Silicon Corruption Valley -
How technology is enabling political corruption in South East Wales
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Introduction
I am publishing this blog to expose corruption within public institutions in
South East Wales, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is in order
to do it.
The UK has some of the clearest
defamation and libel
regulations in the world. If
anything that I write here is incorrect, the people I intend to call out can
- and definitely should - get me into court, have the
record set straight, and make me pay for my badmouthing.
I am doing this knowing there will be a big cost for me personally, and for
the people I care about. But doing it anyway is the only way I can protect
them and honour their astounding bravery and unwavering support.
What is this all about?
At its simplest, this is about the dangers of the "buddy" networks
that permeate public life in South Wales. They used to be called "Old
boys' clubs", and the term sums it up pretty well. But today, technology
has been thrown into the mix with self-served interests and well-placed
connections, and has produced a political monster more powerful and less
accountable than anything I could have imagined.
Admittedly, my experiences are not going to be commonplace. But some of the
issues involved have the potential to affect many in the borough, and to an
extent, in the country. And I hope, at the very least, to show how little
oversight is in place to protect everybody, whatever the
individual circumstances.
What has happened?
This all began when I questioned what I felt had been irregularities in how
the social housing stock had been transferred from Torfaen County Borough
Council to Bron Afon Community Housing, and that widespread breaches of
tenants' rights by the housing association were taking place which in some
cases were subject to oversight by the local authority but were not being
properly investigated.
Ineffective local government in of itself, if not unexpected, isn't that
interesting. But, as I will detail in the posts that follow, the extent to
which old colleagues have been prepared to go in order to protect one
another from accountability - being willing to commit criminal
offences and to use public resources to cover those
offences up - is in everyone's interest.
In the coming weeks, I will use this blog to publish the story of how:
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Senior officers of Bron Afon and TCBC routinely and unlawfully shared the
personal data of social housing tenants in the borough, and did so in my
case to fraudulently administer my rent and council tax payment accounts in
order to exert financial pressure on me in retaliation for complaining about
housing rights and questioning the nature of relationships between the two
organisations
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A senior officer of TCBC attended Cwmbran Magistrates Court and succeeded
in persuading me not to give evidence in a vexatious claim the council had
made for unpaid council tax, perverting the course of
justice in order to obtain County Court Judgments against me (and
due to the rules of severability, against my wife)
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Elected councillors abused their positions as trustees of
Torfaen Citizens
Advice Bureau to bury my complaints to them against TCBC and Bron Afon
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After making Gwent Police aware of issues going on between the
aforementioned organisations they buried the matter and prevented
the submission of document evidence by blocking the email address I
had used to contact them (and another address that I had not used). Evidence
suggests that Gwent Police have recorded an undisclosed offence committed by
me against Torfaen Citizens Advice, even though I have never been
contacted by the force, much less questioned by them about any
related matters
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Senior officers of the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux and
Citizens Advice Cymru buried complaints made against the local office, and
cautioned me against pursuing the matters further
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After I mistakenly contacted the then UK Minister for Local Government,
Housing and Communities, senior officers of the Welsh Government were made
aware of matters that came under their devolved responsibilities. The Welsh
Government officers used their positions to bury subsequent complaints made
to them about the matters
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Senior managers at BBC Wales buried my complaints to them about the matters,
and provided details of my correspondence to the Welsh Government and,
through a third party, to a former colleague of BBC Wales - the then Chair
of Torfaen Citizens Advice. After complaining to the BBC, all records of BBC
Wales' work with the Chair and other officials at TCBC through the BBC Wales
Children in Need Charity Commission were removed from the bbc.co.uk
website
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A partner of Rubin Lewis O'Brien Solicitors in Cwmbran buried information I
had provided to them about matters. I had approached the firm because they
represented Torfaen Citizens Advice, and soon after complaining about their
failure to act on the information I had provided to them, a notice appeared
on their website informing clients of an email systems failure that had
resulted in the "loss of some client information"
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I appealed to Bron Afon to cease hostilities and resolve our dispute. A
senior support officer at Bron Afon attempted to bribe me
with employment support if I accepted that the matters could not be resolved
to my satisfaction. I declined the offer.
