Welcome to STC and the LGO: this where the corruption of the complaints process is explained using examples from the Harbour View Site or its subfolders:-
- http://theharbourview.co.uk/ukdocks/ is basically just a library these days;
- http://theharbourview.co.uk/greens-place/ is just now just one page and permission to knock it down has now lapsed it it is slowly rotting away.
- There used to be a broadsheet published by a former Councillor, “The Beacon”, that was critical of the ‘Town Hall’ but it got snuffed out.
- https://theharbourview.co.uk/stc-corruption/ – a look at some pivotal posts since September 2013.
If a Council Officer receives a complaint and they do not wish to do anything about it they simply do not answer it. They may feel duty bound to acknowledge it and follow up with a response but they will have changed the argument or context and there will be a disclaimer at the foot of the page which sends you back to square 1:
If you are still not satisfied with the Council’s response then you should use the Council’s complaints procedure which has 3 stages.
Principal Planning Officer: 13th January 2014
Unless explicitly stated otherwise views or opinions expressed in this email are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Council and are not intended to be legally binding.
- First Stage
- It will not take long to discover that you will not get a straight answer: so you refer it to a Manager and you have left the first informal stage where they can and do say what they like and entered the 2nd Stage of their Complaints Procedure and if he or she repeats what the Case Officer has said, you are doomed to spend the rest of your time repeating your claim/complaint to no avail.
- Second Stage
- While the Manager may agree with your main argument he will have sown so much misinformation and it is that, that will be picked up at the more formal Stage 2 and be presented back to you as facts even if it clear from the correspondence with the Manger that they were no better than lies. The departmental head or whoever is responsible for Stage 2 has the choice of accepting the evidence or the misrepresentations given to them by the Case Officer’s Manager.
- Third Stage
- It then becomes apparent that they are now committed to the story put out by the Case Officer and they can get away with this because the initial complaint is not recorded, it has been overwritten with something meaningless, or worse, a misrepresentation. The person dealing with Stage 3 will be appointed by the Chief Executive and they have the choice of of accepting the evidence provided or basing it on the misrepresentations given to them by reference to Stages 1 and 2 of the complaint.
- Fourth Stage
- The Council will have driven the complaint all the way through their ‘Complaints Procedure’ stripping out all of the original complaint and replacing it with the misinformation given in the earlier stages. Naturally when the complaint is presented to the Ombudsman you have to begin all over again and you present a it refined form simply because of the need to reduce a year’s, or perhaps more, correspondence down to a page or so. The Ombudsman then has the choice of accepting the evidence accompanying the brief description or accepting the account provided by the Council and one can tell from the first draft what they have decided.
- Fifth Stage
- Complain that the Council have been giving misinformation and or misrepresentation (lying) to the Ombudsman and the 2nd Inspector says that your latest complaint remains that of your previous complaint.
The Alternative Complaint Procedure (ACP) is deceptively simple in overwriting the original complaint and that and you are steered through to the Local Government Ombudsman where they can flatly ignore any evidence provided, preferring to give credence to the lies that the Council tell them.
The Council then say:
“It remains the case that all complaints procedures relating to this matter have been exhausted both internally within the Council and externally.