The Secret's Out: Bristol City Council Forced to Publish Stepping Up Fraud Report.
The Council said no. The Information Commissioner said otherwise. Who'd have thought?
[The Stepping Up report is only the latest to be marked CONFIDENTIAL — and quietly filed away.]
Well. Here we go again. This one’s about a filing cabinet. So. Nothing new then. In one sense. At least.
Yet. Somewhere in an office at City Hall, a Bristol City Council fraud report sat finished, filed, done, since April 2023. Nobody burned it. Nobody shredded it, or used it for hamster bedding. They simply told anyone who came asking that they were not allowed to see it.
Not for the public. Not, it turns out, for the council’s own audit committee. Bristol City Council spent two years running that trick before the Information Commissioner intervened and asked why everyone was so out of breath.
The report was about Stepping Up, a leadership training company set up by former Labour councillor Asher Craig, funded by the council to the tune of over £700,000.
You already know where this is going. You can feel it, can’t you.
So. Let’s walk through this together, because the walking is where the details live. Right?
The Report Nobody Was Allowed to Read.
So. April 2023: the council’s counter fraud team files its report on Stepping Up, prompted by “reports of irregularities.”
No fraud found. Concerns raised, though — real ones, about how the money and the contracts got handed over.
You know. Like. Who’d have guessed. Possibly.
It seems they were concerns worth writing down. Apparently not worth showing anyone, though.
Then in June 2025: local resident Joseph Lloyd asks for the report under Freedom of Information law. It was refused, as per usual, one might say.
The council says releasing it would “prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs” — five words that mean nothing and are deployed precisely because they mean nothing.
Like. Um, nothing new here. You will now be redirected.
Understandably. Lloyd complains to the Information Commissioner’s Office. The regulator reads the council’s reasoning and calls it what it is: “generic arguments.”
Then. In May this year, the Commissioner orders the report published. And the council doesn’t fight it. Simply publishes. Notice that.
Two years of resistance, and when a regulator actually leans on the door, it swings open without a struggle. That’s not the behaviour of an institution protecting something serious. Correct me, if I’m wrong.
Even the Watchdogs Weren’t Allowed to Watch.
Now, the part that should actually bother you.
This was not a report kept from strangers. It was kept from the council’s own audit committee — the people whose entire job is to check the council isn’t doing anything daft with public money, and doesn’t. Not on this occasion. Anyway.
Liberal Democrat councillor Nicholas Coombes told the committee that officers had said, in effect, you may not see this. Meanwhile, the Information Commissioner was independently concluding the contents were “absolutely fine for the general public.”
So. In theory, at least. One of those two groups was doing its job. It was not the one inside the building. The audit committee exists, in theory, to hold the council to account.
In practice it was being handed the same “computer says no” that greets anyone ringing the council tax line, except with better furniture. Oh, and an orchestral version of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ playing on a loop.
“Hiding the information doesn’t make the problem go away, it only makes the public more suspicious.” — Cllr Nicholas Coombes
Next. If you can withstand further excitement, and your bladder is in full working order.
Coombes wants chief executive Nick Hibberd in front of the committee to explain the fiasco — a bit like hauling in the new tenant to answer for the last owner’s damp problem. Hibberd wasn’t in post when any of this happened, mind.
Stephen Peacock, who was, has since decamped to the West of England Combined Authority — comfortably out of reach, several pay grades removed from anyone still holding a clipboard and asking questions.
Last seen in these pages reportedly collecting a WECA exit package worth roughly £270,000, according to figures previously reported here, while the authority he departed racked up £918,000 in staff payoffs over three years.
Nice work. If you can get it. One might say.
Have you, like me, noticed this is the great trick of local government accountability. By the time anyone is finally allowed to ask what happened, the person who did it has a new lanyard and a new car park space.
The Numbers Nobody Wanted You Reading.
The bottom line being that strip away the secrecy, and you’re left with the figures the report actually contains. And it’s the figures that are the real embarrassment. Watch.
By April 2023, 116 council staff had gone through Stepping Up. And. Um, stepping out. The back door. One’s left to ponder over.
Twelve per cent were promoted into leadership.
Thirteen per cent into non-leadership roles.
Fifty-three per cent — more than half — show no known progression whatsoever.
Twenty-three per cent left the council altogether. Same back door.
Read that again. Slowly. Over half, nowhere. Nearly a quarter, gone.
This was a scheme meant, in Craig’s own words, to “respond to the city’s paucity of diverse leadership” — a genuinely decent aim, undermined by outcomes that never came close to justifying the money chasing them.
Wasn’t there another term for this back along. The Job Creation programme?
Anyway. Craig, an unpaid non-executive director, and castaway of the Rees era, says she always “adhered to ethical boundaries and professional standards” and denies any personal benefit. Fine.
The numbers don’t care what was in anyone’s head when the cheques went out — and ethics boundaries are a marvellous thing to have adhered to, in a scheme where more than half the participants ended up exactly where they started.
Do not collect £200. Do not pass go. You know the game. Don’t you?
Incompetence, or Something With Better Manners.
