Full Written Judgment on Lynda Gooding Tribunal

[Interested]

To a certain degree this is true, however over the years she (AW) has surrounded herself with puppets and in most instances people who can unbeknown to them take the flack and s**t on her behalf.
I'm am led to believe she has run the place with a complete disregard to any of her staff, and has controlled all management/trustees exactly as she wanted to.
The whole place has only served as a financial gain for her and her daughter and other certain families involved with both MRA and Connected Care.
The whole set up would appear to have been completely "bent" from the top down and also has been for a long, long time.
What is even more interesting is "if these recent tribunals hadn't have come to light would the whole corrupt process still be running as previously"
Probably, people were aware of the concerns long before these tribunals came under public gaze and chose to do nothing, so don't hold your breath Hartlepool.

[steveL]

 @interested

You're dead right that she has used the Trustees as patsies but let's not carried away here. Some of those Trustees have run their own businesses so can't be quite as naïve as all that and let's not forget that two Councillors were also Trustees of Manor Residents. So if it's true that she 'has controlled all management/trustees exactly as she wanted to' then it doesn't say much for those two councillors, one of whom, Stephen Akers-Belcher, is currently the Chair of the Council. Personally, I find it impossible to believe that he wasn't aware of what was going on and the lack of any call from Labour for the compensation payments to be made suggests he isn't that bothered about paying people at least the minimum wage.

Then you have Christopher Akers-Belcher who up until recently was a board member of Who Cares (NE). We now know that the accounts/funding of both Manor Residents/Who Cares(NE) were ridiculously inter-mingled even though Ged Hall told us all that they were entirely separate organisations. This is the same Ged hall who made the initial decision to award Who Cares (NE) the connected care contract, without putting it out to tender and while knowing that the accounts for Manor Residents were a total sham.

Then we have Marjorie James who is currently busy trying to convince everyone that she has/had nothing to do with Manor Residents even though her Scrutiny Forum was at the very centre of the push to get the connected care contract awarded to Wilcox and Cranney's Who Cares (NE)

Oh yea.....Cranney. In thick of it then and  still in the thick of it now - lurking in the shadows before deciding which way to jump.

So that's 5 Councillors and one ex-councillor at the core of this whole mess. So while the Trustees undoubtedly have responsibilities, let's not allow them to be used as a smoke screen for others. 

The council is now in the process of transferring the service delivery responsibility away from Manor Residents to a joint arrangement involving West View Project/ Belle Vue and (I believe) Headland Future and transferring staff accordingly.

Will Wilcox's Management job remain in place? Surely not . . . and is everyone happy if it turns out that Cranney is involved in Belle Vue?

I doubt if the management set-up at those organisations is as bad as MR but the fact is that HBC is making the change without any real assurance or knowledge of how well those organisations are being managed either – we're still riding on a wing and a prayer. They were sloppy with the Phoenix Centre, they were sloppy with Manor Residents and they're still sloppy now.

[DRiddle]

I actually find it quite interesting that we've arrived at the situation we're in right now.

If you think about it, the council is in a mess. Senior officers know it, the peer review team know it, the few genuine members of the Labour Party know it, the none coalition members of the opposition know it, and the publics awareness of the mess is growing and growing.

The LGO, charity commission, Labour North, the police, potentially HMRC and god knows which other external agencies now have the situation on their radar.

So what comes next?

Well, there is an answer.

All it would take is two key senior officers, the CEO and the chief solicitor, to say "enough is enough" and potentially every single person listed by Steve immediately above could be cut out of our council like the removal of a cancerous tumour.

If that happened, Labour could get back to being Labour and the CEO could ultimately retire when ready after 40 years associated with our council and have his legacy largely in tact (rather than tarnished by this mess). The chief solicitor could come to work, do his job, and do it well without the spector of either Akers-Belcher over his shoulder and most importantly of all, we could see 5 or 6 new brooms via a by-election and get everybody working to improve a town that's teetering on the abyss.

If that were to happen, 5 or 6 people jog on and find a new 'vocation', our council gains some credibility back and 90 odd thousand people will be better off.

Very idealistic and simplistic I know. But I always try and follow the principle of Ockham's razor.

Ockham's razor... the most obvious explanation is usually the right one.

[DRiddle]

I also think that if anything even close to the above were to happen, there'd be a beautiful poetic irony in all of this.

That being, the people caught up in this if removed from our council would struggle to find jobs paying anything more than national minimum wage.

[stokoe]

as david stated here.



All it would take is two key senior officers, the CEO and the chief solicitor, to say "enough is enough" and potentially every single person listed by Steve immediately above could be cut out of our council like the removal of a cancerous tumour.

i think it goes a lot deeper they all have something on each other.

[brassed off monkey]

Manor Residents is controlled by a Sociopath, most people know exactly what has been going on for a long time, but have through personal gain or fear of reprisal kept quiet about it, until Wilcox forced employees to resort to Employment Tribunals.

http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

Take a look at this website & the see how many of our elected representatives might qualify.

The Board of Trustees in theory should have been in control, but for whatever reason they all chose not to accept the responsibility of the position of Trustee, that has allowed Wilcox to run the place as she saw fit.

The resignations of S Akers Belcher & P Beck is a reflection on how easy they thought it would be to cut & run, its not as simple as they assumed however, the excuse of " Lack of Information about Employment Tribunals just wont wash, there has been an awful lot of chicanery going on within Manor Residents long before they resigned & they & their fellow Trustees bear responsibility for that.

There has already been an example of what can go seriously wrong with Grant Funded organisations in Hartlepool with the Phoenix Centre as a case in point, badly managed & badly run it cost council tax payers Thousands of Pounds bailing it out, only for it to untimately go to the wall.

