Bumper Summer Skidder! Double "Holiday" Edition!

When you are cowering beneath any available shelter during our Great British Summer here's some horror stories to, er, make y'all feel even more miserable - courtesy of bent Labour Sandwell Council! 

Alice Davey - the worst Director's performance since Alison Knight?

Over the years Labour have realised that the people of Sandwell are so craven they can be bought very cheaply - "circuses" without the bread. Thus thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money have been wasted on a series of "events" over the years. Many have been disasters, and the vast majority have been loss-making as well! Bent Labour really can't organise a p*ss-up in a brewery!

But in these straightened times Labour's crazed, spend,spend, spend behaviour is unsustainable. Now the incompetent Comrades think that they can actually put events on AND make money from them.

Enter Mr Matthew Huggins - an employee with an interesting back story if ever there was one! I have received countless reports that since his arrival bent Labour has been "spending money like water"  on events etc. - despite the presence of the Government Commissioners. The Skidder keeps being told that there is "a massive hole in the budget". Recently, Huggins was "relieved of some of his workload" to "help him", but remains at the Council.

Back in the day, Liam Preece chaired one of the most notorious meetings of this corrupt Council when he and his Labour colleagues attempted to give retrospective legality to their bent deal to flog Lion Farm Fields (incredibly, still an ongoing issue) They switched off the sound recording for the relevant item. In the history of this blog this was the stage for the most truly awful performance by a Director of the paid service, the hapless Alison Knight (Skidders passim). Knight's performance that night was one of breathtaking ineptitude but, as we shall see, the recent "up yours" hubristic show from the Director of Borough Economy, Alice Davey, was marked by stunning arrogance and seeming contempt for the Council and the watching public.

Curiously, Preece was purporting to be chairing the meeting this time too. He is, of course, as weak as p*ss and a pathetic rimmer of Tom "Twatson" Watson. He was an ineffectual Labour Councillor in Charlemont and Grove Vale before Charley folk realised how useless he is and chucked him out. In true Sandwell Labour-style he was soon found another seat. The scum* in West Brom Central thought they needed someone crap to "represent" them and duly voted him back in!

I know that some readers don't like to click through to videos posted on the blog but you really need to see this shocker from a recent Audit Committee meeting. Please also note the astonishing comment from Preece, "I haven't seen the strategic risk register for sometime". This was spotted by local Community Activist, Darryl Magher, who rightly questions why Preece hasn't seen this all-important document for so long when he is CHAIR OF THE F**KING COMMITTEE!

As you will see, Preece tries to ask for figures showing whether bent Labour IS actually making any money from the considerable sums they have chucked at "events", but Davey, in an outburst of management babble about going "offline with this", flatly refuses to tell him or the watching public the true position (and I think we know what that is don't we readers?) Preece shows the firmness of a milk jelly with her, and when she effectively tells him to "do one" - he does! ROFLMAO!

This is truly shocking even by Sandwell-standards. Questions must be asked about what went on here and, of course, the public needs to know what the (inevitable) losses actually are! 

Yes folks, Wednesbury is STILL sh*t!

Over the years, this blog has consistently pointed out that bent Sandwell Labour Councillors hate business and enterprise - except when it comes to enriching themselves in which case they are all for it! Most of them have no business acumen whatsoever and on the wilder shores of this cesspool, the lunatic fringe like Cllrs Piper and Fenton yearn for the destruction of capitalism and private enterprise altogether!

Socialists are nothing if not sentimental and yearn nor a non-existent past where workers supposedly had "dignity" and comrades nearly destroyed the economy through endless strikes. Sandwell Labour has this absurd nostalgic hankering for markets. No, not financial ones which ensure the efficient use of capital and create wealth, but street markets where you can buy a pair of cheap knickers and a cauliflower in the pouring rain.

There are many reasons why many markets up and down the country are failing or have failed, but these don't appear to have come to the attention of Sandwell's corrupt Council. I know Wednesbury is a sh*thole but, as a quondam market trader myself, the Market is a woeful sight. This does not stop the Labour liars bragging on the Council website that, "Wednesbury is one of Sandwell's ... most vibrant markets."  WTF must the rest be like?????

And so bent Labour decided - once again - to revamp their pathetic previous efforts. There is nothing in Wednesbury that would not be better for facing a visit from the Luftwaffe but, under the guise of a "heritage project", some hopelessly designed stalls have simply been plonked around the old, er, Market Place and the top of Union Street. The Wednesbury Labour Councillors - some of the worst in the Borough (and that's saying something) - were quick to attend photo shoots metaphorically masturbating next to the, er. empty stalls.

