• Seeking information from ‘Official’ and unattributable  ‘insiders’ sources about pension ‘experts’ activities;

• ‘Clerk Smirk’ – A typical bizarre example of ‘stonewalling’ an FOIA request;

• Information Commission Office exposés;

• Information Commissioner Graham and his Office – is he and his 388 ‘merry men’ worth £20mil?;

• Commissioner Graham and the ICO – A Litany of dismal Failure – The Guano Trail- Mr.A. Laing’s Undertaking – A Follow     Up;

• The Justice Select Committee -A Triennial Review? – The Bugler’s ‘Experience’ in abundance; 

          • FSV-RRB lays his Guide Line to the PRF Bull’s Eye finding ICO & LFRS Hidden Scandals .

In compiling these series of exposés the Bugler, of necessity,  uses a wide range of sources from unattributable  ‘insiders’, to direct approaches for ‘official’ information.

It seems in practice that no Local Authority or Fire Authority willingly releases information about even the most mundane matter. It is simply not possible that when the seeker of truth enters their ‘kingdom of information’ that they will be given the simplest of ‘information’ over the phone, because this is another ritualistic ‘game’ in which the ‘applicant’ will immediately run up against carefully constructed procedural stonewall defences. 

These stonewalls are built on an unexplained paranoia which grips Fire Authorities when it seems necessary to ‘protect’, from divulgence, any information from the Taxpayers and especially its own former employees now retired, who all put it there in the first place.

Perhaps this phobia is the ‘establishment’s last remnant of WWII when apparently the ‘walls had ears’?

In this ‘game’ a routine request is placed before a series of stonewalls which are deliberately constructed to be scaled by the information seeker.

The ‘principle’ of this obstruction is based on time and frustration. An Authority has 20 lawful days in which to confirm that it has the information sought and to formally respond; not 20 days to ‘think’ about it.

This request then deliberately sits on a desk in-tray in a queue for 20 days or more, primarily as budget justification for the high salary posts it supports.

When ultimately, it is refused on this or that well practiced spurious pretext, the hope is that the seeker of truth will simply get bored, frustrated, and go away.

Mix in the natural incompetence of a local authority, and the ‘information’ remains hidden, or if you prefer in their speak ‘protected’ as they intend; though it is never made clear ‘protected’ from what or whom?

This ‘game’ which is the ultimate ‘clerk smirk’, is operated  by those who can best be described as overpaid ‘kingdom building’ bureaucratic nonentities without a vestige of common-sense(a prequalification of course )given ‘power’ which they regularly enjoy abusing to the detriment of all, simply because they can.

This is a particularly bizarre example of this genre involving a failed routine attempt under the Scottish FOIA to obtain simple information on the expenses of Board members of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service.

Recently the Bugler published  the expensive ‘running’ costs of 25 Councillors on the Lancashire CFA managing 1000 ‘uniforms’ compared to their counterparts of 12 Board Members of the Scottish Fire & Rescue Service who are managing 8000 ‘uniforms’. The Editor tried for several months to obtain this basic information by phone from the SFRS, calls and messages were never returned.

Finally, the Bugler submitted a written FOIA request. It was duly acknowledged on the 9^th April 2014 by the SFRS  ‘data governance team’, behind the first bureaucratic stonewall, who confirmed that the SFRS would deliver an answer within 20 Statutory days from the ‘data protection manager’s bunker, sheltering behind her second stonewall. This was the usual two stonewalls of ‘clerk smirk’; the use of the word ‘protection’ has interesting connotations.

No Authority ever uses a supplied call back number to release the simplest of information sought. One wonders what these overpaid ‘protection’ managers do all day?

On Friday 11^th July 2014 the Bugler received a refusal to disclose, 94 days after the acknowledgement of the receipt of the request. So much for Scottish law, 20 Statutory days, and the SFRS compliance with it.

Now, if possible, to unravel this ‘refusal’…chocolate teapots and Alice in Wonderland to the fore…

The SFRS, in one of the more creatively bizarre convoluted refusals the Editor has ever experienced, and he has experienced the gamut , Ms.Haddow protects her information by firstly arguing that the information sought is legally exempted from release because the proposed date for blanket publication of this information would fall within 12 weeks (in the remainder of the UK this calculates as 7X12= 84 days) of  the Bugler’s request for this information; which we all know was confirmed on the 9^th April 2014 plus 84 days, making the additional 12 weeks the 1^st July 2014.

Now allowing for the fact that many a ‘mickle makes a muckle’, and as far as the Editor knows from his own Scottish forebears and from Mary Somerville, their esteemed mathematician, it has never yet been possible to make 84 days(to the 1^st July 2014) into 94 days(to the 11^th of July 2014) and one is left completely bemused  with this statement.

However, Ms. Haddow then goes on in even more convoluted  corporate paranoia to inform the Bugler that this ‘information will be published in August but fails to supply a date or where it might be found ?

Next, dare we say it, Ms. Haddow addresses  the matter of the ‘public interest test’. Ms. Haddow and the SFRS have decided that the Public are not interested in how they spend their Taxpayers money. She states thus…

  The public interest test is ‘something which is of serious concern and benefit to the public’ and not merely something of interest to an individual. It is the view of SFRS that there is an absence of any public interest factors as the information will be published proactively within 12 weeks.

One surely must firstly ask the question that if the Public are not interested, why publish the audit accounts at all, and secondly, if it was to be proactively published within 12 weeks of the Bugler’s request, which brings it to, at the latest, 1^st July 2014, why was it not released to the Bugler because this date has now passed or at least it has south of the border?

Dear Reader… does a double negative still make a positive, assuming you have not lost the plot by now?

Finally, and eventually, the Bugler arrives at the 3^rd stonewall, called pre-emptive cover up. Should the Bugler be  minded to challenge this diatribe of tripe then Ms.Haddow’s colleagues will defend her position, in more deliberate time wasting, as they carry out  a ‘review’ of her decisions which might take them 6 months…

When in deceit and/or cover up one gets this clever, or stupid, the applicant can be forgiven for either giving up or deciding to probe even deeper because there is something seriously amiss about this extraordinary refusal. What is it they are attempting to hide?

Could it be that the SFRS audited accounts are so sensitive to anticipated Public criticism that they are choosing the 18^th of September 2014 Independence Referendum Day to publish them so that they are buried in the welter of a politically news. What other conclusion can there be, because if so, then they are attempting to deceive the entire Scottish taxpaying electorate…

Nevertheless the cynical point remains that the SFRS by a series of manipulative devious abuses of due legal processes and assumptions, all of  which they could not actually get right, means that the SFRS have continued to retain their  ‘information’, whether or not it is of any actual importance to the Bugler, by setting the finest example yet of clerk smirk, which if it confirms anything, is embarrassing SFRS paranoid secrecy of the most bizarre kind.

