The Cheese Toastie - gateway drug to motorcycle gangsterism

I am grateful that Bristol Council is on the case - what would we do without such folk:

Cheese toasties have been banned from sale in a Bristol park amid fears a proposed hot food van could attract booze-fuelled antisocial behaviour and motorbike gangs.

Where would we be without the sort of councillor brave enough to face up to the Dark Evil of the Toastie. The nation would be riddled with booze-fuelled motor-cyclists and other ne'er-do-wells. Here is our heroic councillor Claire Hiscott:

“It’s right next to Orchard School, which is a challenging school that sometimes has a problem with keeping kids in school. They have to have patrols of staff to make sure kids don’t walk off site. The lure of a food concession may encourage kids to take a little walk. The school has made a lot of effort to encourage healthy eating. We have problems with childhood obesity. Historically we had antisocial behaviour, not just motorbikes, from young adults gathering with alcohol and causing a disturbance."

What a load of nonsense and typical of the attitude of too many councillors (and a fair few local residents) to young people. Do they really think that having a van selling cheese toasties is going to turn sweet innocent school kids into obese, booze-crazed motor cycle gangsters?

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Why the Taxpayers Alliance needs to shut up or learn something about local government

I can't speak for others in local government but the Taxpayers Alliance really gets my goat. And I say this as someone who wants low taxes and small government. The TPA seem to specialise in a particular low rent form of attack - sending freedom of information requests to every council usually to obtain information already publicly available. This information is then totted up and badged as waste. Thousands of hours - all funded by the taxpayer naturally - spent providing trite information about councillor expenses, officer pay, trade union facilities time or numbers of press officers. The TPA then bungs out a press release screaming about waste, how hard-working officers are 'overpaid' or councillors travelling the land on junkets.

The problem is that none of this febrile investigative work gets anywhere near the heart of the TPA's alleged mission of lower taxes and smaller government. It gets them a headline - "Ten Borsetshire top bosses earn over £100,000" or "Big Borough Chief Executive earns more than the Prime Minister" - but the effect of this isn't to get us better, smaller government but rather to undermine public confidence in their local government. The TPA will then get some information about potholes and claim that, if we didn't pay chief executives so much money or employ press officers then we'd have all the cash needed to fix those potholes - despite this being utter tripe.

Don't get me wrong, this is good politics - at least if you're looking for a stick to beat incumbent council leaderships - but it completely and totally misses the point. If you want smaller, cheaper local government then the only way to do it is for one or both of two things to happen - councils stop doing things they do right now and/or councils start charging people for the services we give them (see green waste collections, for example). At the moment - not that the TPA ever mention this, of course - top tier local councils spend between 50% and 80% of their budgets providing social services and social care - in Bradford's case about £180,000,000. Paying the chief executive £120,000 instead of £160,000 isn't going to make one jot of difference to this problem bar making it more difficult to recruit a good enough person to run the organisation.

I was talking recently about the difficulties councils have recruiting and retaining planning officers (typical pay £30,000-50,000). As soon as we get an experienced officer with his or her boots under the table, up pops a far better paid opportunity in private consultancy and off zooms the experienced planning officer. The same applies for property and planning lawyers, good accountants, leisure centre managers, and human resources officers. Maybe the nice folk working for the TPA are doing so for love and a bowl of rice every second day but in the real world there's a competitive market for the skills needed to run large and complex organisations and the professional expertise to deliver the services those organisations provide.

If the Taxpayers Alliance wants to meet its mission of lower taxes it needs to start saying what it is that government should stop providing so as to do this - not just infrastructure projects like HS2 but actual revenue services like defence, benefits, health, education or pensions. It would be more interesting to see a picture painted of the small state, low tax future implied by the TPA's mission but all we get is attacks on petty waste (and often not even waste but legitimate spending) and the wages of senior offers - wages that aren't competitive and which often result in poor management in those local councils.

It's time we started to push back at the TPA - for sure they provide good copy - over local government pay, service delivery and funding. Because the TPA is wrong, damages the reputation of local government and prefers a cheap headline over a thoughtful contribution to the debate about how English local government is run and funded.

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Should Council's be doing this?

I understand the financial imperative for local authorities to seek investments that will provide (possibly) assured future income. But there is a point at which you have to ask whether using the Public Works Loan Board (PWLB) to invest in commercial property is either fair or the proper use of such borrowing:

Through this innovative partnership, local authorities borrow money from central Government via the Public Works Loan board at a fixed low interest rate and regenerate surplus land that they own by building a Travelodge hotel as either a stand-alone project or as part of a mixed-use development. Not only does this create jobs and boost the local economy but it also provides a substantial return of profit for the council.

It looks great, doesn't it? After all the commercial interest (Travelodge in this case but it could be other businesses) gets access to cheaper finance than would be the case had they borrowed from normal commercial sources. And the Council gets that much vaunted 'regeneration' and an income from owning the freehold. It all seems like a brilliant idea but it does raise questions especially where the deal is less of a partnership that the one described here.

