Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

The picture of the sinking Antarctic cruise ship Explorer took me back to three years ago when my wife and I cruised the same waters on her larger sister, Explorer II.

Although we never felt in the sort of danger the smaller ship faced, it is a trip not without its risks. Walking on these lands can be hard going and on our first day’s landfall a German living in the Lake District collapsed and died. We also heard a week or two later that a yachtsman had fallen into a crevasse and been killed on the same island.

Still, it was a memorable trip, the best day being when we were in the centre of a school of 200 fin whales - the second largest breed - hunting krill. Wherever one looked there were spouts blowing as we stayed with them for hours.

We walked among the thousands of penguins and, more nervously, among the huge, ugly elephant seals clutching flat stones which we were told to clack together if they or any of the smaller seals showed aggressive intent.

The ship’s brochure said that no more than 200,000 people had ever set foot on the Antarctic continent, but I now read that 30,000 tourists a year visit the area. I can believe it because 30 cruise ships call in at the Falklands alone during the short Antarctic summer.

When we returned to the Argentinian port of Ushaia, Explorer - the one that capsiozed - was tied up at the quay. It looked minute, just as we must have looked to the huge German cruise ship moored next to us. Its flag was flying upside down, the international distress signal. My suggestion to our crew that we board her, right the flag, and claim salvage - up to a third of the value of the ship - was, unfortunately not taken up. Even shared with the crew it would have paid for a few more trips to the most dramatically inhospitable place on the planet.

The passnegers on Explorer were lucky; not only were they all saved but they will have holiday memories to dine out on for the rest of their lives.

Tory ‘twin hatter’ councillor John Mingay has come down in favour of Bedford gaining unitary status after reading my blog.

‘Twin Hatters’ is the name given to those who are a member of both district or borough council and the county council.

In an entry on the row over another ‘twin hatter’ Peter Hand. I described Mingay as ’sitting on the fence’ but in a letter to his county council leader Madeline Russell last week, Mingay referred to this and said that he now wanted to make his position clear and that he was backing the borough.

Hand got into trouble because he made his support for the borough plain in a letter which challenged county Tory leader Madeline Russell to pay the costs of the county’s judicial review herself if she was so certain of winning. As a result Hand was hauled before the Tory group and threatened with losing the whip.

In the event he was given a mild slap on the wrist and told not to be a naughty boy again.

If Mingay votes against the county Tory whip he could also be in trouble but it looks as though Tory solidarity on the county is beginning to break up. Hand said: “A lot of members of the group shook my hand after the meeting.”

Of the five Tory twin hatters on the borough and the county, Hand and Mingay have now declared for the borough. Tarsem Paul’s position is unknown to me. Tom Wootton and Lynne Faulkner have both declared for the county. Wootton was on the county before being elected to the borough for Roxton this year and is county portfolio holder for transport. Faulkner was elected to the county two years ago and is deputy chairman with a £30,000 a year allowance.

All the Labour twin hatters support the borough.

So far there has been no borough vote on unitary requiring the whip to be put on. It will be interesting to see what will happen to county supporting twin hatters were that to happen.

The word is out that - almost uneblievably - the county council is positioning itself for another judicial review.

This time it is because it has been invited to put in a bid to run Central Bedfordshire, either on its own or with Mid and South Bedfordshire (the two districts which will combine to make the new one). Mid and South can also make a joint bid themselves thus making three options for the Government to choose from.

The Government has given the bidders until December 17 to prepare their bid, which should be enough because most of the work has already been done and it is just a matter of adapting it to this part of the county.

But the county council thinks a month is too short and has asked the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) to allow three months. The DCLG’s response to this new attempt to delay has been a firm ‘no’ and it is over that - it appears - that the county is considering going to the High Court.

Don’t they think of the taxpayers at all? They are already riled at the prospect of the county spending £400,000 on its first judicial review. If there’s another I predict they will march on County Hall. I hope they don’t burn it down. We will need it when we become the unitary authority for Bedford.

Yesterday I went to Paris on the first day of the new service from St Pancras.

It was certainly quite an occasion, with an orchestra and a choir playing and singing to the crowds.

I had been invited by former Mayor of Bedford Gilbert Beazley of Pavenham and a group of his friends. I was already in London but I was doubtful about finding them in the crush until I had a brainwave and looked for them at ‘the longest champagne bar in Europe’, spotting them immediately.

