Why you should think twice about sending an e-mail to your councillor

Imagine that you want to send your county councillor some highly confidential and sensitive information. You  trust your councillor and believe that they will act in your best interests. It may well be that the problem you are highlighting involves the actions of the authority itself as a provider of adult care, education or children's services; perhaps it may have something to do with planning or regeneration schemes. Perhaps you have reason to believe that council staff or officers are guilty of abuse or corruption. Perhaps you are employed by the council and are acting as a whistleblower.

What you, and very likely your councillor, do not know is that the council can monitor your correspondence, without your knowledge or permission.

That is what happened to Cllr Sian Caiach, a Carmarthenshire councillor, who has written about it on her website here. Coincidentally some other councillors are known to have expressed concerns recently that their e-mails have also been accessed by "the authority".

Cllr Caiach discovered that her e-mails were being read by people other than those for whom they were intended when a scrap of paper headed "Attendance Form" came into her possession. The form was filled out by the council's head of IT and noted the recipients of an e-mail sent by the councillor. The identity of the person requesting the information was left blank, although it is likely to be one of only a couple of senior officers.

Whether monitoring was a routine event is not yet clear, but Cllr Caiach is now attempting to find out.

It may be helpful to provide a brief timeline of what happened in this case.

In the aftermath of her arrest for filming part of a council meeting, Jacqui Thompson wrote a letter to all councillors calling on them to support the filming of council meetings. Some councillors asked the chief executive to respond to Jacqui Thompson.

Instead, the council's chief executive, Mark James, sent a letter to the Madaxeman blog which subsequently became the subject of a libel action. Having sent the letter to the Madaxeman, Mr James then decided to tell his employers, namely the elected councillors, what he had done.

Cllr Caiach responded to the chief executive's e-mail as follows:

"I think it would be more correct to say that the response was that several councils would consider filming with the permission of the chair or presiding officer and that Cardiff already films and streams on to the

internet. Anglesey are also running a trial sound recording planning and licensing meetings. I strongly suspect that we could record sound at all chamber meetings immediately using the sound system we have.

Many English councils have been filming themselves or allowing individuals to film for years without the sky falling in. The press report that a full video system which would presumably last a good few years
would cost us less than £20,000. In the interests of democracy and to maintain the trust of our electorate I suggest we vote on this at our September meeting as I'm sure it could be quickly installed before the next council election. We have absolutely nothing to hide but our actions give quite the opposite impression."

That is the full text of her reply, and its content can hardly be described as seditious.

For reasons which remain unclear, someone in the council felt sufficiently nervous to instruct the head of IT to investigate.

The council's policy on e-mail monitoring is confused and open to interpretation, and since it is senior council officers who do the interpreting, you can safely assume that the interpretation will be whatever is in their interests rather than yours.

This is how the council's own Standards Committee summarized the e-mail policy:

The authority’s email usage policy makes it clear that emails generated by, or accessed via, council owned equipment will not be considered as the private property of their creator/recipient, and that the authority may access those emails at any time without an individual’s consent or knowledge. 

Individual senior officers cannot directly access the emails of others in the authority, unless they have been given permission to do so by that person.

A senior officer can request that an individual email account be examined by the IT department, but will be expected to give good reasons why this should take place.



There will be legitimate reasons why one person should access the e-mails of someone else in a workplace, but this case is surely not one of them. Given what happened subsequently, there is a very strong likelihood that one party in a trial effectively accessed the e-mail account of an elected representative who was also a witness for the other party in the trial.

Old fashioned snail mail or a private e-mail address may be safer options if you have something confidential to tell your councillor in future.