On 27 April 2015, I submitted papers to the case officer handling my Civil Service Code case. The case, put simply, was that I was being forced by senior managers to commit breaches of the Code via their misinforming our Minister. 

The Code states:

As a civil servant, you are appointed on merit on the basis of fair and open competition and are expected to carry out your role with dedication and a commitment to the Civil Service and its core values: integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. In this code:

• ‘integrity’ is putting the obligations of public service above your own personal interests
• ‘honesty’ is being truthful and open
• ‘objectivity’ is basing your advice and decisions on rigorous analysis of the evidence
• ‘impartiality’ is acting solely according to the merits of the case and serving equally well governments of different political persuasions

My case officer was appointed by Samantha, the overall head of our unit, who herself was complicit in the breaches. I and my union official objected to this appointment but were told we had to accept it. With what I have learned since I would definitely not accept it, and instead insist on a more independent person running the case. Below is my overview paper.


Terry Edge – Civil Service Case Overview, April 2015
 
 
This case revolves around the Department's largest 'Out' project under the Red Tape Challenge. In essence, it was to bring about a change to the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988 that would save industry millions of pounds per year, make UK furniture greener and more fire-safe, as well as put right problems with the current flammability requirements. 
 
Against my better judgement, senior management pressured me to bring forward the money-savings changes, ahead of the overall amendments I'd been working on, so that the current government could claim the credit. Along with Steve Owen (of Intertek), BIS's technical advisor, I brought the changes in on time, under enormous pressure from Ministers, BRT, senior civil servants, etc. 
 
However, following the public consultation, and due to a combination of insufficient knowledge, lack of trust in the experts working for them, professional jealousy and career risk-aversion, Barbara Middlemiss (my Grade 5) and John Lord (my line manager, Grade 6) [Update, their real names are Bridget Micklem and Phil Earl] misinformed the Minister in such a way that the project has now been delayed by at least a year (and probably considerably more). 
 
I believe their actions constitute a breach of the Civil Service Code and their insistence I follow their direction puts me in danger of such a breach; also that their persistent undermining of my work and reputation in order to protect their mistakes constitutes bullying.
 
Examples of misinformation:

• Assured the Minister that extra research work was needed to prove the validity of the test when this wasn't true (and they now admit it isn't)
• Briefed the Minister that negative criticisms of the proposals were valid even though there was no evidence to support them
• Ignored the advice of a group of leading experts who informed them that BIS had proven the case for the changes - and continued to brief the Minister that more work needed to be done
• Gave in to vested interests, criminal in one case at least, that wanted the changes delayed/stopped
• Failed to inform the Minister that stakeholders had lied and/or provided false information at a round table meeting
• Deliberately obscured and withheld the truth in the government response to the public consultation on the proposed changes, in order to mislead the public into believing that more work was needed, and caused other government Ministers to sign off the response without having the evidence required to make a valid decision.
• Deliberately failed to answer a single question raised by consultation responses despite me having provided them with answers to all the questions raised

 
As a consequence:

• Extra fire deaths and many more house fires will ensue
• Trading Standards cannot prosecute cases (leading to more non-compliant furniture getting into the UK, leading to more deaths and house fires)
• UK furniture will continue to contain large amounts of flame retardant chemicals now known to damage health and the environment
• Retailers such as XXX will be forced to continue selling unsafe products and face damaging public outrage if the media finds out, along with possible huge costs of recalling literally millions of products
• Large-scale criminal activity will continue

 
Because I refused to support their efforts to misinform the Minister, in what I believe is a breach of the Civil Service Code, they have subjected me to bullying in the following ways:

• Consistently undermined my work and reputation
• Sabotaged submissions to the Minister which would have made her aware of the truth behind the proposed changes
• Caused me huge stress by not trusting my work (or that of Steve Owen)
• Damaged my reputation with stakeholders
• Exaggerated/lied about my behaviour towards stakeholders
• Presented falsified evidence at my end-year review to suggest I have a behavioural problem with stakeholders
• Used my end-year review unfairly, and against all the evidence to the contrary, as a tool to build a counter-argument to this Civil Service Code case
• Tried to lever me out of my post (and may still do so) [they did]

 
I have evidence to support all the claims made above. 
 
