• Manslaughter

We’ll come back to them in a moment. What’s more depressing is panning back and looking at the many national scandals which have, or should have, led to public inquiries. These include, as well as the Post Office, Grenfell Tower, the rail crashes at Ladbrooke Grove and Potters Bar, infected blood, Covid PPE and the several child abuse ones. In all of these, people died (some by their own hand).

There is a crime of corporate manslaughter. I might be wrong but I don’t think any director, minister, council officer or anyone else has even faced a charge of this, still less been convicted. If these cases don’t look like corporate manslaughter, then what do?

Nor do I believe that there’s any sense that anyone in these roles remotely fears the possibility this might happen to them. A lot of these matters get settled out of court and often in a way which removes the threat of prosecution. In short, a deal is done. The shareholders or the taxpayers pick up the bill and the people who could have stopped it walk away.

• Consequences

When you reach a position of power or responsibility (many of which, like those of being a director, have their duties clearly defined in law) then surely for the worst transgressions there have to be consequences. Directors of companies get sent to prison all the time (well, not all the time). However it seems that the larger the organisation, the less chance there is of this happening.

To take the Potters Bar crash, someone didn’t put the bolts back on the track. Should this person, earning perhaps £20,000pa, be sent to prison? Possibly not. Should their manager? Their manager’s manager? The regional director? At some level, you get to someone who has to take responsibility.

There are at a certian level  people paid sufficiently well to surely make it clear that if one of their people screws up – and if this was clearly the result of bad processes or management – then they have to take the rap. A huge fine for the company is one thing, but the boss won’t be paying that. Going to prison for a year or more would focus the mind.

We get this with drink driving. Unless you have a lot of pull or a very sharp lawyer, it’s twelve points and (generally) a ban`; and perhaps more if you’ve hurt someone. This isn’t something you can do a deal about and pay a fine to make it go away. Why should manslaughter be any different?

• Responsibility

I’m not sure of the current definition of who might be vulnerable to corporate manslaughter or similar serious charges. However, it might be as well to ensure that all those in such position, and the rest of us, knew who these were. Perhaps the management chart of any organisation of a certain type or above a certain size should have a red dot next to the name of anyone whose position is sufficiently senior that they could be banged up.

This might also make things easier when they’re defending their salaries at shareholders’ meetings, Commons select committees or Cotswold dinner parties.”You might think it’s a lot,” they could say, “but I could go to prison if any of the systems below me screw up and I could have stopped it.” That’s a fear we can all understand.

• Broad brushstrokes

Since I’m painting in such broad and unrealistic brushstrokes, I’ll add another.

You may or may not accept the above statement that the larger the organisation you run, and therefore the more damage and misery you can cause, the less likely you are to do time if things go wrong. Fair enough. I’ll offer you another one.

This comes in two parts. The first is that any problem becomes progressively more difficult to deal with the longer it persists; and this becomes exponentially more difficult to deal with if a cover-up is attempted. Watergate and the PO scandal both provide different examples which, respectively, proved and are proving this proposition.

And yet we do it. Let’s take an example of a local council which is weaponising a charge – let’s call it a Community Infrastructure Levy – against its residents (or perhaps it needlessly closed a football ground, or decided to penalise a community transport company: random and hypothetical examples, you’ll understand).

It must soon become clear that a wrong has been committed. There’s then, as we discussed last week, a point where an “us v them” attitude is developed, which leads to full-scale corporate defensiveness and then a whole carnival of denials, obfuscations and delays. All of these are just different stages of a cover-up.

However, I would lay good money that the leaders of any organisation that finds itself in this expensive, divisive and non-productive position would look back and say “that was where we should have changed course.” You can’t go back, of course.

However, people are much more receptive to candid apologies than leaders would like to believe. However, rare and brave indeed is the person who (a) realises that the last chance for a graceful and face-saving change of path has arrived and (b) has the courage to admit it in public. Mostly, they plough on into the increasingly tangled undergrowth.

