Council Comms delay on strike answer was “spam” problem

EMAIL IS A quick and efficient way of contacting people, yes? Not always: when it comes to contacting the Tower Hamlets Council Communications Team, you may be better off walking over to the Town Hall, standing outside – and hollering up at the window.

Part of the dispute over the new contracts for the Tower Hamlets Council workforce is the issue over whether an adequate Equalities Impact Assessment (EIA) was carried out.  East London News reported on the case put forward by Tower Hamlets Unison (see link below).  We also emailed the Council Communications Team, asking for a formal comment on whether there was or was not an EIA. While we were emailing, we also asked if Executive Mayor John Biggs would appear on the 20:20 Vision vodcast which is live-streamed on the Vodcasts Facebook page.

We first emailed the Comms Team on 9th June. We received no reply and wrote again, asking for a reply, on 30th June and 11th July. Imagine our delight when a reply arrived – sent just before 11am on 12th July. Sadly, when we opened the email we saw it was just the standing acknowledgement message (below). It was strange, though. The standard message declares that the Communications Team in-box is monitored “between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday”. Why had the Communications Team not acknowledged our email sent on 9th June until 12th July?

The answer came the following day, in a message sent out at 6.56pm (rather later than the standard working day during which the in-box is monitored).  The answer (see picture at the top) said that the delay was due to our original email going into the Council’s spam box.  This is worrying for two reasons.
•First, this suggests that the Communications Team (or Council) did not check its spam box between 9th June and 12th July.  Let’s hope the ELN message was the only one that was sent there.
•Second, ELN had emailed the Council Communications Team at 4.11pm on 31st May, asking for a comment on a different matter (the Council’s new consultation platform). We received a standard acknowledgement on 1st June and a personal acknowledgement later the same day.  The statement we had requested was sent to us the following morning.

How sad that our message sent on 31st May did not go into the Council spam box – but our messages sent on 9th June and 30 June did go into the Council spam box. Although our email of 31st May asked an important question, we have to admit that our messages of 9th and 30th June, about the strike, were even more important. The “subject” of the message sent on 31st May was “Question re online corona survey”. Our email sent on 9th June was “Tower Rewards/Equalities Impact Assessment”. If the Council is checking up on its filters to work out why the ELN email was sent to spam, and then not found for over a month, it needs to check whether any of the words “Tower Rewards” or “Equalities Impact Assessment” are ones the spam filters don’t like.

Anyway, after all that – what did the substantive reply to our question contain?  We had asked – on 9th June – if there had been an EIA on Tower Rewards.  The substantive answer was a link to the Council’s general statement on Tower Rewards.  In that statement, the paragraph on the EIA states:
“10.  All changes were subject to a detailed equalities impact assessment which found no disproportionate impact on any sector of the workforce based on gender, ethnicity or any other protected characteristic.”

This does not answer the points put forward by Unison, which we covered in our earlier article on the EIA (see link below).

The second question in our email was an invitation to Executive Mayor John Biggs to appear on our local news show.  That was not mentioned in the substantive reply sent to us on 13th July.  Accordingly, we had to email again. Our email went out at 8.26pm on 13th July.  We do hope that this follow up email did not go into the Spam folder – and we did receive the usual routine reply, sent out at 7.28am on 14th July.  We await the further reply.

●Read more about this story:
Biggs silent over equality impact of “Tower Rewards”

●Read more about it:
Unison Gen Sec pledges support to see off “Tower Rewards”
London Unison branches support Tower Hamlets colleagues