Careless Councils

One of the interesting things to emerge from the Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) into the Glasgow bin lorry crash, which claimed the lives of 6 people, is that Glasgow City Council's human resources department failed to do its job properly.

Because not only did human resources fail to take up proper references for the bin lorry driver, Harry Clarke, which would have highlighted his medical history and fitness to do such a job, the FAI also exposed the fact is that the city council had no references for 16 out of 18 other council drivers who were recruited around the same time.  

Now as I said in a separate post recently, this revelation has not resulted in calls for city council's chief executive or even the head of human resources to resign, unlike the public clamour surrounding Scotland's police chief, Stephen House.

Yet Glasgow's cavalier approach towards taking up references is symptomatic of a wider malaise if you ask me, as someone who has been heavily involved in the fight for equal pay in Scotland's 32 local councils for the past 10 years.

At key points during the Action 4 Equality Scotland campaign individual councils have wheeled out the 'dog ate my homework' excuse in relation to the production of key documents and information on job evaluation and the assignment of scores and grades which affect people's pay.

In an age of digital records and paperless offices, some of the largest councils in the land have suddenly 'lost' crucial pieces of data which could have resolved a disputed point in a matter of seconds, yet they try to get away with 'murder' by insisting that the information no longer exists and/or has been destroyed.

A case in point is North Lanarkshire Council where crucial information relating to the assessment and grading of key council jobs (e.g. Home Carers) mysteriously disappeared, even though the importance of keeping accurate records was known to all of the council's senior officials.  

I understand that we may be about to hear of another information debacle as the equal pay cases against Fife Council get underway in October, but the underlying pattern is clear and it's one of big public sector bodies losing potentially damaging information in strange and inexplicable ways.

So if I had my way, I'd sack some of them because that would be the very best way to shake the system up.