FOI requests reveal that Newcastle City Council disbursed public money to The Recruitment Junction for an ex-offender employment programme, yet maintains it holds no records of whether mandatory monitoring conditions were carried out or even considered. The Council also disclosed correspondence it described as “redacted” in which the personal data was fully recoverable by copy and paste.
Newcastle City Council awarded a public grant to The Recruitment Junction, a registered charity, for a programme serving ex-offender jobseekers. FOI requests subsequently submitted to the Council have failed to produce any evidence that mandatory oversight conditions attached to that grant were applied, assessed, or recorded.
The Recruitment Junction (charity number 1191442), based in Newcastle upon Tyne, received a Newcastle Fund Round 14 Small Grant under reference NFSGR24/59. According to funding and impact documentation disclosed through FOI, the grant funded a “Job Finder” programme for ex-offender candidates, with activity including support for prison leavers, hardship grants, rent arrears assistance, food parcels, utility top-ups and travel costs.
What the grant conditions required
The Newcastle Fund Small Grants programme operates under a signed Grant Aid Conditions Form. Clause 7 creates an explicit monitoring obligation where funded services are delivered to clients the Council classifies as “vulnerable”:
Additional clauses require grantees to maintain proper financial records, allow the Council access to those records, and submit end-of-project reports with supporting evidence. Clause 10 states that the organisation must not supply misleading, dishonest or inaccurate information at any stage of the application or grant period.
The Council’s FOI responses
FOI requests were submitted under references 25584 and 25961 to establish what oversight had actually taken place. The questions were direct: whether the activity was treated as involving vulnerable clients; whether a clause 7 monitoring visit was carried out; and whether any officer assessment discussed the accuracy of the information submitted by The Recruitment Junction.
The Council’s response to FOI 25961 maintained that it held no recorded information confirming whether The Recruitment Junction’s funded activity was treated as involving vulnerable clients, no records of any monitoring visit, and no officer assessments relating to the accuracy of the organisation’s submissions.
An internal review request has been submitted challenging those positions as inconsistent with the Council’s own grant framework and the nature of the funded activity.
The Council’s response appeared to treat the submission of an impact report as equivalent to the separate clause 7 monitoring visit obligation. The internal review request challenged this directly, noting that clause 7 expressly states the visit is additional to reporting; the two obligations are not interchangeable.
Given that the funded programme explicitly served ex-offenders – a group routinely classified as requiring additional safeguarding consideration – the suggestion that no officer ever assessed or documented whether clause 7 applied is difficult to reconcile with the Council’s own scheme documentation, which includes references to safeguarding, vulnerable adults and policy compliance throughout.
“An impact report is not the same thing as a monitoring visit, and clause 7 expressly says the visit requirement is additional to reporting.” – Internal review request, FOI 25961
Redaction failures in disclosed documents
Alongside its responses to FOI 25584, the Council disclosed several email correspondence documents. Each was described in its filename as “Redacted”. Each contained personal data in plain sight.
The redaction applied to these documents was cosmetic rather than functional. While some header fields had been obscured visually, the underlying text of the PDF files was left intact. Any reader who copied and pasted the content of the disclosed documents into a text editor would find names and personal email addresses fully readable, including addresses that the visual redaction appeared to have removed.
Proper redaction requires that the underlying text layer of a PDF is physically removed, not merely painted over. Free, open-source tools exist that do exactly this. ReasonableRedactor, developed and published by The Reasonable Adjustment, is one of them. It runs locally, requires no account or subscription, and removes the underlying text rather than concealing it. The Council’s approach did neither.
- Microsoft Outlook’s automatic external sender warnings – which insert the sender’s email address as plain text in the message body – were not identified or redacted, leaving personal email addresses fully visible and selectable throughout multiple documents
- In two of the four disclosed correspondence files, redaction does not appear to have been applied at all; names and email addresses appear in full in both the headers and the body text
- The personal email addresses of multiple named Newcastle City Council officers were similarly left exposed in the disclosed material
Labelling a document “Redacted” while leaving its underlying text intact and selectable is not redaction. It is the appearance of redaction. Whether the disclosure constitutes a reportable data incident under Article 33 of the UK GDPR is a matter for the Council’s own Data Protection Officer to assess.
Documents obtained
What happens next
An internal review request (FOI 25961) is currently pending with Newcastle City Council. The review asks the Council to conduct fresh searches, identify which teams and records were consulted, and explain how a “not held” position is consistent with a grant framework that explicitly requires monitoring documentation to be produced and retained.
This article will be updated as further information is received.
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