Silicon Corruption Valley - How technology is enabling political corruption in South East Wales

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:

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
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)
Elected councillors abused their positions as trustees of Torfaen Citizens Advice Bureau to bury my complaints to them against TCBC and Bron Afon
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
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
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
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
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"
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.
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
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
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
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.

Graeme Russell - Company Secretary and Director: Sometime Head of Human Resources and Pensions at TCBC
Veronica Anne Crick - Company Director: Current Torfaen Councillor and former director of Torfaen Citizens Advice Bureau
Dawson Evans - Company Director: Group Leader of Economy, Enterprise and Tourism at TCBC
Peter Durkin - Former Company Director: Sometime Deputy Chief Executive at TCBC
Richard Edmunds - Former Company Director: Sometime Head of Strategic Services at TCBC
Bob Wellington - Former Company Director: Sometime leader of Torfaen Council and the Welsh Local Government Association

Shared Resource Services - UPDATE!

Since publishing this part of Corruption Valley on April 28^th, 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 22^nd, 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.

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.
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.
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.
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

Louise Crump, finance officer at TCBC, are corrupt;
Deb Smith, Deputy Head of Finance at TCBC, are corrupt;
Lyndon Puddy, Head of Public Services Support Unit at TCBC, are corrupt;
Duncan Forbes, former Chief Executive at Bron Afon, and former County Borough Solicitor at TCBC, are corrupt;
Alan Brunt, Chief Executive at Bron Afon, are corrupt;
Mandie Adams, Liason Officer at Bron Afon, are corrupt;
Malcolm Edgson, Chief Executive and Company Secretary at Torfaen Citizens Advice Bureau, are corrupt;
John Ernest Killick, Director at Torfaen Citizens Advice Bureau and Deputy Leader of Pontypool Community Council, are corrupt;
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;
David Daniels, Elected Councillor (Executive Member for Housing) of TCBC, and former Director of Torfaen Citizens Advice Bureau are corrupt;
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;
Simon Fowler, Senior Regulation Manager at the Welsh Government, are corrupt;
Peredur Jones, Audience Services Manager at BBC Cymru Wales, are corrupt;
Dominic Groves, Deputy Head of Executive Complaints at the BBC, are corrupt;
and
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.

Corruption Valley

Thursday, May 28, 2020

BBC's Executive Complaints Unit responds to Corruption Valley

Alison Wilson, BBC Executive Complaints Unit responds to allegations

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Corruption Valley - Part One