The first question is how local authorities with preferential borrowing rates and a benign tax environment are affecting the property market, especially for the sorts of investment - shopping malls, car parks, supermarket sites and so forth - that are favoured because of their (hopefully) reliable income. It may well be the case that the value of these assets is inflated by the capacity of local councils to invest larger sums given low interest rates on their borrowing.

The second question is whether the PWLB exists for the purpose of commercial property investment - especially the sort of investment Bradford Council has undertaken by simply buying an existing car park for several million quid. Surely the operation of the PWLB shouldn't be merely 'prudential' (does the ground rent exceed the cost of borrowing) but should contain some recognisable social value.

Finally, do local councils have the expertise to engage in this sort of property investment - what looks like low risk may turn out to be more problematic. Imagine buying up a freehold only to find that the income from ground rent dries up or becomes difficult to collect? Local councils are looking for long term income here without necessarily appreciating how market and social change will affect that long run - what happens to car parks in a world of self-drive cars? Do AirBnB type models undermine the budget hotel? And how will the medium term play out in the world of retail letting?

Councils will, of course, turn round and say, 'but we've no choice as we've no money'. This merely returns to the original driver of such investments - falling council revenue budgets - while the risks associated with such strategies are unclear and the impact on property markets elsewhere store up further problems. And this is all before we consider how many billions councils will add to public borrowing.

Should councils be doing this?

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Some public health doubletalk...

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Bradford Council (to the best of my knowledge) has no policy of supporting or not supporting a minimum unit price for alcohol. I checked and this is the response to my questioning about this article:

I have looked again at the original press response and I am clear that our response did not suggest that supporting MUP is council policy, only that Public Health Bradford would support the introduction of MUP.

It seems to have passed Public Health Bradford by but, for the past year they have been part of Bradford Council. And the thing about Councils is that policy is made by councillors not by officers. The Director knows this hence the wonderful piece of double talk above.

To save you following the link, this is what the officer told the press:

"Public Health Bradford would support the introduction of alcohol minimum unit pricing to help address alcohol misuse and its associated health problems."

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Why don't people complain about bad public services?

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Perhaps it's the futility of the exercise?

Nearly half of people who complained about problems with a public service in the past year felt their complaint was ignored, according to new research from Which?

The research also found that a third of people who experienced problems with public services did not complain, with most saying it was not worth the effort. Of those that did complain, 39% said they were unhappy with the outcome.

I don't know about my councillor colleagues but these findings are something of a damning statement about our councils' services (not to mention other public agencies services). Not that we get stuff wrong and generate complaints but that the public - or a whole lot of them - don't think complaining is worth while and, when they do complain, the response from the offending public service isn't good enough.

We spend a lot of time (well I don't but lots of officers and councillors do) pontificating about 'public sector ethos' and sneeringly referring to the private sector as a place of wickedness and ethical inadequacy. What this Which survey tells us is that all this grand talk of public sector moral superiority is just a load of wibble when is comes to the very basics of service.

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Leaving Bradford? Your views please

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OK, I most of you aren't from (or especially interested in) Bradford but for those who are there's a blog post at the Bingley Rural Conservatives website about whether Shipley, Bingley and Keighley should leave Bradford:

There are undoubtedly differing views about this idea – some feel that replacing rule from Bradford with rule from Keighley isn’t necessarily an improvement while others feel that the dominance of the old City over the wider District leads to misplaced priorities. Phil Davies is very concerned about planning decisions but there must be equal concern about the manner in which Bradford Labour has implemented its cuts to services.

Just recently, during the budget discussions, Labour proposed closing five children’s centres – every one in the Shipley and Keighley constituencies and every one in a ward with Conservative councillors. The same goes for spending on highways, on youth services and on regeneration – the focus is on the City and especially the City centre.

Happy to accept views from anywhere - politeness is, as always, urged on you!

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So how much power do your councillors have?

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It's not new to say that local government isn't really master of its own destiny. Nor would I be the first to observe that local councillors - the people we elect to make decisions about that local government - have even less control over that destiny. Most thoughtful local councillors know that the big decisions about funding are outside local control and also that many of the ways in which that funding is distributed are not within the local council's gift either.

Back in 1961, when my Dad was first elected to the Municipal Borough of Beckenham, local councils undertook duties placed on them by national governments (e.g. refuse collection) but the funding for those duties, as well as the other things a council chose to do, was entirely raised locally through the rates or through charges. There was no revenue support grant, no centralised setting of business rates and no national fee levels. It was down to the councillors.

Between then and now something changed. My Dad always blamed the 1970 Local Authority Social Services Act for starting the rot but whatever the cause we moved from a situation where local government was controlled locally to a situation where, for most councils, what they do is defined by national regulation and the necessary funding provided by central government. In 2011 local government spent £147billion and £103billion of this - 70% - was central government grant funding (one caveat here - this is a net spending figure not a gross spending figure, the £147bn is the call on tax revenue from local government).