Summary Overview
 
The key point is that all the necessary research and testing work to support the proposed changes had been completed by the time of the consultation launch on 7th August 2014 – as agreed by John Lord and signed off by the Minister. This was further confirmed by a meeting of the UK’s leading test experts at BIS on 21st November 2014. By the time of the Ministers’ round table meeting on 9th February 2015, the majority of stakeholders present had had nearly two years in which to present BIS with any ‘further work’ which those with vested interests claimed needed doing. In the event, all that was put forward at that meeting as further work was that BIS should commission British Standards Institute to spend a further 12 months working on a test foam formula that already exists in the current Regulations and was including in the proposals in the consultation document.
 
Barbara and John originally claimed to believe that extra work could be done. Later, they admitted that this was not the case but that we had to be seen to do something because “it’s what the Minister wants” (but because they had briefed her so). They are now claiming that every view by any stakeholder is valid, even if there is no evidence to back it up; that, if a stakeholder claims there is more work to be done but doesn’t know what it is, that is still something BIS should take seriously and delay accordingly.
 
This view is further undermined by the fact that neither Barbara nor John has sought for or come up with a single piece of additional work that needs doing, despite having had 8 months (since the consultation launch) in which to contact a huge choice of stakeholders. Similarly, they have intentionally and systematically ignored the evidence in favour of the proposed changes.
 
Also key to the case is John Lord’s behaviour in delaying the implementation of the proposed changes. I believe this was motivated mainly by professional jealousy and (self-confessed) risk-aversion. The first delay was caused by him going to private office when the first submission was sent up, to tell the Minister’s Private Secretary, [TB], that “these changes are probably not going ahead”. This act alone meant we then faced a huge uphill struggle to convince the Minister and get the changes through in time. On at least two more occasions, I heard John on the phone to [TB] sabotaging submissions (that had been agreed by him and Barbara Middlemiss): once, to tell her a submission would not be going up (in time to meet a critical deadline) because it “wasn’t working”; another time, she phoned him and he agreed with her that “it just isn’t working; the Minister just doesn’t understand”.
 
Another key delay he caused was with work on the consultation responses. He instigated a complicated spreadsheet which the response team found very time-consuming to fill in. By the deadline for completing the work, only about a quarter of the returns had been processed. I invited Steve Owen to come to BIS and help me go through the responses and we completed them all in two days. John refused to use this work; instead he set up another team – including at least one person with no experience of the Regulations – with the result that the processing work took nearly three weeks.
 
By the time the Minister reached the final deadline to enable implementation in April 2015, she was still being given mixed messages by our team, exacerbated by the delays, with the result she informed other Red Tape Challenge Ministers that she did not have enough information to be able to go ahead with the changes in time.
 
 
 
Terry Edge, April 2015
 

From my journal, 9 April 2015
 
Yesterday, Samantha [the Grade 3] came over to ask me about my holiday in Cornwall (we went to Scotland). She then said she'd like to have a short meeting with me in the afternoon. She's never asked about my holidays before, or anything to do with my life come to that, so I thought oh-oh.
 
She started by telling me that my case [Civil Service Code case against Barbara and John] was going to be investigated soon (case officer appointed by Samantha); that it should be finished within 40 working days and if it isn't her boss has to look into it (which of course is the real reason for keeping to time, not that I get a fair investigation).
 
She then said she had a 'proposition' for me. This involved her speaking solidly for 8-9 minutes at the end of which it was clear that I was expected to just say yes. In short, it's that I should move to another job in another team for 40 days, while the case is going on. Her 'reasoning' was:
 
1)         She wants to be fair to me and it can't be good for me to be working to a policy I don't agree with.
 