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After an incredibly conscientious and brave officer of one of the
organisations involved alerted me to a plan to use child protection
powers against me in order to force me to stop digging
into the matters, I approached the then acting executive headteacher of my
child's school for help. Evidence suggests that senior officers at TCBC and
Bron Afon were made aware of my approach and that records
were then destroyed. Two of the schools' board of governors are closely
associated with Torfaen Citizens Advice
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In response to an email to the
Member of Parliament for
Torfaen about his performances in the House of Commons, the then Shadow
Solicitor General and current Shadow Home Secretary, Nick Thomas Symonds
contacted me to see if there was anything his office could do to
help me with matters. He failed to inform me that he had
previously served as a trustee of Torfaen Citizens Advice,
and evidence suggests that he buried my report of corruption in the borough
and informed his former colleagues about the correspondence between us
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The Head of Public Services at TCBC personally intervened in and frustrated
requests made to the council in accordance with data protection and other
corporate governance rules. Measures requiring system administration
privileges have been used to prevent me making complaints on multiple
domains used by TCBC, Bron Afon and their partners
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After trawling through thousands of documents, evidence suggests that Bron
Afon and Gwent Police have targeted my parents-in-law in
connection with these matters. Buried deep in my tenancy records, Bron Afon
and the Community Policing Team have an obscure discussion about anti-social
behaviour at my in-laws' street address. Like many in-laws, mine can
attest that I don't visit nearly often enough, and I'm certainly not
anti-social when I do. As Bron Afon tenants, they are subject to strict
anti-social behaviour rules but have no legitimate association to my
landlord in respect of these matters, and until publication of this blog
have had no knowledge of what has happened. Their relationship to me can
presumably only have been established by purposely cross-referencing my
wife's family name to Bron Afon's tenancy records
How is this all connected?
There will always be connections between people in public life. There isn't
an inherent problem with that because most organisations have conflict of
interest measures that stop problems occurring.
In my case, these measures have failed, and I can prove that in some cases,
have been flagrantly disregarded. The seriousness of matters as I have
described them comes from a shared technological platform through which
electronic documented evidence is processed and is at risk - as I intend to
demonstrate - of being tampered with. The organisations involved know this
to be true and wouldn't have acted the way they have had it not been for
their confidence in the technology to shield them. They couldn't have acted
in this way had it not been for the regional deployment of technologies that
makes it easier for powerful individuals to network with each other, and
that protects them from any kind of meaningful scrutiny.
Shared Resource Services
It is important to understand that the IT systems of Torfaen County Borough
Council and Gwent Police, as well as those of Monmouthshire County Council
and other public bodies not connected to the matters described in this blog,
are all physically connected. Parts of the Welsh Government IT systems
depend on the OneWales Azure cloud service. Shared Resource Services
Business Solutions Limited (SRS) operates it all. SRS has already faced
investigation of matters of integrity and mismanagement, and perhaps
unsurprisingly it has been - and is - almost entirely controlled by officers
and councillors connected to individuals who feature in these
allegations.
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Graeme Russell - Company Secretary and Director
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Sometime Head of Human Resources and Pensions at TCBC
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Veronica Anne Crick - Company Director
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Current Torfaen Councillor and former director of Torfaen Citizens
Advice Bureau
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Dawson Evans - Company Director
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Group Leader of Economy, Enterprise and Tourism at TCBC
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Peter Durkin - Former Company Director
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Sometime Deputy Chief Executive at TCBC
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Richard Edmunds - Former Company Director
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Sometime Head of Strategic Services at TCBC
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Bob Wellington - Former Company Director
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Sometime leader of Torfaen Council and the Welsh Local Government
Association
Shared Resource Services - UPDATE!
Since publishing this part of Corruption Valley on April 28th, a
very helpful reader contacted me to suggest that I take another look at how
SRS is organised...
There are two operational arms of SRS
SRS Public Services is a public sector
collaboration between TCBC, Monmouthshire County Council and Gwent Police,
and subsequently joined by Blaenau Gwent and Newport Councils, designed to
deliver public sector service integration in the provision of information
and communication technology services.
SRS Business Services, the SRS Business
Solutions Limited referred to previously, is a trading company limited by
share capital and wholly owned by TCBC and MCC that sells surplus capacity
to the private sector.
I'd suggest you take a look at SRS Public Services' website, at
www.srswales.com, but in the time Corruption Valley has been online, the
website has not been operational.
I know because I've been searching relentlessly to find out more about how
it's run. There are some snippets left over in search engine caches, and a
few industry press pieces floating around the web, but nothing directly from
SRS.