Not surprisingly governments have sought to control this level of expenditure (it is about a quarter of total government spending after all) and to try and direct the way in which the money is used. To understand how this budget works we can divide the activities funded through local government into three areas: education; social services and social care; and municipal services (bins, potholes, parks and so forth). This is an oversimplification but helps to explain how local government actually works.

For education the local council (as 'local education authority') is two things - a route for money to be paid to schools and the provider of services to those schools. The bulk of the funding is in the form of the Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) - the formula for distributing this grant is defined nationally but administered through a schools forum rather than, as in times past, a committee of the local council. The schools forum is not an elected body, it is not accountable to the council and its membership is institutional (schools, LEA, unions, colleges, etc.). Put simply, local councillors do not control the funding of schools. So when you blame your local council for not improving education try to remember this fact.

In the case of social services and social care local councils provide services in response to demand - or 'need' if you prefer the approved social care word. The budget is what the US Federal Government would call "relatively uncontrollable". In any given budget period the council has to estimate how many people will require social services and/or social care. That's how many children might be taken into care, how many disabled people will require support, how many of the elderly population will need home helps and so forth. Since education funding is effectively outside the local authority this is the biggest area of council spending. And while councils have some funding flexibility, at bottom they have a duty to meet the need identified.

Municipal services consists of everything else the council does - this includes statutory services such as planning, libraries, youth services and the registrar of births, marriages and deaths. As well as those things we tend to think of as what councils do - empty our bins and maintain the roads, run parks and provide swimming pools. Councillors do have more discretion over these services and over how much funding they receive. For some things - swimming pools and public lavatories, for example - the council has absolute control and can open or close them as it wishes.

The truth of all this is that 80-90% of the spending and activity undertaken by your council (or councils if you live in the shires) is simply given - determined by regulation, set out in statute or otherwise required by central government. And three-quarters of what your council spends comes in the form of central government grant - with all the strings and restrictions that come with this. Ministers and bureacrats down in London will always want to make sure that, wherever possible, the agenda of the national government is met by the local council. As a result we have had restrictions of borrowing, limits to tax-raising powers such as rate capping, the use of regulation or ring-fencing to direct spending and, if all else fails, simply removing any power for councillors to control or change what the council does. We even got an instruction this year to hold a 'named vote' on setting the council tax!

So when, as we did in Bradford yesterday, councillors get together and "set the budget" bear in mind that what you're seeing is a finely tuned political row about a few million quid out of a budget totally over a billion. The budget debate - "we've found £200,000 to invest in saving kittens", "the Tories are casting old people into the darkness by reducing the walking stick budget by £50,000" and "Labour are failing youngsters by removing the swing seat cleaning service" - this debate isn't really about the budget at all, it's about the tiny bit of the budget that our system of local government allows us to control.

Sometimes it makes me wonder?

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On the setting of council budgets...

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Bradford Council is about to set its budget for 2014-2016. I can hear your excitement at the prospect, the sounds of cynical snorts echo through the grand rooms of City Hall, even the odd snigger is heard. "Budget! Useless shower, what do they know about budget!"

All eighty-nine of us Councillors will troop into the Council Chamber at 16:00 tomorrow clutching our agenda and our copies of the budget. Few will have read the budget.

Your cynicism has turned to rage as you splutter - "what d'you mean, haven't read the budget?".

Absolutely most won't have read the budget because the Labour-controlled executive only published said budget yesterday - 48 hours before we get to vote on it. This was the last possible moment at which they could publish - leaving the rest of us with little or no time to read, absorb and propose amendments in time for the deadline for submission of those amendments (10:00 on the morning of the full council meeting). Bearing in mind that the Finance Director has to sign off any amendments.

I shan't bore you with the details of the Labour budget. Suffice it to say that they've done what we expect them to do - make cuts they don't need to make for maximum political impact and charged local residents as much as they possibly can for the pleasure of not receiving services they used to receive.

What bothers me is that, for all the council leader's protestations about the 'budget process', this is how we've always gone about the task of setting a budget in excess of £1 billion. A flurry of activity as we argue the toss over a few million quid. As my grandfather once said about the budget for Penge Urban Distrct Council (of which he was Chairman): "the amount of time spent on an item is in inverse proportion to that item's cost".

So Bradford Council's gross budget is around £1.2 billion. And we are scrabbling around down the back of the sofa looking for about £1.5m so we don't have to withdraw youth services from any community where the youth aren't actually running riot. And £65,000 to keep the public loos open in Haworth (a place that gets several million visitors every year).

