Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph contained an interesting piece on the effect of the cuts to Council funding. The newspaper states that “It is a sign of how bloated local government had become that councils have shed 230,000 jobs without hitting front-line services”. Of course front line services have been hit but not in ways which significantly impinge on the services people receive. Standards have been eased but not sufficiently to cause complaints. At the yesterday evening’s Town Council meeting I was asked if the Babergh District Council staff were having to apply for their own jobs. I weaselled out of by saying that whilst I didn’t have any details it would follow that as we amalgamated services we should be able to do so with a lesser number of staff. Consequently people were not applying for their own jobs but for new jobs under the new regime. As night follows day there would be winners and losers. The keys to success were that the right people were chosen for the new posts– not necessarily those who could do the talk but those able to walk the walk. The other issue was that people who no longer had a job were treated fairly to ease the transition to the next phase of their lives – (e.g. statutory redundancy payments are enhanced by 50%). Times change and there is no iron rice bowl anywhere any more. The full piece can be found on http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/9755916/Taxing-councils.html
Political – Local
Treasury Management
Today I attended a Babergh District Council Meeting. The agenda was fairly varied and included the Mid Year Report on Treasury Management. This is usually nodded through as it can be quite technical and there should be few changes – since the policy is in place and it is the Officer’s job to stay within the guidelines and report the when and why of guidelines being breached.
Page six of the report revealed that the Council has opened a custody account with King & Shaxson. The name rang a faint bell so I asked who they were. And useful answer came there none. You would have thought that the person introducing the paper would know who King and Shaxson were – especially as he was effectively recommending them as a conduit for our excess funds. If he didn’t know you’d have thought that he would have asked. Did he read the Council papers and get himself properly briefed before coming to the meeting? Or was it shyness which prevented him from asking the questions. The lack of knowledge and information broke the first rule of looking after other people’s money – would you put your own money there?
As it was we didn’t know whether King & Shaxson were up there with Marks & Spencer or lurking in the shadows like Burke and Hare.
Just in case anyone is interested , King & Shaxson is a long-established City name, with a history that goes back to the mid-nineteenth century it is owned by PhillipCapital, a Singaporean financial services company.
Perhaps more importantly from our point of view they are listed by the Debt Management Office (DMO) of the UK Treasury as a primary participant in the Treasury bill market enabling them to bid, on behalf of investors, at Treasury bill tenders.
More information may be found on http://www.kingandshaxson.com/CorporateProfile.aspx
Meanwhile I try not to despair of the people who aspire to lead me and look after my interests.
Hadleigh Local Shopping Loyalty Card
Whilst many major companies are lawfully avoiding UK taxes, they are nevertheless depriving our Exchequer of the revenues needed to provide the services and building we need – and they are also attacking our own home grown business which find it difficult to compete against people who pay little or no tax. So it’s no more Starbucks for me. In future I’ll look for Costa (owned by Whitbread).
I’m going to try to give up Amazon and instead use our local bookshop The Idler.
Hadleigh has its own Local Shopping Loyalty Card. Collect a card and get it stamped ten times by local participating retailers (look for the window decals). Hand in the card when completed and participate in a monthly cash draw (£250 in December). If we do not support our local shops – then one day they will not be there.
Tim Passmore elected Police & Crime Commissioner
Tim Passmore, the Conservative candidate for the County post of Police & Crime Commissioner, beat Labour’s Jane Basham in an extremely close contest yesterday.
After second preference votes were counted, Tim polled 36,946 whilst Ms Basham had 35,005.
Mr Passmore said he was “pleased and honoured” to be elected as PCC on what was a “historic day” for Suffolk.
He said: “It was close. I know the turnout wasn’t particularly good – it was better here in Suffolk than in some areas but I have been critical of the Government all along in the way that the publicity was put out for raising the profile but the local media has done a fantastic job”.
“The Government should have financed an election address to everybody, particularly when you have got a new election like this, a new concept – I don’t know what they thought they were up to.” He said it had not been possible to go out and speak to all voters individually but he and his team had “done their best”.