After a couple of bottles and some canapés we made our way to the train and enjoyed the rapid, smooth trip. In our group was a train buff with a gadget which by global positioning could tell us how fast we were going. Through Kent it was 139 miles an hour, but when we got to the flat plain of Northern France it peaked at an incredible 192.

Paris was in chaos. A stretch limo had been ordered to drive us around on a whistle-stop tour, but there was a transport strike on and the roads were solid. The car arrived 20 minutes late with a profusely apologetic driver, who suggested we use what little time we had to go to the Opera district - we were due to catch a train back at 7.13, French time, and it was by then after 6.

After 30 minutes we had barely gone a kilometre and I was beginning to worry about getting back for the return train. After a bit longer in which we had scarcely moved I suggested we bail out and walk back to the Gare du Nord which we did. Gilbert made gallant speed despite not being in the first flush of youth and we got back at 7pm, 13 minutes before departure.

Despite that, it was a fun day. The refurbished St Pancras is remarkable. It was suggested that we adopt a new slogan: St George for England; St Pancras for Bedford.

There has been a lot of criticism of the giant statue of two lovers meeting (or perhaps separating). In isolation, it is perhaps a bit vulgar, but less so with people congregating round it. But the smaller sculpture of John Betjeman looking up at the station clock was much better.

There was a neat coincidence, I realised, in that Gilbert Beazley was the first Mayor of Bedford in its current form, and I will be its last and the first in its new form after unitary status has been achieved.

Four years ago at the St Peters Church Remembrance Day service I made a departure from the usual biblical reading, is the passage from the Book of Micah about turning swords into ploughshares.

Instead I read a couple of war poems, Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, and Kipling’s short, bitter poem: To a Dead Statesman, which goes:

I could not dig\ I dared not rob\ Therefore I lied to please the mob.\Now all my lies are proved untrue\ And I must face the men I slew.\ What tale shall serve me here among\ Mine angry and defrauded young?.

It proved a popular change and I was asked to to do it again so have read various poems at St Peters ever since.

This year I was asked to do the same at the main service at the War Memorial on the Embankment. I didn’t read a poem, but I read three extracts about Armistice Day recorded by soldiers after that event. It seemed to go down well, at least among those who could hear it.

I had been asked by the Royal British Legion to read a World War II poem at St Peters. It is actually quite difficult to find one with the emotional impact of WWI poems. I read one called Naming of Parts, in which a soldier is half-listening to a lecture about his rifle while looking dreamily out of the window at spring bursting into life. I introduced, it saying that war is said to be 90 per cent boredom, nine per cent horror and one per cent pure terror and this was a poem about the 90 per cent, but I am not sure the congregation really got the point.

I am already thinking about my choice of texts for next year’s 90th anniversary of the end of WWI.

There was another change from the normal order of things at the Embankment Remembrance Sunday parade - but not a welcome one.

The Royal British Legion master of ceremonies calls out the names of people and organisations wishing to lay wreaths. But political parties are never mentioned. My name was called first, as first citizen of the borough, and was joined by Robin Younger, chairman of the county council. Next was Patrick Hall MP, and Dr Vaughan Southgate, this year’s High Sheriff. With them he called out somebody whose name I don’t rmember as the local UKIP candidate for Bedford and Kempston, representing UKIP MEP Tom Wise.

It may have gone over the heads of many of the people present, but certainly not among the politicians present. Remembrance Sunday is one occasion in which politics is forgotten. It was made worse by the fact that the master of ceremonies was known to be Bedford chairman of UKIP.

I had a word with him afterwards and said it was unacceptable. He didn’t appear to understand and said he had called Patrick Hall up by name. Yes, I said. By name but not by party, and nor should he. It was quite wrong. He shrugged and said: ‘If that’s how you feel’.

That is how I feel, and if the official Remembrance Sunday parade is to be become a party political occasion I will be reluctant to attend in future.

Saturday morning saw the third state of the borough debate and undoubtedly the best so far.

After each debate we have looked at comments from those attending and adapted the format. I think this year we got it right.

It was a morning of two halves. After an introduction in the Harpur Suite by John Cross, chairman of the Local Strategic Partnership, we moved to the Corn Exchange where I and my portfolio holders and the police waited at tables for people to come and tell us of their concerns. I was pleased that by the end of this session we seemed to have dealt with everybody’s questions; certainly there didn’t seem to be anybody who had gone away without being able to talk to somebody. Some took their points to several different tables. I hope we all sang from the same songsheet.

