Wakefield Council has no plans in place to deal with a zombie invasion, it appears. The shameful admission was made during a debate on Freedom of Information (FoI) requests at the Solicitors in Local Government weekend school on – you guessed it; no, 31 March. Close, though.
The issue arose in a presentation on frivolous requests – such as said preparations for zombie invasions. Apparently local authorities don’t have to bother responding to such requests, according to deputy information commissioner Graham Smith. He said that ‘silly and daft’ requests would be covered by existing guidance on vexatious requests.
It was left to Bernadette Livesey, director of legal and democratic services at Wakefield Council, who was one of the leaders of the session, to admit that her employers had actually responded to the zombie request.
“We were able to reply truthfully that we had no information,” she said, according to a report in the Law Society Gazette.
I toyed with the idea of posting a special 1 April blog, in the honourable tradition of some of our broadsheet newspapers. I realised, however, that some of the goings on in the world of the expert witness are far more bizarre than anything I could make up. One issue exercising expert witnesses above any other is the ‘reform’ of the fee structure. In this context, of course, that means to cut. It is a kind of reversal of the use of the term ‘review’ used to mean ‘increase’ when referring to bus fares.
In a kind of Alice in Wonderland view of the world, the fees allowed in London are less than elsewhere in the country – at a time when George and Dave are calling for the realities of local pay scales to be reflected in public sector pay. In the House of Lords on 5 March Lord Beecham quoted an NHS trust as saying the £90 per hour allowed wouldn’t cover the cost of a consultant.
It’s not been a good week for solicitors, either, at the hands of the courts. First the High Court ruled that the scrapping of fees for committals was legal, throwing out the Law Society’s move to judicial review. Then, there was the news that HSBC will not face an investigation by the OFT over the size of its conveyancing panel. Following that, 15 firms learned they are to be shut down by the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority over professional indemnity insurance issues. It goes on.
As if all this dismal reality wasn’t enough, the spoil-sports at the Law Commission for England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission are ganging up to take away those small bits of light relief for when the burden of being law abiding gets too much: the obsolete Acts of Parliament! Legislation to rid the statute books of whole or part of 867 Acts will be laid before Parliament in the summer by the two bodies (who, to be fair, exist for just such a purpose). Many are to do with the early development of railways or regulation of various activities in India or Ireland. They will follow the obligation to attend archery practice into the recycling bin of history. There goes the livelihood of anyone listed in the Expert Witness Directory offering consultancy on such issues.
Chris Stokes