Tagged: birmingham post
FOI Friday: Hospital parking, strange police phone calls, cheating students and criminals applying to work in schools
Toilet seats and compensation < < < Birmingham Mail
A WORKER sued Birmingham City Council and won £1,750 after a toilet seat collapsed causing him injuries, it has emerged.
The man was one of 274 successful claims in the last five years leaving taxpayers with a bill of almost £5 million.
Trips, exposure to deadly asbestos and problems with training were behind some of the most costly compensation payouts by the city council last year, the Birmingham Mail can reveal.
The cost of defending claims by a police force < Carlisle Times and Star
Cumbria Constabulary has paid out almost £50,000 in five years defending itself against employees who made claims of racism, sexism and unlawful deduction of wages.
The figures, released under the Freedom of Information Act, show 12 employees made claims against the force between 2008 and 2011.
Of these cases, Cumbria Constabulary lost three following an employment tribunal, won three and settled five without the need for an employment tribunal.
Bomb alerts in a city < < < Bradford Telegraph and Argus
Bomb experts carried out a controlled explosion after a smoke grenade was found in a Bradford alleyway in the 15th Army call-out to the city in three years.
Statistics from the Ministry of Defence released to the Telegraph & Argus under the Freedom of Information Act show the Catterick-based Army bomb disposal unit had been deployed to 14 other reports of suspicious packages, bomb hoaxes and improvised explosive devices in the district before the latest incident on Monday night.
Violent criminals apply to work in schools < < < Sunderland Echo
VIOLENT thugs, benefit fraudsters, drink drivers, drug users and a witness who lied under oath.
These are just some of the people who have applied to teach your children.
Today the Echo reveals the long list of convictions held by people applying to work with children in Sunderland’s schools.
The criminal offences were discovered when the past of applicants was scrutinised by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB).
A Freedom of Information Act request found that 72 applications made in the city in the last two years were flagged up by the checking process, which unearthed 180 previous convictions.
A parking ticket issued every five minutes < < < Western Morning News
Motorists in Cornwall are being punished with parking tickets once every five minutes, the Western Morning News has discovered.
Parking officers handed out more than 36,000 tickets across the county in the past year, with drivers paying out more than £1.5 million in fi1nes.
Student plagerism on the rise < < < Nottingham Post
THE number of university students in Nottingham getting caught for cheating in coursework is on the rise.
In the past year 340 students in the city have been caught for plagiarism – almost 100 more than last year.
According to figures obtained by the Post, through a Freedom of Information request, the number of students found guilty of plagiarism at Nottingham Trent University has more than doubled, shooting up from 94 students in 2009/10 to 211 students 2010/11.
Crazy calls made to police < < < Sunday Sun
FROM vampire chases and alien attacks, to UFO and zombie sightings… these are just some of the spooky calls taken by North police forces.
Dozens of members of the public believe they have had a brush with the supernatural over the last five years.
The Sunday Sun can reveal the wacky calls received by forces in the region after a Freedom of Information Act request unearthed some ghostly goings-on.
Since 2007 more than 80 calls in relation to UFOs, aliens, zombies, vampires, ghosts and witches have been made to police by concerned members of the public.
Police officers who quit while conduct probed < < < Manchester Evening News
CAMPAIGNERS have demanded an end to hospital parking charges for seriously ill patients after a Sunday Sun investigation revealed £8m was raked in by health trusts last year.
A probe has revealed nine NHS trusts in the region raised a whopping £8,287,429 in parking fees – that’s up £106,000 on the previous year.
But many scrap all charges in some special cases, making parking free or discounted for cancer and renal patients and long-stay relatives.
Parking fines rebooted < < < The Birmingham Post
The ‘please name your top 20 streets for parking fines’ story is almost as old as the Freedom of Information Act itself but put in the context of tough economic times for businesses, it is perhaps more relevant than ever. To that end, the Birmingham Post got hold of Birmingham’s top 20 list – with one small street raking in almost £100,000.