And, of course, they have remained just that - empty! Now the anti-business Labour comrades have hit on a brilliant wheeze to make the stalls pay their way lol! Yes, you guessed it - give them away FREE! They are advertising for anyone holding public liability insurance to take stalls for nowt on 6 Saturdays from now. 

I have said so often on here that these jokers couldn't run a whelk stall - but they can't run any other type either without compounding losses to us taxpayers. Total *****!

And on the subject of markets ...

Bent Labour have also used 49 years of dicatorship to run West Brom Indoor Market into the ground. These jokers now want to invest millions of our money in a super-duper new Market Hall. There are experts around the place who can advise on such matters (admittedly at a price) but Labour Leader Kerrie, Dim Kez, Carmichael is trying to rehabilitate the Criminal Councillor, Steve "Rocky" Melia (although I use the work "rehabilitate" with caution as Melia has not, hitherto, achieved any level of competence or aptitude), and so Kez sent the Crim on a taxpayer-funded jaunt to gawp at Crewe Market. The only things this nasty, dimwitted, POS has ever run are his mouth and his fists, and so we await his views on running markets with, er, no interest whatsover.

Here he is, appropriately highlighted in yellow given his pathetic cowardice:

A Gunn to the Head?

You good folk keep sending me stories and this one can best be described in an email I sent to Dim Kez regarding Alfred Gunn House on 4th July, 2023:

"THIS IS NOT A PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNICATION - PRESS ENQUIRY

"I have been informed, rightly or wrongly, that you personally were heavily involved in awarding a contract for the renovation of Alfred Gunn House to Seddon Construction.

"The allegation is that firms such as Lovell quoted in the region of £40m whereas Seddon put in a low-ball offer of around £11m (although the stated contract value ended up at £14m). There is no allegation (yet) of corruption but an allegation of further SMBC/Labour incompetence in the groupthink determining that the Council was getting a bargain from Seddon.

"I am also informed that Seddon have run up costs already of around £28m and work remains incomplete.

"Are these allegations true and, if so, what is the final figure budgeted for this project?"

Needless to say, Kez is happy to shoot her vicious mouth off at me but has failed to respond to this email. Incidentally, I also wrote to Seddon who have also declined to respond. 

Obviously Carmichael wants to create more work for Council staff and so I have duly obliged with a Freedom of Information Request (link below)

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/refurbishment_alfred_gunn_house

This looks like another big Labour scandal in the making.

Gove's Commissioners not interested in alleged Sandwell "fraud"!

I received some intelligence from a Council whistleblower. Over the years a number of staff have asked me to raise issues with the Council as they have been too afraid to do so - with good cause especially during the appalling bullying of the Cooper/Eling/Britton and Stevens eras.

In my chaotic way, I "lost" the complaint in my paper mountain but when I found it again it seemed from other intelligence received from staff that a couple of the alleged miscreants may have already been dealt with. I did, however, send a precis of the complaints to the Commissioners - complete with the names of most of the accused. Here is an anonymised version - and please remember that these are just unproven allegations:

Employee A sits in the office with 3 or 4 mobile phones selling cars during work time. He also leaves work during normal hours to work on cars.

Employees claim flexitime for [the whistleblower alleges] "working" beyond normal hours from home. It is alleged that these claims are fake.

Materials for jobs are ordered without any inspection of the actual sites. The waste is "unbelievable". Materials are left to rot in all weather and then have to be disposed of as "hazardous waste". "Tons" of sand are delivered to even the smallest of jobs. Patios and driveways are supplied for "special tenants". Disabled wet rooms are installed and then "able-bodied" tenants put in so that the bathrooms are ripped out and reconverted at yet more expense.

An employee bullied numerous members of staff but SMBC only moved him/her to another section.

An employee has interests in companies undertaking voids maintenance work.

An employee took a redundancy payment but was reemployed, in an alleged scam, the following week under a new job title.

The response from the Commissioners has been gob-smacking noting, as above, that some names were supplied. Kim Bromley Derry and his co-Commissioner will NOT investigate these matters AT ALL -  because they say they do not fall within the legal definition of whistleblowing! WTF? So much for sorting this corrupt Council out! This is what you are paying £2m for (thanks to bent Labour).

Parts of this could, of course, be a Police matter but given the corrupt relationship - at least (possibly) - until recent times - that also looks like a non-starter. Carry on bent guys and gals - you are immune from sanctions!

