Author: simon
Undercliff Drive: Details Of The Wragge Report
Thursday, 29th November, 2007 at 3:05 pm, Isle of Wight
The report by Wragge & Co on the Undercliff Drive investigation runs to 75 pages, so will take a while for us to digest. It builds and refers to the previous reports carried out by Addleshaw Goddard, QP, Heath and Sharpe Pritchard the earliest of which started in 2005.
The Wragge Report found “systematic and on-going failures of the Council’s processes and internal controls, and inadequate supervision and line-management of and by a number of officers.”
“A culture of officers from the top down taking an unduly narrow and restrictive view of their role. This has undoubtedly been a factor in the catalogue of problems.”
“Officers interviewed provided no coherent or consistent explanation as to why the failure to comply with the EU Procurement Regulations and Contract Standing Orders (“CSOs”) occurred in the first place and why the project was not put onto a sound contractual footing once the problem was uncovered.”
As to how all of this could have come to be, the Wragge Report found a “complex interaction between factors such as inadequate training, incompetence, a failure to comply with Council systems and procedures, poor supervision and inadequate checks and balances.”
They highlighted “multiple failures of the internal controls, obligations to record, report, investigate, monitor and ensure compliance with the internal rules, or to remedy the defects when found.”
“Several officers were found wanting in their conduct and capabilities. Some were reckless, others indifferent, but all failed to discharge important elements of their duties to the Council.”
“There was an apparently widespread failing to understand, or follow, basic council procedures in the Engineering Department, and what can be best described as indifference or tolerance of this by the rest of the organisation.”
Perhaps for those involved there will be relief that Wragge found it “difficult to apportion ‘blame’”. Wragge state that “it is unhelpful to the organisation to dwell on that issue [blame], as a blame culture does nothing to encourage reporting.”
Quite if that will satisfy the tax-paying citizens of the Isle of Wight - only time will tell.
Politics, St Lawrence, Ventnor
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November 29th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
“Quite if that will satisfy the tax-paying citizens of the Isle of Wight - only time will tell.”
It certainly does not satisfy me, especially in view of:
“Several officers were found wanting in their conduct and capabilities. Some were reckless, others indifferent, but all failed to discharge important elements of their duties to the Council.”
and:
“what can be best described as indifference or tolerance of this by the rest of the organisation.”
as these standards of behaviour still live on especially within the planning department.
Oh, how I miss Solent T.V.
November 29th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Fellow islanders if you really believe this you’ve been conned the lot of you. 900k this report cost, £2 million in total with all of the add ons. What could you have bought with that? Undoubtedly 2 people **cked up, and they should have gone. But the others? If you want a change of culture then there are better ways of doing this.
Read the Sharpe Pritchard report, hushed up by the council as it actually said there had been very little wrongdoing. Looks to me like Duckworth is just keen on making a name for himself for “cleaning up this town” and is using your hard earned council tax to do it.
I bet anyone prepared to wager that Duckworth is gone within 2 years, with a supposed reputation for being a hard nosed enforcer. Sickening. I hope you let your disgust at this farce be known at the ballot box.
November 29th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Others will think that he stopped the rot …
Yet more will think that by making a hullabaloo about something that the council (now) doesn’t actually want to do (because they’ll have to pay for the work as Government funding criteria are out of bounds) will mean that every other questionable deal that the council has done won’t then need to be looked into, as “it is unhelpful to the organisation to dwell on that issue [blame].”
Having read the Wragge report - you’ve got to question why it cost a reported £1.1 million quid. OK, there’s quite a few hours put in there, but to spend that much time and come out with nothing solid at the end apart from that it’s “difficult to apportion ‘blame’,” is that good value?
November 30th, 2007 at 11:28 am
@Simon. Not good value and certainly a long way from Best Value. Another way of looking at the sums would be
£900k; the main legal cost paid to Wragge & Co.
£1.1m; the cost of suspending 7 senior people for 9 months odd + Sharpe Pritchard etc.
£12m approx; the value of the Central Government monies, promised for the repairs then withdrawn and lost to the island because we could not get this sorted out.
So is the total cost to the island approximately £14 million? And at the end of it all we have a “difficult to apportion blame” comment in the report? It just does not seem to add up to me.
November 30th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
@Tom:
I hope you let your disgust at this farce be known at the ballot box.
I hope that you are not suggesting that any Councillors of the new administration are involved in this unsavoury business.
With your proclivity for offering wagers, I would hazard 50p that you are associated in some way with the old Island First regime, under whose “watch” all this began, or, even worse, one of the officers involved.
November 30th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Interesting perspective Freddie, I was thinking the same myself. I’ll add 50p to yours to up the ante.
November 30th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
@ Jan & Freddie…. so how do I collect your monies then being neither an officer involved or part of Island First? Blimey, can I not take an interest in Island politics? Maybe if more people did we’d not be in this mess
And, should I add to my sums the £5.5 million or so already spent on this project, now cancelled? That would make it a nice round £20 million wasted on this exercise.