In this prime example of a simple FOIA request the Public has seen the SFRS quite incapable of following the law; an SFRS which does not hesitate to flagrantly breach the 20 day rule of Scottish law which like their English counterparts, they have not the slightest regard for; whilst providing ‘work’ and high paid salaries for this ‘governance team’ and their ‘protection manager’ for a period of at least 129 days for what is clearly an over worked group of SFRS employees, or are they?

Interpretation of their simple reference system indicates that the Bugler’s request was the 69^th in 2014 thus this stonewalling department receives an average of 1.4 requests per calendar day which would be unlikely to stretch even a part-time smirk clerk would it? To say nothing of value for money, or the actual cost to the local Taxpayer of this ‘governance team’?

Fortunately the Internet was created  with an interlinking cell structure which was designed to bypass all obstructions both digital and clerk smirk and thus ‘information’ can still be obtained. All it takes is time(less than 20 days) and patient probing; it is ‘out there’; and can be found, as experience in probing and the following example confirms.

A single phone call on the 10^th April 2014(the day following the lodging of the FOIA request to the SFRS) to ‘Audit Scotland’ produced a copy of the then current audited accounts of the SFRS by immediate return and the expenses of the SFRS Board was found on the page 3 of the accounts and all published by the Bugler the same day.

So this is a typical working example of simple unwillingness to comply with the law in either word, and more importantly, spirit.

It is not the actual error, maladministration, or malfeasance which gives the greatest offence it is the dual affront of an intellectually insulting blatant cover up which Fire Authorities and their servants then assume that a person of average intelligence cannot actually figure out for themselves what they are all up to.

To read the refusal notice. Go here.

All this provides no encouragement to any supporter of transparent democracy who understood, up to this point, that the FOIAs of both England and Scotland were enacted by their respective Parliaments to help Taxpayers obtain information which they have a right to seek and hold.

Pragmatically ‘Asking Question’ under the FOIA is quite simple. See ‘Asking Questions – Chapter’ and the quick use of this site https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/ (highly recommended) which does all the donkey work completely in the public view of accountability.

A FSV asks his Fire Authority a Question and will receive a refusal or a censored/limited information reply. Either way, the response should be treated with interrogative suspicion because it is what is not in the reply or is fudged/flannelled/stonewalled/or blarneyed which is usually more interesting. Always look for what is not there, rather than what is…

If dissatisfied, and the FSV writes so, then the latest stunt by the Fire Authorities is to offer a ‘review’. There is no basis for this in law because the ‘reviewers’ will undoubtedly be the self-same persons who refused your Request in the first instance, and in the Scottish example above and the Lancashire examples on the website just recommended it is the usual weapon of stonewalling by time wasting. Just ignore this nonsense and take it forward to the ICO that is what we the Taxpayers pay them for.

It is therefore inevitable that an unrequited seeker of truth, after quickly exhausting the Fire Authority approach, will find himself at the Information Commissioner’s Office door. Unfortunately most complainants who approach an Information Commissioner, having been pointed there by a smirk clerk(a legal requirement), either with a problem concerning an FOIA or subject data request have sadly misplaced high expectations from him, but then, from their prior experience these smirk clerks know how ‘toothless’ the ICO really is, and have little fear of repercussions .

This Act is supposedly ‘policed’ and currently ‘enforced’ by Information Commissioner Graham and his Office(ICO) for England and Wales. Go Here.

It is an unquestionable fact that Information Commissioner Graham allows these smirk clerks and their organisations to misbehave in such an unsupervised, intolerable, and insufferable manner in which they end their emails with a gratuitous insult, which is to give the false impression that they are ever eager to help in the transparent release of ‘information’, when nothing could be further from the truth?

Then, adding insult to injury, when Commissioner Graham is pressed for action and  asked what he intends doing about this atrocious state of affairs he uses the very weapon that these ‘smirk clerks’ use as a final stop gap in resisting the pressures of such persons as disabled FSVs, Graham, like them, then accuses the determined questioner of being ‘vexatious’ or tiresome another handy legal fig leaf for him to hide his organisation’s inadequacies behind.

The simple question still is, and remains, why has Information Commissioner Graham failed to use his Statutory powers to call them to account, powers he asked for?

Some years ago when Commissioner Graham took office, he took office on the basis that he had no legal teeth and that his Office lacked prosecutorial powers to enforce the Acts he is responsible for(Including God save us all-information on the Environment) and indeed that was true. But in short Parliamentary measure, responding to his appeal Parliament(us)  provided him with those Statutory ‘teeth’ but look what he did with them for the ‘man in the street’ – absolutely nothing.

Usually the Commissioner’s post is occupied by a former member of the media and because this is so it seems that the ethos of pursuing headline grabbing news is never very far from his self-promoting, job-securing,  thoughts. When these misanthropic headlines are self-created they satisfy Parliament that Commissioner Graham and his associates are on the ball and are about their weighty business of protecting confidentiality and prosecuting the wayward. This successful and deliberately misleading strategy is shaped to draw Parliament and the Taxpayer’s attention away from their huge expenditure set against their threadbare results column in their balance sheet.

Commissioner Graham leads an organisation (a quango), principally based in Cheshire, and  claims that his organisation is allegedly ‘independent’ from government, which is of course a fatuous nonsensical statement which simply does not withstand simple Trading Standards scrutiny, if it applied.

Because as Commissioner Graham and his staff know only too well they are all employed as Civil Servants by the Civil Service under Civil Service rules with potential Civil Service pensions; conduct which includes a requirement that they act  in accordance with the current edition of the ‘Civil Service Code of Conduct’ in matters of honesty and transparency.

Commissioner  Graham reports to Parliament under the overarching Ministry of Justice and is subject to examination by the Justice Select Committee of the House of Commons whilst purporting to be the champion of the proletariat (the commoners if you like) in all matters relating to ‘protecting’ or obtaining ‘information’.

If, Commissioner  Graham truly believed that he was ‘independent’ of government then surely his Office ought  to be privatised and made to pay its own way and then we might see how successful his ‘independent’ business might be?

The actual fact is that we the ‘commoners’,  the Taxpayer, last year paid Commissioner Graham and his civil servants’ salaries the handsome sum of  ‘about’ $12mil of the total £20

mil for the privilege of managing an organisation with a current staff of 388 which produces depressingly little in the way of solid results for those whom it was created to serve, though you would not believe it if you read the trumpeting of ‘successes’ with which he justifies his existence, to himself and Parliament.

It seems that self-aggrandisement is not yet dead at ‘independent’ quangos, including the ICO.

Here is a taste of smug, third person, self-praise…

“But what is most pleasing is the Committee’s recognition of what has been achieved in bringing the Freedom of Information caseload under control, despite falling grant-in-aid funding and growing numbers of complaints. The picture that emerges is of a regulator that is delivering, that is relevant, and that is efficient. There are challenges ahead, but we’re in good shape, and that is reason to feel positive about the future.

Christopher Graham
Information Commissioner
21 March 2013”

Well actually you are not in ‘good shape’ Commissioner.

