Ian Hamilton Chief Executive St George's Healthcare NHS Trust
(Please see text in red to read my comments on the fact that the David Sissling internal NHS investigation found my allegation that Ian Hamilton should not have charged a bill for a party at the Savoy to the taxpayer has been proven)
In the time that has elapsed since the completion of my Employment Tribunal case in June 2003 Ian Hamilton has resigned his position from the Trust citing poor health as the reason. I have no idea whether Ian Hamilton has succumbed to the events of the last year or whether he has a more serious illness, which has made him give up his post at St George's, however I sure the events of the past fifteen months must have put him under severe strain as the wrong doing at St George's featured more heavily in the media and Mr Hamilton's most frequent comment was "no comment". Ian Hamilton and I had known each other and worked together for nearly twenty years, so it came as a shock to me when he told me that he wanted me to resign my post as Finance Director and when I refused said he would take disciplinary action against me on the grounds that I had a difficult management style and could not form reasonable relationships with people. If this was really the case he had taken a long time to form that conclusion. In fact, in March 1999, when I had been Finance Director for nine years, Ian Hamilton had said in an e-mail that he would be happy to serve under me if I was Chief Executive, a strange thing to say to someone who you think can't work as a team player and who can't in your opinion form proper relationships with people.
My problems with Ian Hamilton started just a few months after he had been appointed to the post of Chief Executive, when I had to present to him the monthly financial figures for the period ending September 1999. Mr Hamilton had been Chief Executive for only three months at this point and quite outside the Trust's disciplinary code for the first time threatened me with the sack simply because he did not like the figures I was presenting to him. I was becoming aware that Ian Hamilton was an individual who was out of his depth as Chief Executive and that he had very little personal integrity and was someone who was prepared to issue unjustified threats in private quite outside the Trust's disciplinary procedures if he couldn't get his own way. When he threatened me again on the 27th March of 2000, I took the precaution of tape recording the conversation that I had with him. In this conversation, the tape of which was supplied to the Employment Tribunal, Mr Hamilton states in relation to the threat he had made the previous year, “I am explaining to you why I said I needed to get a new finance director. I am not denying that I said to you that I would get a new finance director. I am explaining to you why that would be necessary unless I saw things getting turned around”. The reason why I made the tape recording on the 27th March was because in March 2000 Melanie Summers the General Manager for Medical & Cardiac Services told me that Ian Hamilton was planning behind my back to dismiss me as Finance Director and to support her view she gave me a copy of an e-mail, which Mr Hamilton had sent to John Parkes the Trust's Deputy Chief Executive, someone who at that time had only been employed in the Trust for a period of six weeks, stating, "that he had profound concerns re Finance Dept". I knew from my experience of Mr Hamilton that if I raised the issue with him, that whatever was said at our meeting, Mr Hamilton would lie about the outcome in due course and this is clearly demonstrated on page eight of the Trust’s Management Statement of Case, where, when Mr Hamilton believed that there was no record of the meeting held on the 27/03/2000, he stated in relation to the letter I gave him at the meeting complaining about his behaviour towards me, “The Finance Director claims that he wrote to me about this meeting but I have no record of this”. The tape recording shows that this is an extraordinary statement for Mr Hamilton to make as he promised that he and I would take time our of our diaries so that we could agree our joint objectives. As the tape records him saying, when I gave him the letter, “Let me digest it. The key thing is that you and I spend some time together”. I can state without fear of contradiction that I never at any time received the promised response to my letter and Mr Hamilton never made himself available to spend time with me, which he stated, was the, “key thing”. Miss McLoughlin states on page two of my dismissal letter that, “You stated that Ian Hamilton had bullied and harassed you over a number of years. We do not accept this view, we believe that Mr Hamilton sought to work with you to improve your performance but was unsuccessful”. I believe that the tape recording of the meeting with Mr Hamilton proves the complete reverse, the e-mails I received from the all the General Managers at that time from Melanie Summers, from Mike Cumberbatch , from Ruth Meadows and from Deidre Baker, which all show that they did not have any significant problems with the support they were getting from my directorate and that what was really happening was that Mr Hamilton was trying to blame me to cover for his own performance shortfalls. Ian Hamilton was bullying and harassing me over a long period, by issuing threats against me in private, by not replying to legitimate concerns I raised with him in writing and by promising to meet with me to agree our joint objectives and then failing to do so. I do not believe that a truly independent Chairman could seriously come to the conclusion that these are actions that would be taken by a manager who was seriously trying to improve an employees performance and I believe that Ian Hamilton’s subsequent inaction and denials about having a record of the letter I personally handed to him, show that he is a man without personal integrity.