• A new tense

What we need is a new tense, which might be called the past continuous imperfect or the present admissional. I don’t know how the syntax would work (French, with its plethora of verb endings, would be better suited to such inventions than English). They used to do this in China a lot, and perhaps still do. The gist might be something like this.

“In the past, I have made or condoned a number of statements about this issue which I now recognise to have been [delete as appropriate] immoral, illegal, stupid, misguided, politically motivated, perverse, ill-considered or just generally plain wrong. In short, I screwed up. Being the [delete as appropriate] leader, minister, director, CEO or responsible person, I would like to plead present admissional.

“This means that any charges I might face, custodial or otherwise, will still apply but will be mitigated by this heartfelt declaration. We are abandoning this course of action with immediate effect and embarking on a new one which, will, hopefully, produce better results. Thank you.”

What might the effect of this be? I’d suggest that the speaker would be praised, even by opponents. How many times has this happened? Hardly ever. Why not? Because to admit you’ve been wrong is, as we see it, to admit you’re weak – and who wants a weak leader?

It also might be to admit that you re, or at least were, legally wrong. However, just as courts take “guilty” verdicts into favourable account, so should they respond well to the present admissional. We all mess up, but this person has apologised – is that not a huge step forward?

The art of apologising is a rare one. When I have to do it, I’m in a ferment beforehand but receive an endorphin rush when it’s done. It’s also very rarely that the apology isn’t accepted.

For many people – including Lee Castleton, where this started – an apology like this (coupled with suitable compensation) would have gone a long way. As it is, we’re in a horrible place of twenty years of pain for him, non-productive corporate defence by the PO and huge costs for everyone – which you and I will have to pay for. It doesn’t seem like those responsible are going to do any time either: but here’s hoping…

• Community Infrastructure Levy again

Yes, I know I’ve written about this in the past but here’s a bit more. It follows from much of what I’ve said above. I have two things to add about this scandal (by which homeowners in several areas have been charged sometimes six-figure sums for sometimes fairly basis home improvements).

The first is that although some councils are by any standards behaving badly about this, to some extent this isn’t their fault.

The original 2010 legislation, perhaps for political reasons, stressed the local flexibility councils would have. It’s been proved beyond all reasonable doubt – and admitted recently by the Minister Matthew Pennycook – that this has not worked. Matters such as who should or should not be charged CIL, what kind of problems any local review panels or similar should accept and the max and min CIL charges per square metre are things the government should decide.

If the CIL scandal has taught is anything, it’s that interpreting and implementing these matters is often beyond councils’ competence. “Local councils” – the clue’s in the first part of the name. There are hundreds of local services these provide, many of them superbly, and which central government should go anywhere near. A national regulation like CIL is not one of these.

Fortunately, there seems a growing sense in Westminster that this legislation is mis-firing. But will it be fixed? Matthew Pennycook, you have all the ammunition and support from an increasing number of MPs. What are you going to do?

• CIL tropes

The second concerns a few tropes that may be levied against those who’re fighting these injustices.

• These people have homes and CIL is a fair way to get them to pay their share. Wrong. CIL was never designed as a tax on wealth. Many of us extend or convert our homes, normally for utility value rather than profit. This places no extra burden on the local community in the way that new dwellings do.
• They can afford it. Wrong, in most cases. Would £85,000, and at times more, for building an extension seem like a fair charge to pay to you? Could you afford that? Some people are having to sell their homes to pay these bills. How would you feel about that? In any case, being able to afford to pay a charge doesn’t make it right.
• They were aware of the risks. Wrong. The system is opaque and some councils count on this. In no case I’m aware of were the likely charges made clear in advance.
• It’s a middle-class obsession and not at all similar to the PO scandal. Wrong. Both involve similar threats and penalties. Both involve people who have invested in the place or business they’re trying to develop. B0th have faced abominable obstacles from organisations that should have helped them.
• HMRC and VAT will treat you in the same way for errors. Wrong. These can be corrected or adjusted in cases of genuine misunderstanding. I have experience of both.
• The council’s hands are tied and they have no discretion. Wrong. West Berkshire Council displayed discretion eighteen months ago and there’s been no challenge to this. Indeed, the Minister recently said that this was a “good” example.
• Anyway, this couldn’t happen to me. Wrong. If you live in an area which charges CIL and where the council behaves in the way, it could. Be warned…

