Mr Kinsey Finally Reponds to FOIA Request
The following response was provided by Surrey & Borders Director of Operations Peter Kinsey. Incidentally , this blog has hardly taken 18 hours to create and its 3 months old, has almost 40 blog entries and hundreds of researched links. Mr Kinsey was simply asked to supply statistics he already had as Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust has just carried out a review of all its work services.
So, Surrey & Borders cuts daily £3 payments to its garden centre workers while its Director of Operations makes false claims about the hours he has worked.
FOI Request
I write following receipt of your most recent email making a formal complaint and requesting information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (“FOIA”). Your request was termed as follows:
“Lastly, would you please provide official statistics for the service users Surrey & Borders NHS Trust currently employs including job title, pay scale and whether temp or full time contract. This is an FOIA request.”
As you know, under FOIA you are entitled to recorded information that the Trust holds but if it takes the Trust longer than 18 hours to essentially locate, extract and provide the information to you, it does not have to respond. You have made a previous request under the Act within the previous 60 days and the Trust is therefore entitled to aggregate the time taken to deal with both of these requests. I have therefore obtained as much information as I can without exceeding the 18 hour limit.
As you know from the previous response, specific details about individual clients cannot be provided to you as this information is personal data (as defined by the Data Protection Act 1998) )and disclosure would contravene the first data protection principle. Further, information relating to clients’ therapeutic work will be confidential between them and the Trust. This specific information is therefore exempt from disclosure under the FOIA.
In view of this, I have endeavoured to respond to your queries in a more general manner and hope that the following information will be of use to you.
The clients who attend within priority enterprises undertake therapeutic activities and training within establishments run by the Trust on a not for profit basis. There is, therefore, no formal contract of employment in place and no formal pay scale. Clients attend the service for a varying number of hours per week and provided with different sums of money.
The service operates on the basis of referrals to the Trust, although there is an assessment period to ensure that the referral is appropriate. The aim of the service is to return people to employment, to provide work experience and voluntary work externally to clients with mental health and learning disabilities. The Trust endeavours to provide realistic work experience and nationally recognised qualifications working in partnership with East Surrey College. The funding for the placements comes from service level agreements with Primary Care Trusts however, Social Services also purchase individual placements.
The Department of Trade and Industry has produced the following guidance on this issue which you may find useful: www.dti.gov.uk/files/file11883.pdf.
As of the 5th June 2006 the following numbers of clients were undertaking therapeutic work at the various priority enterprises:
* Queen’s Park Garden Centre 19
* Old Moat Garden Centre 35
* Arts & Craft Matters 40
* Assembly Matters Redhill 40
* Netherne Printing Services 25
* Assembly Matters Horley 20
I hope that this has been useful to you.
If you are unhappy with the Trust’s response to your request, you have the right to complain to the Trust and should contact me. If you remain dissatisfied, having exhausted the Trust’s internal complaints procedure, you have a right under Section 50 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to seek a determination from the Information Commissioner on whether the Act has been properly applied by the Trust.
Yours sincerely
Peter Kinsey
Director of Operations
Adult Mental Health Services
posted by simply human @ 1:36 pm
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12 Comments:
The man is a tool
He's a creep thats for sure. Look at those figures as well with people getting paid different sums.
This information should go to the minimum wage unit as if there are no pay scales, contracts, agreements or understandings other than Surrey & Borders and/or its agents cutting payments whenever it likes or worse, as in the garden centre, not paying people at all , these workers have no rights in their work environments whatsoever.
The minimum wage people are investigating the issue but as a third party raising the issue I am not allowed to know the results of the investigation. However I have asked SABT to make details of the minimum wage investigations public in my freedom of information act requests for information. Last week I had a mail from Declan Flynn apologising for the delay in responding to my FOIA requests but they would definitely reply by the middle of this week. So this afternoon I wrote to Declan Flynn asking where their definite reply was? I got back an 'I am out of the office until Monday' automated reply. Seems like SABT will do anything rather than reply to our questions in an open resonable manner. Mr Peter Kinsey here hiding behind details of the Act like an 18 hour limit to collecting information is yet another example of how much of a cover up is being attempted and how much SABT have got to hide.
They certainly have something to hide, maybe we should ask for a meeting with the wonderfull Peter Kinsey and Fiona Edwards, I dont think they would do it, but would be worth trying. or turn up to one of there board meetings.
The worst thing is Peter Kinsey is well liked and respected by the SABT staff but he has the people skills of a fish.
Jill,I have invoiced SABT as Peter Kinsey deliberately wasted my time witholding information already available to him through the recent work services review. He could have provided that information without exceeding 18 minutes never mind hours and so citing the 18 hour rule was clearly unreasonable and provocative.
Someone needs to testcase NHS Trusts abusing the FOIA process anyway and why not do it in county court first as all one has to demonstrate is that the other party unreasonably imposed costs on you.
I think I can demonstrate that particularly as Kinsey was using the 18 hour rule to claim that my requests imposed unreasonable costs on his Trust.
By the way, SABP Trust officials routinely browse this blog along with the PPI and its weird to see campaigners names appearing in Trust documents as well:)Thanks to Rosemary Moore for quietly tipping us off about that one.
Hope everything is ok with you.
Peter Kinsey may well be a likeable bloke , I hope he is, but his conduct here has been despicable. We have had some very able users and carers involved in this campaign , some local to Surrey, some not, and yet Peter is still trying to give people the runaround so what chance did the garden centre workers ever have once SABP decided it was going to cut their payments?
Ditto for Fiona. SABP wasted thousands on the 'Making it Real' programme and that money was wasted because what Fiona and Peter are now doing undoes everything she and Graham Cawsley said on the day exposes them all as fakes.
These people have simply been caught Making Life Easier for themselves at their service users expense.