You preside over what can at best be described as an ‘organisation’ which is not ‘delivering’ in the real world on the executive task set by Parliament; is not ‘relevant’ to its task in hand; and is far from ‘efficient’ having, as you alluded to, managerially collapsed under its case load because of a high turnover of staff who were driven out  by poor management at all levels and where initiative and enthusiasm were discouraged by a stultified middle and upper management who really had no idea what it was about and were loath to take the initiative in pursuing and enforcing Regulations against  those who were blatantly, in non-compliance with the Acts. Acts you are meant to enforce, whilst Local Authorities including Fire Authorities continue to thumb their noses at you.

Is this what you describe as ‘good shape’?

In this quote you are seeking to mislead by ‘spinning’ the truth to make it look as though that in spite of falling funding you were successful in doing your heroic best in imposed circumstances beyond your control, all of which is simply more arrant nonsense.

It is little wonder that the staff turnover was high, because in addition to shambolic management, if we are to believe the 2013/14 ICO Internal Audit Pay and Pensions Review, the Commissioner could not even manage his own Payroll or Pension Scheme robustly, leading to, it seems, paying staff who were no longer in its employ and furthermore, quite ironically, to the maladministration of a pension scheme which was a complete shambles.

Ironically the very reason that disabled Fire Service Veterans had complained to Commissioner Graham in the first place to obtain their own pension documents from Fire Authorities to prove the shambolic maladministered state of their own pension Schemes which he failed to deliver…

            “Payroll

 The ICO may not have robust controls (including appropriate segregation of duties and authorisations) in place and operating regarding adding, amending or removing staff from the payroll;

Controls may not include appropriate arrangements to check changes to standing data or flexible amounts prior to their communication to Capita for processing or reconciliation of changes made once processed; and the ICO may not have appropriate arrangements to monitor the payroll.

            Pensions

 The ICO may not have robust controls in place and operating regarding the enrolment of staff pension  schemes and the application of selections to the payroll; and Amendments to pension scheme selections (including leavers), and any impact on payroll deductions   may not be applied correctly.”

Commissioner Graham’s solution to this catastrophic management failure was self-serving. He cynically went for the easy option of the ‘headline grabber’ and simply ‘binned’, by hand wringing obfuscation, the mass of requests from those like disabled FSVs who counted for little in the self-publicising  job-preserving stakes which interested him, but who were counting on him to force recalcitrant Fire Authorities to release to them the information which they pay Commissioner Graham  to champion on their behalf…

This was of course a well practiced piece of  ‘management expertise’ which the BBC would have been proud of in their former employee protege Commissioner Graham who used a purely cynical exercise in self-preserving  self-justification to annually select a ‘target’ offending organisation, generally one which has not the legal resources to stand up for itself, and which he then makes an example of in an easy ‘road kill’ operation ensuring of course that his media office feeds this outstanding and vigilant success story to his chums at the media, most particularly the BBC.

This methodology used to be described by way of an old adage which states that once you  ‘get the name of a good worker you can lie abed all day’.

All this contemptible political posturing is far from the truth and reality for the ‘man in the street’ who is simply desirous of using the service he pays for and expects to promptly receive.

On the 17^th October 2014 the Bugler sent an open email to the ICO copied directly to Information Commissioner Graham. No reply was received. Go here.

On Monday morning 24^th November the Bugler obtained the Information Commissioner’s direct to desk telephone number and in his absence spoke to his PA.

The Bugler required a call back from the Commissioner, or one of his Assistants, to finally deal with the stonewalling and perpetual breach of the Data Protection Act 1998 by the LFRS failing to release the Personal Record Files of the disabled FSVs and Widows who had applied for them to check their own pension records.

Failing this the Bugler indicated the intention of taking the affair direct to the Permanent Secretary at the Justice Select Committee of Parliament, which remains.

On Tuesday the 25^th November 2014 at 11.49hrs, failing a response, the Bugler left a further message .

On Wednesday 26^th November @11:27hrs, once more.

On Wednesday @12:32hrs M. Andy Laing, Head of Performance Improvement, which has failed for 8 years to ‘perform’ with this issue rang to confirm and accept the abysmal failures of his department, and in general, of the Information Commissioner; his ‘managers; and staff(with two one exceptions – Ms Hargreaves – Ms Egerton).

Mr.Laing indicated his ‘enthusiasm’ for getting to grip with this appalling state of affairs and indicated a prompt course of action which he intended to pursue against the LFRS by sending his staff on a fact finding mission to the LFRS.

In a quid pro quo the Bugler volunteered, that pending the completion of this action, the Bugler would not published the article entitled “ A Litany of Dismal Failures”.Go here.

This action by the ICO, given 6 years of calculated breaches of the Statute law by the LFRS and its servant Lee Gardiner, must surely include specific action against Gardiner who has special responsibilities in law as the direct Data Controller of the LFRS, and nothing less than a punitive and exemplary fine against the Lancashire Combined Fire Authority will suffice to dissuade other Fire Authorities from contemplating such stonewalling perpetual breaches of the law and more importantly restore public trust in the integrity of the ICO.

Mr. Laing gave an undertaking that he would act promptly and with determination and that he would regularly report his progress to the Bugler for publication.

It is extremely rare for any Firefighters to seek refuge from any situation they face but on this occasion they sought refuge with the ICO as the only organisation which they could envisage would have the necessary powers in law to bring this aberrant abomination of public misconduct by the LFRS to an immediate close.

The Lancashire disabled Fire Service Veterans have felt betrayed, obstructed, and deliberately frustrated by so called ICO managers including  Mr.White a subordinate of Mr. Laing, no man can yet serve two masters….

The disabled FSVs will watch with wary interest…

In the meantime there arises the small matter of a Triennial Review of the ICO required by Parliament and more importantly the Taxpayer and their £20 million expenditure.

Once more it is accounting time for Commissioner Graham. When this self-examination ‘review’ is complete he can, perhaps, lie abed all day for the next 3 years…

Lying on Commissioner Graham’s desk on the 25^th November 2014 gathering dust for the last 6 years are files upon files of Complaints which are extremely important to the disabled Fire Service Veterans, their Widows, and families of Lancashire.

Commissioner Graham has simply failed on his watch to address and resolve a single complaint, or to take punitive action against both the LFRS and Lancashire County Council who have smirked and ‘seen off’ his feeble organisation for all this time, and he was quite content to allow this complete failure to continue…

This is the public disgrace of an organisation which Commissioner Graham heads and which we the taxpayers spend £20mil per year. If this was a private business with a proper board of directors, not a group of under worked social ‘do gooders’ Graham would have been fired long ago, and rightly so.

