---

Standards Board for England

I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to debate the Standards Board for England. For those hon. Members who have never come across it, let me say with great sincerity, "Lucky you!" The board is supposed to promote high ethical standards for local government, but in my experience it is an inefficient, expensive and woefully unfair outfit that should be confined to the history books as quickly as possible. The Standards Board was established on a whim of political correctness. The driving force behind it was that master of oratory, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, East (Mr. Prescott). He wanted local councillors to behave properly. That is a perfectly worthy goal, but the right hon. Gentleman could be clumsy; he loved to interfere in the natural order of things—and I suspect he still does. So instead of leaving it to the common sense of voters not to elect lunatics, or the common sense of the police to get involved when they had to, the right hon. Gentleman decided to reinvent the wheel. It was a triumph; the wheel was completely square. That is the sad story of the birth of the Standards Board. It was guaranteed to malfunction because it was designed by idiots. It has turned the act of complaining about councillors into a fabulous spectator sport. Imagine the centre court at Wimbledon where anyone can take a pot shot. That is the system the right hon. Gentleman created: "Complaints are free; why not make one now?" Several councillors from Bideford in north Devon are still under investigation because they want to scrap prayers before meetings to save time—hallelujah! Do we need to learn the lesson? Even in this place, where one would think we would all know better, the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) recently reported a Lib Dem councillor to the Standards Board for the appalling act of removing a petition from a local post office. Last year, there were 3,500 different complaints—one for every waking hour of every single day. We are getting this wrong. If there are too many complaints, the staff cannot handle them, which means more people have to be hired and everything slows down. There is only one thing worse than slow justice, and that is no justice. The Standards Board offers both in heaps. It has become an overblown, bureaucratic kangaroo court. It pretends to operate like the Old Bailey, but people should not expect a fair trial, or any help in defending themselves. The Standards Board has set new standards, and they come in at gutter height. I could illustrate this argument with any number of high profile cases, but I prefer to stick to the one I know best. It concerns a former Somerset county councillor called Paul Buchanan. Adjournment debate groupies may recognise his name—I am sure the Minister does. The case of Paul Buchanan has dragged on for more than two painful years. I have raised it in this House on several occasions. Paul Buchanan was deputy leader of Somerset council's Liberal Democrats. What happened to him speaks volumes about what is wrong with the Standards Board. The board was bamboozled and brow-beaten into investigating Paul Buchanan, and all because of one unscrupulous public official: the chief executive of Somerset county council, Mr. Alan Jones. On 4 April 2007, Alan Jones composed a six-page letter of complaint about Paul Buchanan and sent it to the Standards Board for England. It was the work of a deliberate assassin. Paul Buchanan was accused of secretiveness, undermining staff, aggression, threatening behaviour, rudeness, intimidation, anger, disrespect, fraud, sexism, racism, homophobia, and abuse of his office as an elected councillor; not bad for one man—he is almost unique. There is barely concealed hatred of the man in every sentence. Jones did not just want the Standards Board to investigate; he wanted an instant political execution. He asked for then councillor Paul Buchanan to be suspended there and then, but he did not get that. The jobsworths at the Standards Board might have been forgiven for thinking that Paul Buchanan was an unstable nutcase with homicidal tendencies. In fact, the really unstable and unsavoury character was, and is, the complainant: Somerset county council's most senior officer. However, wrongly—inexcusably—the Standards Board does not investigate complaints against officers; it cannot. That is another ridiculous gaping hole in its half-baked interpretation of justice. If anyone's local chief executive is caught bullying staff or paying off his mistress from public funds, the Standards Board will rightly say it is none of its business; it can only investigate councillors, and it was obliged, because of the rules, to launch a full-blown inquiry into Mr. Buchanan. Hundreds of interviews were conducted and thousands of pages of transcripts were churned off the printers, and when it rejected Alan Jones's first batch of complaints, he wasted extra time querying its decision. It was dealing with a deranged obsessive. The first investigator retired, exhausted, halfway through and lawyers came and went. Heaven knows what the cost is—we certainly do not. What was the result? Eventually, 16 of the original complaints were chucked out, four others were referred to a higher court, not a proper court, but another quango; a panel with the pomp of the legal system, but—I say this in this place—none of the fairness. That meant even more uncertainty for Paul Buchanan. The panel— with a new bench of barristers—finally met in Somerset, and I went along to watch this gladiatorial sport. Key witnesses were called, but few, if any, turned up—most, understandably, did not want to have anything to do with it. The panel upheld one tiny charge: the heinous charge for which Paul Buchanan should have been dragged out and hung was that he had been overheard swearing under his breath. Is that pathetic or was it the crime of the century? I shall let you decide that