Last November (https://brian-riley.blog/2023/11/03/meanwhile-on-planet-babergh-3/) I reported on a meeting of Babergh and Mid-Suffolk Joint Overview and Scrutiny Committee One of the key areas looked at was the Annual Review of the Joint Homes and Housing Annual Strategy. Lurking at the back of the paper was the delivery plan which included the following new task: “Ensure we deliver a quality repairs and planned works service by holding our contractors to account. Making sure they respond to works orders in a timely manner as set out in their contract KPIs and our tenancy agreements.” I was told that we were not checking on contractors’ repairs and the problem was one of resources. In which case we needed a reallocation of resources from writing about work to doing it. I was given to understand that inspectoins would commence in April 2024. So it was with a sense of some anticipation that I attended this October’s Joint Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting. One of the key areas looked at was the Annual Review of the Joint Homes and Housing Annual Strategy and so at an appropriate time I raised the matter of the inspecting contractors’ work. To my surprise I was told that no inspections were taking place. This was due to a misapplication (my word) of resources. It appears that the Housing Department is focussing on Policies, Protocols & Procedures ignoring the obvious that it’s sharp end performance that counts. The inspection regime should commence in January or February and that this timescale was realistic. There was no sense of embarrassment that their focus was inwards and not towards their relationships with contractors. Nor was there any appreciation of the moral hazards of not checking on contractors. The meeting can be viewed on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fhaNOul8wo) and my questions are featured just before the two hour milestone. I confess I had trouble keeping a civil tongue in my head.
This blog/post is the sole responsibility of its author Brian Riley. It has not been approved nor is it endorsed by Babergh District Council or South Suffolk Conservative Association The copyright on the housing image is owned by Oast House Archive
A recent meeting of the Babergh District Council Cabinet revealed two interesting details. First the minutes of the previous meeting showed the comment by a councillor that the anaerobic (waste) digestion was more sophisticated than composting. I suppressed the thought that anaerobic digestion practitioners attend sophisticated parties, enjoying fine wine and having an informed appreciation of ballet and opera but instead I concentrated on the view that the more complicated something is the more likely it is to malfunction. But we expect to learn more in November. Meanwhile lurking in the small print of the General Fund Financial Monitoring 2024/25 Q1 Forecast was the news that interest income was down £723,000. Most of this (£612,000) arose from the unexpected closure of one of the council’s pooled investment funds, which had only recently been announced. I was unable to get further details except that the closure was unexpected. There is an experience of people & organisations going bankrupt slowly at first and then very quickly. But even asteroids give notice of impending doom. Which prompts the question of who was asleep at the wheel whilst this “unexpected” situation occurred? When was the investment downgraded to junk status or worse? What role did our Money Investment Consultants play in this debacle? I’m not suggesting that Babergh is in financial difficulties but I would like to know more and more specifically who was asleep at the wheel.
Disclaimer: This blog/post is the sole responsibility of its author Brian Riley. It has not been approved nor is it endorsed by Babergh District Council or South Suffolk Conservative Association.
Often, District and County Council meetings test one’s boredom level as the meetings are often a formality and decision making is often pushed to the side. So it was on Tuesday when Babergh Councillors were asked to note the Council’s Annual Treasury Management Report and the progress and strategy of CIFCO (the Council’s property company). Although the papers presented to us were for noting rather than approval there was some lively questioning About an hour and a half into the meeting we sat down to look at a paper for approval bearing the seemingly innocuous title “BC/23/17 Recommendation from the Independent Review Panel”. This paper suggested that as we now had two Deputy Leaders (one a legal requirement) and the other discretionary (depending upon the wishes of the parties concerned), they should both be classified as political and were recommended to receive 1.25 times the basic Councillor’s allowance as a special responsibility allowance for their respective positions. The paper’s arguments seemed reasonable until the assumptions were tested. The comparative councils with two or more deputy leaders were much larger than Babergh. The range of skills and duties suggested that we would be paying over the odds for a job share programme. Really, this was a ruse to reward political allies. After much discussion in the chamber, I was pleased to move an amendment to the original proposals and suggest that as this was a job share, each of the deputies should receive half of the suggested allowance. The voting went to 11 votes for and 11 votes against with 5 abstentions. The Chair exercised her casting vote against the amendment, even though there was a distinct mood that the original suggestions were not acceptable. We then moved to voting on the substantive motion. 10 voted for and 11 voted against whereupon the original recommendation was lost and the residents won. Taxpayers should not be paying for vanity projects and this whole exercise demonstrated that although the Conservative Group at Council is small (seven of us) we are not without friends. The meeting may be viewed on YouTube and the web address is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQhNAX5Que0 Disclaimer:
