Things that West Yorkshire Police could safely cut...

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Received an e-mail this morning from Bradford Council's press and marketing operation - telling me about the latest of West Yorkshire Police's jolly campaigns: "Neighbourhood policing: here for good!"

You may already be aware, that the Chief Constable, Sir Norman Bettison, has launched a Police campaign, ‘Neighbourhood Policing Here for Good.’ Please see the attached poster.

The campaign will aim to reassure the public that West Yorkshire Police is still committed to Neighbourhood Policing and the principles of 'Our Commitment.'

The campaign will be driven by the Force’s 48 Neighbourhood Policing Teams who will be provided with materials such as posters and flyers. The message will also appear on the Force website, social network sites and be distributed via Bluetooth messaging.

 
And you wondered what your local police were up to, didn't you? Posters, flyers, grand tours by the top brass, receptions for us councillors (and others of the local 'great and good') - I'm curious as to how many criminals this will catch and how many crimes it will prevent. Approximately none at all, I suspect.
 
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Nottingham's Labour Leader doth complain too much I feel

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Nottingham is the local authority that thinks the public shouldn't know about how it spends their money. It is, of course, run by the Labour Party. And now - with the release of some spending information following a Freedom of Information request - the reasons start to creep out:

Nottingham City Council has hit back after housing minister Grant Shapps accused officials of misusing corporate credit cards to settle purchases of pizza, wine and a trip to Alton Towers theme park.

Details of the £3.5m spend in the year 2009-10 emerged from a freedom of information request submitted by communities secretary Eric Pickles following the council's refusal to publish details of all spending above £500.

Among purchases queried by the minister are £7,011 spent at a wine shop, £958 with Russian airline Aeroflot, £69 on Domino's pizza and £63on gift websites. A further £80 was spent on admission for Alton Towers and a card was used to settle a £50 bill at a local pub.

I'm sure a great deal of this is explainable but, given the Council's dislike for spending transparency, it doesn't look good, does it! However, the local Labour bigwigs continue to dig their hole deeper:

Defending the council, deputy leader Cllr Graham Chapman accused ministers of 'playing silly games' and of acting irresponsibly by failing to request the information formally as ministers of state.He said he was confident spending would be justified once full details were checked.

Cllr Chapman said: 'Most of the figures are below £100 and we are going to be checking on each of the individual items on Monday. But with the wine, for example, it is likely that it was brought for an event at the council house, - where we hold weddings and events for local businesses as a way of making money.'

I do hopw Cllr Chapman is right - I'd hate for some of that spending to be dodgy!

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Friday Fungus: Disposing of disposable nappies!

This week's economist reports on the work of Dr Alethia Vasquez-Morillas that looks at using mushrooms to deal with the trickiest of waste management challenges - disposable nappies. These nappies, so convenient to mums and dads, create something of a headache for waste managers:

DESPITE their name, disposable nappies are notoriously difficult to dispose of. Studies of landfills suggest they may take centuries to rot away.

And because of this our green friends have applied their unique form of passive-aggressive promotion to the advocacy of "real nappies". But now they can relax as Dr Vasquez-Morillas has found what looks like the solution:

This research assesses the feasibility of degrading used disposable diapers, an important component (5–15% in weight) of urban solid waste in Mexico, by the activity of the fungus Pleurotus ostreatus, also known as oyster mushroom. Disposable diapers contain polyethylene, polypropylene and a super absorbent polymer. Nevertheless, its main component is cellulose, which degrades slowly. P. ostreatus has been utilized extensively to degrade cellulosic materials of agroindustrial sources, using in situ techniques. The practice has been extended to the commercial farming of the mushroom. This degradation capacity was assayed to reduce mass and volume of used disposable diapers. 

And you've guessed it, those lovely oyster mushrooms gobble up the nappies pronto!

