posts: finsbury park, finsbury park stakeholder group
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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Our Harringay councillors that were so vocal in the "tough" election fight back in May are now seemingly absent. From the Head of Client Services email:
"At our last meeting we agreed that we would meet again next Tuesday the 3rd June for a Finsbury Park Event Stakeholder Group.
The meeting will be held at the Civic Centre in Wood Green at 6.30pm. The new councillors for Stroud Green and Harringay Wards will also be invited to this meeting
so that they can meet the group and be brought up to speed."
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Permalink Reply by Cllr Emina Ibrahim on
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Yes and we attended and ensured that the issue was added to the agenda for the area forum. Simon Farrow and Stuart McNamara attended the area forum and updated the community.
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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John at least today we now see some even more interesting Minutes.
Apparently these ones took four years to be coughed up after repeated asking (and no wonder: 'Fox', 'Lark', 'Tiger', 'Badger', 'Phoenix' !).
I believe we have to thank the tenacious Chairman of the Treasury Select Committee.
Our local council was uninvolved. However I would point out that the regulatory somnambulance revealed, occurred during the boom years of the previous government.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Well done, Clive. A tiny breeze of fresh air and a few rays of sunshine breaks through the bureaucratic murk.
"Every bureaucracy strives to increase the superiority of its position by keeping its knowledge and intentions secret. Bureaucratic administration always seeks to evade the light of the public as best it can, because in so doing it shields its knowledge and conduct from criticism…"
"The concept of the 'official secret' is the specific invention of bureaucracy, and nothing is so fanatically defended by the bureaucracy as this attitude, which cannot be substantially justified beyond these specifically qualified areas. In facing a parliament, the bureaucracy, out of a sure power instinct, fights every attempt of the parliament to gain knowledge by means of its own experts or from interest groups. The so-called right of parliamentary investigation is one of the means by which parliament seeks such knowledge. Bureaucracy naturally welcomes a poorly informed and hence a powerless parliament — at least in so far as ignorance somehow agrees with the bureaucracy's interests. "
Max Weber on Bureaucracy
As you'll recognise, "parliament" in this context means the council and councillors. I'm sure most bureaucrats have welcomed new councillors with smiles. As well as polite reminders about the bureaucratic rules which must not be broken.
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Welcome to, just a Minute!
I think our Council could learn from the publication of Minutes from another public body, the Bank of England. One of the few good things done by the first Chancellor of the last goverment was to make the BoE independent. The 1998 Act directs it to publish the Minutes of the Monetary Policy Commitee.
These are probably the best-known, most (price-) sensitive and most-read Minutes in the nation.
They're even more important than the Minutes of our park's stakeholder group.
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"The MPC (Monetary Policy Committee) goes to great lengths to explain its thinking and decisions." — Link here. (Scroll to paragraph 6.)
Why? I'd suggest it's because the decisions of investors depend on confidence. Which is built when:
"The minutes of the MPC meetings are published two weeks after the interest rate decision. The minutes give a full account of the policy discussion, including differences of view. They also record the votes of the individual members of the Committee. The Committee has to explain its actions regularly to parliamentary committees, particularly the Treasury Committee. MPC members also speak to audiences throughout the country, explaining the MPC's policy decisions and thinking. This is a two-way dialogue. Regional visits also give members of the MPC a chance to gather first-hand intelligence about the economic situation from businesses and other organisations."
I'd ask HoL members to reread and reflect on that. "Full account ... recorded votes ... explain its actions, decisions and thinking ... speak to audiences ... two way dialogue ... gather first hand intelligence ..."
About as far away as it's possible to be from how the failing Kobercouncil makes key decisions.
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WE LIVE in extraordinary times – the lowest interest rates for some 300 years – and it's no surprise the BoE's MPC MInutes should feature in news bulletins and be poured over.
Their MInutes are of course, extremely important as interest rate decisions will affect the lives of millions of people through mortgages, overdrafts, savings, investment: in fact, it would probably be a minority who were unaffected. And their thinking gives an indication of likely changes (or not).
Nonetheless, the MPC's Minutes represent an example for others as a model of transparency and good governance.
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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Thanks Clive - can you do us all a favour and shine more light on the secrecy?
Arguably the most beneficial pragmatic change we can bring about is surely the deployment of open data for the good of residents. Any lack of it holds us back. Bristol City Council has just opened a lot of data and part of the reason they cite are the benefits to the Bristol economy.
