Corporate Governance Committee Meeting 26th October 2011

The request was successful.

Dear Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council,

From information received about a corporate governance cabinet committee meeting on the 26th October 2011, the following was stated:

7.1 A vulnerable group of people with learning disabilities in the care of Wirral Council was abused by this Council over many years. It is imperative that the Council addresses all the weaknesses that contributed to this unacceptable outcome.

Questions:
Was anyone arrested and charged in connection with this abuse?
If not please provide the reason why?

Did any police officer have any involvement in investigating these offences?
If not, then why not?

Wirral Council must be aware of the names and positions of people within the Council and outside, who committed these heinous and utterly dispicable acts perpetrated against the most vulnerable in our society.

As the Council has admitted to this action, it should hold it's head in shame until such times as all perpetrators are behind bars.

Yours faithfully,

Arthur Hurworth

I. Sevova left an annotation ()

No and No basically Arthur. We know that the two senior officers responsible for this left the Council by mutual consent the day before the Klonowski report was published where they were named as the principle abusers. They were allowed to leave with massive pay offs of around 100k each and presumably good employment references.
Paul Cardin went to some effort to get the Council to reveal this info and so you should find the FOI response in Paul's requests.
When has Wirral Council ever sacked a senior,chief officer, or Director let alone involved the police?
Wirral Council has worked hard to get its 'most abusive' tag and it wont give it up easily!!

I. Sevova left an annotation ()

Here is the link for the FOI response;

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/da...

Arthur Hurworth left an annotation ()

Thanks for the comments, but if there was no police involvement, then their certainly should have been.
And yes WBC got its bad name for many reasons, but if they dont change their ways they will be keeping it.

Lets all hold our breath, and see where that gets us, possibly (LANDICAN CEMETARY).

I. Sevova left an annotation ()

Yes indeed, the grave will take us before Wirral Council turn over a new leaf and become "normal".

My theory is that now Wirral MBC and its powers that be, feel that they have well and truly crossed the Rubicon and they will never be able to develop a good reputation or rather be able to ditch their appalling one.

I honestly think they see this as a good thing because they can now do what they like as the way they're perceived can hardly get any worse so they they can keep abusing with impunity!

The Wirral MBC slogan should be "Proud to be Abnormal"

Dear Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council,

By law you should have responded to my freedom of information request by the 4th February 2013,
It appears eventhough you are being monitored by the information commissioners office, you still fail to answer within the lawful time scale.

Yours faithfully,

Arthur Hurworth

Dear Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council,
As you are blantantly breaching the FOIA by not responding to this request, I will forward it to the ICO for them to see how unwilling and unhelpful WBC is when responding to requests.

Yours faithfully,

Arthur Hurworth

InfoMgr, FinDMT, Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council

1 Attachment

Good Morning,

In response to your request for an internal review; please see text below
and also the attached document as our response to your enquiry.  I
apologise for the delay there has been in replying to you.

 

The information that you request belongs to the Police and therefore any
request should be directed to them.

 

For further information I would refer you to the AKA Report (publicly
available) and the follow up report by the Head of Safeguarding into the
specific issues regarding provider concerns (attached)

 

Kind regards and sent on behalf of

Tracy O'Hare

FOI Co-ordinator

Information Management

Wallasey Town Hall

Brighton Street
Wallasey
Wirral
CH44 8ED 

Tel: 0151 691 8397

 

[Wirral Borough Council request email]

 

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Martin Morton left an annotation ()

Well done Arthur (and thanks also to Wirral's FOI team) you have enabled the release of one of the most significant documents relating to investigations into my whistleblowing concerns.

As interested parties may recall there was public and media furore surrounding some of the findings in the AKA report published in January 2012 ( threats with baseball bats, allegations of rape and the circumstances surrounding the death of a vulnerable adult linked to an organisation identified in the report as a "criminal OCG who controlled the business at the time").OCG - stands for Organised Crime Group.

Despite the fact that the issue relating to the death was by far the most significant allegation I whistleblew about the matter only warranted a couple of lines in the AKA report and frankly not much more in the report attached to this FOI request.

However I am grateful that the report concludes "Witness 2 (that's me)considered that there could have been more done by way of care for the man and that it should have triggered a Serious Case Review/Critical Incident report by an independent person.The investigators agreed with this proposal and whilst that was open to the then Safeguarding Adults partnership in Wirral it was not instigated so that proper inter-agency practice could be scrutinised through an independent author".

There is much,much more to this particular case and is one of the main reasons why I will continue to challenge those who continue to minimise or deny the seriousness of the issues I raised in the public interest.

Regards & thanks,Martin