Public Services, Very Private
As mentioned previously, there are a number of news stories about
the criminal trial of a senior director from a while back. There are old news
stories about unaccounted-for six-figure gaps in the books being plugged with
tax money, and stories about
staff redundancies after rounds of funding. Like I
wrote earlier, SRS is plagued with a history of integrity issues and
mismanagement.
On July 22nd, 2015 for example, the
TCBC Audit Committee took a
look at the Wales Audit Office Review of the SRS. Alison Ward, then the
Council's Chief Executive in response to the review, cited the
"visionary leadership" and the "huge injection of money [that]
would help transform Blaenavon to become a national centre for ICT" as
positives drawn from the document. Councillor Graham Smith made somewhat
different observations, noting that he felt "it was the single most
damning document he had read in the seven years he had been a
Councillor", and that "the truth about the trial of the Senior
Director should be stated".
In that Committee paper, I learnt that at that date, all
SRS staff were TCBC employees, and that Governance was provided by Gwent
Police. What was it I had said? "...almost entirely controlled by
officers and councillors connected to individuals who feature in these
allegations..."? You don't know the half of it, yet!
So, why is it so hard to find documentation from SRS? Well, aside from the
website - including its dedicated Governance section - being currently
unavailable to the public, are the papers not hosted on one of the
collaborating bodies' own websites? After all, the issue of scrutiny did
come up an awful lot in the Wales Audit Office Review.
It turns out that TCBC host all the board papers on their website, just not
on the area available to the public. Every SRS Board paper, every decision,
every tax pound spent is available - to internal users only, on the SWOOP
intranet section of the torfaen.gov.uk website.
Very public services, very private scrutiny.
The Real SRS Governance
SRS is run by three boards - the Strategic Board, the Finance and Governance
Board, and the Business and Collaboration Board, and it's run by some very
influential people: among others, there are elected Councillors,
the Police
and Crime Commissioner, the Chief Constable of Gwent Police, and alongside
the SRS Chief Operating Officer on the Finance and Governance Board, the
current TCBC Assistant Chief Executive (Resources), Nigel Aurelius. Keep a
look out for that last name in upcoming posts...
Why publish this now?
Everyone has a fundamental right to privacy. Me, my family, even the
individuals I'll be writing about. But I intend to prove that there is an
unacceptable risk to everybody's privacy and other basic
rights if the issues I'm raising aren't addressed. I am still, as I write
this, reluctant to go ahead and publish, but in recent weeks, my hand has
felt forced.
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The COVID-19 lockdown measures have caused my household money worries and I
feared that any financial difficulties we faced would be leveraged by Bron
Afon and TCBC against me. As TCBC would administer any support with housing
costs, I requested an assurance from the Deputy Head of Finance that badwill
or bias would not impact any claims for assistance sought. The Deputy Head
could not give me that assurance.
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The BBC recently carried
a report by PA Media about a "contradiction of
the principles of public justice", where inquests in the Gwent area had
been allegedly held in private because of the lockdown. I feel there is too
great a risk of the organisations involved in my matters using the lockdown
to destroy electronic evidence supporting my allegations.
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The BBC also reported on a
Lancashire
Police officer threatening to
"make something up" in order to arrest a man in Accrington. This got
me thinking that, perhaps more than anywhere else in the UK, if a police
officer in Gwent wants to make something up against you - or worse, a
political associate of theirs does - the force has the means and opportunity
to destroy the evidence that proves your innocence, too.
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When the BBC reported Nick Thomas Symonds'
promotion to
Shadow Home Secretary, I worried that he had become entirely unaccountable. I contacted
both his and Keir Starmer's offices for assurance that their relationship
wouldn't stand in my way of getting accountability for Nick's role in these
matters. Neither has been able to give me that assurance.