FOI Friday: Bad living conditions, school repair backlogs, teen drug dealers and the return of schoolyard compo
Revealing the findings of ‘neighbourhood renewal assessments’ – Stoke Sentinel
Here’s one which could run and run across the country. The Stoke Sentinel reports on the findings of a council ‘neighbourhood renewal assessment’ – the likes of which are carried out by councils all over the place.
A NEW report has painted a sobering picture of just how bad living conditions have become in the Portland Street area.
The report, released under the Freedom of Information Act, shows how much conditions have deteriorated at some of the houses.
It is based on surveys carried out at 274 properties, a mixture of private rented and owner-occupied homes, as part of the council’s Neighbourhood Renewal Assessment.
Repairs backlogs at schools – Coventry Telegraph
WARWICKSHIRE schools have a staggering £83 million backlog of repairs.
Warwickshire County Council bosses estimated the cost of getting all the county’s schools up to a reasonable standard of repair.
The figures were uncovered by the Telegraph under the Freedom of Information Act.
The cost of clearing up after police warrants – South Wales Evening Post
I think there’s a better story in here other than the one the South Wales Evening Post has gone with. It reports on the £5k in compensation the police has paid out for repairs to properties which were damaged during ‘negative warrants’ – ie warrants which were executed but didn’t lead to an arrest or seizure of goods. That’s a good story – but looking at the breakdown of negative v positive warrants, almost half were negative. A better story?
120 ‘foreign objects’ removed from patients in Lincolnshire – Boston Standard
Here’s a curious story. FOI led to the Boston Standard to find out that 120 people had ‘foreign bodies’ removed from them in hospital, yet the hospital couldn’t say what those objects were. The Standard used information from elsewhere in the country to talk about the sorts of objects which could be involved.
Teenage drug dealers – Teesside Evening Gazette
SUSPECTED child drug dealers as young as 15 were among those arrested on Teesside, new figures have revealed.
Officers from Cleveland Police arrested 17 suspected child drug dealers last year.
Five were girls held over claims they were dealing cannabis, and six of the boys, including two 15-year-olds, were risking lengthy prison sentences after allegedly dealing in Class A drugs.
The findings were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Escapes from mental health units – Wigan Evening Post
10% of people admitted to mental health units in Wigan escape, according to the Wigan Evening Post.
Cost of overseas patients not paying up – Scarborough Evening News
This story stands out more because of the level of detail released than anything else:
SCARBOROUGH’S NHS Trust is owed more than £30,000 in hospital bills, racked up by overseas patients not entitled to free treatment.
The figures, obtained via a Freedom of Information request to Scarborough and North East Yorkshire Healthcare NHS Trust, show that since February 2009, £33,229.41 has either been written off or is currently being chased by the Trust.
The numbers include £10,297 that the trust is still chasing from a Syrian patient who underwent treatment in May 2010.
The highest amount written off was for £5,701, owed to them from a Thai patient who underwent treatment in August and September of 2009.
The books and CDs you aren’t borrowing from the library – Sunday Sun
Tomes such as Old Scottish Clockmakers 1453-1850 and Agrarian History of England and Wales Volume 5 have lined library shelves untouched for decades.
But surprisingly some popular names were also on our list, compiled from Freedom of Information requests by the Sunday Sun.
When it comes to music, in Northumberland, four copies of Coldplay’s album X&Y were only borrowed once last year, the same number as The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.
The return of an old favourite: Schoolyard payouts – Leicester Mercury
A schoolgirl who was burnt when baked beans were spilled on her could be in line for a council pay-out of up to £12,000.
The hot food was spilled on the youngster’s neck at a county council-run school. The authority has now set aside thousands of pounds to cover potential compensation and legal costs.
The incident is one of 63 compensation claims made for injuries sustained at county schools during the past four years, according to new figures. But, of the 29 cases dealt with to date, just five have resulted in a compensation pay-out.
