I was going to call this post, "How to Get What You Need from a Civil Servant" but a) you have to be able to translate what they really mean first, and b) it's extremely difficult to ever get what you need out of a civil servant, council official, or politician. 
 
Remember, you're up against centuries of practice on their part. Medieval nobility made the fatal mistake of handing administration over to early civil servants. It must have seemed like a no-brainer at the time: they do all the boring auditing while you get on with the fun stuff like robber-baroning, hunting and sucking up to the monarch. But it quickly led to the situation we have today where you phone up an official with a legitimate complaint, them being a public servant and you being the public, yet you come away with the distinct impression that you have somehow offended them and feeling extremely lucky that they have agreed to possibly "look into it".
 
Years ago, on the Kenny Everett TV show we see Kenny at home. His doorbell rings; he goes to the door, opens it and outside is Billy Connolly who says to Kenny, "Yes?". Connolly takes the offensive at being bothered, saying, "You opened the door," then threatens to call the constable. Kenny closes the door but can't resist opening it again. Connolly is still there and now exasperatedly says, "YES?". This is exactly what it's like dealing with officials when you have a legitimate problem.
 
I was a civil servant for many years before becoming a whistle-blower against the service, so while I don't necessarily have all the answers, I think I can identify a few tricks of the trade that you can be forewarned about. 
 
NEVER EVER FORGET THAT IT'S ALL A GAME TO THEM
 
Civil servants for the most part, and particularly in recent years in Whitehall departments, are trained to never do or say anything that might lead to work, changes in the law, or helping the public. The game is to come away from any meeting or phone call having said nothing of any substance and promised little by way of actual follow-up work. Behind closed doors, they actually boast about achieving these aims, such as they are.
 
There is no clear solution to this other than to be constantly aware that they are playing a game. Therefore, try to make everything you say in a phone call or a meeting with them propositional, not just part of a narrative. Which is of course much easier said than done but below are some hopefully helpful clues.
 
LISTENING TO YOUR PROBLEM
 
You get through by phone to the right person (which itself is an art form, of course), this could be say the official who is in charge of the piece of law that you have an issue with. Bear in mind that they will already know about your complaint and will have already decided on the outcome. But very often, the first thing they will ask you to do is explain your problem in detail and how it is an issue for you.
 
This of course seems a very fair and reasonable line to take. And it would be if, as said, they hadn't already decided on the outcome of your complaint. In fact, this tactic is designed to both take the wind out of your complaint and to be able to note that they are "listening". As you talk for 5, 10, 15 minutes and all your points are being noted and "Hmmmm"ed and "I see"ed at, you start to feel confident: perhaps they weren't aware of this problem before and they're actually going to do something about it.
 
Sorry, but this technique is in the same department as the word "consider", which civil servants love to use in their drafts for Ministers' replies to MPs. "I will consider carefully all your points" writes the Minister, but of course "consider" doesn't promise any action at all. 
 
In short, they are notlistening to your problem; they're managing it. And one way they manage it will be to tell their line manager that you spoke for a full fifteen minutes without interruption - eh? What a nutter. Civil servants have decided that this behaviour is on a par with people who write letters to them in red ink with lots of underlines, bolds and triple exclamation marks and therefore are only too happy to encourage you to take it up.
 
Possible solutions:
 
The Reverse Everett
 
When they ask you what your problem is, you say: "What do you think it is?" This is risky, however, since they will probably counter with The Reverse Connolly and say, "You tell me." Which in the circumstances is unfortunately not that unreasonable.
 
Punctuated Requests for Affirmation
 
You pause after every key point you make and say, "So, what do you think of that?" This prevents them from labelling you as a nutter who never stops for breath. It also requires them to clearly demonstrate their unwillingness to actually do anything about your complaint. Because they can only really reply, "I'm not in a position to say . . . " or "I'll certainly consider it . . . " or "Please carry on; I need to hear your whole argument . . . " This reminds me to advise that you should always record such phone calls - because this kind of avoidance of action, minimal though it is, will probably be the only evidence you ever get.
 