The naughty boys and girls list

My "rolling" blog on (a) Sandwell employee miscreants and (b) SMBC staff doing work "on the side" is proving popular and more information is welcome. Oh, and there should be a couple of absolute humdinger entries coming soon ...  Watch this space! You can find it via this link:

https://thesandwellskidder.blogspot.com/2023/07/sandwell-council-rolling-log-of.html

Of course, the former Labour Leader [sic] of the Council, the tyrannical Cllr Steve "Squealing" Eling was not an employee of SMBC but he was raking in the allowances whilst also working for nearby, er, Rotherham Council. Of course, he institutionalised corruption at bent Sandwell during his evil regime (Skidders passim ad nauseum) - one of the main reasons the Commissioners are in now at your expense. Here is the entry for your convenience in case you don't want to click through and read the whole of the existing post:

"This is a slightly odd entry in this list since Eling was not an employee of Sandwell Council but the political Leader of it whilst also working at another Labour basket-case Council, Rotherham. Thus he was raking-in pay at one council and allowances at the other.

"Eling was reported by a number of Sandwell employees as having a vile temper and he institutionalised the corruption which was already rampant when he was one of two Deputy Leaders. Rotherham MBC claimed that he was working for them as a “political officer” but that this was NOT a politically-restricted post.

"As the corruption intensified on his watch at Sandwell the long-serving and (too) loyal Cabinet secretaries were suspended after Eling thought they had exposed the Monitoring Officer in what appeared to be misconduct. A Councillor in the private section of the Council House where the Leader’s Office is situated was heard screaming, “I want the f*ckers out and I don’t want the f*ckers back”. Many sources say this was Eling and he has never formally denied the allegation. (As it was, Eling was totally wrong and the secretaries were not the whistleblowers. They were all reinstated with an apology and a small compensation payment. The principal senior employee doing Eling’s dirty work was hapless s.151 officer Darren Carter who moved on to Reading Council despite his track record.)

"Since Eling was splitting his time between Sandwell and Rotherham (and actually living for most of the time in a pretty north Derbyshire village) he needed a right-hand man to be his enforcer at Sandwell whilst he was absent, and he chose a ludicrous figure, Cllr Richard Marshall. The pair met with me and in return for exposing two other of their senior Labour Councillors (which I was doing already) they offered to  feed me confidential Council information or, as they put it, there would be “more leaks than Wales”. 

"To that end the pair set up a WhatsApp account to send the confidential information to me. Most of the feed is available at my post of 5th November, 2017 - “Steve Eling - You Are a F*cking Liar!”. Amongst much appalling output the pair (a) asked me to give the female Assistant Chief Executive “a good kicking”, (b) suggested they might arrange a travellers’ site next door to an enemy’s property development so the travellers could “shit in the gardens” of the new houses, (c) alleged that a fellow Labour Councillor's partnerwas a transexual or, as they put it, “a cock in a frock, and (d) envisaged a married Labour Councillor “sp*nking” over a female Councillor “in her bikini” since this would be better than the male “doing his wife” - also a Labour Councillor.

"Despite Rotherham Council having full knowledge of all this,  and in the sick, sick, world of local government, they made Eling their “Equalities Officer”. Eling was suspended by the Labour Party and did not contest his Council seat but remains the Chair of an important local charity, Warley Woods Community Trust, who think he is wonderful and are content to ignore his truly shocking track record (of which this extract only details a small part)."

Brandhall - What's in a word?

There is now very serious concern about the conduct of the Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust. This blog reported that the Trust provided a (controversial and disputed) survey of the wildlife on the lovely Brandhall Green Space (formerly a golf course replete with mature trees). As we have seen, bent Labour loves destroying green spaces in Sadders and is determined to force through a development wrecking a substantial part of the site. 

When this was forced through the Council, Satnam Sahota's puppet and tenant (Skiddder's passim) Peter "Alberich" Hughes stated in public that the green space that survives will become what is laughingly called an "eco-park". He further stated that the Wildlife Trust would be getting the gig to "advise" on the eco-park - thus profiting from the destruction of a beautiful environment teeming with, er, wildlife.

This blog previously described how I wrote to the Trust and asked whether it was part of its charitable purpose to destroy valuable green space in an urban setting, and (b) to then make profit from this. Was there not a clear conflict of interest here? The Trust said they were unaware of Hughes's public comments and had NOT made any arrangement with the bent Council to profit from further work at the site.

ONLY 83% of the locals who responded to the initial plan were against this devastation (!) but bent Labour is setting up a separate group of cronies and rimmers to "consult" with about the project - thus sidestepping the existing - and vocal - local campaigners. A meeting was held for the patsies to give "their" thoughts and Labour invited the Wildlife Trust too. Sources told The Skidder that. at the meeting, the poisonous Hughes again claimed that the Trust would be cashing-in by advising on the project "going forward".

