Welcome to fixmycouncil.com, inspired by failures of governance at Bristol city council and the West of England Combined Authority. I have been a journalist for more than 40 years, starting at the Bristol Evening Post, a newspaper editor in Hong Kong and a senior business editor at The Sunday Times for a dozen years, and what I see makes me weep. We have millions of pounds of public money being overseen by people (OK, usually men) who can’t lie straight in bed. This blog will continue until I see some hope on the horizon, win the lottery or expire…
– Andrew Lynch
-
Peacock: You’ll never find out who hired Slocombe on £20k a month! (It was me. I just forgot I told scrutiny in July)
Stephen Peacock is in danger of looking like a clown. After “forgetting” the Grant Thornton report in January in order to protect his then political master Dan Norris, the chief executive of the West of England Combined Authority…
-
A Grant Thornton report that even Weca CEO Stephen Peacock will be able to remember
The auditors are presenting their annual interim report to the audit committee of the calamitous Weca. In January Stephen Peacock suffered a moment of forgetfulness about last year’s hugely critical report – as did the monitoring officer and…
-
What Weca’s cocked-up hirings reveal about its chief executive Stephen Peacock
A word-by-word analysis of Peacock’s surprise admission that he mishandled recruiting chums from Bristol city council on mega-pay and showing how he tried to blame everyone but himself – and the team that ran the process
-
Whistleblowers can’t trust the chair of scrutiny at the West of England Combined Authority
A whistleblower has put a cat among the Redcliff pigeons. It turns out that scrutiny chair Jerome Thomas could not be bothered to reply to the whistleblower despite fears that he and two other former officers were being…
-
Amnesia is catching at the top of the West of England Combined Authority
I have been having a wee stooshie with WECA after its CEO misled the scrutiny committee by pretending he had not heard of the report that is damning about the soon-to-be-no-longer mayor Dan Norris. It turns out that…
-
Norris’s swansong: it’s all about me …
Did I ever mention that I was a minister? At the West of England mayor’s last meeting he stuck to his self-obsessed playbook
-
In between taking calls, Norris channels his inner Trump
It’s the mayor’s last Q&A before councillors on the scrutiny committee
-
Just what did the chief executive of the West of England Combined Authority say?
It’s quite clear on the video here that West of England Combined Authority chief executive Stephen Peacock said he didn’t know what the Grant Thornton report (new readers: a critical document into behaviours under Mayor Dan Norris) was.…