Summing up request
 
When you've finished, ask them politely to sum up what you've just said. They will do everything they can to avoid this because while they're only repeating what you've said, on tape or in notes it could look like they are actually agreeing with you. They may say they'll write to you after they've consulted other colleagues in the department, and they'll set out your issue then. But it's worth persisting with this one, politely pointing out that this is a serious matter which they've agreed to consider; therefore, it's important that you know they understand exactly what you're putting to them.
 
DON'T EVER SWEAR, RAISE YOUR VOICE OR CRITICISE
 
Just as officials are very good at establishing who's going to run an inquiry and quickly putting in place terms of engagement that very much suit them and not you, they do the same thing in miniature, in say a telephone conversation. They won't tell you the rules beforehand, of course, but if you break one of them it allows them to dismiss everything you say.
 
So, for example, if you make the mistake of saying, "For f*ck's sake!", even if it's the most appropriate response to them claiming that they don't know the first thing about the job they get paid £80K a year to do, you are still, er, fudged. Because not swearing is an internal rule in Whitehall departments and anyone who breaks it can be dismissed as a dangerous lunatic. Even if they're not a Whitehall civil servant. Even if they're a Minister.
 
Similarly, don't raise your voice, even if to do so would be the most human response to another duplicitous inanity they send your way, e.g. you say: "WHAT KIND OF PERSON AREYOU?"
 
Watch out, too, for accusations that you are "criticising". For example, I was once talking to a civil servant, giving them information - on record, verified, factual information - that indicated that one of the "independent" experts they'd appointed was probably in the pay of the very industry that he was supposed to be investigating. Instead of expressing alarm and promising to look into the evidence, they accused me of "criticising" their expert and I could hear the scratching of a red pen making an entry in that nutter register.
 
Solution:
 
Politely, stick to the facts and evidence. Specifically say that you are not criticising (their expert); you are helping them to make sure that this important investigation into public safety clearly needs to be independent. They won't act on this, of course, but at least they can't put another tick against your name in the register.
 
THE TELLING FLASH OF IRRITATION/ANGER/IGNORANCE
 
Civil servants are well trained in never answering your questions and steering you towards premature balding by violent follicular self-assault, but there will usually be at least one moment when their guard slips, unconsciously. This is similar to when marriage experts talk about the flash or snarl of contempt that can appear in one partner which, while quickly suppressed, is a major indication of a failing marriage. 
 
For example, when after much stonewalling, I finally managed to get a meeting with Debra Macleod at BEIS who is now in charge of the furniture regulations, there were a few comments she made unconsciously which gave away her true position. Generally, she spent two hours avoiding the key question I put to her, which was: "Given that your department has proved the match test doesn't work in practice in around 90% of cases, do you agree that UK sofas are unsafe?" But there were three moments when she didn't realise what she'd actually said, mainly because deliberate ignorance is never a fool-proof tactic to take.
 
First, I asked her: "What are you doing about BS7177?" She paused then said, "Er . . . remind me?" To which I said this is a key area in the review of the regulations that she was telling everyone BEIS was working hard on, therefore she ought to know. I said it was to do with mattress covers. Her answer to this was another unconscious giveaway: "That's a British Standard and I'm not expected to know about standards, just regulations." However, the Furniture Regulations are based around modified British Standards.
 
The third giveaway was when I asked her what was happening with interliners. She said, "What's an interliner?" She'd previously been telling me that BEIS was working hard on the returns for the 2016 consultation. One of the proposals in that consultation was for interliners. These three comments were definitive proof that despite having been in charge of these regulations for 18 months (at the time), she hadn't even looked at them, let alone understood them. 
 
Now, you probably won't be able to get these people to face the punishment they should receive for this kind of deliberate obfuscation, lying and deliberate incompetence but there are two values in noting these kinds of unconscious responses. First, you have it on record if there ever is a future reckoning, such as a public inquiry. Second, their animal mind that is shaped to do everything to avoid responsibility will know that you know.
 
