Amnesia is catching at the top of the West of England Combined Authority 

Dear Jerome

Thank you for your response to my concerns over the West of England Combined Authority chief executive misleading the scrutiny committee on January 27.

I have decided to cc all the people I had originally cc’d in this conversation.

To your points:

Although the monitoring officer alone rejected my statement for March 7, it seems you were involved, which is dispiriting.   

You say that after Cllr Hodge’s question about the Grant Thornton report “the CEO did not recall what report was being referred to legitimately [my emphasis] needed to refresh his memory on the matter – I don’t believe that is misleading”. 

This is one of the most astounding things I have ever read. Presumably you expect me and others to believe it, which is profoundly insulting.

Do you seriously expect anyone to believe that an experienced and focused chief executive, who is paid a six-figure salary, could not remember the revised Grant Thornton report, the most significant report on the authority in its short history? 

Bearing in mind that:

The CEO very likely engaged with the report’s authors when he was running Bristol city council because they interviewed Bristol for its side of the story. 

The CEO and the monitoring officer were present at the audit committee meeting on September 9 when the Grant Thornton report was discussed for more than 40 minutes. The CEO seemed awake, flicked through the report and spoke to the committee. Feel free to watch that committee meeting on YouTube if you have not already done so.  

The CEO and the monitoring officer were present at the September 15 scrutiny meeting when Alison Streatfield-James secured the committee’s agreement to discuss the report.   

The CEO, as Democratic Services pointed out to me, is very well aware of the report. To quote from its March 7 (11.56am) email: “The statement as put in its current form is not acceptable as its content is both inaccurate and potentially defamatory in regard to comments made about individual officers. It is untrue to say that the CEO was unaware of the report.” 

So why would he momentarily forget what the Grant Thornton report was? Was he only unaware of the report during the January meeting?  

Presumably in January, the CEO had read the minutes of the September scrutiny meeting in front of him that were approved moments earlier. Would this have not helped his defective memory?

On his arrival at Weca, the CEO would have been aware that the report was being revised as his team were working on it with Grant Thornton.

If the CEO is seriously saying that he forgot what the Grant Thornton report was then he is again misleading you, the members of scrutiny and me as a member of the public.

Of course, it doesn’t end there. 

You as chair are now denying a failure of governance by saying that the decision not to discuss Grant Thornton was taken at a work planning meeting on October 17. You say that members of the committee were invited to attend. I suspect none did, or you might have said had they attended or mentioned who they were.

If a decision was taken at that meeting to overrule a committee decision to discuss the Grant Thornton report, where does that appear in the minutes? Nowhere. There are minutes, but not a word on a secret decision to overturn a committee agreement made in public. If it’s not in the minutes, it obviously didn’t happen.  

To say that no members objected when you belatedly sent round an email on February 24 is only evidence that members were presented with a fait accompli. 

At the January 27 meeting the CEO, the monitoring officer and you all had the chance to respond to Cllr Hodge when she asked about the Grant Thornton report.

Any of the three of you could have raised the work planning meeting where the decision was allegedly made to drop discussion of the report in January. 

I quote: “It was the case that none of us recalled the detail of the agreed process …” So the amnesia now seems to be collective – first the CEO can’t recall what the report is, then the CEO, the MO and the chair can’t recall that it had been decided to drop its discussion. 

I quote again: “a report that had been in the public domain for a considerable period of time and had been discussed at September’s audit committee”. That is all rather irrelevant but for the fact  that If this report is so well known, which I agree it is, why would the CEO “legitimately” (a strange choice of word, I might suggest) need to refresh his memory about it. 

When executives mislead boards, their positions become untenable. As I have shown, the positions of the  CEO and the MO of the authority are no longer tenable.

I don’t intend to continue this correspondence.

You have made your choices, which are to defend the indefensible actions/inactions of senior officers.

You have sought to protect the officers with a ludicrous defence that they are forgetful. Forgetful people should not be running authorities that are involved with budgets of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of pounds. 

I will also return to the committee to raise this subject.

I will make a complaint to the local government ombudsman about the actions/inactions of the CEO and the monitoring officer. 

I will write a report on this and send it to Carolyn Downs. I have bcc’d her into this.

I will write to my MP, Carla Denyer. And I will make a complaint to the Green Party about your role. As you are also my local councillor I will look at other methods of taking this issue forward.

It saddens me that you have chosen to take the position you have in the face of so much irrefutable evidence.

Yours sincerely
Andrew Lynch