At the Employment Tribunal hearing, the Trust’s barrister sought to suggest that the recorded conversation showed that the Chief Executive had previously raised concerns with me about my management style. This of course is not true. The issues raised at the time by the Chief Executive were easily refuted by the e-mails sent to me by the General Mangers and what the conversation simply shows is that the Chief Executive, when confronted with difficulties in the performance of his own role, simply from time to time tried to shift the blame unreasonably to me. If he had truly felt that there was a real and consistent failure on my part as Finance Director, he would not have written to me several months after this conversation on the 14th September 2000 to say, “May I take the opportunity to thank you for the major contribution which you continue to make to the Trust”. In addition it is inconceivable that given that Miss Mcloughlin and Mr Hamilton claim that there were well-known problems with my management style going back over several years, that Mr Hamilton should have asked me to take over the management of the Procurement Function in December 2000 and then asked me in January 2001 to take on the responsibility for the Computing and Information Directorates. This was done because Mr Hamilton in reality knew that I was a capable manager and that is why he asked me to take on these important functions, when they were in a state of disarray. It is true that when Mr Hamilton felt he was personally in trouble he would bully and threaten me, but when the Trust had a problem that needed effective management he would forget his threats and ask me to manage further important functions. This gives the lie to the statement that there were continuing problems with my management style, if there had been I would not have been asked to take Board responsibility for these additional major functions.
I recorded a second conversation with Ian Hamilton this time on the telephone on the morning of the 30th July 2003, the day after Mr Hamilton had asked me to resign from the Trust. I was concerned that having regard to Mr Hamilton’s previous attempts to bully and threaten me, that despite the seriousness of the previous days meeting, I had again been left in a position where I did not know whether my job with the Trust was being threatened or not. As the tape (which again was supplied to the Employment Tribunal) confirms, when I asked Mr Hamilton, “Is this a formal disciplinary”? He replied, “No, I think, it’s true we need a further discussion with Colin (Watts) you and me and see where this is leading to, where it is going to go. It may not need to be anything as a formal meeting whatsoever”. I think given Mr Hamilton’s previous record of lying, I was justified in recording my conversation with him, because I knew he would say things to me in private, which he would later deny. The fact that he said on the 30th July, that the matters he was raising with me might not be serious enough to warrant even an informal meeting, show that to resort to summary dismissal with out any intermediate steps in the Trust’s Disciplinary Code being applied, simply reinforces the unfairness of the way the investigation of the complaints alleged against me were not independently handled and illustrates that the decision of the internal hearing panel to subsequently dismiss me was both unfair and unjustified. This transcript also underlines the Miss McLoughlin’s further unfairness towards me, by her ignoring the grievance against Ian Hamilton that I lodged with her and her failure to deal the grievance according to the Trust’s own procedures. As my conversation with Mr Hamilton shows, the concerns that had been raised about me at that stage, might not even have required as much as a discussion at an informal meeting to resolve. Therefore I was clearly entitled to raise a grievance against Mr Hamilton and expect that Miss McLoughlin would arrange for it to be heard in accordance with the Trust’s written procedures. That fact that Miss McLoughlin ignored the grievance is simply further evidence of the unfairness she was exhibiting towards me.
Ian Hamilton the
should not have been allowed
to investigate the complaints that he claimed had been made against me.
