The Wall Of Silence RE: The Affairs of Selby Area Internal Drainage Board

Response to this request is long overdue. By law, under all circumstances, The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman should have responded by now (details). You can complain by requesting an internal review.

Dear The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman,

I note your response to my FOI requests and evidence. This is, however, the same reply as is now being given, and has been given for fourteen years now, by DEFRA, the District Auditor, the Local Government Ombudsman, the Home Office, the Attorney General’s Office, the Police, Selby District Council, Police and Crime Commissioner, Independent Police Complaints Commissioner, all Yorkshire MPs, Association of Drainage Authorities, Gang Master’s Licensing Authority, Committee of Standards in Public Life, the Inland Revenue, and all newspapers.

All of these bodies have had years to study evidence as sent to them by me over these fourteen years, and as sent in FOI form to you recently. All have refused to act in any way on this evidence, and all, as if as one, pretend that, because Selby IDB is a separate entity in law, not one of them may interfere with the internal affairs of the Board, no matter how the Board’s affairs are conducted. This, however, cannot be true, as it leaves the conduct of Board affairs without any checks or balances whatsoever.

Most of those whom I list above are public officers, whose first duty is to the truth. You who are public officers have all told me, in one way or another, that anything of Board business is not your business because it is enacted by a separate entity. Here, though, in order to establish an opinion, you necessarily needed to scrutinise evidence which shows that Selby IDB has not known of a large part of its own business from 1982 to the present date, and that this has resulted in the Board’s best workers being almost pauperised whilst the Board, as a legal entity, and, worst of all, the public at large, being entirely ignorant of any of this.

Even though you now know of all of this, you still place the Board’s and the public’s right to know the truth a very poor second to the weakest of arguments ie: that because the Board is a separate entity, anything else but “Hand wringing” is out of the question. According to you all, this is “Not our business” because “It is a matter between you and the Board alone.” This is rendered nonsense by the fact that I, as a servant of the Board, merely had my wage rates imposed by person or persons unknown, and the Board, as an entity, provably did not even know of my very existence during the time in question.

What you are all telling me is that every “Law and order” authority in the country, when repeatedly shown evidence of questionable conduct in the affairs of a public body, may not act in any way because they are rendered impotent by the mere fact of the entity being a public body. Surely, if evidence of murder was placed before you, it would be your bounden duty to inform the proper authorities? Alas, in the case of Selby IDB, and given the list of authorities as above, it appears as if no proper authority is left to inform.

Apart from being “In complete denial” of your own role re public accountability, every authority has sought to “Pass the buck” to some other authority, who, of course, does the same, leaving me with nowhere to go. Hence I say, to you all, you have now seen evidence of a very questionable nature. You have now formed an opinion re same. You have now refused to act for these many years. Will you now “Sort yourselves out” in that the gentlest of enquiries may be made by one of your number as to the answer to these questions, to be put to those who run the business of Selby IDB.

“What party authorised the treatment of the Board’s piece workers 82 to 03?” and “What party asked me to “Claim” between 2013 and 2015, to what does the “Claim” refer, and does it apply to all other workers also?”

Yours faithfully,

Paul Crooks

FOI Officer, The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman

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