The second session, chaired with aplomb and humour by David Russell, chief executive of the Bedford Charity, was modelled on David Dimbleby’s question time. The panel consisted of Steve Lowe, from BoS, Mo Aswat from the town centre company, Jean O’Callaghan from the Bedford Hospital Tust, Chief Superintendent Andy Frost, John Cross and me. We had no advance knowledge of the questions.

What pleased me was that the session went along with good humour from both sides which I took as a sign that on the whole people are happy with what we are doing. Of course one can’t please everybody but I think that fact was appreciated by the audience.

After this very successful event I doubt we will be changing the formula very much next year.

What a pleasure it is to be able to blog about something other than unitary councils.

On Friday night I was at St Pauls Church for a most unusual evening in commemoration of local businessman Michael Peters who died on April 9.

Michael, who owned Michael R Peters electrical goods shop in The Broadway, was a true son of Bedford. His shops were immensely successful but he gave away a lot of money both to local causes and disaster relief in the wider world. I knew Michael quite well and have never met anybody who talked so much commonsense every time he opened his mouth.

A man completely without ’side’ it was decided he would prefer a bit of jollification to a solemn ceremony so the church pews were set aside in fabour of tables for a dinner which was accompanies by music from the jazz band which led his cortege through the town at his funeral.

After the meal there was a bit of dancing at which i partnered Mrs Peters with a bit of the hopping around which passes for dancing in my case. This was in the central aisle and looking down I realised it was taking place on a well-worn slab over a tomb. I do hope its occupant, whose name I couldn’t decipher, liked traditional jazz. The Vicar of St Pauls, John Pedlar, didn’t seem to think he would mind.

It was the second time in two events in which my wife’s and my raffle tickets won prizes, in this case a litre of scotch. Maybe the averages are beginning to restore themselves as raffle tickets are usually money down the drain where I am concerned.

The event raised funds for research into the rare blood disorder which caused Michael’s death. It was a lovely evening. The only solemn moment came when his daughter, reading a poem in his memory, broke down and John Pedlar had to take over. Seven months after his death he is still badly missed by his family and all who knew him.

Life can be difficult for a writer. If you have already implied that somebody is bonkers, what do you do when she proves it?

Madeline Russell has had a letter in the Municipal Journal in which she proclaims that her county council has ‘blown a hole’ in Bedford’s unitary case.

The only hole that is blown is in Madeline’s foot. It has just proved what years of financial incompetence has shown already; when it comes to local government finance the county council doesn’t know its nether regions from its humerus.

Its analysis of our case is full of errors and misunderstandings, but what amazes me is that she should make a public statement like that which is bound to make her look stupid when - or, in deference to her state of mind, I’ll even concede, if - it goes wrong.

I might take great pleasure in rubbishing the county’s case, believing it to be gravely mistaken. Forget the ‘might’. I do. But I still wouldn’t go out on a limb like that because political certainty is an elusive commodity.

When Madeline speaks I seem to hear the flapping of white coats?

A choice feud is building up between the Tory ladies of Bedfordshire - not so much the war of the Roses as the battle of the thorns.

And, naturally, it is all to do with unitary status.

The already tense relationship between Mid-Beds Tory leader, the amiable Tricia Turner, her Bedford counterpart Nicky Attenborough and Mid Beds MP Nadine Dorries, all lined up against county Tory leader Madeline Russell, has spilled over to visceral loathing.

At the moment, though, it is Nicky v Madeline, both ladies of what Botswana detective Mma Ramotswe calls ‘traditional build’, which is ironic because it is slim, boyish Tory councillor Peter Hand who has brought it to a head.

Politics is Hand’s life. He is a member of Bedford Borough, the county council and Brickhill parish council. He is also political researcher to Nadine Dorries and wants to be an MP.

Being on both the borough and the county has given him a problem, which side to support in the unitary row? Being sensible he has chosen Bedford, which has left him out of favour with the county Tories. He is not the only one to face this dilemma, Cllrs Tom Wootton, Lyn Faulkner and John Mingay are also members of both councils but Wootton and Faulkner support the county while Mingay sits on the fence.

Hand certainly does not sit on the fence. In last week’s Bedfordshire on Sunday he challenged Madeline over the judicial review. “If you’re so certain the county will win, why don’t you guarantee the costs personally?” he asked. A reference to believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden indicated what he thought of the chances.