At the end of the meeting we will have fulfilled our responsibility - setting a Council Tax for 2014/15 (and, yes, Labour propose an increase) and agreeing the associated budget. The problem is that none of the Councillors and few, if any, Council Officers will have read the whole of this budget. I know that, having done my best to wade through the budget, I will have missed something. And, at some point in the year something will come up and the response will be: "oh, it was in the budget" accompanied by a finger pointed at the offending line.

I could say that this is no way to run anything but, given the scale of Bradford Council, I can't see any way in which setting the budget can be anything other than 'top line'. And this means that, rather than the 'budget management' approach most councils adopt, we should use a priority-setting approach. At the planning stage, regardless of statutory duties and the exercise of statutory powers, we should ask what it is we think the council must do, what we think is nice to have and what is essentially a waste of time or money (or both).

There will be some things the council sees as a waste that have to be done because some numpty down in London says so ('equalities impact assessments' spring to mind here) but, by deprioritising them, we reduce the cost to the minimum needed to meet the duty. In contrast, there will be things we consider absolutely essential but which aren't a duty (providing public lavatories, for example).

The hard part of this approach to budget setting is that your decisions - I'd close down the essentially useless smoking cessation services, for example - will result in criticism from those associated with the service. A climate change department (Bradford has one of these) would be down near the bottom of my list of essential council services but the greens and 'save the planet' obsessives may take a different view - very loudly.

Most of the time the result of this process is that no-one is satisfied but equally there isn't enough dissatisfaction to result in big protests or (much more concerning for councillors) people voting you out of office. The result is that essential services are run on the same rickety basis as 'nice to have' services and bureaucracy we can do without. A sort of shared pain.

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Scrapping the position of Council chief executive? Well it's a thought...

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Indeed a thought that Bradford Council's Conservative Group has proposed in its last two budget submissions (more specifically we've asked that the position is included within a wider review of governance and leadership). It seems that the government down in London agrees with us:

‘The Government believes that the traditional model of chief executive, with a wide public role and a significant salary, is unnecessary and can weaken the ability of a council’s political leadership to set a direction through the executive role of elected members.'

Now partly this is all part of the "no public servant should be paid more than the prime minister" nonsense but there's a more important and broader issue here of governance. As council chief executives have drifted away from their traditional town clerk role they have become what one Bradford councillor called "the unelected mayor", individuals with an enormous amount of discretionary (even arbitrary) power. Moreover this power is exercised without the capacity of the electorate and its representatives to control or correct actions.

The intention of the 2000 local government act (for all its myriad flaws and failures) was to re-establish the authority of elections and elected people either through the introduction of a directly elected mayor or else through a powerful leader and cabinet model. The presence, especially within the latter, of powerful chief executives undermines the authority of that political executive by creating a different nexus from which policy and strategic leadership can come.

In Bradford this problem is illustrated by the fact that the chief executive has over £4 million worth of officer resource directed to policy, strategy and 'change' whereas the entire political establishment has just two and a half policy officers (less than £100,000 worth). A moment's glance at this structure tells you that the political leadership of the council, in terms of positive policy-making, is completely dominated by the chief executive. Indeed it often seems that the only action us politicians can take is to veto a proposal. Positive proposals, if they don't accord with the professional leadership's 'vision', run the risk of simply staying just that, a proposal.

None of this is a criticism of the capability of chief executives merely to observe that the position has grown to such strength that the over-riding principle of democratic leadership and accountability is undermined. We need to look again at the role of leading the 'paid service' and consider how we can - if we like the idea of democracy that is - rejuvenate the role of councillors and political leadership.

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So what are local councils for? A thought on objective-setting

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I'm reading the agenda for Bradford Council's Regeneration and Culture Overview and Scrutiny committee (like you do). And I'm struck by the problem with local government - perhaps the problem with government everywhere - the problem of, for want of a better term, 'mission creep'.

Except it's not quite mission creep. The problem is that most of the time, in most places, government is really uncertain about its objectives. It's not that extraneous or new 'objectives' are added to an activity but that government doesn't actually know what its there to do.

Government is something we rather take for granted. We can see the things it does - everything from invading Iraq to emptying out rubbish bins once a week. At the front end, we tend to see the job being done more or less well. Satisfaction rates for waste collection in England are generally pretty high -  certainly over 80% and, in many cases, over 90%. And we don't need reminding how good our front-line troops are at their job.

However (and I'll stick with local government here), sit down with a big local council and ask them what their objectives are. What you'll get is everything from the stupidly banal - "to be a world class city" - to the utterly meaningless. Here by way of example is Manchester Council's 'objective':

As a Council our objective is to support the delivery of Manchester’s Community Strategy through the Manchester Partnership. The Community Strategy was refreshed during 2012/13, reaffirming our vision of Manchester as a world class city as competitive as the best international cities;

• that stands out as enterprising, creative and industrious
• with highly skilled and motivated people
• living in successful neighbourhoods whose prosperity is environmentally sustainable  
• where all our residents can meet their full potential, are valued and secure 

Who could disagree with any of this - as a mission statement it's wonderful, capturing the idea of a thriving, dynamic, international city. But is it actually an objective? Does it tell me anything about what I should be doing right now? Can it help Councillors and officers know what decisions they should be taking today? And is it a guide to developing a strategy?

