The curious case of Sarb Bajwa and the British Dietetic Association

David Pilgrim posts….

Sarb Bajwa remains the CEO of the British Psychological Society. In the view of many, he has been a lame duck ‘leader’ since his suspension in the wake of the fraud perpetrated by his personal assistant. The appointment of that assistant was surely his responsibility. She had 17 previous convictions relating to fraud. Over an 18-month period there were more than 900 authorised fraudulent transactions on their Society credit cards amounting to more than £70,000 (see here). Bajwa’s year-long suspension resulted in eventual reinstatement, but questions were raised about failures on the BPS side of the timeliness, process and probity of their investigation of his conduct.  

Astonishingly, not content to retain his full-time salary, and with his legitimacy hanging by a thread, the BPS CEO decided to branch out and offer his personal wisdom to another organization, becoming a Director of the British Dietetic Association (BDA) in 2022. This is the only body in the UK representing the whole of the dietetic workforce and it also functions as a trade union (see here).  

Whether the BDA were told of his suspension is one of many loose ends to query about Bajwa’s flirtation with ‘moonlighting’. We do not know if this unreported soft shoe shuffle was done with the complicity of the BPS Board; maybe they were allowing him a face-saving exit to pastures new. Who knows? We can only speculate because we can only do that, given that the BPS has an unfailing habit of not disclosing matters of importance to ordinary members of the Society. Members were not told about the fraud at the time, nor of his suspension, nor of the quick exit, minus punishment and whilst still presumably suspended, of the Chief Finance Officer to a post at, ironically, the National Lottery Community Fund. 

Now members have not been told, except by @psychsocwatch on “X”, that the Leicester BPS HQ office is now up for sale. For those new to the news, you may want to read that sentence again, but it is true. The BPS has run a deficit for many years and drawn down Society assets in the millions. There were many financial irregularities over the last two decades and five changes of Finance Director in about as many years. The membership has kept been totally in the dark about this dire financial position of the Society.

What purported to be a “business plan” discounted holding onto senior practitioner membership and their interests in favour of grasping at recruitment of early career graduates and their accreditation. That tactic is not turning out to be a cash cow. Rumblings about accreditation within higher education are seeing senior academics question what they actually get from the BPS, other than a tiresome bureaucracy constraining their freedom. Income streams, which sustain the highly paid Bajwa, his mysterious deputy and his Senior Management Team are clearly wobbling. The financial viability of the BPS is now highly uncertain. An Al Capone type outcome might be emerging. It is not the self-serving mendacity of the leaders, we have documented at length, that may be their downfall but mundane financial matters. However, for them it is not about owed tax but empty coffers.

Under Bajwa’s stewardship, a cabal has continued to run the BPS incorporating for a while the CV-improving applicants for Board membership. This has included cycle after cycle in the past ten years of Presidential candidates. A significant proportion of them have removed themselves before completing their three-year term. One was reportedly physically removed from the premises, one was expelled from membership and another left for personal reasons. One president, David Murphy, resigned as Vice President after the reputed breakdown of his relationship with Bajwa. Given the failure of accurate reporting by Jon Sutton, the supine editor of The Psychologist, of the true reasons for his resignation, Murphy was moved to publish his full letter of explanation on “X” (see here). The first appointed independent chair of the Board of Trustees, David Crundwell resigned without explanation after being in post for a mere 15 months (see here)

Who, other than BPSWatch has reported this shambolic picture of disaffected departures and financial meltdown? The Board have carried on regardless, with boat rocking not being permitted and the duty of transparency on behalf of ordinary members going absent without leave. Only those in the know are allowed to continue to be in the know. The antics of Bajwa have only been possible because of these other complicit actors. 

Given all of the above, what role has Bajwa been exploring on the Board of the BDA and how does he depict his claim to grand managerial authority? His statement here on the BDA website conceals his role in the BPS completely:

I am a senior manager and leader and spent the early part of my career living and working in Southern Africa for an international aid organisation. Over the last 15 years I have been working for a number of global professional membership and learned societies in a variety of regulated sectors, including: legal services; financial services, the engineering industry and health and social care. I am used to working in a changing national and international political landscape and have led these organisations through a variety of challenges. I understand the importance and value of professional bodies both for their members and the wider public good and believe that they have an invaluable role to play particularly in terms of building and sharing expertise and knowledge. I have been responsible for strategic planning; operational delivery; change management; managing campaigns and lobbying; public policy development; events and marketing; external relations and stakeholder management; customer service; financial and budgetary management I enjoy leading and driving change, being externally focused and forward facing and I have consistently delivered growth in the organisations for which I have worked. I am excited and looking forward to being part of the BDA family and contributing to our success.