one, Mr. Deputy Speaker. What was really behind all this? Why on earth did a chief executive who was earning £160,000 year and who had 17,000 staff and huge responsibilities go to so much trouble to make complaints about what was seen as an ambitious councillor? Mr. Jones's explanation to the Standards Board was beyond belief; he said that Paul Buchanan's behaviour was""capable of damaging the council's continued improvement and external reputation"." Whoop-de-doo! That statement would stack up only if the charges against Mr. Buchanan were proved, but they were not and he was acquitted of everything serious, other than the crime of the century of swearing under his breath. We should recall what he was accused of: secretiveness, undermining staff, aggression, threatening behaviour, rudeness, intimidation, anger, disrespect, fraud, sexism, racism, and homophobia. He was probably accused of leaving the loo seat up too. This was simply a personal vendetta. So why did Jones want to "get" Buchanan and what had Buchanan "got" on Jones? I am sorry if that sounds conspiratorial, but there is a big hint of conspiracy in all this. Mr. Buchanan knew too much. Back in 2005, there was gossip about Alan Jones having an affair with a member of staff called Jenny Hastings. Everybody at county hall knew about this—it was no secret. What Buchanan did not know was that when the affair came to an end Ms Hastings made a serious complaint of sexual harassment against Alan Jones. That is, of course, a sackable offence, and rightly so. The complaint had to be dealt with by a confidential panel of elected members, including the lady who led the council at the time. Halfway through she was taken ill—legitimately so—and Paul Buchanan, the acting leader, took over but he was never told about the inquiry. It was Alan Jones who let the cat out of the bag and he came to plead with Mr. Buchanan to help, but Mr. Buchanan rightly told Mr. Jones that he would not and could not help—big mistake. Unfortunately, Alan Jones has a long memory and he bears grudges. By the time the leader returned to work it was deemed too dangerous to punish Jones by sacking him—that is perhaps just one of those quirks. Unfortunately, Jenny Hastings was threatening an industrial tribunal, which is a very public way of exposing the antics of her lover, and the Audit Commission was due to inspect the council. There is nothing like a five-star sex scandal to scupper one's chances of an excellent four-star rating, as they say in the best adverts. So, behind closed doors, and with the help of ACAS, a deal was signed to buy Ms Hastings off—that cost £140,000, which is slightly less than the annual pay cheque of the chief executive. Some very large extra payments indeed were made, and in the next couple of years millions of pounds were spent on mysterious "staff restructuring" at Somerset county council. I do not know the answer to this and I know that the Minister does not either, but I wonder, and we must speculate, whether any of that money helped to buy the silence of those who knew the gory details. Were they given a golden goodbye when they retired? Paul Buchanan continued as deputy leader, taking a particular interest in the projects that were close to the chief executive's heart, but Mr. Buchanan is no fool. He was apt to ask too many difficult and complicated questions. The Minister will know of my interest in the development of a joint venture company between Somerset county council, Avon and Somerset Police and IBM—it is well known. The outfit is called Southwest One and I am afraid that it has made a complete hash of things in the county. The computer system does not work, and it cannot place orders or pay bills, let alone—and most importantly—save money for the county. Southwest One is a nightmare, and is the product of Alan Jones's dream of radically improving services. That is why the incoming Conservative administration—we had great success down there—immediately announced a full inquiry a few weeks ago into the whole sorry mess. They did so independently. The Jones philosophy was "anything goes", which explains how he was able to hire the wife of the Avon and Somerset chief constable to set the thing up in the first place. Sue Barnes, the chief constable's wife, became the Somerset project director without a formal interview and her hubby, Colin Port, is now on the board of Southwest One. I ask the House—is that right? Paul Buchanan was involved in assessing the merits of the commercial bidders back in 2006. He was—let us remind ourselves—the deputy leader of the council, and he does know one or two things about business. He is a successful businessman. There were three rivals: Capita; British Telecom, for which Mr. Jones got a consultancy in Somerset; and IBM. With millions at stake, such companies spend fortunes polishing their bids. Guess what? They twitch if anybody speaks out of turn. I am sure that we have all had experience of that. On 12 February 2007, Sue Barnes went to London with Paul Buchanan to meet IBM. My sources in the industry told me at the time that IBM was badly rattled—it thought that it was going to lose the bid. It had heard rumours that Alan Jones had been singing the praises of BT at a late-night drinking session at a conference of chief executives. I forgot to mention that "Big Al" likes to unwind with a glass in his hand and, dare I say it, a pretty woman, but this time he was overheard, unfortunately for him. Sue Barnes and Paul Buchanan had to go and see IBM and to pour oil on troubled waters so that IBM did not walk away. Otherwise, the whole project would have gone belly up. I have no problem with procurement projects—neither have the Government or the Opposition. We all agree on that point. Within a day or two of that meeting, Jones's attitude to Buchanan changed. He set out to destroy this man's opportunities. Jones sent a letter to the leader of the council about Buchanan's behaviour and persuaded four senior