This blog/post is the sole responsibility of its author Brian Riley. It has not been approved nor is it endorsed by Babergh District Council or South Suffolk Conservative Association
I had always thought that it was Deng XiaoPing who said that it was too soon to tell whether the French Revolution had been successful. I’ve since been updated insofar as it was Chou EnLai talking to Richard Nixon in 1972 and the comment referred to the 1968 student demonstrations Nevertheless, it does illustrate that revolutions tend to have long tails. In modern times we can look at the 1917 Russian revolution and the Irish Civil War of 1922 as illustrative. Tim Stanley writing in the Daily Telegraph on 31st October under the banner headline that “the Brexit revolution has come to an end” argued that as with France in 1799, the elites are back in control, but Britain has still been changed for the better. “…why did the Tories elect Liz Truss even though it was obvious six weeks ago, now confirmed, that Rishi would be a far better PM? My theory is that we all subconsciously knew that Sunak spelled the end of the Brexit revolution. Not its reversal but, like Napoleon’s coup of 1799, the defeat of its radical spirit. Brexit conforms to the four stages of the French Revolution: crisis, contradiction, purification and reaction. In 1789, Louis XVI called an Estates General in his quest to raise cash; in 2016, David Cameron called a referendum to eliminate Euroscepticism. Both backfired. The Estates General demanded a constitutional monarchy and the Brits voted to leave the EU, so Louis fled to Varennes and Dave to his garden shed. Theresa May now tried to ride two visions of the new order – protectionist and paternalist vs free trade and liberal – and with Parliament fractured, and counter-revolutionaries conspiring, she was unable to get us out of the EU. This necessitated the election of Boris Johnson, the British Georges Danton, a literate rake, a champion of the people. His instincts were small state but, being a populist, was inclined to give the mob what it wanted – hence he marched us out of Europe but also rebranded Tory politics as faux-European. Conservatism became Gaullist: culturally conservative and littered with grands projets. I liked it, but Boris will be Boris and his regime collapsed in scandal. With the PM forced to retire (Danton took refuge in Acris, Big Dog at the Casa del Campo), we entered our Jacobin phase of ideological intensification. Yes, Liz Truss was our Maximilien Robespierre, and though her utopian vision was far more modest than critics made out, the very idea that we might guillotine the board of the Bank of England triggered a Thermidorian Reaction. The French decapitated Robespierre and installed a collective leadership till Napoleon took power. In Britain, some faceless men pulled off a coup to install Sunak in four days flat, which was impressive for a country where it can take six months to replace a boiler. Looking back on the 1790s, many Frenchmen asked what the point of their revolution had been. They killed a king and finished with an emperor. Yet feudalism was also eliminated, and the French now saw themselves as a nation, with a Left and a Right, both espousing liberties – the rights of the people – they each claimed to be more willing to protect. Here, Britain is out of the EU for good. The greatest testament to the permanence of Brexit is that even the Labour Party accepts it, and is patriotic and critical of free movement (have you noticed how often its MPs are on GB News?). At some point, a Labour government, or a Tory one, may well put us back in the Single Market, for if we are not willing to reform tax and trade on the lines Citizen Truss wanted, then we’ll wind up a stagnating economy trapped behind a tariff wall. And how else do we resolve Northern Ireland? But even if that came to pass, we have still dodged the bullet of European political integration, re-establishing Britain as an Atlantic-facing nation, global and yet parochial. Sunak, elected in just 2015, is a child of that revolution, even if he doesn’t entirely understand what the founding fathers wanted. I recall seeing him interviewed at the 2019 Tory conference where he was asked to name the best bit of Brexit. The correct answer is “freedom”. He gushed, “Free trade zones!” I preferred it when Boris reputedly said “F business”. I translated it from the unpardonable French to mean: “Something matters more than making money, and we will not be dictated to by the markets” – which is precisely what has now happened. Rishi will never blaspheme against business. His