To me the true scandal is not that a couple of officers **cked up a contract. Thats a straightforward disciplinary offence and should have been treated as such. There seems to be no doubt that they did what they were accused of and they deserve everything they got. It was the way this was “investigated” on a much wider scale, wasting public resources, council focus, officer time, in a totally inappropriate way and spending £2m in the course of doing it. To then say, after £900k it was “difficult to apportion ‘blame’” reeks to me of incompetence. For £900k I’d want something a bit more concrete than that.
And actually it is the current lot of councillors who have presided over this farce. Nobody has had the balls to stand up and say “hang on, this is just a little bit crazy.” The whole thing has been like a runaway train just costing more and more and getting more out of hand week by week. What we needed was someone to stand up and say STOP. Our current lot of councillors never did that, and thats the real shame here.
November 30th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Tom, if someone had stood up and said STOP, others would have screemed COVER UP. With small town (Island) mentallity involved no-one was going to completely win this one.
November 30th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Quote from Tom: And actually it is the current lot of councillors who have presided over this farce.
AND
Our current lot of councillors never did that, and thats the real shame here.
Tom, I think that you have a complete misconception of the power base in politics.
Our “elected representatives” really have as much “power” as our M.P.s. Everything is run by a faceless bunch of career bureaucrats, who are TOTALLY to blame for this fiasco in addition to many other indiscretions which escape attention.
Any whiff of wrongdoing by Councillors and they are hung out to dry on a Standards Board.
Same scenario involving officers, then it’s gardening leave, possibly followed by suspension and then months of internal inquiries usually held by fellow “officers” albeit they may be from a different Authority.
And then we still have to pay for their inflation proof pensions for the rest of their lives.
A Councillor should be so lucky!
December 3rd, 2007 at 12:00 pm
@Farmersboy, I think you’re right…
@Freddie, I don’t really know where the balance of power lies, but I’m happy to bow to your better judgement & knowledge. I take your word for it that the councillors did what they were told on this by Duckworth & Co (is that not a bit sad?!).
I’ve worked at a few places where there were diciplinary actions however. Where people were sacked, warned, sanctioned or whatever. I’ve never worked somewhere where the management decided to spend £900k on external legal fees to investigate wrongdoing in the workplace. Why did this happen and who took the decisions? Does it mean that the next time someone gets diciplined in Mr Duckworth’s administration they’re going to bring in external solicitors to do the disciplinary? Does it mean that Mr Duckworths in house legal team are so incompetent that we need to get rid of them as they’re just a waste of money?
I’m sorry to bang on & on about this, but think what £2 million odd could have bought if the council had been competent enough to do its own suspension & investigation & disciplinary. Parks for our kids, an extra community bobby or two, a rebate on our council tax bills.
And (again yes i know I’m boring) the Sharpe Pritchard report says actually there was no great loss to the island, no self interest, no malice, no dodgy payments…. just a bit of incompetence really. So what has this all been about? There looks to have been a couple of people who were undoubtedly wrong and stupid and deserve all they got. But there are a load others who were dragged into this unnecessarily at enormous cost to us all. Why?
December 4th, 2007 at 10:39 am
You obviosuly missed the letters in the CP from myself and John Powell both saying the whole scheme was a farce and should be dropped.( well they WERE both on the back pages !) We both drew the similarity between King Canute and the Council. This road was never more than a B Road and never had heavy deliveries along it. It was used by coaches as a shortcut to Niton and they never stopped to admire the view, You cannot see the sea because of the trees ! All that was ever needed was repairs and shoring up on an intermittent basis and this could still happen and buses could still traverse the route if the road was levelled .
No need to augment the Niton route at all . This is another example of where a Council is led by the nose by its officers who seek grandiose schemes for their own future CV’s. It may only be coincidence but some of the officers are members of the bent finger society which does lots of worthwhile charitable work but in other aspects is a negative force in public administration ( now watch the feathers fly !)
December 4th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Oooo Louis thats interesting. Who is a member of the bent finger soc then?
December 4th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
@ Louis
“This is another example of where a Council is led by the nose by its officers ..”
How perceptive. How true.
December 5th, 2007 at 10:06 am
@ Louis…. “This is another example of where a Council is led by the nose by its officers who seek grandiose schemes for their own future CV’s.”…. I think you are right and I think this applies to the farce they called the investigation too. If you read Mark Greenburgh’s resume on Wragge & Co’s website he says, in answer to the question Most challenging job you’ve ever done?
“Investigating a deputy chief executive, director of finance, and six senior colleagues for dereliction of duty and misconduct issues.”
Hmmm sounds familiar. So this thing has been good for your CV then Mr Greenburgh? And for the CV of the Chief Exec, who can now boldly claim to have cleaned up this town. Though quite frankly, if you were going to spend £900k of our money on cleaning, I’d rather have employed 30 dogpoo wardens.