The fact that he did so was in
complete contradiction of the NHS
Code of
Conduct For Managers. Even
if there had been no code of conduct, an independent person should have been
appointed to investigate the complaints that Chief
Executive himself was making against me. The Code of Conduct for NHS Managers is quite clear on this point,
stating that it is important that investigations are seen to be fair and
impartial and listing organisations that can provide individuals to carry out
that role. When
Ian Hamilton gave evidence himself at my internal disciplinary hearing he was
unable to produce one e-mail or letter in the evidence he presented against me
to show that I had in fact been warned about my “management style” or my
relationships with outside organisations. I
was therefore never given the chance prior to the disciplinary hearing to
explain why such criticism of me would have been inappropriate, nor was I given
the opportunity to have modified my “management style” should any of the
criticism made against me have been shown to be valid.
To try and cover for this glaring omission in his case against me, Mr
Hamilton sought to rely on what he purported to be a conversation that we had at
my Individual Performance Review (IPR) meeting that was held on the 5th April
2002. The
Trust’s Individual Performance Review Policy clearly states that in relation
to an IPR meeting, “Agreed objectives and actions are recorded on the Personal
Development Plan and a summary of the discussion is recorded on the summary
sheet. Both parties then sign this off. A
date is then set for a six month review”.
The policy also states, “If a capability issue arises it should be
addressed immediately and not left until the IPR.
If a capability issue arises for the first time at an IPR this issue
should be addressed and the IPR rescheduled for another occasion”.
Ian Hamilton stated at the disciplinary hearing that he had been trained
in the IPR procedure, yet he is seeking quite contrary to the Trust’s written
procedures to use the IPR meeting to suggest that it can be used as evidence
that I was previously warned about the concerns that the other executive
directors and external organisations had about my performance as Finance
Director and which subsequently led to my summary
dismissal from my employment. Even
if it was true that I had been warned at that meeting, which I vigoursly
dispute, the IPR procedure would have required the Chief Executive to provide a
summary sheet of that discussion, which we would have both of had to sign and he
would then have had to set up a review meeting in October 2002 to review my
progress in addressing the weaknesses in performance that we had agreed.
None of this was done and in giving evidence to the disciplinary hearing
Mr Hamilton claimed the reason for this was a simple oversight on his part.
It seems inconceivable that the Chief Executive can seriously expect it
to be believed that in a matter so serious that it might lead to the summary
dismissal of a member of the Trust Board, that he simply forgot to follow the
Trust’s IPR procedures in which he claims to have been trained.
In giving his evidence to the hearing, Mr Hamilton submitted hand written
notes, which he claimed he had taken at the meeting and which he asked the
disciplinary hearing to accept as a true record of the discussion that had taken
place between us, although I had never been given a copy of these notes until
the investigatory meeting that was held on the 8th August 2002.
The first part of the notes follows the pattern of the objectives that
were set for me to achieve in 2001/02 and which I recognise as being a
reasonable record of the discussion that we had at our meeting and confirms that
I had met my objectives. However,
there is a separate sheet attached which is headed perceptions of finance, which
contains a list of items. Some of the items on the list repeat issues already
covered on the proceeding two pages, but also included are a number of points
and issues which I do not recognise from our conversation and which appear to
have been added as an after thought. In
any event these notes do not contain any reference to concerns being
expressed by other executive colleagues about my management style as Finance
Director or concerns that external organisations had problems with my
performance as Finance Director. If
the Chief Executive had followed the Trust’s own IPR procedure there would not
now be a dispute as to what was said at the IPR meeting, even though his own
notes clearly demonstrate that he had not raised with me the alleged concerns of
Marie Grant and Paul Jones nor the alleged concerns of external NHS
organisations. Ian Hamilton said at
my internal hearing that he would have expected me to get back to him with my
revised objectives including the issues that he claims to have raised with me
about my poor management style. That
this is another false assertion on his part is easily demonstrated if you
examine the copy of his objectives
that he sent to all the Executive Directors on the 27th June only one month
before I was suspended telling us that we should base our objectives
on his. These objectives relate objectives to individual directors and
there is no special instruction to me to address any of the items
which he now claims were raised with me at the IPR review meeting, I am treated
in exactly the same way as the other executive directors and I gave him my
objectives for 2002/03 at our regular business meeting held on the 4th July ,
which do not contain any special objectives about management style or external
relationships and he made no special comment on them at the time and certainly
did not ask me to alter them to include the issues which he now claims were of
concern to him. If the Chief
Executive had really raised these serious concerns with me at the IPR meeting I
hardly think it is credible that he did not confirm these in writing to me and
just sent me the general round robin with all the other Executive Directors.