Sadly the answer to all those questions is 'no' (I'm not picking on Manchester here - Bradford's will be just as anodyne, just as purposeless, I just couldn't find them).

Local councils are complicated beasts running a lot of different services that, other than being delivered locally, don't really have a great deal in common. Some are related to place - roads, paths, parks, trees and so on - while others such as home help services relate to individual people. Councils respond to emergency situations ranging from flooding through to taking abused children into care. And councils provide (although this is a little moot these days) services such as education across the whole population.

Go on then. Set a clear, understandable and quantified objective for all that activity. Pretty challenging! And this is the problem that results in terms like "world class city" cropping up. It seems to me that, in the absence of a clear external incentive (such as that coming from customers switching to another supplier or from the profit motive) Councils are forced to look within themselves for that incentive.

As a result Councils create visions, missions and objectives that aren't within their capacity to deliver - those four bullet points of Manchester's aren't really within the City Council's gift. The council can influence every one of them but doesn't control them. Nor for that matter are those bullets under the control of government (or 'the wider public sector' as we like to call it) making them almost entirely useless as an 'objective'.

I'm a 'soft loo-paper' Tory. Local government is not some sort of ideological mission to change the world but a fairly prosaic set of services that we think need providing - schools, waste collection and disposal, looking after the roads, helping old and disabled people who need support, protecting vulnerable people especially children and things like parks, swimming pools and libraries that provide for our leisure. Plus a set of statutory roles and functions including planning, licensing and environmental protection.

Our job as a council is to do these things well. Both to the satisfaction of local residents and to agreed objective standards of service quality. For sure we can add a little bit of vision and future planning into our mix of activities but our purpose isn't to change people's behaviour but to provide a place - safe, cared for and open - that allows people to make the most of their individual, personal lives.

The problem is that councils can't leave well alone. We have to poke about at the 'let's change people's behaviour', 'let's save the planet', 'we will transform lives in the borough' sort of stuff with the result being (as Bradford demonstrates) a host of essentially interfering strategies - a 'play strategy', a 'food strategy', a 'cycling strategy', an 'alcohol strategy'. The public hasn't asked for any of this expensive activity and wouldn't even notice if it wasn't there. Yet because the producers of these strategies can provide a tenuous link to the 'objective' or 'vision' they are claimed as vital and essential to the council's purpose.

We fuss and worry about the grandiose - indeed there's nothing us councillors like more than a bit of grandstanding (sorry, 'looking at the big picture'). It makes us sound good, the papers like it and we can pretend we're actually changing something when all we've really got is another wasteful strategy.

What really matters is whether the council has its finances straight, satisfies residents, and meets its own targets on service quality improvement. Making it so the highways engineer, the social worker and the bloke digging the spring beds in the park are all delivering to the objective of the organisation (and even better, can explain how).

Right now council leaderships - political and professional - spend too much time on grand words, strategies and visions but far too little time on making sure children and the old are protected, the roads are swept, the potholes filled, parks tidied and that the loos have soft loo-paper.

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Some Councillors just don't get it - the case of York's leader and his deputy

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The leader and deputy leader of York City Council appear to dislike the publics' opinions:

A report brought before City of York Council’s audit and governance committee at the request of leader Coun James Alexander and his deputy, Coun Tracey Simpson-Laing, this week recommended speakers should not criticise the authority’s officials, should avoid “party political” and “frivolous” points and should ensure anything they say is “factually correct”. 

As it happens the committee wisely sent the document straight back to this couple of oversensitive political leaders with some choice word. But the question is whatever possessed them to propose gagging public comment and cuffing the prerogative of meeting chairmen?

This is from the same book as banning fair reporting, stopping photography and preventing filming - all things that self-important councillors have done in recent times.

We really should stop trying to make out that we are so grand that any criticism of our actions, debates or decisions must be prevented.

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Minimum pricing by stealth...

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The campaign against minimum pricing for alcohol - a unwarranted and unjustified impost on the less well of - seems to have been success, at least for the time being. Or so says the Wine and Spirits Trade Association: 

Minimum alcohol pricing looks set to stay off the UK Government's policy agenda until at least the next General Election, the chief executive of the country's Wine & Spirit Trade Association has said. 

Crack open the bubbly folks, good cheer for all - including the poorest in the land - we can toast a successful campaign.

Or can we? Here's something from Alcohol Concerns 'Guide to Alcohol for Councillors':

Consider introducing a by-law to establish local or regional minimum pricing which is being looked at by local authorities in the north West.