As she and her colleagues describe in Waste Management, cultivating the right type of mushroom on soiled nappies can break down 90% of the material they are made of within two months. Within four, they are degraded completely. What is more, she says, despite their unsavoury diet the fungi in question, Pleurotus ostreatus (better known as oyster mushrooms), are safe to eat. To prove the point she has, indeed, eaten them.

Wonderful - dealing with a previously intractable waste management problem and providing a food source! What could be better!

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Campaign Comment: Funding Unions

Yesterday afternoon I was delivering in Denholme - rushing a bit as I had a meeting to get to and wanted to finish the round before setting off to Bingley. Coming out of one gate I spotted a young (well younger than me) man clutching my leaflet. He came across the street - by this time the leaflet was tightly folded up and clutched in his hand. Not a happy fellow.

"Is it really true that the Council pays for all these full-time union officials? That's taxpayers' money isn't it?"

I explain that, yes, Bradford Council does spend over £300,000 paying the wages of full-time Union officials - a figure that shocked me and took some prizing out of officers.

"Well I don't pay taxes for that. And it's the same with the Government - they're giving millions to the Unions."

Now that was news to me! So I checked and the young man was right:

The Union Modernisation Fund (UMF) is a grant scheme, launched by the previous government, providing financial assistance to independent trade unions and their federations for a limited period. It was designed to support innovative modernisation projects which contribute to a transformational change in the organisational effectiveness of a trade union. The UMF sought to enhance the ability of trade unions to meet the needs of their members and to make an effective contribution to constructive employment relations and the economy as a whole.

An appalling misuse of public money. And not just a small amount of taxpayers' money either - the Unite union alone received over £4 million from the last government. No wonder that Union was such a generous supporter of Labour!


Update: The TPA published their review of taxpayer funding for trades unions - it's more than I thought: £85m including £67.5m in payments to the 2,493 full time equivalent public sector employees working for trade unions at the taxpayers’ expense in 2009-10.

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Government procurement incompetence - a reminder

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Sebastian James has published his review of education capital financing and has this to say:

In summary, I have found that the system of capital allocation and spending which has developed over at least the last decade has frequently resulted in poor use of resources, a bureaucratic system for providers and Local Authorities and a mixed – and at times poor - outcome for both parents and children.

And:

I believe that there are some very significant opportunities to increase the amount of schools regeneration that we can undertake for any given sum of money. To give you a flavour of this, the consensus view from our workshops was that as much as 30% of the total money spent could be saved and this is borne out by our initial pilot project in Doncaster.

I'm pretty confident that a similar review of NHS capital funding, housing PFI schemes and leisure investment strategies would show the same degree of waste and mismanagement. The was Labour's central strategy for capital investment - Brown's big idea - and it will cost us very dearly.

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A good day in Denholme

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Today, Bradford Council refused permission for the development of a landfill site at Buck Park Quarry near Denholme. In the greater scheme of things a rather minor decision but, for the village concerned, a day for smiles all round. For several reasons.

Firstly, landfill is dirty, messy and mostly unnecessary. The UK's preference for sticking rotting rubbish into holes in the ground rather than using more responsible (and economic) approaches such as waste to energy remains a mystery. I know that the greenies like Friends of the Earth seem to think that incineration is a greater sin than allowing the rubbish to rot slowly into the ground but, in truth it is the most environmentally damaging method of disposal.

Secondly, Denholme villagers campaigned long and hard against the proposals. A previous application was refused by Councillors (against the wishes of planning officers) and only granted permission at an appeal where - shamefully - Bradford Council refused to submit evidence on the specious grounds that they might lose and be awarded costs. To say this spat in the face of local people and the Councillors who voted to refuse permission is an understatement. For technical reasons the development was stopped as local people - again without Council support - took the developer to the High Court where they won. With the result being that the planning permission lapsed (and the Council then won a further High Court case brought by the developer).

Thirdly, the outcome today vindicates the only pledge I made to the electorate four years ago - that I would vote against any proposal or policy that would make landfill more likely even if that proposal was from my party. I did this - voting against the Council's waste management strategy in full council because my group had accepted a Liberal Democrat amendment ruling out waste to energy as a disposal option.

