Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

EVEN while they twist and turn like squirrels in a trap, night closes in on the county council.

Cheshire County Council is in precisely the same position as Bedfordshire. The Government has been ‘minded’ to accept the proposals by the county’s seven districts to form two unitaries which would extinguish the county council. The county decided to go to judicial review.

But it took legal advice on its likelihood of success and the potential costs which could fall to the taxpayer. The advice was that the county stood very little chance of succeeding and costs could be more than £500,000.

Explaining its reasons for dropping the judicial review the county said that in these tight times for local government it could not justify spending that sort of money.

So there are some county councillors who don’t want to barge blindly ahead and fight to the last pound of you money. What a pity that they are a minority of the ruling Conservative group at County Hall.

THE county’s ‘Save our Salaries’ campaign is spreading its net ever wider. On Sunday they went to the Queens Park Gurdwara, and on Tuesday to the court of Cranfield University to garner signatures.

They have also tried to get them from the sick, seeking to set up a stall in Bedford Hospital. No doubt they’ll be soliciting signatures from the mortunary and local undertakers before long. They won’t mind if the signer is dead just as long as somebody will guide the hand.

Many people are asking who is there to do anything at County Hall if everybody is out collecting signatures. The anser is that they are using ill-briefed outside agency staff to supplement the ‘volunteers’ from within their own blockhouse on the river.

It is bad luck for the county that this blitz - no doubt prescribed by their PR company at enormous expense to the taxpayer - comes just as it is announced that Bedford is one of the seven top district councils out of 238 in giving the taxpayer value for money while the county is still languishing at the bottom of shire counties.

Not only that, its education department is eleventh out of eleven comparable authorities at Key Stage 4 (GCSE level).

So appalling is the county’s record that it doesn’t matter how many signatures it cons out of people with half-truths and downright lies, those in the know, including the ministers and mandarins of Whitehall, will be aware that allowing the county to run anything more complex than a Mister Whippy ice-cream van is a recipe for disaster.

It will be fascinating to discover how much the county has spent on lawyers, for the judicial review, PR and advertising in this past year. I suspect the figure will be a scandal.

Remember what Abraham Lincoln said? You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

The county council has now discovered the truth of this dictum. The Audit Commission has just published its reports on value for money for district and county councils.

Bedford has scored equal TOP place, sharing it with six other councils among the nation’s 238 district councils. Let’s repeat that: Bedford is equal best in giving its taxpayers value for money.

And the county council? Its position has not improved since last year and is equal BOTTOM of the shire counties.

So much for its claim to be fastest improving etc. etc. So much also for its claim that only it can deliver the benefits in tax cuts and improved services which will flow from unitary government.

Add to that last week’s revelation that in education it is 11th out of 11 education authorities at key stage four - when pupils take their GCSEs - and it becomes ever more evident that you would be mad to trust the county council as the unitary authority for Bedfordshire.

THE county council’s expensive PR consultants - the people who gave you ‘We love Bedfordshire’ - have come up with a new wheeze.

SoS.

No, not save us, we’re sinking, but Save Our Services. It is asking people to sign a petition to save the top brass of the county council from the hard-nosed competence of a unitary borough.

So precisely what would the signers get for their signature? According to the county they would get better education. The problem is with the county’s position against its comparator group of councils for Key Stage Four, and that stage is very Key indeed, because it is GCSE ‘O’-Level year.

The county has come eleventh. And how many councils in its comparator group? Let’s count them: nine, ten, eleven, er that’s it. In other words, it has come bottom of its comparator group.

No doubt it will claim that it is in the toughest group, but I am prepared to bet that if checked against all the education authorites it would be near the bottom of the class.

That SoS is beginning to send out a different message. ‘Save our Salaries’, perhaps.

We have had the pleasure of the Rev Cllr Charles Royden on the council for some months now and have been wondering what sort of councillor he was going to be. Would he become a good shepherd, leading his bleating flock to sunlit pastures (before taking them to the slaughterhouse to have their throats cut - I’ve never understood the attraction of the good shepherd metaphor)?

Or would the Lib Dem be a latterday John Bunyan, drawing passionate word pictures of a Lib-Dem Jerusalem to come?

Or would he talk rubbish?

We now have the answer. It’s the latter.

At January 22 meeting of the boroughcouncil he drew attention to bad pavements in Brickhill. Fair enough. It’s a problem everywhere in the borough. The county council spends less on its street responsibilities in Bedford than it does in mid and south Beds. The borough makes up some of the shortfall, but when it gets less than a tenth of the council tax it cannot make up for all the county’s neglect, nor should it.

This is one of the many reasons we want out from under the county council.

Cllr Rev Royden made a frothing speech about how the borough should make up for the county’s deficiencies. He also made some reference to ‘closed doors’ which completely passed me by, but anyway the county will love him.

The one thing the county has proved good at over the years is offloading its responsibilities to the borough. For example, running the Bedford Museum and Cecil Higgins Art Gallery should be a county responsibility and would only take a penny or so of its council tax. But by some sleight of hand its managed to pass that buck to the borough where it consumes ten per cent of ours.

