Pictured is Cornwall Council’s Mr Simon JR Mansell MBE FCILEX

Blog posted 28 September 2015

     CORNWALL COUNCIL’S VEXATIOUS POLICY EXPLAINED.

The moment Cornwall Council’s Mr Fixit Simon JR Mansell MBE introduced the Local Government Ombudsman Factor to the Information Commissioner Office as to why I should be denied Freedom of Information requests, the ICO’s hands were tied. That unless the ICO could prove the decisions by the LGO were wrong the ICO had little choice but to accept and agree with the Council’s reasons for not replying to my FOI requests.

This combined with the PHSO and the CQC has created an ‘Appalling Vista’ type situation.

That Cornwall Council’s reasons for invoking a modified ‘vexatious’ policy under Section 14 (1) of the FOIA was in some way due to my inability to accept decisions made years earlier by the LGO.

The introduction of a ‘vexatious’ policy is probably the most abused and dishonest way for organizations to avoid answering difficult questions. I recall my landlord Sanctuary Housing twice invoked a vexatious policy on me to avoid answering questions about a criminal Mediation Scam it had organized and funded and was covertly conducted by TPAS in a public place, a cafe, without the proprietor’s consent, or my consent to enter into binding mediation.

Sanctuary Housing Association is the largest social housing Landlord in the country with some 100,000 properties, and the Tenant Participation Advisory Service (TPAS), a glorified protection racket for Landlords, frequently advises Government. Not the kind of organizations one would expect to be short of funds but organizations which needed to bury my complaint as quickly and as dishonestly as possible.

The mediation scam remains unresolved to the day despite 2 Sergeants and 2 PCs from Devon & Cornwall Police at St Austell Police Station attempting to set me up to remove blogs from my website involving Sanctuary Housing, and, as a consequence, blogs about the Council. The IPCC ruled in my favour.

Cornwall Council first invoked a ‘vexatious’ policy on me in 2014 due to its inability to answer complaints and within in its own timescale. It then closed a number of complaints unresolved and blocked me from making further complaints for 1 year. This year it invoked a ‘vexatious’ policy to avoid answering FOI request but later applied it too broadly to exclude information I was entitled to receive. To overcome this the Council then introduced a modified vexatious policy, moved the goal post, to avoid answering questions by assassinating my character and by introducing ‘the LGO factor’ and the excuse I had upset Council members of staff .

The fact these members of staff had wilfully engaged in unlawfully rigging Welfare Priority Assessments for the Council and had personally abused my late wife was not taken into consideration by the ICO. Also not taken into consideration was the fact the Council sent me a threatening ‘Letter of Defamation’, itself vexatious, in 2014, advising me not to repeat the names of 2 members of staff on social media again.

To date I have now named and shamed 6 Council members of staff and a member of the NHS Trust on social media in excess of 500 times without being served papers for Defamation. That it is the Council who is responsible for upsetting its members of staff by not acting upon its ‘Letter of Defamation’ to protect and defend their reputations. This because the Council has no stomach for scrutiny. I consider the ‘Letter of Defamation’ is vexatious because the Council sought only to threaten me.

It is one of the most perverse injustices of all when you have a wilfully blind LGO protecting a corrupt Council using absolute discretion not to investigate serious allegations. The problems remain unresolved, they fester and the public remains without protection from further abuse. An LGO so perverse that she ruled in the Council’s favour before I had even been given an opportunity to respond to the Council’s reply to my complaint. Something most Ombudsman would find perversely unjust and wrong.

The Council’s assertion that the named and shamed are in some way ‘victims’ is grossly offensive when one considers the Council and its staff have knowingly abused and discriminated against many mentally ill and vulnerable adults who should have been supported and protected.

I close with a statement I understand was made in Parliament. The LGO “Operate the most perverse and publicly criticised system of administrative justice in the world”, unquote.