East Herts Uncovered

Welcome to East Herts Uncovered

This sites aims to provide an insight into the workings of East Herts Council over the last few years.

Nigel and Deborah Clark were elected members of the Council for a number of years but resigned in September 2010.
Deborah was first elected as a Conservative in 2003 and served on the Executive and as Chairman of the Audit Committee in her first term. She was re-elected in 2007 as an Independent for Hunsdon ward with an increased majority.
 Nigel was elected as an Independent for Sawbridgeworth in 2007

This site contains information on:
The People at East Herts Council: Who are the key players? What have they said and done? How much are they paid?
What allowances do councillors claim? Did you know the councillors' allowances total more than £350,000?
Planning at East Herts: How does it work? How have some of the major decision been taken? Are there inconsistencies?
Projects at East Herts: How much do you know about the Hertford Theatre investments, the Causeway deal? Take a look at where and how significant amounts of your money have been spent.
Finances at East Herts: Has the Council really been prudent? How is the money raised and where has the money been spent?
Openness and Transparency: Is East Herts "open and transparent" as it claims? It has started publishing its spending but how does it respond to Freedom Of Information requests?

Some of you reading the following pages might think – these things can’t be true – if things were that bad, something would be done about it. That’s what we used to think.

However:
The Chief Executive seems to be the final arbiter on complaints about her officers.
The Leader failed to acknowledge our formal complaint about the Chief Executive – he did not bother to reply
The Standards Committee* did not consider this to be a breach of the Code of Conduct by the Leader.
The Standards Board for England (the national agency) won’t get involved in cases determined by local standards committees.
The Ombudsman "shall not investigate a complaint that concerns something that affects all or most of the inhabitants of the area of the Council involved"
The District Auditors, despite receiving around £130k per annum in fees from the Council to protect the taxpayer’s interests, do not seem to want to tackle some of the difficult issues we have raised.
The Audit Commission issued some pretty damning reports after the Icelandic Bank fiasco but two years later we still haven’t seen any disciplinary action by CIPFA (the professional body for local government finance officers). Did no-one, anywhere, do anything wrong?

All these agencies are funded to look after the interests of ordinary taxpayers and we have been deeply disappointed by their lack of substantive action, to date. Our democratic system seems to be broken. Nevertheless, we have not given up - we have still got a few irons in the fire........

We will continue to shed light on what is going on at East Herts Council. We hope the electorate will listen and take note. Please take a moment to browse through the remaining pages of our website.

*We have submitted a Freedom of Information request to find out how the members of the Standards Committee are selected.

  "I understand that the four District Councillors on the Standards Committee are appointed by Council each May. Can you please tell me
  what the selection process is for the other members ie the four independent Members, one Town Council Member and two Parish
  Council members?

  In particular can you please tell me

  1. How are candidates identified?

  2. Is any process used to assess the suitability of candidates and, if so, what does this entail?

  3. If more than the required number of suitable candidates are identified, who decides which of them should be appointed, and on what
  basis?"

The Council has refused to answer, claiming this request is vexatious.