councillors to sign it. Then, the Lib Dems called a mate—Councillor Richard Kemp—from Liverpool, Mr. Jones's home town. Kemp, as a Liberal, is known as the Jackal. He is deadly, and Jones went to London to give him the ammunition—signed statements from people in and around his office alleging Buchanan's "unspeakable" behaviour. They were probably signed in their own blood, too, for all I know. I apologise to the House that I am forced to go into detail to explain this yet again, but I do not understand—and I am sure that the House does not—why a chief executive should be immersing himself in the political side of any council. That is not the job or the role of chief executives. They are meant to leave politics to the politicians—and rightly so. Somerset council, with a weak Lib Dem leader on her way out, thought that Mr. Jones could get away with anything and do what he liked. However, the Jackal came to Somerset with a cunning plan. If Buchanan quit as deputy leader, promised to shut up and to accept "mentoring", the charges would be dropped. Mr. Buchanan rightly said, "I'm not going to play." If he had agreed to the Jackal's plan, he would have been accepting his own guilt. As we have proved, he is not guilty of anything other than swearing under his breath. On 27 March 2007, the Government provided the assassin with a convenient smokescreen. It was the day that they published a list of councils that wanted to become unitary authorities. Unfortunately for us, Somerset was on the list. The Jackal reached for his weapon, fired off an e-mail and went to the Standards Board right away. This was where things came full circle. He wrote:""It is an ideal time to deal with this because of the Unitary News."" Does that sound familiar? The Jackal was using the old adage, "It is a good day to bury bad news." No serious attempt was ever made to deal with Jones—that was what was meant to happen. Jones wanted to go to the Standards Board; the Jackal pulled the trigger. How times change. I am sure that many hon. Members will have read the letter from the Jackal that was sent to the relevant Minister some time ago. It is required reading. It is from a Lib Dem, in his own words. He said of the Standards Board:""There is no evidence that any of these boards have had any effect in improving behavioural standards. There is some evidence that they have encouraged people to make malicious claims about councillors."" That is the Lib Dems' top man, the Jackal. It is a miracle—the very man who specialised in malicious claims against Paul Buchanan has suddenly been converted, falling off his ass on the road to Taunton! At last the Jackal has seen the error of his ways, but it is too late for Paul Buchanan. The very outfit that the Jackal now wants scrapped is still turning the screw. On 13 July the high court of the Standards Board, the adjudication panel, will meet to have another go at the allegations brought by Alan Jones. The nature of those allegations is quite extraordinary. We must remember that chief executives are immune from the Standards Board, so Mr. Buchanan decided to complain about the behaviour of his chief executive to Somerset county council. He wrote to the county solicitor and detailed a long list of shortcomings—womanising, drunkenness, bullying—and he gave chapter and verse, with all the dates and places. So what does "Big Al" do? He complains about the complaints, to—yes, the Standards Board! It is true. He says that he is being bullied because someone has complained about him being a bully. It gets better: the Standards Board was obliged, yet again, to call in more lawyers, do more interviews, produce more transcripts and waste more time and money. The House will be glad to hear that it will all come to a head on 13 July, at the Holiday Inn in Taunton. If people want to see a kangaroo court in action, there is space available and they should head down to Taunton. However, anyone expecting that the chief witness in this case would be none other than "Big Al" himself would be wrong. Mr. Cowardy Custard from county hall does not fancy being cross-examined, and I wonder why. He would much prefer to avoid all questions, about basically anything. He has reduced a tough TV producer to tears. I know, because she worked for ITV and she stopped on the motorway to ring me and complain. I am afraid that Mr. Jones' reputation is bad, but this time the kangaroo court that is the panel will not be asking him to attend. I think that that is appalling. In other words, Mr. Buchanan is expected to prove that he did not bully the chief executive without the chief executive showing up in court to give evidence, because he cannot be forced to do so. The panel might as well go back to the days of the ducking stool, and I think that we know what that feels like. A person is tied to a chair and lowered into a pond: if that person drowns, he or she is innocent; if not, he or she must be a witch and so gets executed. Good old Somerset! What makes it doubly ridiculous is that Paul Buchanan is no longer a councillor and never wants to be one again. And what is the worst punishment available to the panel? They can ban him from being a councillor, even though he is not one. This is all too much. The Standards Board has become a joke, and a very bad joke at that. It is about as much use as a fireproof match or an inflatable anchor. In a dotty effort to improve its awful public image, many of its powers have now been handed back to local councils, and that has made things much worse. If Paul Buchanan were a councillor today and fresh complaints were made about him by Alan Jones, then the judge and jury would be Alan Jones himself. Personally, I would not want to be cast away on a desert island with Mr. Jones. I quote again from the Jackal, who said:""The standard of decisions that are made by council officers…relating to standards issues is diabolically low"." I shall leave it there, Mr. Deputy Speaker, as I need say no more.