The cost of council sick pay – Birmingham Post
Birmingham City Council spent £35 million on sick pay for staff last year.
And new figures have revealed employees in some departments are taking more than double the national average of days off ill.
The authority spent £34,856,713 on sick pay between January and December last year, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
The council did not reveal the bill for paying agency staff to cover absences, meaning the total cost will be even higher.
FOI Friday: Council workers earning less than a living wage, mental health wards and publicly-funded competitions
1. The impact of the closure of mental health wards -Burnley Express
This FOI from the Burnley Express really impressed me because it illustrates brilliantly how FOI can be used to paint a fuller picture than an organisation would otherwise seek to reveal. Lancashire Care NHS Trust, the mental health trust for Lancashire, plans to end all in-patient mental health care at Burnley General Hospital. Some patients will be moved to Preston – around a 60 to 70 mile round trip – and in 2014, dementia care will move to a site near Blackpool, almost a 100-mile round trip.
The trust argues it is about improving services for patients – but how many patients will be affected? That was the nub of the Express FOI, which is well explained in the article because it does what few FOI articles do – revealing what questions they asked before going into the answers.
Figures for the final six months of last year show the three wards in Burnley and the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit were very busy. The PICU ward was 91.2% full, two of the others were at full or over full, at 99% and 102%, and the third was 56% full.
According to the Trust, 472 teenagers have been admitted to the PICU ward in the last five years. 489 patients were admitted with dementia.
The new Blackpool development, a car boot sale site at Wyndyke Farm, off Preston New Road, is expected to open in 2014. Its 30 dementia and 16 PICU beds will serve the whole of Lancashire. The Trust says it is reducing dementia care in hospital because of developments in community services.
The numbers rather suggest that there won’t be enough beds, and those that there are will be up to 50 miles away. The numbers from the FOI request show, if nothing else, that there’s no numerical reason for closing the wards. Change for change sake?
2. Council’s dog poo crackdown is well, you know – Kidderminster Shuttle
Here’s a good example of FOI enabling residents to hold a council to account. The Kidderminster Shuttle probably covered the launch of the local council’s crackdown on dog poo – I imagine it warranted a press release. Shame, then, that a year on, and FOI reveals little action materialised.
3. Illegal gypsy sites – Burton Mail
When an illegal gypsy camp appears near someone’s house, the council is normal the first place that person calls for help. The Burton Mail used FOI to find out how many such camps had been reported in the last three years in their area – almost 100.
4. The impact of new parking rules – Birmingham Post
Parking tickets are often the subject of FOI requests – but here’s a different take on how to do it. The Birmingham Post used FOI to find out how many more tickets had been issued following the extension of parking rules to cover evenings and Sundays. The number of tickets issued has risen 74% – a nice little earner some might say.
5. Police cuts confirmed – Halifax Courier
The coalition government promised that frontline police officers would not be cut as police budgets were reduced. That doesn’t appear to be the case in Calderdale, where the Halifax Courier used FOI to reveal where the cuts were falling.
6. Council competitions – Wales on Sunday
I’ve seen loads of councils runs competitions with prizes and thought to myself ’that’s probably a waste of money’ but I’ve never thought of suggesting it as an FOI and aggregating the results though. Wales On Sunday have though – and it does ask some questions.
7. Council workers living under the breadline – Wigan Evening Post
Here’s a clever idea from the Wigan Evening Post - start asking local authorities how many members of staff earn less than the Living Wage – a figure calculated by the the Living Wage Unit to reflect the actual cost of living, rather than just the minimum wage. At Wigan Council, one in five earn less than £7.20.
8. Car crime by ward – Cambridge News
Among the many FOI stories you see about crime stats, it’s not often you come across one about car crime, but this article from the Cambridge News is worth a look – it breaks car crime down by ward. Is car crime important? Probably to those in the hotspot area, it is.