I have asked Peter Kinsey to explain why his Trust thinks those engaged in user involvment issues should be paid for their time but people who work in the garden centre all day long should be expected to work for nothing. He refuses to address this so I am going to ask Fiona .
SABP has 150 people working in this divisive and boundaryless 'work ' environment yet its executives are still trying to duck and weave even after a Government report slammed the public and voluntary sectors for treating disabled workers in this way.
In fact according to his figures they had 179 people working in their various schemes. If they were all on £3 a day then that means they have saved £537 a day or £2685 a week by cutting the £3 a day wages. Plus I suppose they calculated they would save on the administration costs they had in making the £3 payments. But they have not cut the wages of the non disabled workers in these schemes which makes the action directly against the Disability Discrimination Act. I am still waiting to find out from the Disability Discrimination Act people if a class action from a group of workers is feasible. I also hope to get answers to my FOIA requests soon so we can work out where to go from here. I really don't mind if the staff at SABT read this blog because I believe they need reminding that they cannot just treat the disabled people they are ment to be helping in a discriminatory and unjust way without expecting us to protest and take them to court. A meeting with the managers would only be worth arranging if they are willing to discuss changing their whole attitudes and policies in the treatment of disabled peoples under their care and from the responses we have had so far they want to do anything but change. They have tried to bury their heads in the sand and hope we will go away. They have tried to fob us off by ignoring our mails and delaying replies that when we do receive them do more to confuse the issue rather than enlighten us about what is really going on. The fact is it is illegal to use unpaid labour in this country and SABT seem intent on carrying on doing just that and saving themselves a quick £2685 a week but we must keep protesting until they are stopped from continuing this unethical, illegal and unjust practice.
i think the managers and staff of SABP should be on this blog enabling a debate rather than hiding behind bureacratic and legalistic processes that were actually designed to ensure that institutions like SABP were more open and honest with their service users and members of the public.
I'm sure that there's a back story here that SABP managers and staff are aware of and use to justify their actions amongst themselves while officially pushing out the 'Modernisation' line for public consumption.
Think about it, SABP claims it consulted widely in its official blurb yet when service users want to debate with them its stony official silence, bureaucratic ducking and weaving and the same old top down abuse.
Jill's figures point to savings potentially being a major motive, if this is not the case then all the more reason why SABP should start telling the truth. I think people have already been hurt within its silence and lies. This should be enough to prompt the Trust to listen and think again rather than just trying to steamroller through some top down masterplan just because it can.
Just noticed this in one of the comments:
"By the way, SABP Trust officials routinely browse this blog along with the PPI and its weird to see campaigners names appearing in Trust documents as well:)Thanks to Rosemary Moore for quietly tipping us off about that one."
First of all, I don't remember quietly tipping the blog off about campaigners names appearing in Trust documents. And I am not aware that they do.
MY name does appear in some of the Board's minutes related to questions I've raised.
My name also appears in the PPIF minutes where it is noted that I have raised the issue of the Garden Centre Workers and asked about the relationship between the Trust and the PPIF. I wrote a letter on 1 June 2006 as well as emailing, and drew attention to this blog.
Last week I wrote to the Guildford office that oversees the S&B PPIF asking for them to advise me on how to get a reply from the PPIF.
I have seen the names Des Curley and Paul Tovey in the PPIF minutes which can be found on the website.
Good work with the blog but for goodness sake don't go down that familiar and fatal road of secret squirrel stuff.
Rosemary
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mentalmagazine
Rosemary,
I suspect we have both jumped to the wrong conclusions here as the fact is I simply mistook the minutes for the the Mid, East Surrey and Croydon Team Informal Meeting for the missing FoCUS notes you referred to on Mental Magazine not least because the meeting was listed as informal, you were listed as being present, user employment issues relevant to this campaign were discussed and the following items were minuted under AOB.
1. The member of the public informed the Forum of her concerns regarding FoCUS. The Forum confirmed it was keeping a watching eye on the development of FoCUS.
2. The Forum agreed that the appropriate response to the emails received from Paul Tovey and Des Curley was to send them a copy of the Minutes from 14 June meeting that had now been ratified.
Action: MC to send minutes. meeting you attended .
There was nothing ' Secret Squirrelish' about this, I geuinely made a mistake and the reason I did was as much due to the layers of public money wasting and duplicating acronymed bureaucracy at SABP - inpenetrable to most earthlings - as my failure to check that the minutes I received and the notes you were referring to on MM were one and the same. Apologies for that.
For goodness sake! That isn't the same Rosemary Moore who used to cause a load of trouble on UK survivors and go on about how we don't have a users movement in this country is it? Well here we users are with a movement on this blog protesting a just cause which has been kept as more important than any of our individual differences may be. We have had no rules and no in fighting and we've all done our bit in our own ways without squabbling. If the blog owner made a mistake then he is sorry but we shouldn't be accused of anything secret swirrelish whatever that may mean. Even if I am driving the secret getaway car at a secret location on a secret date we will let SABTS have the details if they submit an FOIA request. It may take us a long time to investigate before we can come up with answers though! That is because the answers are so secret even we don't know what they are yet...
Oh I think there's something to be said for judicious squirreling and sharing information only at the right time as members of the public.
Automatic demands for openess from other members of the public seem rather strange and authoritiarian to me ...
The real problem is when a Trust as a matter of habit plays with Users futures without actually involving them fully and then fosters the idea or impression they have been involved through rubber stamping little groups of Users paid to comment across Trust wide issues .
That is not the spirit of patient preference in operation. Its pressured bureacracy, falsification and sqirreling away of unheard Users voices .....
No wonder the Govt wants to get rid of the last vestige of monitoring in the shape of the PPI .. Clearly it wants to shove its political will through with bureau power as slickened up dictat ...
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