Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

Soon vehicles belonging to the borough will be burning biodiesel. At the moment it is only a five per cent additive because that’s all manufacturers will allow. Any more would invalidate the warranty.

But that’s not good enough for me. I want us to try 20 per cent biodiesel in some of our older vehicles that are out of warranty. It may cost more than ordinary diesel at first but I am sure buyers and manufacturers of vehicles will soon be looking at ways of increasing biodiesel use so it will be worth it to get ahead of the game.

I ought to have no difficulty in blogging regularly. After all, I have spent most of my working life meeting deadlines.

But that was when my work was writing regularly and whatever else I failed to do I had to get my copy in to the news desk or editor on time. Now, writing is somewhat secondary to my normal work so it tends to get fitted in after everything else - if I am not exhausted by that time.

Election frenzy, if not upon us, is in sight. Last weekend we took my battlebus out for its first run. You will see it round the borough, next Sunday in Sharnbrook where I’ll be out and about with our popular Sharnbrook councillor Doug McMurdo who is also up for re-election in May.

This past week has been busy, busy, busy. On Monday I was the main speaker at our monthly Better Bedford supper club. Usually I only speak at these events to tell people what is going on in the Town Hall and introduce the main speaker, but this time Cllr Margaret Davey, Better Bedford candidate in Castle in May did the introducing. She had me blushing!

I took as my subject some of my early experiences in journalism, mainly in the 1960s. My wife informed me later I had spoken for 45 minutes, which is a bit over the top as most speakers only go on for 25 minutes or half an hour so as to leave time for questions. Still, nobody walked out.

I spoke again later in the week, though only briefly, at the Mayor’s Philharmonia concert when I introduced the next beneficiary for my mayoral charity ‘Distant Thunder Show Corps’, a marching band based at Sharnbrook School. It is starting a junior band for 8-13-year-olds hopefully recruiting mainly in the more deprived areas of the borough. Youngsters can start in the band at eight, graduate to the senior band at 13 and go right through to 25. Like most of my charity objectives it is aimed at finding things to do for young people to give them an alternative to hanging about on the streets.

There was a collection by band members, but it was great that many of them had never seen a full orchestra playing before. They were mesmerised.

On Saturday I was guest speaker at The Lions annual dinner dance. It is an international charitable organisation started in America. I am glad I didn’t have to follow the comedian who had people in stitches.

It wasn’t all speeches and social. We had a meeting of the Executive in which we considered objections to the budget and decided we would stick to our guns, and on Friday it was the big one, a trip to the Government Offices at Cambridge to submit to questions from civil servants on our unitary bid.

In between there was the normal stuff, reading reports and trying to sort out people’s problems. It’s a full life, being a mayor.

SO there it is. The borough goes for a 2.7 per cent increase in your council tax, less than the rate of inflation, less than the Retail Price Index (RPI), less than the Government’s capping limit of 4.9 per cent.

It is the lowest borough increase for many years. Sadly, as the borough’s council tax is only ten per cent of your total tax bill (75% to the county council, the rest to police and emergency services and parish and town precept if you live in Kempston, Brickhill or a rural area), you may not notice unless you read the small print of your tax demand.

It’s another reason to support unitary government. We calculate we will save you ten per cent per year on your present borough and county tax which is 85 per cent of the whole.

MY Lib-Dem opponent has lots of academic qualifications, and I haven’t but she can still say silly things.

When we were debating whether the council should buy a heat pump for Riverside Square (see below) it was said that this would provide underfloor heating. She got very excited and said did we not know that this was the most wasteful way of heating space.

If we had been talking about electric underfloor heating, she would undoubtedly be right, but this is heat coming from way down in the earth which provides six units of heat for every one of electricity. I rather doubt if there is any system which offers a more favourable ratio.

COMPLEXITY is the bane of some politicians. Give them something that can be reduced to simplistic slogans and they are happy as pigs in clover. Complications make their head hurt.

Unfortunately, complications are the rule rather than the exception.

When I first decided that Riverside Square was wasted as a car park and sought a developer, I said the development would be at no cost to the borough. The borough, which owns the site, got a very good deal out of the developers, MCD. We would continue to get £168,000 a year, the same income as we currently earn from the car park, equivalent to a capital sum of about £2.8 million. Plus we would get £1,200,000 for social housing and £1,100,000 for a foot and cycle bridge across the river to St Mary’s Gardens. In addition, if prices of the apartments rose beyond the figure settled in the development agreement, the borough taxpayer would get 50 per cent of the ‘overage. In all, it amounted to a package worth more than £5 million for a site which had been valued at about half that.

The original design meets Government standards for sustainability, but since then sustainability has come to the fore and I decided that this council had to play its part.

We looked at a number of schemes to reduce the development’s carbon footprint and the one we prefer is a ground source heat pump which drills narrow bores 220 metres into the soil and makes use of the steady heat found there to warm up the building and its water requirements. Jolly good for the reduced carbon footprint and equally good for future residents who would be cushioned against fuel price swings.

The only problem is that it will cost £1.2 million. Given what I said above about the deal we got from the developers, it is not surprising they say: ‘We’ll be happy to do it if you pay for it.’

Our pledge that Riverside would be entirely developer funded was made with the best of intentions and was accurate at the time. The council at its budget meeting on February 5 voted against thye ground pump solution on the grounds that it was supporting a private development. Now it goes back to the executive committee next week.

My view is that circumstances have changed and it is worth going for the heat pump (provided more tests prove its practicability) in the expectation that increased value will get us our money back, or more.