9. Missile-throwing yobs – Nottingham Post
I don’t normally include FOI stories which begin life on a press release, but this one was particularly well-timed from Autoglass, the windscreen repair people. It lists the number of missile attacks on cars by police force, timely given the spate of concrete throwing which has made the front pages.
10. How good are councils as employers? – Bradford Telegraph and Argus
There are 67 cases before or recently dealt with by employment tribunal involving Bradford Council staff. Two resulted in combined payouts of £100,000. A sign of a good employer or a bad one? The number being settled out of court suggests we’ll never know.
FOI Friday: Private detectives, bus lanes, stray dogs and mental health abscondees
Spending on private detectives
A different take on how councils snoop on people – how much one council spent on hiring private detectives. Answer: £100,000 at Carmarthenshire Council, reports the Swansea Evening Post.
Fed up of FOI requests about speeding tickets or parking fines? How about asking how many bus lane infringements have occurred, as reported by the Bucks Free Press.
Rather sad figures from the Coventry Telegraph – they revealed, using FOI, that 10% of all stray dogs rounded up in the city get put down.
Patients walking out of mental health units
An FOI story here which is the result of an FOI by a local MP – correctly credited by the Leicester Mercury. Loughborough MP Nicky Morgan says her FOI research shows 40,000 mental health patients just walked out of units, with over 3,000 of those in Leicestershire.
Phone hacking: The next developments revealed?
This week's front page of the Birmingham Post
Here’s my prediction for the weekend: There will be a lot of stuff written about phone hacking. Who said I’ve not my finger on the pulse?
In all seriousness, if there’s one piece you take the time to read this weekend, it should be Birmingham Post political editor Jonathan Walker’s interview with West Bromwich MP Tom Watson.
While John (-ny come lately) Prescott entertains 24-hour news channel viewers with his ill-informed soundbites and rants against the media and anyone who dare hold an opinion which is different to his own, Watson offers a much more considered, and relevant, insight into what is going on.
Of particular note is the fact that he believes that the phone hacking scandal will go beyond simply dialling into answerphones:
“I know of other technologies that people would be interested in, like tracker devices on cars and scanners. A scanner is a sort of black box, you put it on in a room and it takes all the data of every mobile phone in the room. I think there’s a lot more to come out.”
“Since I have been identified with the issue, there are number of whistleblowers and victims that have started to talk to me.
“In fact, I’ve picked up quite a few more this week, some of whom used to work for News of the World until very recently.”
NHS secrecy breakthrough: You shall go to Foundation Trust board meetings
I should have picked up on this sooner, but I’ve been rather distracted over the last week by the birth of my baby daughter.
Anyway, about three weeks ago I blogged on the potential threats to information access caused by the NHS reforms. The threats are three-fold:
1. The abolition of Primary Care Trusts – the bodies which decide how NHS money is spent locally – in favour of GP consortia. PCTs currently meet in public to take decisions, and there is no commitment that consortia will do the same. How, then, are those holding the purse strings to be held accountable?
2. The push for more Foundation Hospital Trusts: These are hospital trusts which have some freedoms from government rules and regulations. Sadly, one of those freedoms has, up until now, been the right to meet in private, rather than in public.
3. The closure of strategic health authorities: Not, in my opinion, necessarily a bad thing but it does remove one more way into NHS information as all PCTs and hospital trusts report to the SHA. In future, this sort of monitoring will be done by an organisation called Monitor. The level of monitoring, and how accountable it will be, remains unclear.
But Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, has delivered some good news on point 2, concerning founation hospital trusts. He is inserting a section into his Health and Social Care bill which will force Foundation Trusts to hold their board meetings in public.