This statement is, of course, not big on humility but, to be fair, we are all now used to the shameless self-promotion in the new professional class of managers. Bajwa is no more or less guilty of this sort of bullshit which we have come to expect from most of them.  But it is not what he says here that is the problem but what he does not say. We need to move into what philosophers call an ‘omissive critique’ in a wider exercise of critical deconstruction. Here I pick out some of his key claims.

Claim 1 I have been responsible for ….change management… Would that be the £6 million wasted of the members money, with no proven outcome?

Claim 2 I have been responsible for external relations and stakeholder management…. This has included becoming an expert on mental health, even getting co-authorship in an article in The Lancet, despite no clinical or research credentials in the field. As for ‘stakeholder management’, does that include the skill of keeping everyone in the dark, including his own workforce, about selling off their place of work? 

Claim 3 …..financial and budgetary management. Laugh or cry at this point? Would that be him signing off the fraudulent claims of his subsequently imprisoned PA? Would that be overseeing the demise of the Society’s financial viability, with the needed redundancies and property sell-offs first in London and then in Leicester?

Claim 4 I have consistently delivered growth in the organisations for which I have worked. Another laugh or cry moment and a reprise of the previous point.

Claim 5 I am excited and looking forward to being part of the BDA family and contributing to our success.  Well, if the BDA family was to be his new refuge, presumably he would be making decisions about living in two homes and allocating time to each.

Can a full time CEO of one organization be a director in another?

The answer to this question in a British context is ‘yes’, if it is within the law. The challenge of credibility Bajwa has here (along with the complicit actors in his ‘two families’) is not legal but ethical and it revolves around the matter of trust in principle and his personal trustworthiness in practice. This broad point contains with it the following considerations.

First, did the BPS Board approve of Bajwa’s move to a ‘new family’? Again, we do not know, but Board minutes from the time may provide that answer, unless -conveniently – the relevant content is redacted, which is a hallmark of BPS information control to the outside world. If it was approved, redacted or not, then it is not clear what benefits would accrue exactly in Leicester. Surely energy and time would be lost. Synergies might accrue but they should be proved, not assumed.

Second, are the activities of the two organisations separate enough to ensure no conflicts of interest? Neither Bajwa nor his complicit actors at the head of each organisation can reassure any sceptical onlooker. The latter first needs to discover the fact of his two-family living arrangement about the ‘challenge’ (as managers like to describe excruciatingly awkward questions) his dual role poses. Again, we may be the only source of that disclosure – it certainly has not been announced by anyone in the BPS to our knowledge.  An obvious query considering that fact relates to the professional work of dieticians and health psychologists. There may be boundary disputes between them and conflicting emphases in their client work. 

Third, there is the matter of time commitment and this links to the point about assumed synergy. If the latter cannot be proven, then why would a full-time CEO in one place be encouraged to take on the burden of a directorship in another? If Bajwa is receiving payment for his role, this is one consideration, but even if the role is pro bono there is still an opportunity cost. Bear in mind that the fraud and the financial meltdown have created an organisation in serious trouble. That being the case, surely any CEO worth his or her salt should devote 100% of their time and effort to mitigating the impact of an imminent organisational implosion. This is a crisis for the workforce in relation to their job security and a crisis for the BPS members if they unwisely still rely on the Society as a stable base for their discipline. Both staff and members are now in jeopardy, so this is not the time to fiddle while Rome burns. However, this is the BPS and the expected norms of probity and caution in publicly responsible bodies do not apply within the culture of its cabal.

Fourth, in that context, can Bajwa discharge his fiduciary duties with proper integrity to both the BPS and the BDA? This is an open question, but it needs to be asked for all those interested in credibility of both organisations. For example, the loyalty to each is strained by the conflicts of interest noted above.

Fifth, can confidentiality be sustained and kept separate when two roles are carried out simultaneously?  Scenarios may arise when the confidential interests of one organisation might interfere with the other one. 

Even a person with a proven track record of ethical integrity would struggle with these tensions. In the case of Bajwa, his integrity has been tarnished by the fraud and his Houdini-like escape from its consequences. This is not a good look for him or either of the two “families” that he currently shares. Sadly, it is what we have come to expect on this blog from those running the BPS. Few CEOs in the third sector have the dubious distinction of having a whole book published about the dysfunction of the regime over which they continued to preside (see here ).

There is a depressing symmetry between a failed organisation and its failed managers. The former may have emerged anyway, given changes in the economic viability of siloed uni-disciplinary authority; a norm in the last century, which has fragmented in this one. Better managers might stave off the inevitable, whereas poor ones expedite the decline and fall. Bajwa and his cabal confirm this conclusion and leave us with one last query. Do those at the top of the BDA (or its’ ordinary members) have any idea at all about what has happened in the BPS? For Bajwa to have had the gall to make the statement he did on their website reflects his character and maybe their naivety about welcoming him into their family.