2)         She also needs to be fair to Barbara and Phil, since I've expressed my disagreement with them.
 
3)         It will help me expand my whatevers (I forget the exact word but it amounts to bollocks, possibly in both senses of the word), towards furthering my career.
 
4)         I'm very capable (apparently) and this new job is in a priority area.
 
On 1) I said I don't disagree with the policy; just the way it's being managed, the policy being surely that we all want to make the regulations safe. Also, there is a distinction, I said, between the work going forward and the case which is based on the past. Before the case is decided, it doesn't seem fair that I should be the one to have to leave my job.
 
On 2), the same logic says you might as well move Barbara and Phil to different jobs.
 
On 3), I said this is not particularly relevant since I'm already past retirement age and the only reason I'm staying on is to see these regulations put right.
 
As for 4), it hardly seems fair to expect a new line manager to have to train me just for 40 days work. [My gut feeling that she was lying about it being just for this period was confirmed later when she made similar 'propositions' to me. In short she is a bully of the most cowardly sort. Instead of simply telling you that you will do what she wants, she tries to pretend that you made the choice. I now know damn well that the first day I'd have turned up in the new job the line manager would have had no idea at all it was just for 40 days - either that or he/she would have played along with Samantha's lie.]
 
At this point, I recalled that Barbara and Phil were both on leave this week, i.e. she probably promised them a Terry-free unit upon their return.
 
She also specifically mentioned FW/6 [the British Standards Institute's working group on furniture flammability, on which I represented BIS] and asked me what I would do there regarding BIS's proposal. My instinct pinged at this, suspecting a trap.
 
[Which it was. What had happened was that Phil completely perverted the official government response to the 2014 consultation. Apart from rejecting my honest assessment of the responses, telling the Minister that I had a CS Code case on the go when it was supposed to be kept confidential (thereby forcing her to accept his response version), censoring the papers sent out to other Departments, the greatest con he pulled was stating at the end of it that BIS would work with British Standards to improve the new match test, with a view to implementing it in April 2016. Hence, everything depended on this 'work' with BS going ahead. But I'd been pointing out to the team that BS would struggle in this since there actually was no more work that needed doing. The problem being that I was the BIS person on FW/6 - which of course may well have been part of Samantha's plans to move me on, so that a more pliable person could be moved in. So, what Samantha was no doubt hoping with this question was that I would answer by saying that I would not toe the policy line, giving her the perfect excuse for moving me on.]
 
I told her that I only had two realistic choices: either say nothing or put across the BIS line (even though I knew it to be false). Extraordinarily - or perhaps not - she agreed. So much for the truth.
 
Then I showed her that I'd pushed her into a little trap of my own. I told her that Barbara actually told British Standards' management that the work we were asking them to do didn't need doing; but it was what the Minister thought was needed, therefore it had to be done (unless BS were stupid, I don't suppose they had much trouble in working out why the Minister might think that). Barbara, I said, quoting pretty much exactly, also told BS that "The minister has this strange idea that you can test a test. We know that isn't true of course, but we have to try to please her." (Ditto for BS working out why the Minister would think such a thing.) Finally, the clincher: I said that Barbara had asked me to confirm that at the FW/6 meeting, Steve and I would vote down BIS's proposition to do more work! (Amazing, but true. I suspect this was because she only had to cover-off the delay until April 2016; therefore, just the fact of BS being involved was enough.]
 
Much note-scribbling went on as I spoke, that and a furrowed brown of "why didn't they tell me this"itis.
 
When she'd finished I said, "So, do I act enthusiastically at FW/6 about the work we want them to do or just repeat what Barbara told their management?" While her brow was convoluting further at this I went on to suggest that the team needed to work out its objectives and vision since we didn't have these things - something a Grade fucking 3 should of course be able to spot from a million miles away but which she'd completely missed in her gymnastic efforts to get rid of the one person in the team who was more concerned about public safety than protecting his career.
 
I told her I'd think about it but I already knew what my answer would be.