Email to the LGO from the complainant dated 1st March 2011
| Dr Jane Martin Local Government Ombudsman Reference: Your letter to me dated 24 December 2010 Dear Ms Martin, Thank you for your letter at reference. I have not replied until now as I expected a sequence of events to play out which have now indeed done so. In a previous investigation by your office against Portsmouth City Council, I was able to expose a blatant cover up by your Institution and wrote a detailed letter with the proof of it to your predecessor Mr White. This letter is at Annex A. You will see in that letter that amongst other things I said that ʻit saddens me that your Taxpayer funded Institution, has sunk to such depths of lack of integrity, that, rather than improve Local Government in the sprit and context of the 1974 Local Government Act, that set you up; you embed complacency, inefficiency and cover up, in the very organisations you are supposed to regulate.ʼ I have to inform you sadly that since that letter was written and you have taken over from Mr White, it would appear that nothing has since changed. In my last communication with you through the Freedom of Information Act, I stated that I did not wish for Mr Pollard, Assistant Ombudsman, not Mr Jones, Deputy Ombudsman, to have anything to do with my current complaint as they had been involved in a previous cover up. Yet I have just received a letter from Mr Pollard making a so called judgement on my current complaint. This is totally unacceptable for the clear reasons that I have already given, which he has emphasised in his letter to me, by carrying out all the cover up procedures that I previously exposed in my letter to your predecessor at Annex A. In your letter to me at reference you state that ʻthe complaint being investigated by this office is as summarised in Mr Mileʼs letter to you of 11 June 2010 and as amended by your letter of 17 June 2010.ʼ I assumed that if you had made a statement like this , that it would happen. It clearly has not. Once again items of complaint that manifestly indicate maladministration by the Council have been ignored, and statements have been made, that are patently not true, and, cannot be supported by any evidence. A detailed synopsis of these failures by your Institution is at Annex B. I am sure that you will agree that the Local Government Ombudsman is clearly in breach of the 1974 Local Government Act by perpetrating these clear breaches of professional investigation and that in doing so your Institution is either grossly incompetent or corrupt. I ask you as Ombudsman to sort these gross deficiencies out within your department, as you clearly should, as the Head of it. I will be out of the country from 15 March 2011 until 17 April 2011 and will not be able to comment on any correspondence from you until after these dates. I trust that you will expose and correct these gross deficiencies that I have pointed out to you, on my behalf, and in so doing, reform your Institution, and bring it back into the Regulatory Body that it was supposed to be when it was set up by Parliament, rather than the one it has become, a Regulatory Body hijacked by the very Local Government it is supposed to regulate. I thank you for your attention. Yours sincerely, Keith Edmunds C.C. Rt Hon Eric Pickles MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government |