Why the Barnet Eye will not be printing the response from the Chief Operating Officer of Barnet Council to the Barnet Bloggers

Today I received an email from Chris Naylor, chief operating officer of Barnet Council

He starts his response by saying

"I don't think I have a huge amount to add to the answer I have already given about the decision making process, the relationship between the deal, cabinet decision and payment profile and the Council's constitution. "

Mr Naylor then waffles about various things unrelated to the letter sent (as far as I can make out), ignoring all of the substantive points raised.

He ends by saying

"Again, given that your respective blog comments and correspondence with Councillors are generating a lot of enquires for my team, I would ask that you publish this response. I will be sending a copy of this email to
Members due course."

To put it bluntly, in my humble opinion, Chris Naylor is taking the piss. Our blogs have not generated any enquiries, the actions of the council have. If and when Mr Naylor chooses to address the points properly, we will publish his response in full. Mr Naylor clearly thinks that myself and my fellow bloggers are complete idiots and by waffling he can pull the wool over our eyes.

I consider Mr Naylors letter to be a smokescreen. Our letter raised specific points and Mr Naylor has chosen to simply ignore them. Given the seriousness of the issue and the large sums of cash involved, I personally find his attitude and his response insulting. Whilst I am quite prepared for Mr Naylor to insult me personally in this manner ( I expected it) I am not prepared to dignify his response by giving him a platform on this blog to peddle such twaddle. When I first read Mr Naylors response, it was clear to me that it was a crude attempt to shift the discussion away from the serious points raised by the Barnet bloggers and onto nice safe territory for him and his political masters. I for one see no reason why I should collude with him in sweeping the awkward questions under the carpet.

We can tell you that Mr Naylor does not address the facts quoted in our letter in any way shape or form. You can read our response here - http://barneteye.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/barnet-council-response-to-letter.html  and we are quite specific, using evidence from papers published by the council to back up our assertations. Mr Naylor just ignores all of this - If the council wants to use this blog to simply spout the opinions of what we consider to be overpaid officers, who cannot back up any of their assertions with substantive facts, then they should not be surprised when they get told to go forth and multiply.

When Mr Naylor actually bothers to respond to the points we made and stops treating the people of Barnet like idiots, we'll print his blatherings. Until such time as he does, I suggest that any readers who want to read Mr Naylors version of the truth should keep an eye on the http://www.barnetbugle.com/ as they seem far less fussy about what they print than we are and they seem to be the "organ of choice" that the local Tory administration use when they want to get something into the public domain.

To end with, I make yet another request for a formal independent and public enquiry into this matter. If as Mr Naylor claims, this is all entirely ship shape and above board, then that will be conclusively proven and the matter put to bed in short order. Surely if Mr Naylor is so sure of his case, then he has no grounds to refuse such a request.