On the 25^th November 2014 whilst Mr. Laing was giving the Editor of the Bugler assurances that he would work enthusiastically, and we assume tirelessly, at ‘putting matters right’ at the LFRS his ‘boss’ Graham was announcing the following…

“The ICO has issued the following statement in response to the Ministry of Justice’s announcement of a triennial review of the Information Commissioner’s Office. Triennial reviews are part of the Government’s commitment to making sure that non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs) continue to have regular independent challenge. The review will identify and examine the key functions of the Information Commissioner’s Office and consider how best the functions can be delivered, including whether they should continue to exist at arm’s length from Government.

Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said:

“I am confident that the ICO has a good story to tell – very much at the centre of events around information rights. But we must always listen to our stakeholders and we can always learn from the best. I look forward to exploring the best ways of delivering information rights for citizens and consumers, while working with organisations and businesses to meet statutory obligations efficiently and effectively.”

“I urge all those with an interest in information rights and the ICO to contribute to the Ministry of Justice’s consultation.”

One wonders, in his enthusiasm for the task ahead with the LFRS why Mr. Laing, if only in passing, failed to mention this public announcement on this day? Perhaps the announcement lent wings to his feet? We shall see…

For a former member of the BBC, Commissioner Graham has a quaint way of putting things, “a good story to tell”…

Frankly Commissioner Graham that is what concerns us all.

We are not actually interested in your ‘good story’ line, but we are all interested in what positive results our annual £20million pounds bought and what you achieved, and from our perspective having expended, in the time span of your 8 years of failure, £160million pounds to maintain your organisation, aside from perpetual frustration and failure, what  you and your organisation have actually delivered to us, which is absolutely nothing.

And if you doubt that, ask one of our Widows who expended £2000 in Court fees to obtain her husband’s Personal Record Files which was paying you twice, once to support your salary, and a second time to do your job for you.

Then there is the small matter of listening to ‘our stakeholders’ and we presume at £20mil pa we would be a ‘stakeholder’. It is to be assumed that listening and delivering to your ‘stakeholders’ is one and the same and as for learning from the ‘best’ your comment rather escapes us because prior to these past 8 years under your command we naively thought you were the ‘best’? Forgive us if we continue to scratch our heads on that one.

“I look forward to exploring the best ways of delivering information rights for citizens and consumers”.

Is this not simply doing the job we pay Commissioner Graham  substantial amounts of money to do?

The question which must be asked is this triennial review to be carried out by Commissioner Graham on the dismal organisation he heads, or are is he to be independently scrutinised ? Because if the former  it draws the parallel of the old chestnut of turkeys voting for Xmas which they, and him, are unlikely to do…

If this is so then this is just another exercise in fatuous window dressing which looks mighty fine but contains no actual substance.

You can rest assured Commissioner that the disabled FSVs of Lancashire will be contributing to this review and the Bugler invites them to go here and do so.

Perhaps the first item on the agenda ought to be Commissioner Graham’s departure to pastures new?

Finally to the principal questions the Ministry of Justice  poses to the Public?

•The department states that the ICO will answer to an ‘independent challenge’.

Who exactly is the ‘independent’ challenger?

• How best the function can be delivered?

By the 3xE’s, Efficaciously; Effectively, and Economically delivering a prompt service the taxpayers demand and they have complete confidence in ;

• Should(ICO) continue to exist at arm’s length from Government?

The simple answer is no because it has failed to deliver its mandated Public service and terminally damaged the trust of its ‘customers’. It is also largely unaccountable to a remote Justice Department which is itself remote from the everyday ‘customers’ who are supposed to be served by the ICO.

This is an overly expensive, slow to deliver(if at all), front line Public service and should deliver to front line Public service standards. Its performance in this respect is quite atrocious.

A root and branch review is required.

In the meantime here is a suggested Xmas shopping list for Commissioner Graham:

• How long will it be before he takes punitive positive action against the LFRS to ensure the immediate delivery of Personal Record Files to disabled FSVs and their Widows who have been waiting 8 years now?

• How long does it take him to get the message from the LFRS that they do not think, they know, his organisation is toothless and feeble?;

• How long must the disabled FSVs and Public of Lancashire wait to view and examine the expenses of the former Chair CC O’Toole of the Lancashire Combined Fire Authority who remains under police investigation and Public scrutiny; and his former Chief Fire Officer Holland also?;

• How long must the disabled FSVs and public of Lancashire wait to view and examine the Public Complaints Book within which the personal dubious activities of CFO Holland are, or ought to have been, recorded?

It is upon such simple matters that his paymasters, the taxpaying Public, will reach a final judgement on him and his tenancy of office during this current Triennial Review.

Now that will be a ‘good story’ when it reaches its, one hopes,  independent conclusion.

To assist that conclusion having reviewed the Buglers extensive and complete archive dedicated exclusively to all the emails, bi-lateral letters the occasional Decision Notices and the fudged Tribunal it is probably best that the Bugler makes arrangements to copy all that material to the Justice Committee so that those  carrying out this Triennial Review  can have a close encounter with the reality which is simply light years from any pictures that Commissioner Graham might paint of his ‘successes’ to this Parliamentary Committee.

How may one ask does the Bugler know so much about Commissioner Graham and his ‘merrymen’ in ‘action’, an oxymoron if ever there was one ?

The Bugler’s first engagement with the ICO on this pension issue took place in January 2008.

The Bugler, unlike the ICO, has maintained a comprehensive and accurate archive of every communications sent or received from the ICO. It serves its purpose later as the Reader shall see…

It is the intention to transfer a copy of this Archive to researchers providing responses to the current Triennial Review of the Justice Select Committee of Parliament so that those Members of Parliament on the Committee can make determinations based on a current live example of Commissioner Graham’s  failure at ‘work’ and his failures for more than 6 years.

This Review determines whether or not the ICO is value for money for its current £20million expenditure of Taxpayers monies; whether or not Parliamentary monitoring should remain with the current Select Committee; or that this role( in the opinion of the Bugler) ought to be transferred to a more active and aggressive accounting Select Committee, for example, the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) which might give this quango a new direction by promoting and advancing a much more proactive upper management in a stultified organisation which is clearly failing to deliver to the man-in-the-street, the Taxpayer.

At an early point in the vain pursuit of the truth and naively anticipating the support of Commissioner Graham  the Bugler adopted a logical approach to obtaining ‘information’ based on a famous old legal case Compagnie Financière et Commerciale du Pacifique v. The Peruvian Guano Company (1882), sometimes called the Guano Paper Trail, which is obsolete case law and rule for the legal Discovery of documents which could be used to evidentially support a legal position in Court.

It is based on the logic that no action or interaction occurs between organisations in writing without leaving a paper trail or record(The Guano Trail) which, by the use of the FOIA od DPA, can be explored.

It is an interesting aside that when the word ‘quango’ is typed, which is what the civil service staffed ICO is, Word® spellchecker comes up with the correction ‘guano’, perhaps the spell checker knows more about the ICO’s capability than the Taxpayers’ do?