• The biggest abuse

The problem is that there are still insufficient rewards for good behaviour and insufficient punishments for bad, particularly where this is conducted on a large scale. We are after all, just animals with opposable thumbs and a thesaurus. This isn’t going to change. One measure of a civilised society is how well it (a) prevents abuses by those in power and (b) how well it deals with these abuses when they happen.

With regard to the above-mentioned ones, we’re not doing very well. I concede that our systems may have prevented worse ones from happening. However, what’s more depressing than abuses taking place is the time and effort that it takes to do anything about them once they’ve happened. In many ways, that’s the biggest abuse of all…

And finally…

• We have four chickens. Penny and I have different ideas about them. She thinks they should be allowed to roam free during the day in that part of our garden, in so far as they can be constrained in it. I think they shouldn’t as they eat the fruit (currently raspberries), poo everywhere and escape. If you hear any raised voices from Penny Post towers, it may well be about this.

Then I pointed out to her this story about a zoo in Denmark – not too far away – which was looking for unwanted pets, including chickens, to feed to their carnivores. This has caused an amount of social-media kick-back that could perhaps have been predicted. Of course, I wouldn’t do anything like this to our egg-layers – or would I…?

• Opinions differ as to how well this government has managed the economy. The recent report from the BBC about the National Institute of Economic and Social Research’s forecasts of the need for a £41bn financial hole needing to be plugged by tax rises cannot have come as welcome news, or perhaps as a surprise, for Rachel Reeves.

She has one advantage over some her predecessors. In the last fifteen years, we’ve all come to accept by slow degrees that everything we get from the public service is now slower and worse. It also costs us more in charges and taxes, or in resorting to private remedies if we feel so inclined. This is exactly the level of sustained declining expectations that a government likes. 

• A recent article in the Local Government Chronicle points out that one of the results of the local-government reforms will almost certainly be a reduction in the number of councillors, which has been estimated as being perhaps as high as 90% in some areas. Quite how their workload – which, unlike the councillors themselves, won’t disappear – will be managed is unclear. So too is what terms like “neighbourhood governance” will mean in practice.

“This isn’t a virtue of reorganisation,” Professor Colin Copus argues in the article. “It’s a hollowing-out of local democracy and a reduction in opportunities for citizens to get involved in local self-government.”

• I was intrigued, though not particularly surprised, to read in the most recent Private Eye (1655, p14) that both Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss have recently cosied up with US lobbying firm Gunster Strategies. Good to know that their “distinguished career on UK politics”, as Gunster described Kwarteng when appointing him as a strategist, will not go the waste.

• I do love cricket. However, the people running it are a little odd sometimes. Why, for example, this horror of substitutes (they can be used, but can’t bat or bowl)? In the last test in the wonderful series against India. Chris Woakes dislocated his shoulder in the field and, as things panned out, had to come into bat with his left arm strapped up with England needing a dozen runs for victory. He had to do some running – which must have hurt – but didn’t need to face a ball. I was curious about how the Indians would have bowled at a one-armed player but didn’t get to find out.

Every other team sport I’m aware of has substitutes. This sport’s lawmakers have never been famed for keeping up with the times. To a certain extent, that’s its charm. This rule, however, is just silly. The system works elsewhere, so why not in cricket? Oh, of course – because it’s cricket; which is, of course, different. Silly me…

Across the area