Rosemarie Clarke’s missing votes: Cara Davani refuses to tell

Guest blog by Amir Tahir

On 22^nd December last I submitted a Freedom of Information request to Brent Council asking for the following:

1. The number of nominations/votes received by individual Brent Staff Achievement Award winners 2014                                                                                                                                                                          2. The number of nominations/votes received for Rosemarie Clarke for Brent Staff Achievement Awards 2014.

By return I received the following acknowledgement from Cara Davani:

‘Thank you for your information request. We (sic) will forward it to the relevant department who will contact you shortly.’

On 21^st January  I received the following from Brent Council HR department.

‘The requested information is exempt from disclosure under Section 40(2) of the
Freedom of Information Act (FoIA).  The information is personal data as defined by
the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA). As it is information about individuals, we are
unable to give this to you; release of this information would constitute a breach of
Principle 1 of the DPA. Principle 1 states that personal data shall be processed
(used) fairly and lawfully and, in particular, shall not be used unless at least one of
the conditions in Schedule 2 of the DPA is met; in this case none of those conditions
have (sic) been met.* This response therefore acts as a refusal notice under section 17 of
the FoIA.’  

                                                                    * I would welcome opinions on this. AT

Obviously, my request for the total number of Rosemarie’s votes was not made out of idle curiosity; we all know that the response to the ’Vote for Rosemarie’ idea was overwhelming with Civic Centre staff and members of the public expressing  their solidarity with Rosemarie and their admiration for the way she had conducted herself in the face of what a British court has adjudged was Cara Davani and Brent Council’s racial discrimination, victimisation  and constructive dismissal. The online vote she received was massive. Nor was it my intention in any way to detract from the achievements of the other worthy winners of Brent Staff Achievement  awards.

However, the Council leadership’s mean-spirited response to the avalanche of votes for Rosemarie seems to me a missed opportunity for Butt, Gilbert and Davani finally to concede that those voting for Rosemarie possibly had a point; that Civic Centre staff and the public generally support Rosemarie for principled and valid reasons; and that an employment tribunal judge’s opinion possibly carries a little more authority than that of a small cabal of mutually back-scratching and terminally compromised senior managers  and local politicians.          

Information not so free at Brent Council when it comes to respecting the Constitution

Philip Grant has written to Fiona Ledden, Director of Legal and Procurement at Brent Council, regarding her refusal of a resident's  Freedom of Information request  about the meeting Grant had with Muhammed Butt on 'Respecting Brent's Constitution'.

Philip Grant wrote:

Dear Ms Ledden,

I have just come across the attached document, a letter from you on behalf of Brent Council on 18 September 2014 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by a Mr Benazi, on the "What do they know" website.



The request concerns a copy of the notes of a meeting, which I prepared after I had met with Cllr. Muhammed Butt at the Civic Centre on 26 June 2014, notes which I wished to put in the public domain, but which I did not feel able to do for reasons explained in a "guest blog" which was posted on the "Wembley Matters" site in July 2014 LINK

I am writing to point out that the explanation you gave for not providing a copy of the notes to Mr Benazi was incorrect, for the following reasons:

The "information" (the notes) was held by Brent Council, in that Thomas Cattermole (Head of Executive and Member Services), who had been present at and taken part in the meeting, held a copy of them.

My meeting was not with Councillor Butt 'as a Councillor', but with him as Leader of Brent Council, to discuss matters involving the Council, its workings and the actions of Council Officers, and not any personal matter as a "constituent" (which I would have raised with one of my ward Councillors for Fryent Ward, if that had been the case).

The meeting took place at Councillor Butt's invitation, and not at my request.It was to discuss matters which I had raised in a letter to him (jointly with Cllrs Kansagra and Lorber) following a "Soapbox" I gave at a Brent Connects meeting in February 2014 on "Respecting Brent's Constitution", and which he had not yet dealt with. [You may remember that I sent you a copy of the letter, and of the text of my "Soapbox" on 13 February 2014, with an email headed 'Working together on Respecting Brent's Constitution', after you had confused that letter with another matter (a complaint I had made to Christine Gilbert about the actions of three senior Council Officers) in dealing with a request made to you by the then Leader of the Liberal Democrat Group.]

For these reasons, I can see no justification for dismissing Mr Benazi's request, as the information would have been within that which should be supplied by Brent Council under the Freedom of Information Act. I hope that the Council will now, belatedly, comply with that FoI request. Best wishes,