Caerphilly County Borough Council is to revise the way it hires covert surveillance firms to spy on its own staff.
According to council papers considered last week, the local authority broke its own standing orders when it hired Blackwood-based surveillance firm Conquest.
Conquest’s chief executive is Dayton Griffiths. Mr Griffiths is the former insurance and risk manager of Caerphilly Council who at the time of his role in the council was responsible for commissioning work from Conquest.
A report considered by the council’s Policy and Resources Scrutiny Committee last week, stated: “One of the findings of this review is that the engagement of Conquest Surveillance is not compliant with standing orders from a procurement perspective. As a consequence of this, arrangements will now be made for a formal procurement process to be undertaken. No new employee surveillance cases will be agreed until this procurement exercise has been completed.”
The report revealed that over the last three years, the cost of spying on employees has been £156,587.
The committee had met to consider the surveillance issue following concerns from its chairman Cllr Hefin David.
Following the meeting, Cllr David said: “I recognise that this is a sensitive issue and want to ensure that the process is fully transparent. The Policy and Resources Scrutiny Committee welcomed the opportunity to review this matter. We have made clear recommendations aimed at making the process more robust and accountable in future. These were unanimously supported by all members present.”
The council has said it will now engage in “detailed dialogue” with trade unions in order to review and revise the procurement process.
It is a remarkable state of affairs when an employer, as large and diverse as Caerphilly County Borough Council, with an established, experienced, workforce, including senior supervisory staff and many line managers, actually NEED to engage largely unregulated, outside private security companies, to ensure their staff are obeying the rules and doing what they are paid to do.
The job of line managers and senior managers, who are well remunerated, is to "supervise" and "manage" those under their control, if they are not performing as they should perhaps surveillance of THEIR day to day "activity" ought to be undertaken to see who is actually NOT doing their job.
The Actions of Councillor Hefin David has started a "process" which should prove much more accountable in its operations from a due diligence point of view, and, has gone some way to appeasing the Unions, that has to be good news for the ratepayer.
However, what has not been tackled in these considerations by Hefins Committee, is the vast array of issues which have to be considered by the council in respect to the way it has `spied` on individual members of the public, (As opposed to staff) using these private companies, the films and disc`s of that activity, we are told by Deyton Griffiths, rests on Council files in respect to those members of the public who were spied on. This is a situation which is as equally serious, if not more so, than that of staff management failures when it was considered right, by senior Council managers, to circumvent the procurement regulation. I am sure that if anyone has had action taken against them as a result of work done by those individuals in such circumstances the outcomes would be unlawful. Could it be that some employees have lost their jobs as a result?, could it be that individual members of the public were `prosecuted` as a result of this surveillance activity? Or, have suffered some other financial penalty ,by loosing benefit or by paying fines, The Mind Boggles at this odious activity undertaken by Caerphilly council in the name of every ratepayer of the borough. Answers will have to be provided, eventually.