Why Kirsty O’Callaghan was able to get away with it
Now that Essex County Council’s Audit and Governance committee has released their highly anticipated report into the payments made to Simon Harris, and others, for social media shenanigans, it is clear what happened. Kirsty O’Callaghan gave lots of money to her friends for what amounts to not a lot of work.
Simon Harris was the biggest recipient of funds, being paid £350k for being a Facebook admin. There is absolutely no way he didn’t know he was being grossly overpaid, especially as he knew how much the other Facebook admins working with him were getting paid, he was responsible for giving them the money in some instances. I don’t blame Simon for accepting it, I would have done exactly the same, if the local authority wanted to give me £350k i’d become a moral free zone and would take the cash, no question about it.
Not sure I would have been able to face those who were doing the exact same work for a lot less though. Simon is living it large with enough money to buy a house, those who he screwed over were being paid peanuts in comparison.
Given her success with rinsing money out of ECC, Kirsty turned her attention to a private company she set up, SocialKind Ltd. Simon Harris was content director of this new company. That company was paid £80,000 by Suffolk County Council.
Essex County Council runs on glory. It’s not about doing well, it’s about being seen to be doing well. That so called research into the social media project is why Kirsty got away with it for as long as she did. The members and the officers in a postion of power just see that something is getting praise and they don’t care about the cost. They don’t care that the money could be better spent elsewhere, as long as they can brag about something, spend what you like.
Money is continuously wasted on vanity at Essex County Council. Social workers are underpaid and overworked, and there are not enough of them. They are failing the children and adults they are meant to help every single day, including my family, this is my current mental state:
This problem isn’t unique to EEC, we have a nationwide shortage of social workers, and those we do have are underpaid and overworked. This does have a lot to do with the lack of money for social care from central government for the past 14 years.
So with some social workers having to utilise food banks, Essex County Council waste money each and every year on the Social Work Awards. During the period in which EEC has come under the spotlight for throwing huge sums of money at something that isn’t value for money, ECC wasted £10k on this:
The exact amount is £9950 for the sponsorship category ECC has opted for, that is taxpayer money raised from council tax from the residents of Essex and they are wasting it by sponsoring awards. This is what that money gets them, I say them, because although it’s taxpayers money, there is no benefit to the residents of Essex.
I’m sitting here with pervasive thoughts of harming myself, which will of course be made all better because some high up officers from ECC be included in official photographs with ministers, trustees and VIPS at a Parliamentary Reception.
But wait, there’s more, it’s not only that £10k they have spent, every single year they nominate about 50 EEC social workers for the awards, there are 18 different categories and ECC make sure they have a shot at each category. The awards are based solely on written submissions, so winners are chosen on how well the nomination blurb is written. Not all local authorities take part as most LA’s refuse to waste public money on award shows, t&c’s state that you must be willing to attend the final if your nominee is a finalist, which means buying tickets which I wouldn’t be shocked if they were now £100. Essex usually ends up with a handful of finalists and win 2 or 3 categories each year. ECC usually pay for a table or two, a table will cost about £1000, each attendee will have a 3 course fancy dinner and alcohol.
As it’s all about showing off, Essex County Council will do anything to win, even if it involves cheating, corruption isn’t new at Essex County Council, it’s encouraged as long as the members have something to brag about. The post I will link below is one I made almost two years ago which highlights the lengths that the Essex Social Care Academy go to so that they ‘win’ awards. I’ve made a few posts on the Social Work Awards, if you click on the Social Work Awards category thing they should come up if you really want to read them all. The social work awards are extremely problematic.
The Social work awards are incredibly important to Essex County Council, for no other reason than it makes the officers involved in the whole process look good. Essex County Council have won Social Work Employer of the year on two separate years. It’s been worded differently in different years, my view is that this is to encourage local authorities to enter again. There are 151 local authorities in England that would be eligible to nominate themselves for Social Work Employer of the year, as i’ve already stated, the majority of those wouldn’t enter as they don’t want to waste public money on vanity awards. I’d guess that there are less than 20 nominations for that category per year, probably less. So winning that award just shows you wrote a better nomination entry than the other 19. I’ve spent a lot of time researching these awards and my educated guess would be that the LA’s entering for Social work employer or the year is more likely to be around 10. It’s a pointless and worthless award. This is the Essex Social Care Acadamy’s profile on Linkedin:
Essex County Council has been entering every year for about 10 years. A conservative estimate of how much public money they have spent on it during that time would be £150,000. The sponsorship alone is £10,000 a year just so they get the EEC logo on view during the awards. For the Essex Social Care Academy to be able to brag about being award winning has cost the public over £150,000. During the time where the services were being cut due to austerity, social workers pay stagnated, and carers have had to go without much needed help as there has been no money.
That’s not all the money they spend each year on attending award shows and trying to bag themselves awards, Essex County Council try and enter every single awards they can. I’m in a terrible place right now with my mental health, and looking into how much money Essex County Council waste while i’m doing my best not to harm myself is not easy, so this will not be a comprehensive list.
Essex Housing Awards, there were 55 entries across all 12 categories. There was a 2 course meal for the show, award dinners are usually minimum of £100 per ticket
https://www.essex.gov.uk/news/2023/essex-housing-awards-2023
project Management awards and Public finance awards.
https://workingforessex.com/blog/corporate-award-wins-nov-2023
This is the link to book tickets for this year’s Project Management Awards. Terms and Conditions of entry almost always include that you will attend the awards ceremony. You have to pay for your ticket even if you are a finalist. £300 per ticket to attend an awards show is about standard. ECC have a tendency to book a table so senior officers can show off the photos.
https://www.apm.org.uk/apm-awards/#tickets
CIPD people management awards
https://www.cipdpmas.co.uk/finalists/essex-county-council-o0006
inside Housing development awards
https://www.essex.gov.uk/news/2022/national-award-win-essex-housing
LARAC awards and National Sustainability awards
https://www.essex.gov.uk/news/2022/two-national-awards-circular-economy-team
Adept awards
https://www.adeptnet.org.uk/documents/adept-awards-2023-delivering-clean-growth-essex-county-council-harlow-tendring-retrofit
I’ll stop there for now but will do a more connotes list when I am able to. Every department has its own awards they try and win and they all get to attend £300 a head awards night’s courtesy of public money. It would be interesting to see how much money they spend on them per year.
when I was looking into it a couple of years ago I worked out it was costing the public at least £2000 per award.
