Posts tagged Fergus Sheppard

The press office situation at County Hall has bothered me for a while.

Last year Westco, the commercial arm of Westminster City Council, teamed-up with Leicestershire County Council to find a candidate to head-up the slimmed-down communications and press team at county hall.

The high-profile job vacancy, together with a salary of £65,000, attracted more than 40 applications, yet no-one was ever interviewed.

At the end of October, Westco were signed-up for another six month £60,000 stint, to continue to provide an interim communications chief and continue the search for that elusive candidate.

The job was never re-advertised though, and instead the post was quietly axed altogether. Opposition councillors say the council has wasted £100,000 on the whole process at a time when the authority is making cuts to services.

Westco’s original £7,500 a month interim boss, Fergus Sheppard, was replaced by Paul Masterman late last year.

But Fergus continued to work for the county council, one day each week, until fairly recently. He was no longer based at County Hall, however, and was instead down in London.

There were whispers around County Hall that while the situation may have been entirely innocent, it looked bad. Leader David Parsons was, at the time, one of the favourites to become Local Government Association chair. A personal PR man for the leader ahead of the election? All on the rates? Surely not.

Then in December last year Private Eye came out and alleged just that. The council denied it.

In March this year it emerged that Nottingham City Council leader Jon Collins used a taxpayer-funded consultant for party political election advice. The story was uncovered as a result of a Freedom of Information request from the Nottingham Post.

I spoke to the reporter at the Post who uncovered the story. He’d simply requested email correspondence between the council leader and the consultant and the council had delivered. He supplied me with the wording of the FOI request for my own use.

I lodged the same request to the county council in June this year, asking for correspondence between Parsons and Sheppard. A recent response from Graeme Wardle, in member support, said:

“Your request for information has now been considered. However, unfortunately we do not hold the information.
I apologise that your request cannot be met but if you have any further information needs in the future then please contact me quoting the FOI Request Number 2740.”

Effectively I was being told there wasn’t any communication between the council leader and one of the authority’s most senior PR chiefs, or that there were no records at all and all emails had been deleted.

In the past, the usually talkative council chief David Parsons has declined to discuss the communications team issue in any depth with me, and a recent request to the council’s press office on the issue was returned half-answered.

Last week I lodged a new Freedom of Information request, asking for all correspondence relating to 2740. It should shed more light on how my original request was dealt with internally.

In the words of Alistair Campbell, I’ll keep banging on about this one.