PETITION PROMOTER
The petition is being promoted under the auspices of “Kids not Suits”, a campaign group of parents and citizens seeking better use of public funding by those whom we elect. Its core concerns:
• Money wasted in unnecessary bureaucracy and mismanagement could be better spent on averting school closures and reducing class sizes.
• Funding aimed at tackling children’s deprivation can get siphoned off elsewhere.
• Cash which should be spent on the front line gets lost in the back office- and our kids are the biggest losers.
WHISTLEBLOWING MEASURES IN SCOTLAND
Around 40% of UK local authorities have a hotline; up to 10% have a "helpline". The petitioner is aware of only one Scottish public body with measures in place: the NHS, who have a helpline. The National Confidential Alert Line for NHS workers was launched in April and was to allow staff in Scotland to raise their concerns about bad practice in their workplace. But it has been branded “a waste of time” by campaigners.
Dr Kim Holt, from Patients First, said: “It is a complete waste of time. We have tried it out a few times. The people who called found it was hopeless. People who call are being told ‘tell your manager, speak to your union’. They don’t have any power, so all they can do is advise you.”. Kids not Suits think a hotline reporting to NHS Board members would have been more effective.
This petition calls for each Council to have a hotline - not a helpline - as defined by the British Standards Whistleblowing Arrangements Code of Practice (available at http://shop.bsigroup.com/forms/PASs/PAS-1998/). A hotline passes reports back to a designated person; a helpline offers advice on whether and how employees can raise a whistleblowing concern.
THE PETITION
The call, for the Scottish Parliament to order that every Scottish local authority provide staff with a whistleblowing hotline to report mismanagement, seeks to address concerns arising across Scotland about public interest disclosures. In order to prevent victimisation and cover-ups, Councillors need to consider staff reports directly. The adversarial nature of party politics, where no one party will allow the truth to be buried if they can use it to their electoral advantage, would ensure whistle-blowers’ disclosures could never be swept under the carpet.
HOW HOTLINES SHOULD OPERATE
An independent body should run the hotline and every Council worker should learn about it as part of their induction training. There are several commercial bodies providing whistleblower hotline services and a Council might spend up to £20,000 pa on a scheme.
Each Council’s Audit or Risk Committee should serve to oversee their whistle-blower hotline. A sub-committee comprising of a representative from each political party should consider staff hotline reports. If all agree that a report indicates a risk worthy of public concern, it should go on the Council Risk Register and become public. The Committee would then ask the Monitoring Officer for a report on the risk which would subsequently be made public, too.
However, before that report gets to Committee, the whistle-blower should have the right to comment on it. The convener would check these comments and the Councillors would need to decide at Committee who to believe.
Clearly, many disclosures will be human resource matters with no reputational risk. The summit of Councillors would, without recourse to the Risk Register, refer such staff reports onto the Monitoring Officer for action, as per existing disclosure arrangements. If they cannot agree about whether a report represents a risk or not, any one Councillor would be free to cascade the information to their own group members, and choose to subsequently table a motion to Committee for debate. If it was passed, it would then follow the Risk Register procedure.
To ensure whistle-blowers aren’t victimised, a chief risk officer needs to be appointed, whose job would be to train staff on disclosure arrangements, protect them and ensure investigations don’t turn into witch-hunts.
WHY IT’S NEEDED
New legislation is required insisting that all authorities put in place these whistle-blowing arrangements as a condition of receiving revenue support grant from the Scottish Government. The measure would avoid wasteful expenditure and allow both corrupt practices and grandiose schemes to be exposed by Council workers who may know more than senior management about true cost-benefit ratios. Public money wasted on litigation at Employment Tribunals and to compensate unfairly dismissed staff is not funding that is being used wisely.
Good intelligence is often the best defence against fraud and misleading Council reports and there is no better source of this information than from the vast majority of employees, who are honest and ethical. Corrupt and illegal behaviour often goes undetected because employees, aware these things are going on, fear the consequences to themselves and others of reporting them through existing internal channels.
Research suggests that employees place greater trust in a whistleblowing procedure which is not part of their employing body. An independent whistleblowing hotline not only provides a mechanism for exposing systemic fraud, it also serves as a useful catalyst for capturing other corrupt practices, such as discrimination and bullying, which can have an equally debilitating effect on council performance and reputation.
The Institute of Business Ethics noted in their “Speak Up Procedures” (2007) the company practise whereby important whistle-blower reports are escalated to corporate Audit & Risk Committees. It appears that big finance companies don’t let hotlines report to senior management but to Board members. Obviously managing risk is their business and if it’s good enough for them, it should be good enough for the public sector too.
Councillors need to have greater oversight of local government operations. However, many Council Codes of Conduct forbid staff from informing elected members of problems; member/officer protocols state all communications should be routed through senior management. The Scottish Government’s Councillor’s Code of Conduct (2010) tells Councillors in section 3.4:
“Whilst both you and Council employees are servants of the public, you have separate responsibilities: you are responsible to the electorate but the employee is responsible to the Council as his or her employer. You must also respect the different roles that you and an employee play. Your role is to determine policy and to participate in decisions on matters placed before you, not to engage in direct operational management of the Council's services; that is the responsibility of the Council's employees. It is also the responsibility of the Chief Executive and senior employees to help ensure that the policies of the Council are implemented.”
This clause has allowed numerous instances whereby senior managers write slanted reports, cover up mismanagement or are otherwise economical with the truth. Ordinary Council staff who know enough to correct misconceptions are muzzled by protocols which threaten dismissal if they discuss their concerns with elected members. By giving Councillors the facility to listen to hotline reports, power can be returned to those who are elected to serve the public interest.
By using this very natural curiosity of politicians to get to the bottom of things, risks on the operational front can be significantly reduced. And not just the risk to the Council, but the risk to staff from witch-hunts too. Our approach gives politicians the opportunity to properly helm dangerous operations.
The Council committee system depends on senior managers’ reports for the knowledge the Councillors need to pass a recommendation, and it takes a wily Councillor to raise a sound objection. Furthermore, investigations into mismanagement are invariably coloured by the need to protect officer’s reputations. Every politician’s ability to take good decisions can be thus compromised.
The Councillor’s Code of Conduct weakens opportunities for our civic leaders to become aware of malpractice, or the ill-considered outcomes of poor officer recommendations. Politicians should not be using the Code to avoid taking responsibility to implement strong whistleblowing measures. Parliament needs to clarify that the Code does not exclude Councillors from taking sharper operational oversight on staff reports.
Policy is one thing. Good government is another. If we elect politicians who can’t oversee operational matters effectively, one might think they might as well not be there at all. And when politicians fail to hold our bureaucrats to account, it only erodes our confidence in democracy.