The OED defines ‘guano’ as the phosphate deposits left by seabirds…

This Guano Rule insists that every document which might have relevant to the pursuit of the truth and may prove, or disprove, a particular point in litigation must be expressly revealed to opponents. This was to prevent the ‘selective’ release of information to the ‘other side’, a practice in bias which has now regressed to the point in UK Courts where once more the Courts allow this practice of ‘packing the jury’, or more accurately ‘packing the Judge’,  to become the common standard of today’s jurisprudence.

This is of course a blatant erosion of transparency and fair play and Courts by condoning and being complicit in assisting such bias in Justice brings themselves into disrepute and defeat the very objectives of a fair trial which should be based on transparent even-handedness and fair play.

The Bugler, and those we represent, have had substantial involvement with both the LFRS/LCC  and the ICO from early 2008 in seeking the release of ‘information’, so the facts expressed here are grounded on ample documentary evidence in the Bugler’s online libraries and offline archives, and of course the case Studies of FSVs both past and current.

These considered opinions simply confirm the existence of maliciously warped and abused FOIA/DPA ‘procedures’ which simply do not work beyond the first level of challenge, indeed, if they works at all.  Procedures which are not intended to work, nor allowed to work, simply because of repeated political interference by the vested interests of politicians and Parliament who discovered, too late, that the FOIA/DPA could be used against them in public accountability with the consequence that they then set out to repeatedly neuter the FOIA/DPA.

This neutering, led by warmongers like Blair, has drawn Commissioner Graham to conclude that it is not in his organisation’s Taxpayers’ based interest, or his future employment, to apply sanctions against these governmental smirk clerks and their departments, who regularly engage in such maliciously obstructive ‘games’, and as such tacit acceptance by Commissioner Graham of this negative practice has now become an unpublished secret ICO ‘policy’.

The Bugler’s ‘experience’ in the use of the ‘machinery’ of the FOIA/DPA should provide Readers with a practical snapshot of the efforts and results which the Bugler has engaged in over the period of the last 6 years in an attempt to obtain information from the various public Agencies associated with this pension dispute.

The commitment of these Agencies – aside from the idiocy of the  SFRS highlighted above- to the letter and spirit of the FOIA/DPA can best be summarised below, though it also seems that the response and efficiency varies with the effectiveness of individual tasked with dealing with a Request. This in ‘buggins turn’ is usually by an unqualified clerk of inconsequential capability.

It seems in practice that it rests with the seeker of the Truth to determinedly continue asking supplementary questions until the full dimension of the information sought is fully achieved.

Now to  Agencies modus operandii:

• Audit Commission –  always responded promptly and comprehensively but needed prompting latterly in respect of the dimension of the statistical information supplied;

• DCLG-Firefighters Pension Team – responded to what they were asked which was very limited; two months ago their rather flustered and belligerent senior press officer was asked for a departmental positional statement in response to the question why the Firefighters Pension Team was failing to implement the 2013 Public Service Pensions Act in respect of pension dispute resolution? The Bugler is not waiting with bated breath for a response…

• DWP – which is a surprisingly transparent organisation, responded promptly, and comprehensively releasing their entire bilateral correspondence(which the Bugler will publish later) on the subject of the pension dispute with the LFRS/LCC who, in an experiment by the Bugler, then asked the LCC for their ‘half’ of the correspondence which they promptly denied existed, until sent a copy by the Bugler;

• LCC – Information Requests went repeatedly unacknowledged, unanswered and ignored, even those placed face-to-face through the then Leader of the County Council CC Driver. When eventually Requests were responded to, the LCC routinely engaged in falsehood; wilful obstruction; economy of truth; playing with words; or claiming ‘vexation’ when the Requests were firmly pursued; a spurious claim which Commissioner Graham accepted and incongruously supported, in spite of perversely having placed the LCC on his Monitoring List for 3 months for the LCC’s persistent failure to comply with the relevant Acts. For endemic Secrecy and cover up by all the usual suspects. Go Here.

• Information Commissioner’s Office – responded to initial phone enquiries immediately without the Bugler having to use formal requests but later when Commissioner Graham was asked why he was failing to issue Enforcement Notices against  the LCC and the LFRS based on their self-evident non-compliance with the law(accompanied with the usual disdainful arrogant attitude), Commissioner Graham refused to budge and when pressed further, in self-protection, then covered up his lassitude and managerial ineptitude by ‘circling the wagons’, which simply confirmed his expensive organisation’s uselessness.

Can Commissioner Graham or his organisation get more inconsistent or embarrassingly incompetent that this? Indeed he can, read on.

• Local Government Association – unhelpful on such mundane matters as Annual Pay increases until formal FOIA Requests used –  then reluctant and slow until ultimately the final Request was ignored. One wonders why the Fire Service employers would be reluctant to release pay to rank salary scales? Is this just more endemic institutionalised secrecy of the mundane?

• LFRS – This was the LFRS’s first response from their in-house LFRS solicitor A. Harold( well known to the Bugler Readership)  to the Bugler’s first FOIA Request on the 7^th February 2008 “Your requests for information under either the Freedom of Information Act  or the Data Protection Act are not regarded as legitimate and thus will not be complied with.”.

How would Harold know these Requests were not ‘legitimate’? Based on his abrupt response Harold would have to know or be familiar with this legislation and self-evidently he did not which simply displayed his abysmal ignorance of the FOIA/ DPA. A response which set the tone for the future stonewall blanket refusal to release any information of any description unless forced to by Court Orders under Procedure and Rules.

Go Here.

It was clear to the LFRS at a very early point that Commissioner Graham had not the heart to either enforce the laws he was responsible for, or the intention of becoming involved in carrying out the very task he and his civil servant staff are handsomely rewarded for.

But why did the LFRS ‘painted themselves into a corner’ at such an early point in this dispute?

The answer is very simple – secrecy.

The LFRS and their pension contractor the LCC PS did indeed have many secrets of scandalous pension maladministration to keep from the prying eyes of Lancashire Pension Scheme Members and the Taxpayers. Secrets which will draw not only draw Public censure but will in time lead to the  dismissal of those pension managers who are responsible, ironically leading to the loss/freezing of their own pensions.

But what were these secrets?

Put simply, pension maladministration on a scandalous and monumental scale which involved not only Fire Service Pensions, but which included a wide range of other unrelated Schemes, including Local Authority employees and the Police. Maladministration which the Audit Commission was to confirm within Lancashire in two consecutive bi-annual checks by its National Fraud Initiative sub-department which in the first check revealed 2,215 errors in the LCC Pensions Services.

Errors which not only involved scandalous failures to retain proper individual pension records in LFRS Personal Record Files and other unrelated Schemes, but which led to the bizarre situation of paying the dead whereby deceased Scheme Members right across the board of Schemes managed by Lister and Wisdom received pension payments but also other errors involving alleged substantial overpayments(£65k) and underpayments (£50k).