I think it's an important point of principle that we are allowed to know what is deemed secret, and why. As the Chief Exec will doubtless tell you to get off his lawn, can you further establish if in fact there is a statutory duty to do this and how, therefore it can be enforced?
As you may be aware, the 'amateur' approach of the Chief Exec to information safety has resulted in a lot of scanned-in PDFs (which cannot be searched) being posted on the LBH website. Not only that, there is no system (unlike elsewhere) for knowing when a document is posted. So Officers can put something on the website without people noticing, and effectively 'bury' it in plain sight.
The tech involved is among the most mature (thus cheapest) we have, so it's not about money, it's about professionalism.
Can you ask the Chief Exec to maintain a published, timely, categorised list of all of the documents the Council produce (adding a field to the 'site map' would do almost all of it), indicating which are secret and add an alerts facility so we know when a document is added or changes status?
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Where on earth have you been, Chris? Clive and I have been banging away about this for at least a couple of years.
Let me give just one example which, as a councillor I raised regularly with staff. Clive also raised it as a resident and made a practical suggestion about how the Council can post many more searchable documents online without compromising security.
I've even poked fun at what I wrongly assumed was Haringey's backward, uninformed and old-fashioned, but essentially benign and well-intentioned approach to not-sharing electronic documents.
I know there are indeed well-intentioned staff who agree, and possibly deplore the fact that some key documents are still posted in a format which can't be searched or indexed. And so ridiculously bloated that the file-size by itself is likely to deter downloading.
But still the practice continues. Why?
I'm with Sherlock Holmes. "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".
Since "leading" Haringey politicians and senior staff are now well aware of the problem, it's impossible that they choose to continue doing something so dysfunctional, silly, unnecessary and avoidable purely by chance or carelessness. The most likely explanation is that it's done deliberately. In other words, at senior level the facts do not point to benign reasons. But suggest that actually they don't want to be open, transparent and accountable. Preferring to operate as far as possible in secret; making it difficult for the rest of us to find out what's going on.
Nothing "amateur" about this. And nothing new.
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You're so dogmatic!
I first mentioned this two and a half years ago on this site and I think you took it up from there on in, didn't you?
There is another explanation. Poorly paid Officers have a job to do and are not trained properly due to cuts and ineptitude by senior management, who don't 'get' modern tech. Officers do their best.
I think it would be more useful to focus in on the perpetrators of almost everything we discuss here - the executive team who are directly responsible for the operation of almost everything the Council does. They earn the big bucks. It's their fault. They are out of control.
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Hi Chris,
can you do us all a favour and shine more light on the secrecy?
What did your last slave die from?!
As the Chief Exec will doubtless tell you to get off his lawn
Chris, I don't think should make assumptions about the Council's Chief Executive. I don't know this for a certain, but I believe he may have helped with the release of this particular information.
As you may be aware, the 'amateur' approach of the Chief Exec to information safety has resulted in a lot of scanned-in PDFs (which cannot be searched) being posted on the LBH website.
Most people with half a brain understand the folly of repeatedly – over years – scanning in paper to PDFs. Native PDFs are of course, hugely more efficient. The saving of time and money has been so obvious for so long that I do wonder if other factors are at play: such as reducing the ability of the public and the Councillors who represent them, to search long documents easily, even at the cost of more time and money to print-out documents and to scan-in paper (with the knock-on storage costs of paper and engorged files.
As Alan has said, this matter has been raised before. As a resident some time ago, I raised it with the CEO, Leader & the head of IT: all are aware of this matter, but no progress appears to have been made. Answers have been wafflely.
The practice ought to be, always save to PDF first (it can still be printed out if necessary of course). Given the likely savings, and the Council's complaining of cuts, I'm surprised at the lack of progress in this area for a permanent 'quick win'.
So Officers can put something on the website without people noticing, and effectively 'bury' it in plain sight.
Yes. The former Mayor made crass foolish insensitive remarks in which she said that the riots were the best thing to happen to Tottenham for a while. Under pressure, a full apology was made and was posted on line ... to web page that few knew about: the Mayor's blog. Unfortunately a photo of the new Mayor appears on the same page as the apology. The new Mayor has promised to rebuild trust in the Mayor's office and I wish her well in that endeavour.
Clive Carter
Haringey Councillor
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