....Who is the most transparent of them all? Well who would have guessed? Step forward the supposedly unaccountable Natural England all diaphanously attired in documents, maps , draft policies, emails and meetings notes. And which villain is the most opaque and unfathomable? Go to the back of the class the once favourite Sheffield City Council hiding behind the crash helmet and burqa of impenetrability.
And here we were arguing that the handing over of Sheffield’s publicly owned assets to non-publicly accountable bodies like The National Trust and RSPB would mean denying Sheffield’s citizens access to information and a process of scrutiny. But then NE and SCC are public bodies while NT and RSPB are not obliged to answer your queries at all.
Could it be that there’s a culture within certain parts of certain organisations that encourages their officers to believe they work for themselves or their office and not for those of us who pay them? Never stop thinking that they work for us.
The story is this:
Recently this blog sent in identical Freedom of Information requests to both Sheffield City Council and to Natural England. This was not a game or a trap. It was done because each organisation was thought to have somewhat different information on the same topic even though some bits would definitely overlap. The subject of the FoI was involvement with the Sheffield Moors Partnership, trying to find out what was going on.
The information came back from the two organisations almost simultaneously. From Natural England came documents amounting to 12 megabytes of attachments. From SCC came one side of A4 showing a workshop agenda and a note to the effect that minutes haven’t been received yet. Not a problem with NE. Probably a cause for complaint to SCC.
Among the papers from NE it’s clear that they have a timetable for nobbling the high-ups in Sheffield Council only after the whole plan is so thoroughly worked out that they will feel obliged to welcome it. All this work so assiduously prepared is done and paid for through public money some of which is from charitable donors to NT and RSPB but other amounts doubtless from Sheffield City Council itself. Within this £16000 will be from RSPB and NT will be hoping to use the Environmental Stewardship money received for Burbage.
There's also the question of Sheffield officers working at helping outside organisations to take over Sheffield's land and that two previous Sheffield officers are part of the process now working for NT and Kier.
1 comment:
Who wrote this document? By the tenor of the way it is written, it was obviously not intended for public consumption! This is another example of the inexorable stitch-up by a group of people who obviously think they walk on water. I have nothing but contempt for them.
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