About the low turnout (16%) and questions about his mandate after losing the first choice vote by 162 votes, he said: “Everybody had the opportunity to vote, if they don’t use it then that’s up to them so I don’t really go much for the argument about mandates.”
Acknowledging that under a different system Ms Basham would have won, he said: “It was very close and I think the point about this system is it does give a broader appeal. We did win quite clearly – in each of the seven districts and borough across Suffolk we had a clear majority on the second preference votes, hence we ended up with a majority of just over 1,900 votes overall. Whichever electoral system you pick there are always criticisms of how you run it.”Comments taken from: http://www.eadt.co.uk/news/politics/suffolk_tory_police_and_crime_commissioner_tim_passmore_criticises_government_over_ridiculous_handling_of_elections_1_1697036
Police and Crime Commissioner
On Thursday we will be voting for Suffolk’s first Police and Crime Commissioner. I am supporting Tim Passmore. His manifesto is on http://www.votetimpassmore.co.uk/. I’ve known Tim for a number of years.
For him if elected it is about:
● Cutting Crime
● Holding the Police to account for an annual budget of £125 million
● Keeping taxes down – the only element of your council tax with no democratic link is the Police Precept – a very regressive situation In Suffolk the public sector (excluding defence) spends £5 billion per year. There is huge scope for savings and improving efficiency and it needs someone with the right experience and determination to push this agenda through.
He is standing as a Conservative because that is what he is but the needs of Suffolk will always come above any party stance.
Tim believes that we need to be:
● Safer:
● Delivering much greater visibility of front line policing
● Improving respect for law and order in society
● Having a greater focus on detection and conviction of criminals and
● Being more robust in our approaches to drug crime, repeat offenders, anti-social behaviour, problem families and domestic violence.
So if you are so minded on Thursday (or have a postal vote) please vote for Tim, he is a man worth backing and will give us the right balance between feet on the street and toys for boys!
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Troubles come not as single spies but often as battalions. So when I wrote in August being a quiet month I did not reckon on Tesco, East House and Hadleigh Quarry all coming out of the woodwork to claim our attention.
The good work that Babergh’s officers do often goes unnoticed and more often unappreciated. One of the current issues affecting Hadleigh is the High School ignoring the needs of its immediate neighbours in Station Road. It is a saga of mistakes, unintended consequences and an inability to appreciate that being big doesn’t mean you are right.
The problem began in 2009 when the school, County and Town Council thought that a Multi Use Games Area (MUGA) was needed in Hadleigh. The site was to measure 60m x 40m and planning permission came with a number of conditions. The suggested site was comfortably some distance away from the Station Road residences and there was no reason why everyone should not have been happy.
But then the MUGA was built 20% larger than authorised and placed nearer the houses. The all weather pitches were not sited nearer to the school but close to the boundary fences adjoining the houses. So, what should have remained a quiet residential area with residents being able to enjoy their summer gardens with the distant sound of happy athletes – meant that the residents felt they were imprisoned in their homes as balls bounced off of the fences and the “athletic” language ranged from the impolite to the downright offensive.
The school says it doesn’t have the money to put things right – as if that is a good reason for continuing to inflict mistakes on other people.
Babergh officials on the other hand served a Noise Abatement Notice on the school in response to noise from the balls hitting the fence around the MUGA. The Planning Enforcement Officer has also intervened because there is unauthorised lighting.
What’s a reasonable way forward? First use the pitches furthest from the houses before you use the ones closest to the houses. Remind players that they are not Premier Division and so do not need to emulate the bad habits that they see and read about. Switch off the lights in accordance with the planning approvals and finally use the normal pitches during the summer months.
Otherwise the authority to use the MUGA 365 days a year until 10 p.m. Mondays to Friday and until 9 p.m. on Saturdays has to be revised and past errors need to be corrected. The purpose of Government and its agents is to serve the public – not to serve some at the expense of others.
The Nature of Politics
It i
s rare that I can agree with David Blunkett.