Underpayments(which ought to have included compound interest on repayment, but did not) which, though recognised by pension managers Warren and Lister, have yet to be publicly declared – another major secret which will be the subject of an expose on these statistical and actual failures by the managers involved and how they routinely misled their monitoring County Councillors, one of whom, CC De Molfetta, is ironically the current Chair of Lancashire Fire Authority with his very own pension debacle.

From the inception of the first Request to the ICO and for the following 6  years to date these blatant, blanket, stonewalling refusals in complicity between the LCC PS and the LFRS in their joint determination not to comply with the two relevant Acts in any shape or form in releasing any information to a range of FSV enquirers has, to date, remained unaddressed by Commissioner Graham in spite of constant reminders that he ought to carry out his Statutory Parliamentary duty to the Taxpaying Electorate.

Commissioner Graham has an absurd approach to recalcitrant Local Authorities in that he likes to persuade them into Statutory compliance. The question he fails to answer is what does he do, if anything, when as in this case

two Lancashire local authorities steadfastly rebuff Statutory compliance or his legally toothless blandishments?

This appalling states of affairs which is a matter of public record was repeatedly drawn to the attention of  Commissioner Graham who, to date, has taken NO positive enforcement action of any description to make the LFRS/LCC comply with any single Act he is responsible for enforcing.

For his information and one hopes his positive interest the numbers of Requests and the correspondence engaged in over a 6 year period created the following administrative statistics:

• Bugler to ICO-LCC-LFRS-DWP-104 files and archived letters;

• Bugler to ICO – at ICO request for copies of all relevant files involving FOIA – 138- Action-0;

• ICO to Bugler – 65. Assessment – 1; Action – 0.

• LCC to Bugler – 25. Action – 1(after the embarrassing receipt of their own correspondence with the DWP supplied by the Bugler);

• LFRS to Bugler – 19. All refusing information Requests with the exception of Court enforced decisions.

• CFA to Bugler – 0; 

So in an overview taking into account the huge efforts expended and the long time frame of deliberate obstruction in pursuing the Truth what was actually achieved by the Bugler?

• The release of information of the interaction between the LCC PS and the DWP which simply confirmed the disarray on a scandalous scales of the ineptitude of the LCC Pensions Service, the LFRS pension contractor, and the complete lack of pension management involvement by  the LFRS and Mr.Warren who holds the Statutory responsibility for the Lancashire Fire Pension Scheme;

• An Assessment by Commissioner Graham that the Personal Record Files of all Fire Pension Scheme Members in Lancashire was held in a ‘system’ which permitted their immediate retrieval and thus their immediate release to those FSVs who desired a copy, but with which the LFRS failed to comply and Commissioner Graham failed to enforce;

• Two wrist slappings by Commissioner Graham on the LCC and the LFRS for lack of Statutory compliance but when pressed to issue Enforcement Notices – excuse upon excuses- and no Enforcement Notices were ever issued;

• The ultimate grotesque act of Commissioner Graham was to ‘convict’ the Bugler of being vexatious, when the Editor refused to take no for an answer, in defence of the very organisations, namely the LCC and the LFRS which Commissioner Graham himself had stated were not in Statutory compliance with the Acts he enforces.

These statistics present an negative graph, an overview, of Commissioner Graham’s organisational failures. There were of course bizarre peaks and troughs of exceptional failures by Commissioner Graham who is without doubt, in its brief history, the most inept Commissioner the ICO has ever had as its ‘leader’.

Now, if indeed further proof was needed of his professional ineptitude, a few examples of actual case studies.

Take the scandalously embarrassing matter for Commissioner Graham of the deliberately repeated failures of the LFRS to release Personal Record Files to disabled Fire Service Veterans even though he had determined in a formal Assessment that they must do so ‘promptly’. This whole deceitful ‘game’, a game deeply involving Commissioner Graham and his ICO; the LCC; and the LFRS and can only be described as a public scandal on all their parts.

When the Bugler Editor brought a Complaint against the LFRS to Commissioner Graham attention, because the LFRS were stonewalling the release of his Personal Record Files from 2008 until 2013, it reached the point in late 2012 , as the LFRS intended,  that the Editor was unable to defend himself in Court because of the absence of these key documents; an absence  which ultimately led the LFRS into direct conflict with the Court, because of their contempt for it, whereupon they were ordered to release the PRF.

This forced release simply confirmed what the Bugler knew all along, that the PRF contained one single piece of paper a DWP pension record which spoke volumes for the supposed robust pension management by the LFRS and its contractor the LCC PS and in the process confirming the uselessness of Commissioner Graham.

Even then in the light of a Court decision, in effect doing his job for him, Commissioner Graham steadfastly and embarrassingly refused to take regulatory enforcement action, or action of any description, against the LFRS’s blatantly dismissive smirking attitude to him.

An LFRS, who at an early point detected Commissioner Graham and his  ICO’s collective lack of moral fibre and backbone thence proceeding regularly and gratuitously to insult Commissioner Graham’s very existence, as they continue to do so right to this present day.

When the Bugler took up the lack of action by Commissioner Graham and his failure to use his punitive enforcement powers which he sought and Parliament had given him he still refused to budge in fact he did nothing. Raising the question once more what is was exactly that we pay Commissioner Graham and his civil servant staff £20mil to do ?

Commissioner Graham’s does not head a transparent or honest organisation either, much as it criticises others for doing exactly what it does itself. Is there not an QED word for this? It is hypocrisy.

During contact with Commissioner Graham there were only two single caring junior persons in the whole 388 ICO civil service staff who cared enough to hazard their future by diligently pursuing the objective of the release to FSVs(one of whom was terminally ill and has now passed away) of their PRFs, a scandalous issue which continues today 6 years down the road where Lancashire disabled FSVs are still being denied their PRFs.

There is little doubt that Ms.Hargreaves and Ms Egerton will rue the day they engaged in their chivalric duty to bring these Personal Record Files into the possession of just two disabled Fire Service Veterans because undoubtedly their ‘career price’ will be rather expensive. Ms.Hargreaves and Ms Egerton  worked with personal integrity and  consciences, in spite of their line managers acquiescence to defeat/obstruction from the word go.

In the end because of the embarrassing failure of Commissioner Graham and his lazy and obstructive line managers Ms.Hargreaves was left with no option but to embarrassingly propose independent Court action to disabled FSVs which resulted in the Complaiants doing Commissioner Graham’s job for him as well as paying his salary. Nice non-work if you can get it, and Commissioner Graham certainly has.

Commissioner Graham’s public embarrassment was only brought to a conclusion by a terminally ill disabled FSV-WH(now deceased) who took the LFRS to Court at a personal cost of £2000.0, money his family could ill afford, to get a Court Order for Disclosure namely the release of his subject data(his Personal Record Files), in effect doing the job this FSV  and others Taxpayers  pay Commissioner Graham  £20mil to do.

The fully documented history which confirms this ‘game’ in all its galling splendour and the toothless Commissioner Graham ‘in action’ will be placed before the Justice Select Committee.