 
 

From my journal, 13th December 2018
 
The first phase of the Grenfell Inquiry ends tomorrow, exactly 18 months from the day of the fire. This week, there have been various summings-up and a few last minute desperate claims of innocence. For example, the head of Whirlpool (which owns Hoover) made the extraordinary claim that the fire was started not by an electrical fault in the Hoover fridge-freezer alleged to have been the cause but by someone on the 4th floor (say) dropping a cigarette which then blew into the flat below to set light to the same fridge-freezer. As has so far been typical of the Inquiry, absolutely no investigation into what might be behind this statement has been made. But here's a bit of my dot-joining thoughts on it:
 

• BEIS recently passed as safe both the actual model that caught fire and the product type (owned by Whirlpool) but in practice tried to hide the test report that actually shows there was/is a serious fire-risk in this product (as reported by electrical experts to the All Party Parliamentary Fire Safety and Rescue Group)

 

• BEIS obviously wants attention kept off of products that caught fire in the tower, and certainly those that are faulty like flammable furniture that isn't supposed to be

 

• Intertek, a test house not a group of "independent technical experts" as claimed, were commissioned by BEIS in contempt of proper procurement rules for government departments, perhaps because Intertek does a lot of testing work for white goods manufacturers

 

• BEIS has utterly failed to do anything about Whirlpool washing machines which keep catching fire, despite being heavily criticised by the BEIS Select Committee Chair

 
Which might or might not explain why the head of Whirlpool would make such a claim about a flying cig based on absolutely no evidence, rather than cite the 60+ page Intertek report that exposes his products as a fire risk (even if BEIS has lied about its findings)
 
Tonight, I listened to the BBC's summing-up of the Inquiry so far. They did their usual "balanced" report, claiming for example that Grenfell residents/survivors are split equally between those who think the Inquiry is doing a good job and those who don't. Really? Every resident that I've spoken to is utterly disillusioned with the Inquiry.
 
A few days ago, Judge Moore-Bick announced that Phase 2 won't start until the end of 2019 at the earliest, possibly into 2020, despite it originally having been scheduled for spring 2019. He puts this down to the fact the Inquiry will be releasing the 200,000 documents accumulated so far (but only to Core Participants). This "work won't be complete until Autumn next year," he says. "There is lots to do and it's likely to identify new questions . . . however, careful and detailed preparation which enables us to focus on the aspects of the programme that are of real significance should make it possible to ensure that the proceedings, once begun, can be completed within a reasonable time." (My emphasis.)
 
Here we see the casual but utterly deliberate establishment tried and tested tricks – the self-selected undefined timings; the false conflations; the unjustified linear assignments to tasks that could and should be running in tandem. For example, note that he calls the distribution of documents "work", when it clearly isn't: it's something that could easily have been going on simultaneously with the other work over the past 18 months. Also incredibly, in saying that when they start again they should be able to get to the really significant stuff, he is dismissing the 18 months work done so far. 
 
Grenfell residents meanwhile are exhausted, ill and suffering from grief and stress. So far, they've seen absolutely no justice at all and precious little truth. A year is a very long time, and my gut feeling is that this is designed to kill off the residents, both as in their challenge and perhaps even to a degree literally. This is how we do things in this country: what is supposed to be an Inquiry for the benefit of the people who suffered from the fire is clearly and more or less cynically built entirely around the needs of the establishment, both industry and government.
 
Moore-Bick also said he was "particularly grateful" for the 307 statements received from those who have lost relatives, survivors, and local residents.
 
But what he's actually saying is that those statements fell into Phase 1 which is not the significant part of the Inquiry. This, believe me, will be the reason given much later in the day, couched in more subtle words of course, for why the Inquiry has done absolutely no investigative work into those statements, and challenged nothing in any of the other witness statements it has received over the past 18 months.
 
 

One of the mostly unseen effects of the Grenfell Tower fire has been to get officials from different government departments communicating with each other for a change, albeit behind closed doors. It would be nice to think that this is in order to pool knowledge towards providing survivors with the full truth about, for example, the toxicity they were exposed to. Unfortunately, it seems as if this collusion is designed to do little more than protect business interests and the backs of civil servants who do not have the guts to stand up to them and have their own mistakes to cover. 
 