job is to sell austerity, hiking taxes on the middle class and cutting services for the poor, sugaring the pill by appointing Suella Braverman to the Home Office and Kemi Badenoch to equalities; culture war bribes to the Red Wall sans-culottes. I’ll be honest: I miss the hope-filled Sturm und Drang of early Brexit, of the sense of forces unleashed and institutions scaled. One could almost hear the glass shattering in Whitehall. But I have no right to impose an ideological vision on the country, especially when the chief issues now are feeding our people and keeping the lights on (I’m not Greta Thunberg), and I take comfort in what our revolution has achieved. It has given us greater sovereignty, an empowered parliament, municipal conservatism, controlled legal migration, levelling-up, a renaissance of journalism, books and independent TV. I believe our era will be regarded as a golden age of debate, when, after decades of consensus, real ideas were passionately interrogated and regular citizens elevated to the king and queen of politics. Like the French in 1799, we are a different society now: Labour stands for the King, the Tories kneel before the voters of Grimsby. Brexit has made Britain a better place.” But we still voted for Truss and ended up with Sunak. The Conservative Party activists are pondering their futures as members and candidates in next May’s local elections are asking how many Hail Mary’s do they need to win their seats. See https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/31/brexit-revolution-has-come-end/
One of the joys of the East Anglian Daily Times is that it not only features regular letter contributors but it also allows for ideas to be developed, One such correspondent is John Dell from Shotley who recently has been arguing that the Brexit vote did not reflect the will of the people, as the Remainers and the Abstainers outnumbered the Brexiteers. As readers if this blog will know, I greatly believe in voting. If you don’t vote then your views do not count and you are only a whisker away from not mattering. Acknowledging John’s position on this issue I caused the following letter to the editor was published by the EADT on 30th June. Dear Sir Let trumpets sound. Let the bells ring throughout Suffolk. Let there be bunting and dancing in the streets all along the Shotley/Pinewood corridor. John Dell (EADT letters 24th June) and I seem to have found something we can agree on in respect of the statistics regarding voting for the UK/EU referendum. If you add the abstaining votes to the Remainers then 29 million people did not vote for Brexit. But fairness demands that you also add the abstainers to those who voted against remaining in the EU. The overall result is the same but by reclassifying the abstainers as being both against Brexit and against Remaining then you have an accurate and verifiable result based on 128% of the electorate. Thus surpassing anything seen, so far, in Russia, China or North Korea. Abstainers effectively assign their votes to those who do vote. But the Dell-Riley principle of counting abstainers twice revolutionises vote reporting and allows everyone to move forward Such is the joy of the Dell Riley principle; it lets the voting outcome to truly be the will of the people and lets political activists harmonise political wistfulness with political reality and so happiness can be achieved all around. And that is my contribution to Suffolk happiness this week The full correspondence is below.
Just when you think that lessons have been learned, you realise that very few people pay attention to history, whether it is recent history or not. Readers of this blog may recall that on May 3rd 2016 I posted a commentary on the then continuing saga of East House, which Suffolk County Council had handed back to Babergh who didn’t know what to do with it except to evict the tenants and leave it empty. The unfortunate history of East House is that whilst Babergh made up its mind, the market moved on and any rehabilitation/upgrading with a view to selling was rendered uneconomic. This week’s news is that Babergh District Council are to increase the debt threshold for Babergh Growth Ltd., from £3,7 million to £7m to facilitate cash flow. The company is responsible for the redevelopment of Babergh’s former offices in Corks Lane We can assume that the cash will be flowing all one way for some time to come as the cash holdings of the company were only £61,433 at 31st March 2021. The development is expected to realise 57 homes. Due to increased costs and impacts from Brexit, the war in Ukraine and inflation, the costs of the scheme have gone up by £680,000 over four years– which begs the question why is there an increase in borrowing powers of £3.3 million. And now comes the prize-winning comment from the Great Leader of the Rainbow Coalitioned Council (John Ward) “Ultimately the development is still expected to break even or even show a modest profit” Why are we undertaking a marginal project? You can almost hear echoes of “With a fair wind and a few sunny days, this time next year we could all be millionaires” It’s time to go back to basics. The economic outlook is not good and the project needs to be reworked to bring the projections back to a reality which will give comfort to the residents that their leaders know what they are doing.
