Neil Wilby Media

A notorious local authority has put itself in the headlines, yet again, after being forced to admit, publicly, that it deliberately and calculatingly defies Parliament, on average, close to once every single working day.

Made all the more remarkable as the current and highly respected Mayor of Oldham, Dr Zahid Chauhan OBE, may well have entered that same Parliament at the next general election having been favourite to be selected to represent the Labour Party in the newly formed, and winnable, Pendle and Clitheroe constituency. He withdrew from the candidacy last month for pressing family reasons.

Responses to requests made to Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council under the Freedom of Information Act, 2000 (FOIA) have revealed that, in a near two year period, they broke the law on no less than 460 (four hundred and sixty) occasions.

But that may still be only the tip of the iceberg as, for the moment, the exposed law-breaking only concerns time limits when responding to the public’s requests, both under the same Freedom of Information Act and the Data Protection Act, 2018 (DPA). Broken down, the current figures for breaches of those Acts are 342 and 118 respectively in the 23 months between November, 2021 and September, 2023.

The quantitive aspect is concerning enough, but Oldham Council is also well recognised for an instinctive ‘cover-up’ mentality of its senior paid officers, and encouraged by the present Council Leader, this reflects in frequently poor quality responses to those FOIA requests visible on the publicly accessible What Do They Know platform. Just one glaring example is highlighted here.

On a sample of just two, that incompetence, ineptitude and rank bad attitude has spilled over into data subject access requests (DSAR), made via the Data Protection Act, and has resulted in legal action being taken against Oldham Council over numerous qualitative breaches of DPA, as well as the more routine time limit breaches (read more here).

Oldham’s Borough Solicitor, Paul Entwistle, was recently asked to bring in a specialist information rights practitioner to dip sample, at a suggested rate of 1 in 10, the data subject access requests made to his Council, in the period under scrutiny, in order to quality assure their output and give some comfort to residents, and other data subject access applicants, that qualitative breaches were not at the same epidemic levels as time limits. The latter running at an estimated, and quite staggering, 45% of all validated DSARs

So far, there has been no response and, on past evidence, there is unlikely to be one. The errant lawyer, whom, for the past three years, has miraculously survived numerous internal attempts to displace him (read more here) is absolutely central to the ‘cover-up’ regime that pervades every floor of the Civic Centre. The latter may well account for the former, of course.

For their part, the Labour Party administration that runs Oldham Council, under its failing Leader, Cllr Arooj Shah, is not only content to place itself above Parliament, they are prepared to break one of its own core Pledges made to residents before, and in the wake of, the last local elections.

The Oldham Labour Group website boldly claims, under the heading ‘We’re Building A Better Oldham’ and sub-heading ‘Putting Residents First’, to hold senior officers to account for the treatment residents get from Oldham Council – and improving customer service.

But there is not a shred of evidence offered publicly that the Labour Party in Oldham have held one single officer in this bandit council to account over any of the manifest failings routinely highlighted here on the Neil Wilby Media website. Asked to provide such evidence, they did not reply.

Cllr Shah preferring, instead, to hide behind a media strategy she personally devised, and oversees, in order to counteract those exposés (read more here). This head in the sand foolishness, and notably poor support from the sycophants with whom she surrounds herself, is one of a growing number of reasons why she is looking less and less likely to still be Leader at the start of the next municipal year (read more here).

The FOIA requests that underpin this article, made by its author, Neil Wilby, can be viewed on the What Do They Know website here and here.

Oldham Council’s Borough Solicitor, their Head of Information Governance and Insurance, Victoria Gallagher, and the Oldham Labour Group were all offered right of reply. In line with the aforementioned media strategy, the email carrying the invitation was not acknowledged by the OMBC press office, to whom it was sent.

Oldham’s two MPs, Jim McMahon and Debbie Abrahams, have been invited to comment on the relentless, unchecked, industrial scale breaches of two Acts of Parliament. The email to Mrs Abrahams were acknowledged but a substantive response is yet to be provided.

Mr McMahon said: “As a matter of principle I would hope and expect that all public bodies including the local authorities comply with both the letter and importantly the spirit of the Act.

“Where this isn’t the case it can deny legitimate rights of access to information being held by public bodies, or frustrate such requests.

“Our experience of local public bodies is that the picture is very mixed, but on the whole Oldham Council appears to comply on the cases I’ve been involved in as a constituency MP.”

Following publication of this article, only one Oldham councillor, out of sixty, contacted Neil Wilby Media to express their dismay over the industrial scale law-breaking and questionable conduct of the paid officers involved in it. The other fifty-nine, if they have read the article and absorbed its content, should be asking themselves, seriously, if public service is really for them.

Particularly, if they wear a red rosette at election time.

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Page last updated: Friday 10th November, 2023 at 0535 hours

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