To this day in a continuous weeping sore of embarrassment for the ICO the LFRS continues its sneering stonewalling rejectionist attitude and remains aloof and unpunished by Commissioner Graham because of the complete failure of himself and his staff to do anything about this embarrassing situation.

The question remains why do we as Taxpayers spend  £20 mil a year on Commissioner Graham and his civil servants?

Perhaps when the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) formalises the report of its enquiry into the accountability of public bodies; including quangos; arms-length bodies; non-ministerial departments and executive agencies including Commissioner Graham and the ICO they may well produce interesting results for the disabled FSVs of Lancashire?

To ensure they do the Bugler has already made contact with a Lancashire MP on this Committee asking that this litany of incompetence, failure, and obfuscation by Commissioner Graham and the ICO be the subject to scrutiny by that Committee and that the Commissioner be directed to attend before the Committee to give his public accounting.

It is an established fact that Commissioner Graham chooses to bite the hand that feeds him, namely  the ‘man in the street’ because quite simply he does not produces headline grabbers for Commissioner Graham but there can be little doubt that if a publicity campaign was mounted to ask the ‘man in the street’ to supply such a campaign with their ‘experiences’ at the hands of Commissioner Graham and his ICO then the media  would simply be overwhelmed with an avalanche of disappointment.

Perhaps the 38 Degree campaign is the place where the disabled FSVs of Lancashire should seek support? Go Here.

It is time this ICO ‘organisation’ was properly scrutinised by its current Justice Select Committee by inviting Taxpayers as men-in-the-street , including disabled Fire Service Veterans to come before the Committee to express their actual experiences at the hands of Commissioner Graham.

Until there is a root and branch overhaul to determine what the purpose of the ICO is, commencing with the removal of Commissioner Graham, and a sea change in the positive use of regulatory enforcement which address the reasonable expectations of a vision which empathises with the man in the street’s view how the obtaining of Information in all its forms from public bodies should actually work there is little hope for this organisation .

Until recalcitrant organisations like the LFRS/LCC who currently know that they can continue with scandalous impunity to thumb their noses contemptuously at the likes of Commissioner Graham, a contempt which he richly deserves, there will be no public respect for the ICO as an organisation. The ICO must learn the old adage which is to speak softly but carry a very large stick which it will not hesitate to use it should the occasion, as now, demand it.

Finally if a Complainant continues to insist that Commissioner Graham does his job how then does he react?  He obscenely uses the very powers of prosecution and enforcement which he possesses and which he has failed to use against Local Authority law breakers against the Complainant couching it in the most abusive and personal language terms whilst interpreting the law as suits his fancy…

“The Commissioner has considered the five factors listed at paragraph 16 and finds that the first four are engaged to some degree. Having taken into account the context and history of the complainant’s dispute with LFRS, he is satisfied that the requests in this case would impose a significant burden upon the resources of LFRS and would have the effect  of disrupting the authority’s business and harassing or distressing the authority’s staff. The Commissioner also considers there is a strong indication that the persistence of the complainant’s campaign on the underlying matter of the pensions dispute has more recently developed into an obsessive and manifestly unreasonable campaign against the authority and individuals within the authority. For these reasons, the Commissioner finds that LFRS correctly applied section 14(1) of the Act in this case.”

And the author and LFRS corrupt  ‘friend’ at court?

None other than our Mr. Andrew White Group Manager in charge of Ms.Hargreaves and Ms.Egerton who is under the command of none other than our committed and enthusiastic Mr.Laing ICO Performance Manager both of whom seem to be quite clearly serving only one master, the question is who?

What an embarrassing and invidious position that those junior members of ICO staff who are trying to do their level best with a conscience find themselves between a rock and a hard place…

Finally, the Bugler can have little confidence in an embarrassing Justice Select Committee because at its last Triennial Review this entire matter was placed before the Committee on the 2nd November, 2011 and after receiving an acknowledgement nothing happened. Go Here.

It seems a prerequisite of ‘Performance’ at the ICO that the left hand should not know what the right hand in Commissioner Graham’s Office is doing.

Whilst Mr. Laing, Head of Performance,  was giving the Bugler an undertaking on the 26th November 2014 that he would send a team up to the LFRS to inspect their filing system in respect of disabled FSV-RRB’s complaint it would appear that this had already been accomplished without his knowledge on the 20^th  November 2014 by Ms.Egerton accompanied by two of her colleagues,  a lead case officer, and lead policy officer from the ICO’s policy department, all on a fact finding mission at the LFRS.

Or did in fact Mr.Laing know this?

It is a pity that Mr.Laing failed to remind us recently that both he and Mr. White have been deeply involved in the ICO’s failures since 2008, perhaps overly involved at a personal level? The Bugler’s accurate and retained archives can be a useful tool in reminding the ICO staff of their professionally failed roles in all these matters.

Currently they are dealing with one of disabled FSV-RBB issues which is that the LFRS have repeatedly obstructed him for the past 4 years from getting a copy of his Personal Records Files using the fatuous excuse that  his records are not held in a legally recognisably (relevant to the DPAct) filing system. What utter nonsense.

One wonders how they managed to find the two PRFs that the Courts ordered to be delivered up?

Once more it is the ICO’s conclusion that all PRFs held at the LFRS are held in a legally recognised filing system. But of course the ICO had made ‘Assessments’  at least twice before, but still the LFRS refused to release these PRFs and it is a reasonable conclusion that having painted themselves into the ‘No’ corner that on this occasion the LFRS once more refused, hence the need for the ‘fact finding mission’ to return to the ICO to see what they can do next?

The Question now is, Commissioner Graham’s having been given the Agincourt salute by the LFRS, what will he propose to do about it? The answer of course is to use the enforcement powers he was given at his request to simply take financially punitive action against the LFRS in the form of a fine.

But Commissioner Graham is a great fudger as he has demonstrated regularly before only this time the disabled FSV’s of Lancashire and other FRS nationwide can now watch a blow by blow accounts of his failures in process on the Bugler, as can indeed the members of the Justice Select Committee who are currently carrying out a Triennial Review on his efficacy and value for money at this moment…

Nevertheless Ms. Egerton is to be congratulated on this extraordinary initiative. Let us hope that one swift is not the harbinger of another failed Spring at the ICO but the fact she is leaving for higher things does this mean that her replacement Mr Naveed Malik (a lead case officer) who has been working on this case with her for a number of weeks nowwill allow the whole matter to go back to sleep. A recent call to him by the Editor ‘encouraged’ him not to take this easy option it is not a good career move…

But as Mr.Malik and his penultimate boss Mr. Laing are about to find out, if they have not already done so as a consequence of this ‘fact finding mission’  the obstruction and stonewalling of FSV-RRB’s is just the tip of the FOI/DPA iceberg which has lain dormant for the last 6 years because Commissioner Graham could not be bothered to do anything about it.

In fact as you will see when the Complainants got frustrated and a little insistent that he wake up and do something he did his level nasty best to bizarrely go so far as to obstruct the Complainants rights using his last weapon of refuge for the lazy which was to describe the Bugler and those he represented as ‘vexatious’.