I'm calling you out
In careful consideration of the defamation and libel laws of the UK, and
taking full responsibility for my decision to publish the following-
I, Nathan Young, of Hollybush, Cwmbran, hereby state publicly that you
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Louise Crump,
finance officer at
TCBC, are corrupt;
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Deb Smith,
Deputy Head of Finance at
TCBC, are corrupt;
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Lyndon Puddy,
Head of Public Services Support Unit at
TCBC, are corrupt;
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Duncan Forbes, former
Chief Executive at
Bron Afon, and former
County Borough Solicitor at
TCBC, are corrupt;
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Alan Brunt,
Chief Executive at
Bron Afon, are corrupt;
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Mandie Adams,
Liason Officer at
Bron Afon, are corrupt;
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Malcolm Edgson,
Chief Executive and
Company Secretary at
Torfaen Citizens Advice Bureau, are corrupt;
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John Ernest Killick,
Director at
Torfaen Citizens Advice Bureau and
Deputy Leader of
Pontypool Community Council, are corrupt;
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Natalie Hopkins,
Elected Councillor of
Cwmbran Community Council,
Adviser at
Torfaen Citizens Advice Bureau and
Governor at
The Federation of Blenheim Road Community and Coed
Eva Primary Schools, are corrupt;
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David Daniels,
Elected Councillor (Executive Member for
Housing) of
TCBC, and former
Director of
Torfaen Citizens Advice Bureau are corrupt;
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Leila Gouran,
Director of Global Academies at
Cardiff Met, former
Project Manager at
TCBC, former
Director and Chairwoman at
Torfaen Citizens Advice Bureau, and former
member of
BBC Wales Children in Need are corrupt;
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Simon Fowler,
Senior Regulation Manager at
the Welsh Government, are corrupt;
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Peredur Jones,
Audience Services Manager at
BBC Cymru Wales, are corrupt;
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Dominic Groves,
Deputy Head of Executive Complaints at
the BBC, are corrupt;
and
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Nick Thomas Symonds,
Member of Parliament for Torfaen,
Labour
Shadow Home Secretary, former
Director at
Torfaen Citizens Advice Bureau, reportedly
capable former barrister and sometime contributor for the South Wales Argus,
the Western Mail and other national newspapers, are corrupt.
I'd like to call out a few more people, like the then acting Executive
Headteacher at my child's school, but 15 separate potential legal cases is
enough for now.
I want to point out that every person named above has my contact details and
if there is any sense that what has been published is
untrue, then anybody reading can reasonably expect to see this blog or the
named individual's social media accounts updated with news of 15
actual legal cases coming my way. If it's not true, why wouldn't
they?
To hell with it -
Elizabeth Thomas,
Associate Head Teacher and
Governor of
The Federation of Blenheim Road Community and Coed
Eva Primary Schools,
you are corrupt, too.
What am I going to do now?
In the interest of fairness, I intend on making the individuals and
organisations involved aware of this publication. If it were me being made
the subject of such a story then I would expect the chance to defend myself.
So long as they do not object, and except to the extent that I am prevented
to do so by law, I will make sure their responses are published.
I'm also going to bring the blog to the attention of local and national news
publishers. I don't expect anybody to take up the story on face value alone,
but claims such as those I have made should be scrutinised just as much as
the alleged actions I've written about. If nobody wants to take up either
issue, you should ask yourself why not.
Many of the individuals I've written about, either as elected officials or
public body employees have a duty to uphold certain values. Whether bound by
the Nolan Principles of Public Life or by ethics clauses in employment
contracts such as those used by TCBC, some of them should have already
reported these matters. Some have had mandatory obligations to report the
matters to regulators such as the Charity Commission. Where I think it is
appropriate, I will inform relevant third party groups and individuals of
my claims. I hope too that, as in the private sector, reputation by
association matters in the public sector in South Wales. Where appropriate,
I will inform partner organisations of the blog's subject matter for their
consideration.
I'm going to ask people to share this story, to ask that you consider the
seriousness of these claims, and that you seek accountability. All but one
of the organisations I have named is run with your money,
either directly through taxation or by grants funded through taxation. Any
cover ups have been paid for with your money, too. And if I'm lying, then
the lifes' work of decent and honest public servants is being tarnished by
the wild claims of some no good hoody behind a keyboard. I hope neither is
acceptable to you.
I need to prepare for retaliation and personal comebacks. The primary reason
for my hesitance to make this public earlier is because it is inevitable
that some uncomfortable truths about my past will be disclosed and used to
question my credibility. I can and will account for every one of my
decisions regardless of the cost to me personally - to quote Floyd
Mayweather "my past is my past". It should never cost my wife or
child, or the people who care about them.
Coming next time...
Subject to the conditions of any forthcoming injunctions - again, if what I
am writing is untrue, why not stop me writing more? - in Part Two, I will
detail the relationships between TCBC and Bron Afon, and explain how the
organisational structures in place stifles oversight, how data protection
laws can not protect people dependent on the two organisations for essential
services, and how the Welsh Government's regulatory framework hardly
discourages conflicts of interest between local authorities and registered
social landlords.