available to the Public in Stoke
Rumours abound as to the role of one Mr Peter Hayes within Stoke-on-Trent City Council. If his name is mentioned, there seems to be a general reluctance of anybody to divest any information whatsoever. HAVOC has an interest in the role and powers of the aforenamed gentleman, as he was the one who threatened the HoHH (amongst others) site with legal action. We know that he is employed somewhere within the Council, allegedly as a free-ranging "consultant" with duties that could conform to the description of "spin-doctor". What his exact role is, no-one seems to know (especially Elected Councillors), and no-one is prepared to divulge. We have also been informed that his presence and freedoms of action are allegedly causing friction within the Council's Communications Department.
Since there seems to be no means of getting anybody remotely connected to the Council to pass on information about Mr Hayes voluntarily, we decided to try to find out who Peter Hayes is, why he is employed, and for whom he is working. As the Council and its employees are supposed to be working for the people of the City, and are paid, at least in part, from our Council Tax, we thought that the information should be in the public domain.
We know of other Freedom of Information requests about the activities of this gentleman that have been submitted to the Council, one by a well-known, household name, national organisation. We do not know of anybody who has been able to elicit any information.
The following is our FoI request:
Dear Mr Chadwick,
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, in the Public Interest, would you please supply me with a full response to the questions below.
1) Mr Peter Hayes is employed as a PR consultant. Please supply a full description of the consultant's role in the Communications Department of the Council, and to whom he is answerable.
2) Please reveal why a consultant is needed as well as Mr Dan Barton, the Head of Communication? Is the Communications Department not up to scratch?
3) Please indicate for whom Mr Hayes works - the Elected Council(lors) or the Elected Mayor (Council Executive).
4) Please reveal Mr Hayes' payscale - hourly or daily rate.
5) Please reveal the percentage of the Communication Department's budget that is spent on the employment of consultant(s).
Please note that full answers to these questions should be considered as being in the Public Interest.
I expect a written reply to these questions within twenty working days.
Yours sincerely,
(Name & Address supplied)
Well, eventually this reply came back. We fail to see why every FoI request seems not to be able to be answered within the requisite twenty days. The Council, when asked for a copy of the contract between itself and Serco for running Childrens' Services in the City, took nearly forty days to produce the information. This recurring practice is patently a ploy to discourage enquiries - or is it that the public are forced to make so many FoI requests for relatively mundane information that the relevant personnel are swamped?
Your request for information regarding Peter Hayes and consultants employed by the Press Office
Unfortunately it has proved more complex and time consuming than anticipated to locate and retrieve the information you have asked for and I now expect to be able to send it to you within the next week. I apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
If you have any queries or concerns then please contact me.
If you are unhappy with the service you have received in relation to your request and wish to make a complaint or request a review of our decision, you should write to Neil Chadwick, Information Governance Manager, Chief Executives Directorate, Civic Centre (Town Hall), Glebe Street, ST4 1RN or email foi@stoke.gov.uk
If, after contacting us, you are not content with the outcome, you may ask the Information Commissioner for a decision. Generally, the Information Commissioner cannot make a decision unless you have already used our appeal procedure. The Information Commissioner can be contacted at: The Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF.
Yours
sincerely
Howard Baker
Information Governance
PR and Communications
howard.baker@stoke.gov.uk
telephone 01782 235581.
Howard Baker |Communications Officer |Public Relations and
Communications
Chief Executive's Directorate | City of Stoke-on-Trent
Civic Centre Glebe Street
Stoke-on-Trent ST4 1RN
t 01782 235581 e howard.baker@stoke.gov.uk
stoke.gov.uk
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And,
finally, we did receive an answer (or a non-answer if you like!).
Please notice the discrepancy in dates between the receipt of the
e-mail and the date on the attached letter. Seems a bit odd as the
Council are obliged to reply within a given time.
Your reference
Our reference
DB/HB
Date 22 September 2008
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Communications Dan Barton Head of PR and Communications
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Dear
Your request for
information
regarding Peter Hayes and
consultants employed by the Press Office
We have now considered your request for information. Our response to your questions is as follows:
1) Mr Peter
Hayes is employed as a PR consultant. Please supply
a full
The department does
not employ a
consultant.
2) Please
reveal why a consultant is needed as well as Mr Dan
Barton, the
The department does not employ a consultant.
3)
Please indicate for whom Mr Hayes works - the Elected
Council(lors) or
The department does not employ a consultant.
4) Please reveal Mr
Hayes' pay scale - hourly or daily rate.
5) Please
reveal the percentage of the Communication
Department's budget
Although we do hold
the information you have requested we
estimate that the cost of complying with your request would be more
than £450. This amount is called the
appropriate limit
and is specified in regulations. When it would cost
more than £450 to find, retrieve and extract
information that is requested section 12 of the Freedom of Information
Act
allows us to refuse the request.
If you have any queries about this letter, please
contact me.
If you are unhappy with the service you have received in relation to your request and wish to make a complaint or request a review of our decision, you should write to Neil Chadwick, Information Security Manager, Corporate Resources, Swift House, Glebe Street, ST4 1HP or email foi@stoke.gov.uk.
If, after contacting us, you are not content with the outcome, you may ask the Information Commissioner for a decision. Generally, the Information Commissioner cannot make a decision unless you have already used our appeal procedure. The Information Commissioner can be contacted at: The Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF.
Information
Governance
Corporate
Communications
howard.baker@stoke.gov.uk
telephone 01782 235581.
From
this obfuscation, we learn :
- that PR and Communications does not employ a consultant. So where does Mr Hayes work, since he is involved in PR and "communication"?
- that PR and Communications does not employ a consultant.
- that PR and Communications does not employ a consultant.