So. Here’s a question worth sitting with rather than rushing past: was this cock-up, or was this cover-up?
The honest answer is that it barely matters which, because the two produce identical outcomes for the person asking a simple question and getting stonewalled. Cui bono — who benefits from two years of delay? Not the public. Not the audit committee. Only the people who would rather not answer awkward questions while a report about their own decisions gathers dust. Funny, that.
There you have it. A small refusal, filed away in 2023, grew into a regulator’s ruling, a public rebuke, and a councillor publicly demanding the chief executive explain himself. Small causes. Large effects.
That is how institutional trust actually erodes — not in one dramatic scandal, but in a thousand quiet decisions to say no by default. Who’d have thought.
“Free, Frank and Candid” — Just Not With You.
Of course. Defending the original refusal, the council told the Information Commissioner its fraud team needs to give “free, frank and candid views,” and that staff would turn “less willing” to help future investigations if their words risked publication.
Awww. Poor loves.
It’s a real principle. Whistleblowers and internal investigators genuinely need room to speak plainly.
However — and here’s where the council’s own defence undoes itself — the regulator actually read the document, and found nothing in it that warranted two years of stonewalling. The principle was sound. The application, in this specific case, was cover.
Shall we do that paragraph again. Only this time with the addition of the X Files theme music providing the backing track? No. Okay then. You clearly understand.
Meanwhile. Labour councillor Rob Logan, chair of the audit committee, welcomed the ICO’s clarity and noted that investigation reports of this kind aren’t normally published. The slow hand clap, I’ll leave to your imagination.
His statement. True enough, as a general rule. Not every internal audit needs a press release.
It’s just that “we don’t normally publish these” is a policy, and “we fought a regulator for two years over one report that turned out to be harmless” is a choice.
If that sounded almost proud — proud of the regulator for cleaning up his own committee’s mess — that’s certainly how it read from here, which is one way to take credit for someone else doing your job. You know. The one you may struggle with yourself.
Exhibit Number Whatever It Is Now.
Now. Regular literary masochists of my writing. I mean Regular readers will recognise the shape of this one.
It has the same bones as Tower House, where the freehold vanished under questions nobody wanted answered.
The same bones as Bottle Yard Studios, where “failure” turned out to be doing a lot of quiet work in a press release.
The same bones as the McColgan KC report into SEND surveillance, which the council also fought to keep contained for as long as it possibly could.
This is not this council’s first rodeo with the Information Commissioner, either. It is simply the latest entry in a Catalogue of Failures that The Almighty Gob keeps growing because nobody at City Hall seems able to break the habit — largely because breaking it would mean admitting there was ever a habit at all.
Surely, I’m not alone in thinking there’s almost a Masonic quality to the secrecy — not the ritual, just the instinct: information kept within the room, passed hand to hand among those already inside it, and treated as something the outside world simply hasn’t earned the right to see.
So. Let’s picture it properly, just for a moment. Shall we?
Somewhere below the committee rooms, a stationery cupboard nobody quite remembers requisitioning.
After hours, when the lights on the main floor go off and the cleaners have gone home, it becomes — briefly, ceremonially — the place where FOI refusals are blessed before they’re sent out.
A junior officer, robed in a hi-vis tabard for want of anything more suitable, intones the sacred phrase: prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs. Somewhere, a laminator hums like an organ.
It is, of course, nonsense. Which is rather the point. The real version needs no cupboard and no ceremony — just a culture where withholding is the reflex and disclosure is the exception, dressed up afterwards in language important enough to sound like it means something.
A sign on the door might as well read FOI: Findings Officially Ignored. Somebody laminate that. There’s a laminator going spare, apparently.
Ask the Three Questions.
Was it practical to keep a document sealed once a regulator was already circling? Was it logical to fight a fight the council was always going to lose? And what, precisely, was the likely outcome of two years spent proving a democracy campaigner’s point for him? Do go on.
Dan Ackroyd answered that last one before the committee even finished asking:
“The council treats the public as an enemy because the council has decided to hide information to avoid political embarrassment.”
That’s the whole story in one sentence. It was never really about the fraud team’s candour.
“Transparency” is a word alien to this council — used constantly in committee, applied never in practice. It would seem.
Campaigners at the meeting pointed to a wider pattern at City Hall — statements redacted, comments labelled defamatory, information managed like a liability instead of something the public is owed. Stepping Up is just the case that ran far enough to drag the Commissioner into the room.
You see. Here’s the thing about drawers that supposedly won’t open. They open the moment someone with actual authority tries the handle.
Bristol City Council spent two years insisting this one was jammed shut for everyone’s protection, and it turned out to open just fine for The Almighty Gob, same as anyone else who bothered to ask. It always did.
Council lawyers said councillors could not see it. The Information Commissioner disagreed. No braille version required.
Sources.
Watchdog orders release of the Stepping Up audit — council statement and Cllr Coombes quotes
ICO enforcement notice against Bristol City Council over failures to respond to data requests
Is Bristol City Council Competent? — the Catalogue of Failures, The Almighty Gob
© 2026 John Langley aka www.thealmightygob.com. Bristol’s most prolific blogger. Allegedly.