Madeline has gone berserk, A group meeting is to consider removing the whip. Nicky is equally angry, but with Madeline. She is backing Hand all the way and has plenty of opportunity for reprisals. She can put the whip on her group to support Bedford for unitary which will leave Wootton and Faulkner in partricular with the reverse problem to Peter. If they vote with their beliefs will they be chucked out of the borough Tory group?

If Hand loses the county whip he will be an Independent on the county and a Tory on the borough. Wootton and Faulkner will be the other way round.

If that wasn’t enough, enter a rampaging Alastair Burt, normally mild-mannered MP for Bedfordshire North-East. He has reported Hand to his boss, Caroline Spellman, the party chairman (Burt is deputy chairman with responsibility for local government). A ticking off from so august a party figure could reduce his chances of getting a constituency, at least until the fuss has died down.

Hand tells me he is sticking to his guns. Nicky and Nadine are backing him all the way (as, indeed, am I). From my point of view it’s all very jolly, spiced up by the prospect of Faulkner and Wootton losing the borough whip.

It won’t happen, of course. The stakes have become too big. A gentle climb-down will be engineered, but it is fun while it lasts.

Sometimes it is harder giving money away than taking it away.

In my last budget I set aside £108,000 to give councillors the opportunity to do a bit of good in their own wards. My reasoning was that while it is right that the big amounts are allocated centrally, councillors who know their own patch can often identify comparatively small improvements which might make a lot of difference to their ‘constituents’.

The rules I set up were that multi-member wards could aggregate their money to provide a bigger pot and wards could even combine together for something which would benefit all of their people. The only proviso was that everybody agreed with how the money should be spent. Simple, no?

Apparently not.

Kempston has seven councilllors in three wards - two Tory, five Labour - which gave them £14,000 to spend. Useful money. But the rule which said there must be agreement seemed to have been missed. The Labour members wanted to spend some of the money on anti-parking bollards in Kempston South. As the rules appeared to have been obeyed, the ward fund committee okayed it, only to find that the Tories were dismayed.

Now it has been called in by the Tories to that warhorse of disputes, the scutiny committee. The committee wants somebody from the awards committee to appear before it. As the rules are perfectly clear and this is just a spat between the two parties, I don’t see why members of the ward committee, who acted in good faith, should be inconvenienced.

If the Kempston councillors don’t sort it out between them I might just withdraw the relevant amount of money until they can find something they do agree on.

All the other wards sorted themselves out apart from a couple who couldn’t add up, so it’s down to Kempston’s councillors to do the same.

You wouldn’t have thought a painless way of reducing council tax by one per cent would cause strife and dissent, but you would be reckoning without Labour councillor Chris Black.

Black, a member of my cabinet, is a very strong supporter of the voluntary sector - ie, people who work for the community through charities - and in particular he supports the Citizen’s Advice Bureau which is heavily subsidised by the borough council. Nothing wrong with that, the CAB is a good thing.

For some years the borough was also subsidising Bedford Housing Advice Centre (BEHAC) to the tune of £90,000, or a little over one per cent of your council tax, but earlier this year BEHAC disintegrated in a welter of recrimination. As CAB and BEHAC shared a building the obvious answer was for CAB to take over BEHAC’s work and that is what is being done. This also saves the council money because while CAB is getting more money to do BEHAC’s work, there is saving on admin costs in addition to that caused by BEHAC’s closure.

So the borough found itself with a pot of spare cash and the finance boys saw that if that cash was used to contribute to CAB next year, some £60,000, or nearly one per cent of council tax, would be saved in what is widely expected to be a very tough year for local government finance. It seemed like a no-brainer.

Not to Black who angrily demands to know why CAB alone is being singled out and fears that it is the thin end of a wedge which will be used to cut CAB’s finances the following year. As a unitary council will be in operation by then, ALL council budgets will be reviewed from scratch, but that hasn’t stopped the Labour group from calling-in the decision to be reviewed by the scrutiny committee.

The reason why CAB is singled out is that the whole business revolves round it and the late BEHAC, and it will not lose CAB a single penny, but there we are.

The odd thing, incidentally, is that all the months since BEHAC collapsed has seen very little increase in housing enquiries in the council’s own independent housing advice service. Which makes one wonder about duplication. But I’d better not say that. There are already enough conspiracy theories swirling around.