He would have surely at the very least have sent me a separate e-mail drawing my
attention to what it was, he now states are matters so serious, that I had to be
suspended from my post only four weeks later and then summarily dismissed on the
basis of issues he did not previously communicate to me.
Because Ian Hamilton asked the disciplinary hearing to believe his word rather than mine in relation to the IPR meeting and because Miss McLoughlin had refused to consider the grievance against Mr Hamilton which I had given her, it forced me to submit information to the hearing that clearly demonstrated that Ian Hamilton was a person of questionable integrity and that he had already previously lied when it had suited his purpose to do so. To demonstrate that this was the case I placed before the disciplinary hearing a copy of the application form that Ian Hamilton had submitted when he had been appointed as Chief Executive. On the application form Mr Hamilton under the heading of Education and Qualifications had written Associate Member Chartered Institute of Public Finance & Accountancy (CIPFA) – Qualified 1974. In fact Mr Hamilton had resigned his membership of CIPFA several years before the date of his application and was not entitled to describe himself as a member of that Institute at that time. I also placed before the disciplinary hearing a copy of a letter from Barry Mather of CIPFA confirming that he had resigned from the Institute in 1995. The Chairman’s response to this information was that as the application had been made before she became Chairman of the Trust it was not something that she needed to take into account, completely missing that point that it demonstrated that when it suited him the Chief Executive was prepared to make ambiguous statements that could be misinterpreted on important occasions and that this should be taken into account when considering the weight to be given to our respective word, when there was a dispute as to what had happened between us and there were no agreed written records to verify the truth. The fact is that this it is a matter that the Chartered Institute of Public Finance & Accountancy has taken very seriously and it was not resolved with Mr Hamilton until March 2003. Although the Institute have come to the conclusion, in my view incorrectly, that Mr Hamilton did not deliberately misrepresent himself, they do however say that in their view his CV in relation to this issue was ambiguous and prone to misunderstanding. The Institute of course were only investigating this single issue from their own perspective, had they been investigating this matter in relation to the other issues that have arisen concerning Mr Hamilton they may well have come to a different conclusion. The fact that the Chief Executive makes ambiguous statements that could be prone to misunderstanding about his qualifications when applying for a senior post within the NHS must raise a question mark about the reliability of statements that he has made in relation to the allegations being made against me.
In
addition to the application form issue I also placed before the hearing evidence
of further protected disclosures I had made in relation to the conduct of the
Chief Executive. In November 1999
members of the Board had attended a leaving function held for Lady Elizabeth
Vallance and her husband Sir Ian Vallance.
The hospital charities had agreed to make a grant of £495 towards the
cost of the function, but the bill at the Savoy Hotel came to more than £1100
and there was a shortfall of £540.25 to be met.
Despite my advice to the Chief Executive that the balance of the bill
should have been split personally between the board directors, the Chief
Executive insisted on charging the bill to the Trust’s revenue account even
though at that time the Trust was already running a huge overspend. When
individuals leave the employment of the Trust there is a clear laid down policy
for the amount of money that they are paid by the Hospital Charity in respect of
the financing of a leaving function and the amount made available from
Charitable resources already significantly exceeded the amount prescribed in
that policy. To charge yet more
expenditure against the public purse for what was exclusively a Board social
occasion was a totally inappropriate use of public funds and far exceeded the
amount ever provided for any other employee of the Trust and subsidised a group
of individuals who could well have afforded to pay for the function themselves.