Denholme isn't free from the threat of landfill just yet - I fully expect the developer to appeal. But this time - after fifteen years of equivocation - the Council is on the side of local people. Fighting the appeal won't be down to local fundraising, the odd bit of pro bono work from lawyers and planners and the research efforts of residents. I have every hope that we will win the appeal and that, at last, we will see Denholme free from having the District's rotting rubbish dumped in this convenient hole in the ground.

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And how is this improvement and efficiency?

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Saturday morning post. The usual mix of bills invitations to take out credit cards and council stuff. And as usual the council stuff outnumbers the rest – agendas, pleading letters from organisations that mustn’t lose their funding or else the skies will darken and the demons will walk the earth again.

Looking through this pile my eyes lighted on a glossy brochure with a nice photo of the Sheffield Winter Gardens on the front. What’s that, I wondered?

Turns out it’s the “Annual Report Executive Summary, Highlights of Year Two” for an organisation calling itself (rather ridiculously), YoHr Space – sounds a bit like some kind of trendy architects or designers but you’d be wrong. It’s a publicly-funded body that’s really called ‘Yorkshire and Humber Improvement and Efficiency Partnership’.

The summary starts out well with talk of ‘cashable savings’ (note to non-local government reader: this doesn’t actually mean any real cash has been saved) and co-operative programmes. There’s reference to ‘Total Place’ – a programme where loads of meetings are held to plan doing the obvious, namely joining up the delivery of services in a given place. And then comes the rubbish – community cohesion, climate change and “innovation”. I was especially taken with the introductory line for “Innovation”:

Implementation of a range of innovative and community based projects designed to
build capacity and support the region’s priorities

Like what, I hear you ask? Oh yes – the ‘Muslim Women’s Leadership Network’ is the case study we’re given and I guess that rather sums up local government’s idea of innovation. We really shouldn’t be wasting money on this rubbish – whatever gender or faith you are, you’re a leader because you choose to lead not because you’ve been on a course or joined a network.

YoHr Space is, I humbly submit, a prime candidate for closure. It achieves nothing that couldn’t be done in the organisation’s absence, it costs several millions and provides little more than a series of talking shops, a few grants to favoured group and a place for a few of us pompous self-important councillors to sit on a board.

And any organisation supposed intended to promote efficiency that thinks spending thousands on a flash full colour brochure to send round to every councillor is either efficient or improving definitely needs the chop.

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Why state monopolies are bad (and I'm annoyed)

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While standing in a queue at the railway station recently I pondered a little on the contradiction of monopoly (the useless station operator had just three tills open at the busiest time of the year for buying tickets). Not the game but the control of a given industry, commercial operation of service by a single organisation. Why is it that private monopolies are bad whereas public monopolies are good?

The economics books say that the monopoly firm will always set their quantity at the level where marginal cost is equal to marginal revenue. This allows for “monopoly profits” so long as entry to the market is constrained.

So why should state monopolies – like health or education, for example – be better? Is there some special magic that makes them different? Well let’s be kind and assume that the state monopoly is stopped by a benign government from price gouging. That would be alright wouldn’t it?

Well not really – not only do monopolies (however cuddly) tend to set higher prices but they do not pass on economies of scale. So while our cuddly government might control the price a little, it does not stop the build up of inefficiencies produced by a lack of market pressure.

So where does all the money go, you ask?

When we look at most privatisation of monopoly industries – telecoms, gas, electricity, postal services and so on – one of the key initial gains lay in reducing the size of the workforce. This should not surprise us since the state monopoly is at its heart a producer owned and controlled organisation. The gains from economies of scale and the excess profits implicit in monopoly do not go to shareholders – as would be the case in a private monopoly – but to those who are employed in the industry.

Ah, I hear you say, that’s good then? After all the money that in a private arrangement goes into to pockets of fat cat owners is going to the workers!