Once again I wrote to the Trust and in respect of the meeting they stated:

"The Trust was invited to attend a public meeting organised by Sandwell Council to gather the thoughts of the local community on the future of the site.  We felt it was important to attend this meeting to ensure that the ecological and biodiversity implications for the site were fed into this discussion as appropriate and to have the opportunity to hear directly from members of the local community about Brandhall."

Once again one can only say - as I have done in writing - that the Trust has chosen to only hear the views of that section of arse-lickers Labour has created to represent the pro-vandalism view. This included six Labour Councillors and seven SMBC employees. Strangely the Council say three reps from the Brandhall Action Group were present, but a group of the campaigners denied this and say that if anyone attended they were NOT there on behalf of the protest campaign.

Curiously Labour invited along something called the "Lion Farm Action Centre" which is ironic noting that Labour are planning to also destroy Lion Farm Fields. What the hell are they doing helping bent Labour destroy a large part of Brandhall?

We have seen that bent Labour have "bought" many local charities (see "Scips" below) and a worrying further statement from the Trust reads:

"I also made it clear [in the earlier correspondence referred to above] that the Trust had not received a formal approach from Sandwell Council about the Trust’s involvement in the future of the site.  These facts remain unchanged. "

Note that the word "formal" has suddenly appeared. This implies that there have indeed been "informal" discussions for the Trust to profit from this egregious environmental damage. Are they pulling my chain? It certainly looks that way since I wrote to Hughes and he had his ventiloquist's dummy, Tony McGovern, Sandwell's Director of Regeneration, respond:

"It is no secret that the Council has made a commitment to work with the Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust on the Brandhall site ..."

Well the "charitable" Trust has certainly been trying to keep this secret! But money talks ... This is really sick (in the traditional meaning of the word.)

SCIPS - have your data rights been breached?

This - the Sandwell Community Information and Participation Service [sic] - is one of the most egregious "fake" charities in Sandwell and whilst purporting to be an independent charity acting for tenants it is largely funded by bent Labour SMBC and acts as a pathetic mouthpiece for the corrupt Council.

It is another of the charities in Sandwell which feeds off other charities who coalesce together to "work" with each other, rather than with real people who actually need their help. If you are a tenant in Sadders it is hard to see what SCIPS would actually do for you if you needed help. Oh, and SCIPS call real people who need help, "customers" (pass the sick bag, Alice).

The organisation also has "members". But any tenant group members also have to be, er, "registered" with the bent Labour Council (as with - now - all community groups who seek help or funding from the twisted Dictatorship).

Recently, someone contacted me as SCIPS had passed their personal contact information to the corrupt Council who duly sent him/her a survey questionnaire (asking for extensive personal details). This appeared to have been a very serious data breach and I duly wrote to SCIPS who advised that a list of all "members" had been supplied to the corrupt Council and that SCIPS consented to the Council asking for this data so passed it over pursuant to what the Information Commissioner calls a "legitimate interest". This is highly debatable and I am looking into this.

Even more worryingly, if you were an individual tenant who has consulted the Charity for help, your data may have been passed to SMBC too. SCIPS allege that every individual who received a survey/questionnaire has given their express permission for SCIPS to pass their data on AND for SMBC to use it (since once the data is received by the bent Council they too can only use it in accordance with the Data Protection Act).

All this came as a surprise to my correspondent who had no idea his/her personal data would be handed over to the Council by the Charity. And SCIPS has failed to say how it obtained the consent of individual users of their "services" for disclosure.

If you are an individual who received a questionnaire  - or even if you didn't but are concerned about this - please contact me via the methods set out below. YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO COMPENSATION!!!!

And in another of those amazing Sandwell "coincidences" I tried to search the SCIPS "privacy policy" today but it was "not available" on the website. Now just fancy that!

The History of Sadders: Part 94

I recently came across this gem from a 1996 edition of the brilliant Private Eye Magazine. This reports corruption within bent Labour Sandwell Council and a total failure of the craven Wolvo C*cksuckers (aka The Express and Star) to report it. These are themes constantly exposed in this blog since 2013 and which still continue to this day!

And if you have insomnia ...

For those who want to get into the nitty gritty of what Sandwell Council legal department has been doing there is a new blog in the Crow Multimedia stable. This is actually intended to cover any interesting legal points from councils across the land but, at present, there is more than enough Sandwell sh*t to expose. 

You can find the blog via the link below and there are two posts on Surjit Tour's unlawful use of public funds to pay for McNally's legal case:

https://www.blogger.com/u/9/blog/posts/1269349089208622678

* The 2023 Sandwell Scum Counter can be found via this link:

https://thesandwellskidder.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-all-new-2023-sandwell-scum-counter.html

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