This document - riddled with misinformation and inaccuracies (including the shocking lie that alcohol problems are getting worse when they aren't) - is being sent out across the land to Councillors. And if ever there were a bunch of people tempted by the New Puritan message it's Councillors - we love a nice ban, a new control or a new power.

So my cavalier friends the game has shifted - now you need to get hold of your local councillor and make the case for alcohol. The case about thousands of jobs, hundreds of businesses and the pleasure of the millions who elect us councillors.

Otherwise you'll get minimum pricing by stealth.

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Minimum alcohol pricing looks set to stay off the UK Government's policy agenda until at least the next General Election, the chief executive of the country's Wine & Spirit Trade Association has said.
Read more at http://www.decanter.com/news/wine-news/584393/minimum-alcohol-pricing-off-the-uk-policy-agenda-says-wsta-chief#mcY3BLie5v2UP4JC.99

Minimum alcohol pricing looks set to stay off the UK Government's policy agenda until at least the next General Election, the chief executive of the country's Wine & Spirit Trade Association has said.
Read more at http://www.decanter.com/news/wine-news/584393/minimum-alcohol-pricing-off-the-uk-policy-agenda-says-wsta-chief#mcY3BLie5v2UP4JC.99

Potholes...

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Every Councillor needs to be on top of the pothole issue and pointing out how the council needs to act and act now to do something (specifically fill in the pothole being pointed out). We are assiduous in performing this vital task, keeping highways maintenance folk busy filling in said holes.

Then we troop into the council chamber and vote for budgets that cut spending on that vital task of highways maintenance. Local council's spend less than 5% of their revenue budget on looking after roads, pavements and footpaths. Which is down from 11% (and in actual cash terms more) in 2008.

This reflects the priority of government - national and local. The idea that looking after roads is an important function of government has long passed - even in the transport field the focus (and the spending) has been directed to railways. While we subsidise heavy rail to the tune of over £13 billion, national revenue spending on roads languishes at a mere £9 billion. And this priority - as ever - is reflected in the choices of local councils.

The odd thing is that most people, most of the time simply don't use trains. Even in London. Yet we all - whether we're drivers, bus users, cyclists or pedestrians - use the roads. Perhaps we have (in our obsession with hating the motor car and disliking the lorry) simply forgotten that it is roads that carry the lion's share of freight, that allow us to get from our front door to where we wish to go and that are the real lifeline of our economy.

That our roads - suburban, urban, trunk and rural - are riddled with potholes represents a colossal failure in government priority. We've allowed ourselves to be lulled by those green dressed sirens into accepting the wholly false premise that railways present any kind of solution to the transport needs of a modern economy. Railways merely take us from one place we don't want to be to another place we don't want to be - it's the roads that complete the journey.

Potholes are a symptom of misplaced priority not a failing of any system. We simply stopped spending money on roads. New schemes are evaluated on the basis of unwarranted environmental impact assessments meaning that, in almost every case, new roads don't meet criteria. And councils faced with tight budget settlements choose to spend on social services for the minority of residents rather than roads for everyone. And there's a reason for this of course.

Those social services carry an enormous risk - whether we're speaking of the terrible child death or the dreadful story of elderly neglect this always trumps you or I getting a broken car as a result of a pothole. So we pour money into social services - as it happens nearly all of the grant we get from central government (education aside) ends up being spent on social services. And the result of this is that we spend less and less money on looking after the roads we all use.

With the result being potholes that us councillors can point at, take action about, get sorted!

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Process or people?

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Surrey County Council let an old lady starve to death:

Officers from Surrey Police have begun an inquiry following the death of 81-year-old widow Gloria Foster.

She passed away at Epsom Hospital on Monday (February 4) after being found abandoned, starving and dehydrated at her home in Banstead.

Mrs Foster was left alone at the property in Chipstead Road after the Sutton-based firm that cared for her, Carefirst24, was shut down following a raid by the UK Border Agency and Metropolitan Police in January.

I don't know the details of the case so can't say whether anything criminal was done. But I have a question - was Mrs Foster killed by the process or the people?  And it's an important question because it impinges on the failings in our National Health Service as shown by the enquiries into various hospitals and hospital departments, most recently Mid Staffs NHS Trust.

If it's the process - or the system or the "culture" - then we must ask how it is that repeated reorganisations and restructures have affected our care provision. Has each revolution in NHS or Council organisation merely, in Kafka's words, resulted in "...the slime of a new bureaucracy"?

Or is it the people - should we really be asking how someone - or worse still several people - can leave an old lady without the care she needed to live for nine days? That's nine days turning up to work with the request sitting on the desk, nine days to make a phone call and arrange some care, nine days to do something so Mrs Foster can live.

Is it the people? Those altruistic nurses passing by a bed where an poorly woman lies in her own urine and faeces - was it the process, the system, the culture that made them neglect her needs? Time and time again, not just in Stafford but across the NHS and in Council care provision, we read of this neglect, this failure to do basic, civilised acts of caring.