The Government is proposing a temporary cut in overseas aid. It should be seen not as a problem caused by our Covid difficulties but as an opportunity to reconsider our aid priorities. Aid should perhaps be focussed on poverty relief, education, governance and sustainability. The current system is fraught with waste and abuse. It is reported that the EU have been ‘acting like clowns’ after splurging £23million of overseas aid on more than 400 circus related acts. The British contribution to these bread and circuses was £3million. The money was spent between 2014 and 2019. The circus grants included £182,000 teaching tightrope-walking in Belgium, Ireland and Romania. Two troupes in Palestine got £138,000 in 2016 to help “foster unity and diversity”. Another in Ethiopia got £280,000 the same year, using some for a new big top. Britain’s circuses received £721,000 which may have been for touring overseas rather than U.K. based education and entertainment. The revelations have prompted circus jokes such as from German MEP Nicolaus Fest: “Many of my colleagues act like clowns, but I never thought they would actually fund the circus”. “Taxpayers deserve better than to have their hard-earned money squandered on such extravagant comedy.” And that is the tragedy. It cannot be too difficult for better uses to be found for the monies – either as aid promoting self-sufficiency or as benefits in our own territories where we have asylum seekers and our own people who need to be levelled up.
We’ve all had those days when we were much younger, when our boss asked us to produce a five/ten/twenty year forecast of whatever was taking his fancy at the time. The forecast would take into account economic cycles, inflationary expectations, disposable incomes, family sizes and so on. To make it credible all assumptions should be detailed and justified.
I suspect that something like that happened recently in Babergh & Mid Suffolk’s housing department when someone was asked to produce a twenty-year plan for housebuilding based on whatever factors were deemed relevant.
The answer is 17,568 homes over twenty years.
Note the precision.
Who believes this rubbish? In the real world our boss would have either called it 17,500 or being a clever sort, he might have said 15,000 so he could under promise and over deliver. If he was on the brink of an unwelcome retirement, he would have rounded the figure up to 25,000 so that his successors would be forever on the wrong end of target fulfillment.
But he would have realized early on that the further away you are from the present the less reliable is your forecast and the more precise it is, the more it will attract criticism & derision.
Unfortunately, many of our public servants do not review their public utterances – hence precision taking precedence over accuracy and unreliable statistics rule our lives.
There’s always room for a good political joke. I heard this (disparaging) remark about a politician I admire and thought it worthwhile repeating for cleverness and appropriateness for using against someone else.
“…spends his time trawling through the calendars of each village and town council to see when their next village fete or open day is so that he can fill his face at the trough. I’ve never known a man turn up to so many free lunches. He’d attend the opening of a letter if there was a sandwich in it for him!”
From time to time I read one of the lessons at the Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral in Raleigh. The first reading on July 22nd is from Jeremiah. Normally I like to avoid Jeremiah and Job as they are not the most cheerful of prophets and I prefer to enjoy the more declamatory words of Isiah, Ezekiel or Nathan.
The reading on the 22nd is about the negligent “shepherds” of the people who deserved better leadership.
Much of Jeremiah’s work was in Judah’s capital Jerusalem. He tried to keep several kings faithful to their stewardship amidst an atmosphere of political intrigue and backstabbing. Jeremiah was blunt about what was right and what was not, and he suffered at the hands of the powerful because of his outspokenness. At the time of his prophecy, a good king in Judah had just been replaced by a king who put the country in thrall to Egypt. Jeremiah raged against this policy.
The reading is Jeremiah’s response to the negligent leaders. I first read the passage as a reproachful piece but looking at the readers’ notes I was encouraged to see that it is proclamatory and that I should not let Jeremiah sound like he’s on Valium. If anything, he should sound as if he is on steroids and caffeine.
He was a vigorous, courageous, outspoken man. He thunders on behalf of a God outraged at the powerful people’s neglect of their responsibility to the poor. “I gave you the privileges of a shepherd, you mislead and scatter the flock!”
Any linkage between the events and characters of 200 B.C. and the present day are purely unintentional and coincidental.
On the other hand, I think I’ve known some readers for whom Valium is the default mode when tackling the readings. But for me, for this week at least it’s a case of onwards with the steroids and caffeine!
From time to time I read one of the lessons at the Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral in Raleigh. The first reading on July 22nd is from Jeremiah. Normally I like to avoid Jeremiah and Job as they are not the most cheerful of prophets and I prefer to enjoy the more declamatory words of Isiah, Ezekiel or Nathan.
brian riley's blog 