How they waste your money

Yes approx £535,000 has been paid in extra payments to leaving staff to agree to clauses in the leaving contract not to talk about the circumstances or the reasons and issues surrounding their leaving.
This is only part of the story as the cost of various barristers ,lawyers and the  like plus dedicated officer time to try and respond to these employment tribunals runs into millions of pounds of your money.
 As followers of the press will know, there have been a number of tribunals which have been either settled at the doors of the court or lost.
 The highest profile one was Peter Francis who brought action against the former chief executive of walsall Council Annie Shepperd under the Disability Discrimination Act. ( Peter was treated dreadfully by AS and he got about £650k in compensation but refused £70K offered to try and stop him talking afterwards) Peter then ran a web site where he put his case which he did well . This is a man who brought over £35Million of regeneration money into Walsall, warned the council about deficiencies in their monitoring system... which came to light last year resulting in loss of reclaimable money from Europe of over a £Million)

A former police inspector employed by the council and brought a case of 'malfessence'... abuse of power by a public official .. which is an arrestable offence but dropped this and was given compensation plus a clause not to talk ;
an executive director left on pretext to pursue her studies... she had made a serious error in her handling of a contract and should have been sacked but took away a very healthy amount to avoid spilling the beans!
Another had a nervous breakdown but was given a gagging bribe again to avoid embarrassing disclosures: another who was in charge of monitoring progress of the Council , was concerned at how the figures were being manipulated, got sacked but at tribunal got a healthy sum to keep her mouth shut
The list does go on and on 
 Of course would not dream of making any direct accusations !!! A lot of above has appeared in the express and star .. from material in the public domain or requested under Freedom of Information Act requests... maybe it helped a bit by knowing where to look!



  I believe whatever party is running the show, the audit side of this council must be scrutinised in greater depth by the Audit Committee and with much more vigour!!

 I welcome any comments!
Ian