Can we ask again - is it the process or the people?

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Some Council Monitoring Officers are pretty dumb....

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‘Some council monitoring officers are informing their councillors that being a council tax payer is a disclosable pecuniary interest in any Budget debate. Councillors are then informed they would be committing a criminal offence if they speak or vote in that debate unless they obtain a formal dispensation.’

Yes folks, the "Standards" nonsense continues.

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Haringey Council - fussbucket central!

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Although I fear that Councils elsewhere will be rubbing their hands in glee at the opportunity to fuss and bother over petty regulation:

Cllr Nilgun Canver, Cabinet Member for the Environment at Haringey Council, said: 'We will continue to work closely with our partners in the police and the courts to tackle illegal activity around vehicles, especially looking out for unlicensed waste carriers that are responsible for so much dumping in our borough.
 

Now I'm pretty sure that this nannying politician didn't write that quote - it was crafted by a well-staffed press office and approved by layers of bureaucrats. I could launch into a rant about so-called "unlicensed waste" and the obscene targeting of tradesmen in vans going about their everyday business. You know why the carpet fitter won't take you old carpet away? And you have to take your own waste to the council tip?

It's because councils have a nice little earner ripping off tradesmen and the Environment Agency has some expensive regulations for people moving "waste" about. Most of these regulations are not there to save the planet, to promote recycling or any such noble aim - they are there to protect primary manufacturers, they a simply protectionism via regulation.

Cllr Canver (or rather the jobsworth who wrote the quote she approved) assumes that Fred the plumber with some household waste in his van is going to do some "dumping in our borough". Rather than take it home, transfer it to his private vehicle and then take it to the tip - thereby avoiding tipping charges from the Council.

The report - understandably - focuses on the utter nonsense of fining a non-smoker driving a brand new van for:

Clipboard-wielding council officers then, however, spotted that he didn't have a 'no smoking' sticker on his gleaming van and he was given an on-the-spot fine of £200. 

And Cllr Canver (without thinking because she probably didn't) had this to say:

We will continue to protect those workers who are forced to sit in smoke polluted environments because their employers don't comply with the law which bans smoke in company vehicles.'

The mind doth truly boggle - this was a brand new van, pristine and shiny, being driven by someone who had never smoked.

However the real lesson of this is that the authorities had no good reasons at all to stop this vehicle. Councils and police have adopted an aggressive and illiberal approach to anyone who has the audacity to use a van for work. I've no issue stopping a van if it's being driven badly, seems unsafe or might have been involved in a crime. But stopping every van that passes and trying to find things to fine the driver for - this was a deliberate and targeted attack on people going about their daily business.

Finally, the Council claims the caught "several fly-tippers" - given the location (Wickes DIY) and the presence of a load of hi-viz clad clipboard-wielders, this is almost certainly not the case at all. What they found were people without a waste licence - not the same thing at all. One is dumping stuff by the roadside, the other is not complying with an expensive piece of petty bureaucracy.

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The brave among you might care to check out Cllr Canver's CV - it's a paen to left-leaning fussbucketry!

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Some Councils just don't get it, do they!

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Wrexham Council has banned a local journalist from sending tweets during a council meeting:

The shock move came this morning when reporter Steve Bagnall attempted to live tweet from a Wrexham Council meeting set to discuss school bus price rises. Steve was asked not to tweet as it constituted a form of broadcast.

This is ridiculous - and probably wrong (although the rules say that the Chairman of a meeting can stop most stuff if he's grumpy enough). But why on earth does this Council think that stopping Mr Bagnall tweeting helps anything at all?

Stupid. Worse, stupidly arrogant.

Update: Comment from Carl Minns - former lead of Hull City Council - on the matter provides some more background - which you can read on his blog - as to how these bans are a misunderstanding of the law (what a surprise!)

There is nothing in this clause the prevents the council from allowing people from tweeting at meetings. I would actually go further and say that given the technology of 1972 this clause is clearly meant to cover broadcast and photographic mediums. I don't think Ted Heath's government thought about banning the transmitting of the written word out of the Town Hall. Clause 6 C actually implies this

(c)while the meeting is open to the public, duly accredited representatives of newspapers attending the meeting for the purpose of reporting the proceedings for those newspapers shall, so far as practicable, be afforded reasonable facilities for taking their report and, unless the meeting is held in premises not belonging to the council or not on the telephone, for telephoning the report at their own expense.

So, the framers of this bill clearly intended for newspapers to be afforded facilities to get the word out of what is happening at meetings. It is not a real leap of imagination to conclude that non members of the press can report proceedings but they just can't be "afforded reasonable facilities"

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LSE Politics Professor George Jones "dysfunctional"

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Prof Jones viewed a webcast of Thanet District Council's full meeting and declared it 'dysfunctional'. In doing so, Prof Jones revealed his deep ignorance of how local government in England operates. It worries me greatly that such dysfunction is teaching students at the London School of Economics & Political Science.

