Opposition members called for greater transparency from Brighton and Hove City Council to make it easier for voters and taxpayers to find rulings and judgments by regulators and other outside bodies.
But a motion aimed at more openness failed to win the support of the ruling Labour administration at a meeting of the full council on Thursday night (1 October).
Independent councillor Birgit Miller called for the council to set up a publicly accessible online register of decisions and rulings from the Local Government Ombudsman, Information Commissioner, tribunals, courts and other external regulatory bodies.
She said that their findings were published across several websites, making it difficult for the public to find the information that they wanted.
She also called for an annual report either to one of the council’s overview and scrutiny committees or to the Audit, Standards and General Purposes Committee.
The report, she said, should include “recurring issues, outstanding recommendations and lessons for service improvement and governance”.
Councillor Miller said: “An organisation begins the process of learning through being transparent about its mistakes and failures as well as being good practice and seeking to embed it throughout an organisation.
“Only through recognising our mistakes and understanding how and why they happen is it possible to learn. Otherwise mistakes and wrongdoing become entrenched and pervasive and become the culture.”
She highlighted the council’s adult social care service, which has an inadequate rating, and housing which is undergoing an inspection by the social housing regulator.
A lack of openness, Councillor Miller said, had left council officials and junior stuff feeling unable to expose issues such as “phantom flats”.
She was referring to flats that do not exist but appear to part of a building where the council is the freeholder but which is managed by Seaside Homes.
The reference was understood to be to a building in Ventnor Villas, Hove, where the basement flat is riddled with mould and letters arrive for flats E, F, and G, which do not exist.
Fellow Independent councillor Samer Bagaeen supported the proposals, saying that residents should not have to “become detectives” to find rulings from tribunals, ombudsmen and other regulators.
He called for a clear record of substantive findings, the council’s response and actions taken.
Councillor Bagaeen said: “I recognise that the administration may choose not to support it. That is their right.
“But such a decision would be difficult to reconcile with the repeated commitment we hear in this chamber to openness and transparency because openness cannot mean publishing only what is comfortable.
“The real test of transparency is how re respond when independent scrutiny is difficult.”
Green councillors backed the independents although Councillor Raphael Hill raised concerns about the challenge of manually updating the council website from multiple sources.
Councillor Hill said: “Let’s also bear in mind that just because this information can be hard to find, that isn’t because of council officers or some shadowy illuminati-type organisation trying to withhold this information from people.
“It’s really just that bodies like the CQC (Care Quality Commission) or different ombudsmen have their own separate website that are hard to navigate and also can be quite technical in nature with their judgments.”
Conservative councillor Ivan Lyons backed the proposal, saying: “Clear accountability is paramount to a Conservative approach.”
He said that an annual report seemed appropriate and should go to a scrutiny committee or to the Audit, Standards and General Purposes Committee.
It also seemed good practice to identify recurring issues, outstanding recommendations and lessons for service improvements and governance, he added.
The Labour deputy leader of the council Jacob Taylor said that the request was not unreasonable but underlined Councillor Hill’s concerns about officer resources.
Councillor Taylor said: “Nominally, we could create a new database. We could create a new website. We could have tracking. Those things could be done.
“But one of the things you learn in this role is almost the art of the whole thing, trying to get change made in the council and in the city is the effective deployment of officer resources, the effective deployment of time and financial resources to fix the things that really matter.”
Labour councillors voted against the motion which was not carried.
The council are like the Labour government, they think they are not accountable. This Labour Government with Starmer and now Burnham are the worst government in history. Burnham even told lies to a Leave area to get into power. WE ARE NOT IN SAFE HANDS.
Behave. It’s not even the worst government of the past 5 years
Don’t worry bhcc Labour lot. This time on this date next year it’s game on and you’ll learn that illegally trying to take someone’s kid and then fighting me tooth and nail to not give me my information on your side witch I got but largely redacted which also contradicts it’s self 2 years ago (that I got, I also printed it of physically) he turns 18 and I can legally pursue my claim you ratz
Cllr Taylor said officer time should go on ‘the things that really matter’. In the same speech he said he wanted officers ‘focused on getting the backlog down of FOI requests’. That backlog shows why the motion had a point.
The council’s own figures show it answered 90% of FOI requests on time in 2024/25 and 73% in 2025/26. At the end of July, 278 requests were overdue, 19 of them by more than 100 working days. The Information Commissioner upheld seven complaints against the council in full between November and July, more than for any other council outside London.
The council publishes none of this. Another Labour councillor told the meeting ‘there’s nothing that we’re not putting in the public domain’, but residents only know these numbers because they asked for them under FOI. Every one of those requests adds to the workload of a team that is already behind. Publishing the figures routinely would take less officer time, not more.