This is what Ms. Egerton had to report to FSV-RRB. Go Here.

Why is disabled FSV-RRB so intent on obtaining his PRF? Firstly, he will discover, as others have done before him the simple confirmation that his PRF will contain little or no evidential documentation of value to legally support their claims and actions in ‘recovering’ monies from disabled FSVs which they alleged were due to them.  

Secondly, that the LFRS has failed to maintain a Statutory duty to him and other Lancashire FSVs, which was to record each and every transaction concerning his individual pension, particularly those changes reported to them by him, once more confirming that they have engaged in the mass maladministration over the preceding decades and have no legal grounds whatsoever for initiating the punitive actions which they have taken against him including sending him down Warren’s ‘hard route’ of penury.

The Scheme manager Mr. Warren is directly responsible in law for this debacle and when , as now, the game is up Warren and his louche chums should just hold their hands up and quit by joining Hamilton on the dole quque.

This ICO fact finding mission has re-raised an issue which the Bugler in an earlier Chapter on Commissioner Graham expressed comment on though at that time without the supporting evidence which this visit has now confirmed.

Consider this.  It is now confirmed that in secret Commissioner Graham operated an unpublished policy that after 2 years all old records of all Complaints(whether resolved, or active, or not) are automatically deleted. This is a curious business the implications of which need to be carefully studied from the standpoint of a Complainant seeking the assistance of the ICO and is a major issue which the Justice Committee’s Triennial Review ought to ‘Review’.

Consider This. Why was the decision taken to automatically delete Complaints after a period of 2 years? What or whose purpose would this hidden policy serve?

Consider This. What happens if a complaint has not be properly dealt in this two year period, which in any event is an extraordinarily long period which simply confirms the ICO’s incompetence as an organisation, and which, judging by the experience of the FSVs in Lancashire, is a regular occurrence ?

The answer – the Complaint is simply dumped by automatic deletion no doubt programmed into the ICO’s server. The embarrassing problem that then arises is what is to be

done when a group of determined Complainants come back to haunt them. Go here for email on lost files to Egerton

Consider this. Six years before in 2008 the Bugler made several formal Complaints to the ICO including that the LFRS were failing to release PRFs. All that was necessary for the ICO to do was is a little as possible, not difficult.

Later stating to the Complainant after an ‘on paper’ ‘Assessment’( that in spite of asking for and obtaining the powers to take any Complaint to enforcement) that this was all they were prepared to do and in effect telling the Complainant to go away empty handed which, by the time they jollied themselves along the 2 years had  elapsed, the Complainant will have already given up in frustration, and then to cap it all the whole Complaint would be auto dumped.

Consider This. Would this pathetic ‘action’ then be recorded by Commissioner Graham in his statistics as another one of his success stories? Would his graph of ‘success’ continue to rise and the backlog decline as a consequence of his hidden scandal?

Consider This. In this particular case, over the time span of 6 years, all Complaints against the LFRS and the LCC will have been deleted automatically at least once, if not three times.

Consider This. One must ask whose purpose this policy of ‘dumping’ by deletion serves? Because it most certainly does not serve the purpose of the Taxpayer /Complainant or the money they ‘invest’ in the ICO?

The answer – is that this secret hidden unpublished policy addressed the monumental backlog of Complaints which Commissioner Graham had failed to process because of his corporate managerial incompetence.

Consider This. Who took and authorised the final decision for automatic deletion after two years?

The answer – is that it can have been none other than Commissioner Graham himself.

Consider This. Who are the direct beneficiaries for such a policy?

The answer –  is that it can be none other than the Commissioner Graham who placed himself by this sleight of hand massaging of his own annual statistics in a position to scandalously  and fraudulently claim and report to Parliament via a duped Justice Select Committee that his organisation was making substantial inroads into the reducing the backlog of work, in spite of reducing budgets for his Office. Heroes to a man and woman…

Consider This. Who are the indirect and unforeseen consequential beneficiaries of this policy?

The answer – those organisation who are dedicated to non-compliance with the FOIA/DPActs. Here is an example using the LFRS.

One curiosity, which drew the attention of the Bugler over the preceding months, in the case of disabled FSV-RRB was why was the LFRS rehearsing and trotting out the same ‘defence’ in respect of their ‘filing system’ which they had been trotting out for the past 6 years? Surely they ought to know it had already been adjudicated on twice by ‘Assessment’ by the ICO and the County Court twice?

The LFRS can only have discovered, or most likely were soto voce informed by a senior member of the ICO’s staff, that if they stonewalled for this 2 years period that all historical records of all Complaints against them would be deleted at the ICO. Thus allowing them in this carousel of fraudulent complicity to, once more, advance the same ‘defence’ against the same Complaints virtually perpetually.

One wonders how many other organisations are also using this tactic provided by Commissioner Graham to deceitfully negate the purposes of the FOIA/DPActs?

Consider this. Commissioner Graham and his Head of Performance Mr.Laing are tasked with ensuring that where any organisation falls below its ‘performance’ in a repetitive failure to comply with the law then this is identified and the organisation is placed on the ‘monitoring’ list for 3 months but how can the ICO identify such a trend of failure if after every 2 years that organisation ,for example, the LFRS’s records are expunged/deleted/ dumped?

The answer – the ICO cannot detect such a trend and thus the professional law breakers such as the LFRS get away scot free whilst other companies decently struggle to comply. Is this particular duty of Commissioner Graham not one of the key stones for his existence – compliance?

Consider this. For the executive in the form of Commissioner Graham and his organisation to set out to deliberately subvert the will of Parliament and its Acts of law is more than an embarrassment it is quite simply scandalous criminality both corporate and individual fraud and a resigning matter.

Just in case Commissioner Graham claims later that he did not know, by reason of his deletion, the Bugler reminds him of those current live Requests on the relevant Act which rest with the LFRS:

•The LFRS continuing refusal, in non-compliance, to release Personal Record Files, which is live. Go here.;

• The LFRS continuing refusal, in support of both individual and corporate corruption, to release the public expenses records of County Councillor O’Toole of the CFA, which is live. Go Here. ;

• The LFRS continuing refusal, in support of both individual and corporate corruption, to release the public expenses records of the Government’s ‘Independent’ Fire Advisor to Junior Minister P.Mordaunt MP at the CLG, and former CFO of Lancashire, Mr. Peter Holland CBE, which is live;

• The LFRS continuing refusal, in support of both individual and corporate corruption, to release the contents of the Public Complaint Record Book as it relates to the logging of a personal Public Complaint at Preston Fire Station against CFO Holland for the sexual harassment of the Complainant’s mother, which is live. Go here.;

• The LFRS continuing refusal, in support of both individual and corporate corruption, to release the simple innocuous information on pension statistics which any reasonable Fire Authority would release as a matter of routine, which is live. Go Here.