To and try and cover any further investigation of the matter the Chief
Executive wrote on the invoice that the bill ,
was to be charged to a non-existent budget called the Chairman’s Hospitality
Budget. My pointing out to him that
he should not have charged this expenditure to the Trust’s expenditure account
represents a protected disclosure and again explains partly why the Chief
Executive was so keen not to follow procedures in order that he could ensure
that I was dismissed from my employment with the Trust.
The whole reason why I took the invoice to Mr Hamilton was because it was
inappropriate to charge it to the Trust’s revenue account.
If there had been no problem in charging it to the Trust I would never
have taken it to Ian Hamilton in the first place.
In fact the Internal Investigation conducted by David Sissling, which considered the allegations that I had made against Ian Hamilton stated with regard to the issue of charging the Savoy bill to the Trust's expenditure:-
"I hold to opinion that the allegation about the Savoy Hotel is proven and that the taxpayer was disadvantaged".
Because of the Chief Executive’s laisez-faire approach to the NHS hospitality rules, I had on the 15th May to write to Mr Hamilton in comprehensive terms to explain the hospitality rules in some detail when a dinner was held at the Lanesborough Hotel, which had been arranged by a company with whom the Trust had a commercial relationship. Despite having outlined the hospitality rules in detail to the Chief Executive, which was copied to Catherine McLoughlin Chairman of the Trust, I was told by Ian Hamilton at one of our regular business meetings that although on that particular occasion the rules would be followed I had annoyed the Chairman by daring to raise the rules at board level. Despite having given this detailed guidance to the Chief Executive in writing, on the 8th November 2000 only six months later the Chief Executive was inviting the executive directors to accept inappropriate hospitality from a company called Patient Line, with whom the Trust were negotiating a large commercial contract which has now been finalised. The Chief Executive now asserts that his secretary sent out the invitation in error, which is quite surprising when you see that she states, “Ian is not able to attend but has asked me to check if any of the Executive Directors would like to attend”. In addition when he made this statement at my internal hearing his secretary was sitting outside the office door and could easily have come in to the room to confirm whether that was the case, however despite my request that she should be invited to clarify the issue, both Ian Hamilton and Miss Mcloughlin refused to allow this to happen once again demonstrating their unreasonable bias against me and demonstrating why the hearing and investigation should have been conducted by independent people. This unfairness is further compounded because the Chairman now seeks to assert that by raising these issues, as instructed to do so in the letter she asked Colin Watts to send me on the 7th August which stated, “The matter set out in support of your grievance relate to the issues to be discussed at Thursday’s meeting. In the circumstances, these matters should be raised as part of the formal disciplinary process and may form part of your response if you so decide”. The Thursday meeting that the Chairman refers to is of course the Investigatory Meeting that was being chaired by Ian Hamilton. It is difficult to see how Miss McLoughlin could have treated me in a more unfavourable and biased way than to be told that I should raise my complaints about Ian Hamilton at a disciplinary meeting being chaired by him. Not only would any independent observer come to the inescapable conclusion that I was not being treated fairly, but then for following Miss Mcloughlin’s instructions I am told in my dismissal letter that this is a further reason why I should be dismissed from my post, even if I had managed to convince Miss McLoughlin and Miss Marks that all the allegations made against me were false. All I have done is to demonstrate with written and tape recorded evidence that the Chief Executive has made false allegations against me and given examples of where he made statements that others have said are ambiguous and could be misinterpreted, has misused public funds and ignored the NHS hospitality rules. No written evidence of any kind was ever submitted in support of the allegations which were being made against me, yet the Chairman chose to believe the Chief Executive and not me, again showing that the disciplinary hearing was a biased sham and that she and the Chief Executive had already decided to dismiss me because of the protected disclosures that I had made.