FOI Friday: Councils charging for phone calls, ministerial visits, school away days and abuse by carers
This week’s FOI Friday includes three at the bottom which I think could end up running and running all summer long…
1. Details behind hoax calls (Coventry Times)
Why would you use FOI to get details about fire brigade hoax calls when the fire brigade is normally so happy to help on this issue? Well, the Coventry Times certainly got a lot more information than I’ve seen in other place – such as the percentage of calls which were hoaxes, the number of fire engines sent to fake fires (five on one occasion) and some interesting details about a regular hoaxer.
2. Hospitals paying for funerals (Swindon Advertiser)
A slightly different take on the paupers funeral FOI request which lots of people did last year: The cost of public health funerals. These are funerals which have to be paid for by hospitals when someone who has died in hospital doesn’t have any relatives, or in some cases, relatives who don’t/can’t pay. In Swindon, there have been 40 such funerals since 2007.
3. Slashing mobile phone bill costs (Yorkshire Evening Post)
Lots of people have done FOI requests asking for the number of council staff with council-paid mobile phones, while lots of papers have done ‘shock, horror’ stories about the annual phone bills. But the Yorkshire Evening Post’s take is different. It got the total phone bills for each of three years and a huge drop was evident. Further investigation revealed it was to do with changing supplier. So while it’s not a scandal uncovered, perhaps it’s still an important story to demonstrate how councils can save money.
FOI Friday: Custard spills, charity finances, twocking – and an important breakthrough
Regional Development Agency assets
An important precedent has hopefully been set this week by the Birmingham Post when it comes to FOI. Regional Development Agencies were a relatively late addition to FOI coverage, and since their demise was announced, some have been reluctant to reveal how much they are selling their assets for.
The Birmingham Post this week revealed that Birmingham’s Stock Exchange, set up by Advantage West Midlands in 2007, has been sold for £1. In three years, it has swallowed £3million of public cash.
AWM at first refused to say how much it had been sold for, arguing it was commercially sensitive. The Post has managed to argue otherwie, and AWM changed its mind.
The front page of the Birmingham Post
According to the Warrington Guardian, a third of charities in the town are in the red after grants have been cut and recession hit donations. Reporter Hannah Bargery used FOI to ask the Charities Commission for details about charities in the Warrington borough. The figures she got back revealed that of the 389 registered charities in Warrington, 123 spent more than they received last year.
You may well have seen this story in the nationals this week but it began life as Monday’s splash in the Liverpool ECHO. FOI was used to ask councils for details of cases where pupils had brought compensation claims against schools. One pupil received £750 for being splashed with custard (presumably at lunchtime) while another got £6k for falling off a chair.
Continue reading
Data: Knowing your means from your medians, and why you should tell the reader
The Birmingham Post recently delved into the Annual Survey of Earnings, reporting on how average salaries were changing. Not surprisingly, many people had seen their salaries fall.
It’s a fascinating data set to explore, slicing and dicing the data into regions, professions, gender, local authorities, constituencies and percentiles within earnings – to name but a few.
Like a lot of data sets to come out of government, averages were presented as both the mean average (in the case of salaries, this would be the total earnings in an area divided by the number of people earning) and the median average (the salary earnt by the person in the middle if the lowest earner was at one end and the highest earner at the other).
The Post chose to use the median average, as this helps reduce the impact of an extreme salary at one end or the other. And in doing so, political editor Jonathan Walker also explained why it did that:
FOI Friday: 10 things we’ve learnt this week thanks to the Freedom of Information Act
At a time when budgets are being slashed, spending at local authorities will come under greater scrutiny than ever. FOI is a powerful tool in this respect, as the Press and Journal in Aberdeen showed this week when it revealed how one council had spent £400,000 on more than 100 trips abroad.
2. The impact of winter vomiting
Yes, on the hottest week of the year, the Herald Express in Devon gets details, via FOI, on how many days over the past five years hospital wards have been shut by winter vomiting. 700 days in total – more than two years.
An interesting take on the impact of the recession is revealed by the Nidderdale Herald this week – a rise in the number of pauper’s funerals taking place in the area.