At one such secret meeting last year, an official from BEIS stated that his department knows that the Furniture Regulations don't work but doesn't know what to do about it. Hold that thought.
 
On 18thDecember 2018, Defra published "Our Waste, Our Resources: A Strategy for England" which can be accessed here. In the Ministerial Foreword, Michael Gove states:

"Our goal is to maximise the value of the resources we use, minimise the waste we create, cut emissions and help create a cleaner, greener, healthier planet. 

"By making sure that manufacturers and producers bear a heavier financial burden for the pollution they cause, the Strategy fully upholds the ‘polluter pays’ principle.
 
"And by protecting the natural world, and leaving it in a healthier state for the next generation, it will help us uphold a core pledge of our 25 Year Environment Plan." 

Which sounds good and indeed the press, where it can be bothered to, has picked up mainly on this intention to get industry to clean up its own rubbish. But let's look a bit more closely at how Defra has also made up its own rules inside this strategy that are directly in defiance of the Stockholm Convention (which the UK is signed up to), to allow mass chemical pollution to continue via upholstered furniture. 
 
For a start, there is not a single mention in this strategy of flame retardants (just one to "chemicals" – see below), despite the fact the UK is the largest polluter of the environment with regard to these chemicals in domestic products.
 
Flame retardants are Persistent Organic Pollutants, and here's what the Stockholm Convention says about POPs:

1) They are highly toxic; 
2)  they are persistent, lasting for years or even decades before degrading into less dangerous forms; 
3)  they evaporate and travel long distances through the air and through water; and 
4)  they accumulate in fatty tissue. 

As stated elsewhere on this site, UK homes contain the highest levels of flame retardant dust in the world, mainly because of our tough (but largely useless) Furniture Regulations.
 
Okay, time to step back a few years. Towards the end of 2013, I arranged a meeting at BEIS (BIS as it was then) with a group of furniture industry representatives, to bring them up to date with the changes we wanted to make to the Furniture Regulations. Changes that would have seen a huge reduction in brominated flame retardants in cover fabrics (BFRs are extremely toxic). Their reaction was less than enthusiastic, it has to be said, but at the time we didn't realise the full extent of their collusion with the chemical industry. I'd also invited a colleague from the Environment Agency to give a talk on the Stockholm Convention and how it was due to rule soon that products containing flame retardants like DecaBDE (ubiquitous in UK furniture at the time) would need to be disposed of safely. And that would be a very expensive process. Well, that certainly got their attention . . . so much so, that a delegation from the furniture industry travelled to Brussels soon after to put a case to the European Commission. Was this to support our proposal to remove harmful FRs from furniture? No, it was to try to get the Commission to let them off the likely huge disposal costs. "But we have a mountain of sofas and mattresses in the UK to dispose of!" they bleated. "Tough," said the Commission; "that's the UK's problem."
 
Then again, maybe they're breathing a little easier now, if they've seen the Environment Agency's record on enforcements, i.e. down from around 130 a year in 2012 to around just 15 in 2018 (see graph at end of this blog). The EA has of course been commissioned to undertake a study into the toxicity of the Grenfell Tower fire. Will that put up their enforcement figures? It's hard to tell since the EA has gone totally silent on this project.

Now, here's what's required of any nation that signs up to the Stockholm Convention:
 
a)    Develop and implement appropriate strategies for identifying stockpiles, products and articles in use that contain or are contaminated with POPs;
b)    Manage stockpiles and wastes in an environmentally sound manner;
c)    Dispose of waste so that the POPs content is destroyed or irreversibly transformed;
d)    Not permit the recycling, recovery, reclamation, direct reuse or alternative use of the POPs;
e)  Endeavour to develop strategies for identifying contaminated sites and perform eventual remediation in an environmentally sound manner.