Lessons should have been learned & checks & balances put in place to avoid any possible re-occurence, they quite obviously weren`t, hence the Manor residents Scandal.

The answer to the MRA problem isn`t just a matter of transferring services that MRA provide to other similar organisations, it has now come to the point that HBC needs to have some form of control & accountability over organisations that are Grant Funded, we trusted to God & Providence with Manor Residents, & look whats gone on there.

We have all seen the convoluted involvement of a number of Councillors with both MRA & Who Cares N/E, Ex Cllr Wilcox, Cllrs C Akers Belcher, S Akers Belcher, K Cranney, G Hall, P Beck, is this coincidence ? it is a clear indication that elected councillors should have no involvement in Grant Funded organisations

The Manor Residents Scandal is unfortunately only a symptom of what is wrong with the running of Hartlepool, the Peer Group Review gave ample indication of what was thought neccessary to rectify problems within the authority, unfortunately through obvious self interest certain councillors restricted the parameters of the Public Inquiry.

The ego driven leadership of our council is driving the town to the brink of disaster, we have Officers of the council put under undue pressure to satisfy the whims & fancies of councillors, officers who are competent & hardworking are now realising that it may well be better for them to seek employement elsewhere rather than be put in untenable situations.

There really needs to be serious consideration given to the way in which a small number of elected councillors can drastically effect the way the Council Operates as a business entity, the CEO & Qualified Officers are employed on extremely lucrative salaries to "Run The Town" they should be allowed to do so "Without Interference" from self serving empire building megalomaniacs.

[steveL]

"teetering on the abyss"

Funny you should use that phrase because it's precisely the same phrase used by one of the Peer Group members when privately describing HBC. "Everything depends on what they do next," was the rest of it.

Well, the first thing they did was to try to stop the release of the Peer Group's own report. They had asked for it to be distributed 'quickly and widely'; it actually took a FOI from HTH to get it released at all.

The second thing they did was to completely ignore the Peer Group's recommendation to 'go outside' for a new Chief Executive so that 'new blood' could be introduced. Instead they appointed Dave Stubbs.

So, in terms of "Everything depends on what they do next," what they did was pay lip service to, but essentially ignore the Peer Group itself.

Welcome to the Abyss.....dark down 'ere, innit?

[jaffa]

MARGERY JAMES has a lot to do with Wilcox and MRA she is the person who took the finance out for Wilcox daughters new car she is driving around in and is paid for out of funding of MRA .....

[norfolkngoode]

as david stated here.



All it would take is two key senior officers, the CEO and the chief solicitor, to say "enough is enough" and potentially every single person listed by Steve immediately above could be cut out of our council like the removal of a cancerous tumour.

i think it goes a lot deeper they all have something on each other.

What will it take to get these two key senior officers to do something about this?

If the average man in the street can see whats been going on, why cant they? And why havent they already done something about it?

Is it like you say, they all have something on each other, have they all had their hands in the till?

I think they are as thick as thieves, as bent as each other, and all with their snouts in the trough.

I cant believe that the Fraud Squad arent already involved.

[Jeff]

It's obvious that this odious lady has the biggest balls amongst the Hartlepool Labour Party.  They are all running scared.  No response from our glorious leaders about the tribunal cases.  Are the tribunal winners going to get their settlements?  I bet AW made sure she and her family were paid in full and on time.  It's time someone stood up to this Bully.
Iain Wright you are OUR MP get it sorted and win back some respect, if you have the balls.  I doubt it somehow.

[Jeff]

Interseting reading off the Labour Website...anybody see any discrepancies here??

Rachel Reeves MP, Labour's Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury,

"Meanwhile not one firm has successfully been prosecuted for non-payment of the National Minimum Wage over the past two years"

"First and foremost, for moral reasons. We simply can't be satisfied with a situation where an honest day's work does not bring a decent day's pay."

"Confronting low pay is part of the very DNA of the Labour movement"

Maybe somebody should tell MRA, Councillors Wilcox, Akers-Belcher, Beck

[fred c]

Interseting reading off the Labour Website...anybody see any discrepancies here??

Rachel Reeves MP, Labour's Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury,

"Meanwhile not one firm has successfully been prosecuted for non-payment of the National Minimum Wage over the past two years"

"First and foremost, for moral reasons. We simply can't be satisfied with a situation where an honest day's work does not bring a decent day's pay."

"Confronting low pay is part of the very DNA of the Labour movement"

Maybe somebody should tell MRA, Councillors Wilcox, Akers-Belcher, Beck

I am certain that "The Dear Leader & The Mob" know what the NMW Policy is !!!!!!

It`s just that they chose to Ignore it when it suited them, as in the case of Manor Residents for some reason they either won`t or can`t  offer any criticism of Ex Labour Councillor Wilcox.

We also have a "member" in Parliament that hasn`t offered one word of criticism of Wilcox & her odious regime at MRA.

Its a Basic Plank in Labours employment policy & our elected Labour representatives have ignored what has been going on at a Council Tax Payer Funded organisation, what a bunch of Hypoctites.

[DRiddle]

I don't know if this has been mentioned already but there's a write up in this weeks Private Eye again. Angie Wilcox is described as an 'anti-poverty campaigner'... (Albeit one who is happy to pay workers £4 an hour, or indeed not pay them at all).

[norfolkngoode]

Its great that Private eye are on the case .......... But we really need a national newspaper to get hold of it, preferably The Sun, Star, Mail etc (I cant really see The Mirror being interested, can you?).

A bit of bad publicity for the National Labour party might embarrass our useless MP and the council in to doing something about it

Or maybe not!