Another obscure way we are governed locally is through heavy bureaucratic demands placed on our small local organisations if they receive any government funding. Or having rules that they are subject to.
Then back into their central offices they go from being focused on service-delivery to getting in a lawyer to work out how to help them deal with the legalistic demands they find themselves facing.
Next thing the lawyer cut and pastes in the legalistic clauses that are now well-developed to ‘pass the buck down the chain’.
The two main categories I’ve come across locally are:
1. Getting volunteers in a local charity to sign that they are responsible for the legal liabilities that are actually the responsiblity of the organisation and quite outside the capability of the volunteers to have any control over. Requiring volunteers to sign for a range of requirements that is much wider than their responsibilities (Ex. I agree I have a Blue Card. I agree I have appropriate qualification to work with people with a physical handicap (who asked people with a physical handicap if they wanted to be excluded from contact with ordinary untrained people!).) When what they are doing is sorting secondhand clothes in a back room. And what is actually required is that volunteers sign their name (accepting liability) not that any of them actually have any of the things they are signing. The volunteer will have the choice of either signing the whole thing or losing their spot. This is the organisation determined to cover it’s ‘arse’ utterly uncaring of it’s volunteer staff. But the organisation is also being utterly unreasonably hounded by threats and needs protection too.
2. Passing liability to subcontractors. This happens in a number of ways. Employing agencies get people to sign long legal documents and somewhere there will be clauses that shift the liabilities of the big organisation to the little individual. These will be liabilities for things that the small individual willl have no control over that are defined by the big organisation. (An example might be advertising claims.) The small individual will have the choice of either signing the whole contract or not getting the job at all. In practice while this will usually not rebound on the small individual full legal consequences could come back to them – they could literally lose their house.
This works the other way too. I was told a local story about a road verge mowed by a subcontractor to the Moreton Bay Shire Council. The subcontrator caused damage to a power box on the verge that ruined the power supply to the property. The owner contacted the Council (responsible for managing the road verges) and they said it was not their responsibility but the responsibility of the subcontractor. The subcontractor was small-fry who could not be easily located and when he was he denied the action – where was the householder’s proof it was he who damaged the electricity box? The householder was left paying thousands to reconnect supply. The Council should take responsibility for managing the quality of work done for it for training people doing work for it for checking.
Councils have become very effective at fending off claims against them. Certainly we are creating a dreadful rod for our own backs if we have a culture of suing but we shouldn’t be passing the buck down to the smallest weakest link in the chain. When BCC published a list of successful liability claims against it it was remarkable by how small they were and how few. We’d be much better preserving claims for real matters and taking responsibility for looking after ourselves most of the time. That said we need our Councils and organisations to manage most of their work quality control as an internal standard process not as part of a liability to be off-loaded down the food chain.