It may not stay optional. In July the Information Commissioner issued formal practice recommendations to at least eight councils, including Newcastle, Sunderland and Durham, for not publishing their FOI performance statistics. The code of practice says councils of this size should publish them quarterly. Brighton and Hove doesn’t.
Sounds like a massive waste of money and resources. I would much prefer my bins and roads to be the priority than some pointless website for some lizard who needs a hobby to see who said what at a meeting about nothing
One is rather fond of the old expression: where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Apparently where there isn’t a will, there’s an officer resource issue.
The proposal is “not unreasonable”. A database could be created. A website could be created. Tracking could be done. But apparently transparency does not quite make the list of “things that really matter”.
All this less than a fortnight after the Information Commissioner served the Council with an Enforcement Notice over its performance of its statutory Freedom of Information duties, citing a significant backlog of requests.
One cannot help feeling that, on this occasion, the argument for greater transparency has rather helpfully made itself.
Lady Bracknell, thank you for pointing this out. I hadn’t seen the Enforcement Notice, and having now read it, it deserves more attention than it has had. It is exactly the sort of thing that would have been highlighted through an online portal like the one the Cllr’s were proposing and Cllr Taylor was saying was not needed.
It is dated 21 September, ten days before the council meeting, and as far as I can tell nobody mentioned it in the debate. The Commissioner says he contacted the council in July after an uptick in FOI complaints. The council then supplied a list of 288 overdue requests, the oldest dating from April 2025.
The council has to answer all of them by 8 January and it also has to publish an action plan on its website by 21 October ‘identifying the root causes of delays’. This feels particularly embarrassing for a council led by an FOI champion like Cllr Sankey.
Toto, thank you. And may I say, what a wondrous name you have. One feels immediately that we are not in Kansas anymore, although Brighton & Hove occasionally produces much the same sensation.
How terribly inconvenient when further investigation makes the case one has just voted against rather stronger.
One does begin to wonder how widely the Information Commissioner’s Enforcement Notice was understood before this discussion.
Indeed, was the not-so-young Councillor Jacob Taylor himself aware of it when making his defence of the council’s position? Perhaps somebody might ask.
After all, 288 overdue Freedom of Information requests and a formal requirement to produce an action plan hardly suggest that greater transparency is a solution desperately searching for a problem.
Sometimes the paperwork really does rather spoil the argument.
Augusta
That 288 people who would do well to go on a dating website in their spare time instead.
Oh, dearest Imogen. One fears that if 288 overdue Freedom of Information requests are the result of people having too much spare time, the Council’s difficulty in answering them rather suggests it could do with a little more.
As for the dating website, one suspects that “poor communication and an unwillingness to disclose information” would result in rather a lot of swiping to the left. As Queen’s Park demonstrated only recently.
Lady B
Don’t worry bhcc Labour lot. This time on this date next year it’s game on and you’ll learn that illegally trying to take someone’s kid and then fighting me tooth and nail to not give me my information on your side witch I got but largely redacted which also contradicts it’s self 2 years ago (that I got, I also printed it of physically) he turns 18 and I can legally pursue my claim you ratz
Well Bobby, did you forget 14 years of the last Tory government? Cameron (Con/Lib Dem coalition austerity mess, Brexit) Johnson (Covid delays) Truss etc.
We could go even further back and look at Thatcher selling everything off, with the water companies set to be the best thing ever! How did that work out?
So we’re hardly suffering the worst Govt ever are we?
Oh Stig. One always feels that choosing the low-water mark as one’s benchmark tells us rather more about one’s opinion of the present station than perhaps intended.
“Others were dreadful too” is a curious standard by which to measure success. One suspects rather a few of Sir Keir Starmer’s supporters have recently discovered the limitations of that particular argument by now.
Augusta
I am going to the police and police crime commissioner or with. Obviously people can do what they want, but if you care about this city and want to see our city be a better place, we have to take a stand. As wellington house and assets are sold off, mass new borrowing, the city cannot afford to ignore this and the police should see this as evidence, a councillor does not and has never in my ten years every done this. I commend the councillor and believe her 100%.
The issue we have is there was £6m temporary accomodation fraud in 2015. Sharma got away with that. So no officer has ever been found accountable.
Mary Mears said back in 2015, without a conclusion the council cannot ever reform. There was never a conclusion, so here we are.
So honestly let’s all do our civic duty and report this to the police
It can only be a matter of time before the slaves stop allowing themselves to be silenced and whipped and local Labour discredited before they round on Ms Sankey with a Vote of No Confidence. She is running a Scorched Earth mission to destroy the city, along with her sidekick Taylor. All for the glorification of their deluded egos. And they are dragging their colleagues down with them to make them accessories to their actions. Any Councillor who still has a conscience needs to act to remove these rotten apples.