9th May 1994

This letter is a formal complaint about the quality of service provided by the Director of the Kensington & Chelsea Volunteer Bureau, Mr Christopher Brooks.

At the beginning of this year, I approached Mr John Moore, the editor of the Kensington & Chelsea Times, with an idea that I had to raise the profile of the elderly in this borough.

All of the details of this are enclosed.

Because of the nature of the project, it was heavily dependent on volunteer workers. Consequently, after speaking with Mr Moore, the next port of call was the Director of the Volunteer Bureau, Mr Christopher Brooks. It should be noted that this was at the end of January this year, Mr Brooks was approached well in advance of the project being launched. He agreed to provide the volunteers, has ample time for preparation and was given continuous up-dates on each development as it occured. In fact, he even once remarked that I may have been disturbing him more often than was needed.

Although Mr Brooks agreed to provide the volunteers, no firm head count was ever established or agreed upon. We played with a number of estimates, and certainly agreed that it would take meny more than Mr Brooks actually provided, which was none!

At the beginning of April, I received a message from Mr Brooks via Geraldine Timlin of 60+ "Sixty Plus", that he may not be able to provide the volunteers that I needed. This was presented to me in such a way as to sound like, "no volunteers at all". Ms Timlin also started to talk in terms of "lunch money" for any volunteers that I may have been able to recruit on my own. Hence my mail shot to over 50 councillors in the Town Hall, I also started putting posters up all over the place - copies of these are enclosed.

After speaking with Mr Brooks again, it turned out that what he had meant to convey via Ms Timlin, was that he may not be able to provide "all" of the required volunteers and that I should also try to recruit some myself. This I did, with very limited success. But then again, the recruitment and allocation of volunteer workers is not my chosen, full-time paid occupation. Nor do I have any previous experience, resources, or a network of contacts, both individuals and groups. Mr brooks on the other hand, is a very different matter.

Mr Brooks knew well in advance the approximate and exact date for the envelope stuffing and distribution, which was 18th April 1994. When this date arrived, Mr Brooks had provided no one, absolutely no one.

On 19th April 1994, at about noon, a telephone call came for me at the "Tabernacle", it was from the volunteer bureau, and they were offering me two people. They were two volunteers from 60+ "Sixty Plus" - as you may know, the Volunteer Bureau and 60+ "Sixty Plus" have a close working relationship. They were two people with very serious "learning problems", they were Mr John Shoy and Mr Jean Marie, two very well known "old hands" on the volunteer circuit, but completely inappropriate to the task that was in hand. That said, the two Johns are known, willing workers, and as far as I know will attempt anything asked of them. I gather that Mr Shoy, being very strong, did a huge amount of work for 60+ "Sixty Plus" when they moved offices recently. Mr Shoy also has a gentle, sensitive nature and would "feel" it if he was underachieving in relation to the people around him. In view of this and other considerations, I declined the offer of the two Johns from the Volunteer Bureau.

I do not know the name of the woman at the Volunteer Bureau who offered me Mr Shoy and Mr Marie, I gather she is new to her job on a paid basis. But I do know, that prior to her gaining her paid position, she had been a volunteer worker with the Bureau for a long time. By no stretch of the imagination were the aptitudes of John Shoy and John Marie unknown to her.

Because of the shoddy quality of service provided by the Volunteer Bureau, I have been in great danger of not being able to keep to my part of the bargain with Mr Moore of the Kensington & Chelsea Times. As it is, I have just managed to complete the task by the skin of my teeth. That said, because of the shortage of volunteers, the distribution has not been as widespread as I had agreed with Mr Moore.

Yours sincerely

SEAN BRYSON