Unfortunately, that was not the question. The question was "Please
indicate for whom Mr Hayes works - the Elected
Council(lors) or
- that "the company" exists.
Who is "the company"? Why is "the company"? FoI request has been
submitted.
- that there's something fishy going on here. " ... we do hold the information you requested ..." implies that the Communication Department does employ consultants. But in replies 1, 2 and 3 it has been unequivocally stated that "PR and Communications does not employ a consultant". Which is true? Also the figure of "more than £450" has elicited a further FoI request on the exact breakdown of costs to process the first request. Be interesting to find out where our money goes! Or maybe we won't?
We have requested a review of this decision, which we expect to come down in favour of the Council. It will, if necessary, be taken to the Information Commissioner.
Further information has come to light:
Apparently, the unnamed "company" referred to above, which employs (employed?) Mr Hayes, was employed, in turn, by the Elected Mayor's office, rather than the Press Office. This is why the Council were able to stonewall this particular application for information, although their answer to question 3 now seems to be disingenuous. We believe that this arrangement ended recently and that Mr Hayes' input, which has always been of dubious value to the Citizens of Stoke-on-Trent, other than to further alienate the people from our supposed representative on the Executive, is no longer required (please sit down and stop jumping for joy!).
It seems to many that the regrettable culture of withholding information from the Citizenry, of treating dissenters with contempt, and of viewing the electorate as brain-dead idiots has spread to become almost omnipresent within the Council during the time that Mr Hayes, or the anonymous company that employs him, have been in the employ of the Elected Mayor's Office. As Citizens of S-o-T, we ought to be cautiously optimistic that we may have seen the last of him. We regret that we are, as yet, no nearer to answering the burning questions of why he was here, what he was doing, how much we paid him for doing it, and what good his presence has done for hoi polloi. But, one way or another, we will eventually find out.
The biggest question now arises ... and will, no doubt, keep arising until the aforementioned culture of secrecy is dissipated. Why do certain of our elected officials deem it necessary to hide information from ordinary people on a regular basis? What good does it do? Why can't we know the truth? What Stoke-on-Trent urgently needs is openness and transparency. Without this, the general feeling of distrust of, and disgust with, the Council will remain.
Unfortunately, we suspect the right time to ask these, and other, pertinent questions will be after the new governance arrangements come into effect in May. By then, of course, the answers will not be as relevant as they are now, and the secretive, evasive and autocratic elements within the Council will have won a small, phyrric victory.
Keep watching this space ...
A new government regulation is due to come into force soon - National Indicator 14 (NI14). This is meant to reduce the amount of "avoidable contact" between the Council and the general public, This could mean that, for instance, the Council has to answer your questions properly at the first time of asking, instead of you having to ask the same question again and again (one typical kind of "avoidable contact"). Read our take on NI14 here.
and we are even more confused than before!
On Tuesday, 24/03/09, BBC Radio Stoke broke the story that Peter Hayes was paid £57,000 as a consultant. In The Sentinel, 25/03/09, reporter Iain Robinson wrote an article in which the following appeared: "Head of PR and communications Dan Barton said that Mr Hayes had been employed as a consultant to deliver media training to council politicians and officers and lobby Government ministers".
May we remind you of the content of a letter received by e-mail on Tuesday 09/09/2008 at 16:25hrs (in full above). This letter was referenced DB/HB, which we must assume means that it was sanctioned by Dan Barton. In the letter, it was stated THREE times
This now appears to be a deliberate piece of disinformation - the Communications Department paid the £57,000 to Peter Hayes' company - which, by any normal standards, means that he, or his company, was employed by the Department as a consultant.
Mr Barton is further quoted in The Sentinel: "He doesn't have anything to do with the press office, although the money he receives comes out of our budget". Our understanding of the English language may be deficient, but surely, if someone is paid out of a Departmental budget, they are de facto employed by that Department. The statement by Mr Barton seems either to be complete obfuscation, or is an indication that he is not properly in control of his Department or of his Department's budget.
Please note Mr Barton's use of the present tense - which can only mean that Peter Hayes' expertise is still being used by somebody in the Council.
The following questions need to be answered:
- If Mr Hayes had nothing to do with the PR and Communications, why was he paid out of their budget?
- Why did Mr Barton allow this to happen with taxpayers' money?
- If Mr Hayes was undertaking media training, who was he training, and why? We remember one particular diktat from the Elected Mayor that all contact with the Press by anybody in the Council had to be through the Communications Department. So, no need for training.
- If he did no work for
Communications,
why, during the BBC Radio Stoke debate on the Governance arrangements
for the City, did he sit with Mr Barton and other Officers of the
Communications Department (appearing to confer with them regularly),
and loudly applaud any utterance by the Elected Mayor? Was he employed
to whitewash the EM?
- For whom did Peter Hayes
really work?
The following e-mail was sent to Dan Barton, Howard Baker (signatory of the letter) and to the Acting Council Manager on 25/03/09 (copied to the three Burslem North Councillors):
Dear Mr. Barton,
The attached letter was received by me by e-mail on 09/09/08 at 12.19hrs. It has a reference DB/HB, which I have to assume refers to your initials and those of Mr. Howard Baker. I infer from this that you personally sanctioned the sending of this letter.
In today's Sentinel (First Edition, page 14), in Iain Robinson's article the following appears: "Head of PR and communications Dan Barton said that Mr Hayes had been employed as a consultant to deliver media training to council politicians and officers and lobby Government ministers."
In the letter sent to me last September, the words "The department does not employ a consultant." are repeated three times.
Either your quote in The Sentinel is not entirely accurate, or I was deliberately lied to last September when trying to discover, under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, why Mr Hayes was employed.
Please can you clarify to me as soon as possible which of the above statements is true.
Yours sincerely,
We await a reply ...
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