Let's see how the UK deals with furniture under these requirements:
 
a) We'll come to the strategy as such in a moment but in terms of identifying stockpiles, etc, contaminated with POPs, basically the UK doesn't, other than citing a "mountain" of furniture. We don't even know what's in an individual sofa or mattress, just that it's a variety of FR chemicals.
b) At present, most sofas and mattresses at end-life go into landfill, where FRs leach out and get into water, soil and the food chain.
c) Virtually no furniture waste is disposed of safely in the UK.
d) The UK allows second-hand furniture containing toxic FRs to be re-sold.
e) As far as furniture's concerned, I'm not aware of any such identification that has been carried out.
 
In light of this, you'd expect the UK's new Waste Strategy to provide a solution. Well, if you turn to page 39 you'll find a section headed: "Invoking the 'polluter pays' principle and harnessing the potential of EPR for other waste streams". (EPR stands for Extended Producer Responsibility.)
 
On the face of it, then, this is the furniture industry's nightmare made flesh: as the producer they will have to take responsibility and, well, pay as the main polluter. Excellent: at last we'll safely get rid of the millions of kilograms of toxic FRs in our furniture and, because they'll have to pay, they'll stop putting new FRs in new furniture too.
 
Or not. Because on the same page we find this:

"Extended producer responsibility can help deal with those items and products which cannot be classified as hazardous waste, for example soft furnishings that contain chemicals which were legal at time of manufacture but which have subsequently been banned."
 
This is an extraordinary statement in that it completely defies the Stockholm Convention. It even contradicts existing UK government policy, e.g. on asbestos – because this statement rules that anything that contains asbestos is not hazardous waste if asbestos was legal at the time of manufacture. Er, so why all that effort to have it removed and disposed of safely that's been going on since 1999? Why do local authorities provide an asbestos collection service to its citizens? Shouldn't they also be offering a collection service for sofas and mattresses that contain toxic and banned flame retardants? Apparently not because Defra reckons there is a difference between one kind of hazardous waste and another; it just isn't explaining what exactly.
 
Let's translate what this statement actually means with regard to soft furnishings:
 
a) The literally millions of sofas/mattresses that contain now-banned FRs like DecaBDE can remain in UK homes because Defra has decided they're not hazardous waste.
b) When they come to the end of their life, we can continue slinging them into landfill.
c) Furniture manufacturers can continue the process of stuffing furniture with the latest FRs that only the FR industry reckon are safe, and when they're later banned do nothing about it.
 
Are there any hidden motives behind this policy?
 
Let's call this speculation for now, but here are a few possibles:

• If BEIS was to tell the furniture industry that under the Stockholm Convention they must pay to dispose of old furniture safely, the industry would publicly hammer them with the fact that it's BEIS's fault they've continued to use tons of FRs, i.e. because in 2014 BEIS proved the furniture regulations mostly don't work but has refused to put them right.

 

• If furniture containing FRs is (rightly) deemed 'hazardous waste' then clearly Grenfell Tower was stuffed with it and the resulting fire highly toxic. This would again impact on BEIS because as said they've refused to put the regulations right. It would also impact on the furniture industry since they've known for at least five years that they're selling toxic products. And it would impact on the flame retardant industry because their products contributed hugely to the UK's worst domestic fire since the war.

 

• If furniture in Grenfell Tower was hazardous then the Environment Agency will be compelled to start their investigation into the toxicity of the fire from the clear foundation that it was indeed toxic. With this ruling by Defra, however, wriggle room is introduced, i.e. they can claim furniture was not hazardous, which on the surface is ludicrous but shallow claims are surprisingly effective in a country that provides no oversight on its government departments.

 

• The cost of disposal of furniture at end-life would be huge. But if it's revealed that industry was knowingly supplying UK consumers with hazardous products, the costs could escalate and perhaps even be lethal. Law suits would abound, and the government itself would not be exempt from being prosecuted.

 
Let's just remind ourselves that this waste management policy was put together by public servants. It's supposed to protect our health and the environment. Which means that the provision it's introduced to de-hazard toxic furniture and thereby allow industry to continue poisoning all of us forever (unless something or someone intervenes and with Brexit looming that seems unlikely) is either an act of extraordinary incompetence. Or it's something else entirely.


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