But the following appeared in today’s Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2210945/British-politicians-rarely-ridiculed-despised-worry-all.html#ixzz28ARK0hWB):
“This sense of decay at the heart of democracy is profoundly troubling to me, since I have always had a powerful belief in the political process. … It is 50 years since Professor Bernard Crick’s classic work, In Defence Of Politics, was published. One of his central arguments was that the political process is bound to be messy, full of setbacks, compromises and failures precisely because it is trying to reconcile different opinions and the contradictions of human nature.
That messiness was often the cause for frustration, even despair, Crick admitted, but we should never abandon democracy as a result of it.
His other main argument was that democracy serves as a vital check on the power of market and vested interests. Engagement in politics, he said, was essential to ensure commerce and organisations served the public rather than achieving dominance. Half-a-century later, in our age of mass globalisation, as capital can be shifted across the world at a touch of a button, it’s an argument that’s more relevant than ever.…
It is a fallacy to think we could run our society successfully without elected politicians. How would competing claims for money be reconciled without them? How would tax rates be decided or budgets settled? How would major services be reformed?
The political process provides the only credible, fair way of making such decisions.
The governance of a nation has to take account of myriad other factors, like fairness, compassion, resources, history, timing and public support.
Civic society cannot live by managerialism alone. As the great Welsh Labour politician Aneurin Bevan once said: ‘Politics is the language of priorities.’
And at least politicians are accountable for their actions and can be chucked out if the public does not like them. Yet according to opinion polls, there is a growing belief that our country could do without politicians and could be run by technocrats”.
And perhaps this explains why some of us believe that running a council on the basis of “no overall control” means that someone else or some other people are in control but they are not elected nor are they directly accountable to the electorate.
Quotation of the Day
Q. Two politicians X & Y (fill in the names according to your disposition) both fall into a river.
You only have one rock, who would you kill?
A: Whoever tries to save them.
Wattisham Flying Station
On
e of this week’s fortunate happenings was to be invited to a cocktail party and beating retreat at the Wattisham Flying Station. The last time I was mixing with operational military air crew was in Salalah in 1982. That of course was a different world. The young officers today have done their tours of Afghanistan and finished their Top Gun Training in the U.S. The Army reckons that it costs about £3.5 million to train Apache Helicopter pilots. You get a sense of what a machine the Apache is when it weighs over nine tons fully loaded and can be thrown around the sky at 180 m.p.h. Not that any throwing around is done. These machines cost around £35 million each. The cocktail party was fortunate insofar as Suffolk County Council are initiating a Community Covenant With The Armed Forces. On first reading the Covenant strikes one as being a tad flabby. It is apparently meant as first steps and obviously it cannot be a one size fits all as the various units and communities have different needs. I was in total awe of the personnel whom we met. They are very professional and certainly good value for money. They do deserve our support and one of my ambitions is to make it easier for our veterans to settle in communities of their choice – or as one veteran once put it to me “I can’t go back to where I enlisted. If I become homeless in Camden my wife will divorce me”. We need to work out better ways to support our military.
Wind Turbine
I publish a monthly column in the Hadleigh Community News called Out of the Frying Pan. The point of the column is to highlight and comment on what is happening in Babergh from the point of our town. The aim is to be informative and occasionally entertaining. Hopefully I focus on some of the issues creeping under the radar. In July I wrote of a proposal for a 18 metre (59 feet) wind turbine off the Pond Hall Road. The 18 metres was from the ground to the top of the turbine and did not include the total height of the turbine blades. By contrast the only turbine in Hadleigh is only 9 metres high. The flag pole outside Babergh’s Corks Lane offices is 6 metres high. Although the site is in pasture, the turbine would be visible from the Pond Hall Road (400 metres/433 yards away) and would be extremely visible from the proposed housing area being planned for the land south of Tower Mill Lane and east of Frog Hall Lane. This week’s good news is that the planning application has been withdrawn. So a small triumph for common sense. Forward with the people
brian riley's blog 