It may be that Thanet Council is a mess but what Prof Jones doesn't seem to appreciate is that the full council meeting is connected to decision-making at the Council only by taking place in the same building. The power - and this is what the Local Government Act 2000 set out - rests with (in Thanet's case) a single Party 'cabinet'. Full council cannot overturn decisions of that body except in a very few areas defined in the Act.

So what Prof Jones viewed was playtime for politicians and, inevitably, it boils down to point scoring, vengeance and grandstanding. Maybe they should be debating "matters that are really matters of public interest" but this would give the erroneous impression that the Council meeting actually has any power to order the council's policies.

So, rather than beating up Thanet Council, Prof Jones should be hanging his head in shame at his total ignorance. Maybe he should read the 200 Act, check out the constitution of Thanet Council and then suggest that - just maybe - the problem lies with the system Blair imposed on councils because we were "out of date".

Full council meetings have just two substantive powers - to appoint a council leader once every four years and to agree the council tax. That's it - everything else is down to that leader we appointed.

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In which North Lincolnshire Council bans shouting in Scunthorpe Market...mad!

The "one pound fish" man is something of a market legend but the idea that traders call out their offers is as old as markets.

But over in Scunthorpe local council officers have sensitive ears. That calling out is now to be curtailed because apparently it is bad for us: 

...strict rules on 'calling off' detailed in a council traders' charter have led to a greengrocer being taken to court, banned from his market for three months and hit with a £980 legal bill. Simon Stanley's offence was to shout out his prices at his indoor market stall.

Apparently North Lincolnshire Council has been bunging out fines and warnings to traders because calling out might upset other traders! The offending charter can be read here - all I can find relating to calling out is this:

You (and your employees) must not:

• Engage in any banter with shoppers and colleagues that causes a nuisance or annoyance to other traders

There are no specific regulations regarding the pitching of prices or offers and it appears that enforcement is entirely at the discretion of Council Officers. The reports suggest that there are specific rules relating to individual markets but these are not available on the Council's website.

Unfortunately, North Lincolnshire Council have chosen not to explain their policies and the manner of their enforcement. The reports from traders appear to be that jobsworthiness has taken over from good management but this might just be the innate grumpiness of the market trader. If it isn't, perhaps the Council should apply the spirit of its Charter and work with traders rather than treating them as a management annoyance.

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On consultation...

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Local government is encouraged - in that gloriously passive aggressive manner beloved of the Department for Communities and Local Government - to "consult" on the setting of budgets. And Councils, carefully and studiously adhere to this requirement setting about extensive and carefully planned consultations.

This evening I attended one of those consultations. Not in Bradford but elsewhere to see what it looks like from the perspective of a consumer of consultation rather than a producer. The Council in question has gone to a lot of trouble - a structured and engaging process, lots of nice technology and a slightly patronising presentation that had the merit of not quite saying "this is all too complicated for ordinary humans to comprehend."

I understand that this show had been on the road - popping into different locations across the borough in question to do the consultation with folk for whom going into the town centre is a rare (even unlikely) occasion. Tonight it arrived in town complete with the Council leader, Chief Executive, Director or Finance and a collection of other councillors and officers. The Council in question has made a genuine and substantial effort to "consult".

And they engaged with about 30 members of the public (including several like me who are offcumdens and only there because our professional life requires it). And this - the lack of public - underlines the problems with consultations. Let's assume that the consultation roadshow stopped at twenty places, each generating 30-50 members of the public. That's 1000 people who have taken part in the consultation out of a population of over 200,000. Those people are not representative - indeed the chances of them having (as I did) a vested interest in one or other aspect of the Council's work is, I suspect, pretty high.

There is no way that - however hard the Council has tried - this consultation can represent the views of the local populace. And this begs a question about the whole process - the perceived need for this "consultation". It seems to me that this "need" reflects the loss of confidence in representative democracy rather than any improvement to the processes of government.

Today, rather than our role of representing the people who elect us in the decision-making of the Council, us local councillors are told we are "community leaders". Instead of representation our role is to act as some sort of cheerleader for endless processes of "engagement" and "involvement". Yet, despite this change, 90% of the population remain neither engaged nor involved in these processes. And the result of this disengagement and non-involvement is that consultation processes become captured by the interested rather than reflecting of public concern (let alone opinion).

The odd thing is that us councillors are told our authority is undermined by low turnouts. Yet around 4,500 folk took part in electing me - almost certainly more that will take part in Bradford's budget "consultation". And in the course of the year I will speak to hundreds of those folk - listening, arguing and, if you must, "consulting". All that these requirements to consult do is to further undermine the role of the councillor.

We replace electoral accountability with consultations that fail to reflect the views of most people, can be manipulated by the interested and that are controlled by council officers. I see no point or purpose to them.

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