I made a FOIA for information on Essex County Council’s entry into the complaints handling awards in 2021. A lot of awards are pay to enter, and these awards were one such awards. Essex County Council complaints department entered these awards in 2021, and won one of the awards on offer. Given the pandemic was still at it’s height, the awards were virtual. Here is what it cost the public for the complaints team to win the award:
It cost them £518 just to enter, and then £1957.20 to attend a virtual awards. When I say them, I mean us, the residents of Essex, we are the ones paying for it. Just so the complaints department can slap ‘Award winning’ in front of their department and make it seem as if they are better than other complaints departments. Notice how Essex County Council does not hold information on how many other departments entered awards in the 12 months preceding my FOI request.
It also benefits the officers involved, when they move to new jobs they can tell a potential employer that they were so fantastic they won an award. The elected members of Essex County Council don’t actual care as long as things look good. There are countless instances of cabinet members praising departments for winning awards. The awards don’t mean a department is the best, it just means that other local authorities don’t waste public money on awards.
The Social Work Awards will be announcing the finalists shortly, Essex County Council will be all over that like a rash when finalists from Essex get announced. I’ll just be sitting here thinking how the money spent on it by ECC could have helped myself and my family.
Then you have the awards that Essex County Council put on. There are the Essex Teaching awards, the Essex Care Sector Awards, Employee recognition awards, social care awards, they have just hosted a Foster carer celebration thing. Each of those costs public money, they hire venues, have catering, decorations, the actual awards themselves, it probably costs tens of thousands of public money. I can’t give a full list because Essex County Council doesn’t want how much they are spending on hosting awards public.
In 2019 the taxpayers alliance researched how much each local authority spends each year on award ceremonies. and calculated the average cost to the taxpayer per council being £18,064. Some LA’s spent nothing, others spent an eyewatering amount. Here is the research:
https://www.taxpayersalliance.com/council_award_ceremonies_pr
They have a full rundown of how much each LA spent in a year on award ceremonies, so I went straight to find Essex County Council, and found this:
The taxpayers alliance submitted freedom of information requests to all local authorities asking for the information, Essex County Council refused to give them the information. I can only guess that the reason for that was because they spend an awful lot and didn’t want that made public.
This is how Kirsty O’Callaghan was able to get away with spending a huge amount of money on a handful of Facebook groups and pages. She used the research paper that was made about Essex Coronavirus Action to show everyone how amazing the project was. The elected members are only interested in looking good so they were happy with it, senior officers are only interested in looking good to the members, so they were happy about with it. Nobody at Essex County Council cared about the huge waste of money, they still don’t. Nobody at Essex County Council are sorry it happened, they are only sorry they got caught. The members don’t care about the wasted money, they oversee the wasting of money on vanity projects all the time, they only care that this got uncovered thanks to people on a certain website who put a lot of work into this.
Simon Harris has come out of this best of all with enough money to buy a house outright, Kirsty O’Callaghan will have made a fair amount from the positions she held, all of them high paying positions, and the money she made from her company. The elected members of Essex County Council don’t care about anything or anyone other than themselves, they will feel they have done enough and will hope it doesn’t harm their hopes for re-election next year.
Then you have the losers, clearly the residents of Essex who paid for all of this while having services cut because the local authority didn’t have any money. You also have the other Facebook admins who were involved in the project who have been completely and utterly screwed by all of this. They haven’t got a huge pile of money to soothe their woes, they’ve been lumped in with Simon Harris which isn’t fair as he was clearly out for himself. He was one of Kirsty’s besties who benefitted substantially from her position, both while she was employed at ECC, and by being the content director of her ltd company.
The other Facebook admins weren’t involved, they weren’t Kirsty’s besties, so didn’t get a small fortune despite doing the exact same things as Simon, and they weren’t part of any of Kirsty’s projects after leaving ECC. They have their names all over everything as being a part of all of this, yet they were the only ones who weren’t playing the system. They did what they were paid to do and had no knowledge of what Kirsty and Simon were doing and the huge amounts of money involved, yet they have been lumped in with them. That really isn’t fair, and it’s not fair that Essex County Council have not specifically specified that the payments made to the other admins were fair for the work done.
The only voice in the darkness is that of Cllr Aidan McGurran. I rarely agree with everything a politician says, but not only did I find myself agreeing with everything Cllr McGurran has said with regards to all of this, I found myself astounded at the lengths he was going to to make his voice heard. When I say his voice, it really felt like he wasn’t speaking for himself but was speaking for the residents of Essex. There was a lot I would have liked to have had the opportunity to say if i’d been in the meetings. There was no need as Cllr McGurran went over and above to speak on behalf of the public, and he was relentless. It was clear he spent a lot of time on this, talking to people, asking questions. He went over and above and you could see his frustration when he was being blocked from getting what he wanted.
So to sum up this rather long and likely incomprehensible blog post, Essex County Council has an ethos of it’s not what you do, it’s about being perceived as doing well. Every single award they have ever won is meaningless, they are in effect paid for awards, paid for using taxpayer money.