The other issue that I drew to the Chairman’s attention at the hearing was the fact that the Chief Executive had previously told me that Ahamed Tomadj had been appointed as the Estates Director at Kings NHS Trust. As the Chief Executive knew well, Mr Tomadj’s had resigned his position at the Trust following an audit investigation that I conducted, which showed that the Director of Estates had failed to comply with the Trust’s standing financial instructions, had accepted an unreasonable level of hospitality from a contractor that the Trust was in legal dispute with and had also appointed contract managers to the Trust, whom he had allowed to supervise contract companies with which he knew they had other business links and who he also allowed, without any payment of rent, to use Inglby House an NHS property as their business premises. My expectation would have been that as soon as he became aware of this matter the Chief Executive should have reported the matter to the NHS London Regional Office. My understanding is that he has failed to do this, although I subsequently reported the matter to the NHS Counter Fraud Department and passed on a copy of my audit file to Gwillam Williams one of their investigators.
In presenting his case to the disciplinary hearing Mr Hamilton claimed that my relationship with the Service Centre Chairs, the Trust’s lead clinicians, had broken down, an assertion that was also made by Professor Jones during the hearing. However, the only evidence presented to support this false assertion was a letter which all the Service Centre Chairs had sent to the Chief Executive on the 29th May and which the Chief Executive replied to several weeks later. In neither letter was I personally mentioned and during the course of the hearing none of the signatories to the 29th May letter, which was not shown to me until after the Chief Executive had asked me to resign, was called to give evidence. Indeed the letter that I received from Pat Hamilton the Service Centre Chair for Women’s and Children’s Services and the reply that I sent her, clearly demonstrates that there was no reluctance on my part to engage with the senior clinicians. In fact the only evidence that was provided to the hearing by a signatory to the 29th May letter, was the statement provided at my request from the surgeon Mike Bailey the Service Centre Chair for Surgical Services, who stated quite clearly, “As far as I am concerned, the implications of the letter were that the process in the Finance Dept, for involving Clinicians had failed. We did not seek in our letter to attribute blame for this, indeed our understanding of the financial structure of the Trust is such that it would be inappropriate of us to try and do so”. When this letter is considered in connection with the letter that I sent to Ian Hamilton on the 12th February, which in the final paragraph recommended that he and I cleared our diaries to jointly meet each of the Service Centres Chairs to review their respective financial positions together with their respective General and Finance Managers it can be clearly seen that the allegations being made against me were clearly false. The Chief Executive when asked at my internal hearing about the 12th February e-mail acknowledged that he had received it, but that he had not thought it an appropriate for he and I to engage with the Service Centre Chairs at that time. It would therefore appear clear where the responsibility lay for not involving the Service Centre Chairs in the financial process; it lay with the Chief Executive and not with the Director of Finance. The e-mail of the 12th February also gives the lie to the accusations made by Marie Grant, Paul Jones and Suzie Bailey that the finance managers were not supporting the general managers as you will see at point A on the final page, I state that it is imperative that, “General Managers work with their Service Centre Finance Managers to be able present to the Director of Finance and IT a balanced set of budget proposals during the week commencing 18th March”. Again any fair minded independent Chairman would have in considering the written documentation that I had placed before them, come to the conclusion that the unsupported allegations made against me by Ian Hamilton, Marie Grant and Professor Jones were totally false, however because the Chairman wished to dismiss me for having made protected disclosures she disregarded the irrefutable evidence that I had presented to her.
Ian Hamilton should never have investigated complaints against me when he was my prime accuser. The fact that Miss McLoughlin and he were still prepared to proceed with a disciplinary hearing where he was the investigator and she was the Chairman and ignore the NHS Code of Conduct speaks volumes about the sort of people that they are and in my view it is alarming that they ended up in the positions that they did. The fact that they will both for different reasons not be involved with the St George's in the future is in my view to be welcomed and I just hope that they are not reinvented somewhere else in the NHS.