Again, not really. Firstly the distribution is uneven – pay for administrative and supervisory employees is far higher than is merited by the skills needed to perform the task (or by comparison with similar private sector jobs) whereas the reverse is true for manual jobs within the state monopoly. This imbalance comes about because administrative functions control the distribution of cash within the monopoly organisation.

Secondly, the organisation becomes overmanned. Not only are new bureaucratic processes and systems developed but senior administrators create a culture where self-administration is a sin. PAs, clerical assistants, clerks and policy advisors proliferate – all on good money, all “contributing”, all there because the monopoly provides the cash to allow such indulgence.

Maybe (just maybe) there is a case for so-called “natural monopolies” to be in public ownership. But there is no economic case at all for health and education to be de facto state monopolies. In fact we get expensive, inefficient, overmanned services run for the benefit of bureaucracy rather than for the consumers of those services.

So I’m right to be irritated by “protecting the NHS” – from what? Efficiency? Competition? Its consumers? Marauding killer zombies? If monopolies are a bad thing – and they are – then the NHS needs breaking up. We can’t go on with the current ineffective and inefficient arrangement - it can be owned by government, charity, social enterprise - whatever - but there must be a properly competitive market.

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£175,000,000,000 in debt and the Government produces glossy brochures!

Home from work. Cup of tea. Post (this being a non-strike day it seems). Blood pressure soars.

Why? Because this organisation - a waste of time and money if ever there was one - spent your and my money on producing a 16 page full colour glossy brochure featuring the joyous headline:

"Overcoming climate change together"

...and it's worse. The whole magazine - page after page - features examples of Government squandering our money:

• The Yorkshire & The Humber Regional Grand Committee
• Non-executive Directors of GOYH (of a civil service branch - why?)
• A puff for European Structural Funds (aka our money filtered through Eurocrats and given back)
• How "Faith Communities bring £300 million to the region" (and how much goes out to pay for the international superstructures of the various religions - damn sight more I suspect)
• Loads of inconsequential money for the housing sector (not enough to make any difference but still millions)
• Plus a double page spread featuring the money wasted by government in holding endless meetings to talk about climate change

...there's folk out there trying to keep businesses afloat, worrying about whether they'll have a job next week, stressed about paying the mortgage...and the Government Office wants to talk about how its talking about "climate change" and send out expensive glossy brochures. It makes me want to scream and shout and tear down their posh (and expensive) offices in Leeds.

Bradford Hospitals spend £2 million on corporate affairs - scope for savings in the NHS?

A few weeks back I received an e-mail from the Corporate Affairs Department of the Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust inviting me to join the Chair and others in celebrating 60 years of the NHS in Bradford. Now in times past I would have cheerfully sent my apologies and said nothing else. But this time I felt that this was a waste of money - certainly it would contribute nothing to improving health care or treatment for Bradfordians. Now as it happens the celebration in question was not put on at great expense but the response from the Trust Chair (£55,000 for a part-time job), former top copper David Richardson expressed surprise that I hadn't simply gone along with the planned jolly Indeed I had the gall to question its value and purpose!

Slightly irritated by this response I asked a few questions about the "Corporate Affairs" function at the Trust and about the remuneration of the Board (as a Foundation Trust there are in fact two boards - the expensive real one and a playtime Board of Governors for members of the foundation). The most significant fact is that all this bureaucracy costs the taxpayer over £2 million each year plus a Board of Directors costing nearly £800,000! It does seem to me that if the NHS is looking to make some savings, the operation and management of NHS Trusts - "corporate affairs" - might prove a fruitful area.

In Bradford simply reducing the number of non-executive directors from eight to four would save around £50,000 each year - cash that could go on paying nurses, providing treatments and contributing to the welfare of Bradford people. But here's a better idea - use councillors for the non-executives. Cheaper and, if we don't like the decisions there a democratic process for accountability - now that would be a radical step!