The end of a frantic week. The first two days were filled with normal council business - meetings, reports etc. It livened up a bit on Wednesday when I chaired the executive.

Sometimes we have presentations on isues of the day before the business is dealt with. That day we had two, the first being the hospital trust telling of their bid for foundation status. I felt sorry for the lady presenting. She didn’t have a very strong voice and the acoustics of the Harpur Suite are appalling.

I am afraid I did not come away with any clear idea of how foundation status would benefit the patients and that, surely, is the point.

The presentation concentrated on the mechanic of the bid. The trust wants to recruit a minimum of 3,000 members. They would elect a board of 16 nominated from among these members. They could hire and fire the chairman of the trust but other than that I don’t know how much real power they would have.

I asked if they could call medical staff to account if, say the wrong leg were to be amputated. This seemed to fluster the trust team but their eventual answer, as far as I could make it out, was that if such an incident occurred and the news reached the board members they could investigate it.

If I got it right that wasn’t too reassuring. Surely any such errors and disasters, rare though they may be, should automatically go to the board. I will find out more about this and report to you in due course.

The second presentation was by Mrs Gillian Parker, the chief contable. She gave a far more commanding performance, explaining some of the reasons why Bedfordshire props up the police league table. It came down to money, of course.

Bedfordshire gets no extra cash for policing Luton Airport and in the police funding formula, it loses four million from the sum it should receive whereas an almost entirely rural force like Cumbria gets about the same amount ABOVE its formula.

Mrs Parker dealt with questions well. I pointed out that Bedford was soon to become a unitary like Middlesborough which was presided by another directly-elected mayor, former policeman Ray Mallon, otherwise known as Robocop. Mallon has access to the police computer which maps crimes and holds regular public meetings with the police where he asks for explanations of crime clusters and what the police intend to do about it.

As a unitary we will have a place on the police authority. If we wanted a regular fortnightly meeting with the same information available, would Mrs Parker welcome it or would she recoil in horror?

She said firmly that she would welcome it. So would most members of the borough council. I hope she doesn’t change her mind.

On Thursday night I had the rare pleasure of dinner at Southill Park, home of the Lord Lieutenant of the county, Sam Whitbread.

After an excellent meal and a fascinating speech about this year’s Beijing to Paris rally by somebody who drove it a 1934 Lagonda ,we got to the point of the evening, an appeal to raise money for an air ambulance which we would share with Cambridgeshire. It costs a million a year to purchase and run an air ambulance helicopter but they are invaluable in getting to hospital seriously injured patients who might be stuck somewhere unreachable by land.

As it happens I know somebody whose 16-year-old son is alive precisely for that reason. He crashed a quad bike and was severely injured. Had an air ambulance helicopter not got him to hospital in under half-an-hour he would almost certainly have died. As it is, six weeks later he appears to have made a full recovery.

The audience lisgtened attentively and I have no doubt the dinner will prove to have been worthwhile financially.

On Friday I ventured into ‘enemy territory’ to attend the chairman of the county council’s annual reception. I arrived late having been to a fund-raising art show in Cardington, and a speaker was in full flow. It turned out to be one of the speakers from the previous night making much the same speech on behalf of Bedford air ambulance appeal.

Everybvody was very friendly even Madeline Russell although Chief Exec Andrea Hill’s handshake was a bit cool.

No doubt normal hostilities will be resumed soon enough. Probably on Sunday.

Earlier on Friday I had a look at the Times and Citizen’s letters page. There was a surge of support for Riversiode Square. The only two anti letters were ‘name and address supplied’ which always makes me wonder why the writer is so shy. But I am satisfied to see public support moving in the rightr direction.

It gets wearying contuinually having to correct the misleading nonsense put out by the county council in its hysterical (in the non-comedic sense) attempts to convince the government that it should be the unitary authority.

Still, it has to be done.

The latest rubbish being peddled by county council misleader Madeline Russell is that this year’s tight settlement for local authorities shatters the borough’s estimated savings from its unitary plan.

It doesn’t. It makes no difference at all. Whatever the settlement the savings remain exactly the same for us and, for that matter, the county council. What to do with the savings - whether to cut services and maintain projected council tax cuts, or to reduce the cuts to maintain services - would have to be considered by the unitary authority, whether it was, us or the barmy army at County Hall.

The big question is does the county council know this?

If it does it is too dishonest to be the unitary authority; if it doesn’t it’s too stupid.