And Royden wants more of this. The county’s going to love him: he’ll get a big wet kiss from Madeline Russell and no doubt a manly hug from the county’s transport portfolio holder Tom Wootton.

That’ll teach him.

Detailed thinking on the £200 million Town Centre West regeneration project is beginning to swing into focus despite the turbulence on the international finance markets and the consequential hit on retailing.

Developers have to keep their nerve and be prepared to look fove years ahead. At times like these they have to ask what the world will look like in five years time when, one hopes, the economy will be on its upswing. When it’s at its peak the trick is to guess when the downswing will start. Not a job for the faint-hearted.

My colleagues and I charged with regeneration of the town centre look to public art to play its part, but how and what to choose when art is so much is in the eye of the beholder?

In recent weeks we have been in a two-stage process of to select a piece of art to act as a focus for the new Bedford. The first stage was to whittle down an entry of dozens of artists to a shortlist of six. We did this by viewing past work and saying ‘Yes, No or Maybe’. It really was difficult, in some ways more difficult than the shortlisting of the schemes for Castle Lane because at least they were drawn up specifically for the site. We had to choose our artist on the basis of work done elsewhere.

These competitions always have an adviser who has a very difficult job. He - in both our competitions it was a he - has to steer the selection without appearing to do so. With a bunch of politicians it’s like herding cats.

In the art competition, there was a clear majority for two large quarter heads which will stare across at each other as if having a conversation. Two other proposals had one vote each.

The brief was to connect the artwork with Bedford, which most of the sculptors tried to represent either by a flowing water motif or a reference to lace. Examining the entries, I came to the conclusion that it was a pointless exercise. I don’t suppose one person in a thousand would spontaneously would identify the references with Bedford, with the exception of the one based on the R101*. Everybody liked it but nobody voted for its because it wasn’t a ‘gateway’ but it could be used elsewhere, perhaps at the refurbished museum when that happens.

The chosen piece will have references to lace, and also to the mint which once stood in Silver Street, hence the name.

All the shortlisted entries will be shown at the town centre exhibition in April. Do go and look. You may not (make that probably won’t) agree with our selection but I am sure it will provide a talking and letter-writing point for weeks afterwards.

And that’s apart from all the mumpers who’ll grunt: “What a waste of money”.

* This is not the same as the street art proposals which aroused considerable comment in December.

HOW will the financial turbulance on the world markets affect Bedford? As there are as many views as there are financial pundits, my guess is likely to be as good as yours.

Of the various projects on the go, Castle Lane (Castle Quays) will probably not be affected. Almost all the residential is let and so are many of the commercial units. Provided there are no drop-outs, the success of Castle Quays should maintain confidence in Riverside Square where work is due to start in a few months.

The Town Centre West development by St Modwen is another matter. It is an expensive development and St Modwen’s abacus will be going full tilt to keep a check on its viability. Crucial is ther search for anchor tenants. Some of the smaller commercial sites have already been snapped up but it is the food store and the department store which are fundamental to the scheme. There will be some nail-biting and it depends on what happens in the retail sector over the next few months.

We can thank our lucky stars that persuading the government to advance finance the Western Bypass (A428 to A421 stretch) worked. Originally the developers were to build it when they had built and sold seven hundred or so homes. With the housing market looking weak that could easily have meant that a start would have been put back to 2012 or beyond.

The question now is what it will mean for the crucial stretch from the A428 to the A6. I intend once again to seek up front funding and it will be necessary if we are to get the full benefit from the bypass.

The situation with Nirah is more optimistic. Now that the government has decided not to call in the outline planning permission the company can drive on with raising the cash. As the money is most likely to come from various foreign capital funds it shouldn’t depend too much on short term financial turbulence.

We have to sit tight and cross our fingers that all these vital developments stay on course.

Our Christmas/ New Year holidays were a two capital affair. Christmas was spent with the family in London; New Year in Rome where we had use of a flat in the historic centre.

I used to be a grumpy young man at Christmas. I hated the present buying; not the giving - few people accuse me of being mean - but the grim slog through the shops with a list of people to buy for and not an idea in my head what to get them. It was worse with the kids, of course. I have never forgotten the advice of a shop assistant at Debenhams when they were two and four years old respectively. ‘At that age they would be happy with a couple of large cartons they can crawl in and out of.’ I am sure she was right, but you just can’t do it, can you?

Now they are adults they usually have a clear idea of what they want and I find that willingness to write out a cheque covers most of them. So now I am a less grumpy old man.

And so to our flat in Rome. Its position meant we were hardly off our feet during the five full days we spent there. The city was packed with tourists. Apparently it gets 24 million visitors a year, five times its actual population.

On seeing the queues for the Vatican and Sistine Chapel we gave them a miss. I had seen them before, but in any case I don’t believe you can really look at great works of art if you are crammed together like a football crowd.

We met Bedford MP Patrick Hall and his Italian wife Claudia and I offered him a newspaper from England in case he hadn’t seen one - he had already been several days in Rome. He declined saying he never looked at newspapers, television news nor the internet while on holiday.

‘Don’t you want to read up on Benazir Bhutto?’ I asked. ‘What about Benazir Bhutto?’ he said. He did not know she had been assassinated a couple of days earlier. I get withdrawal symptoms if I go more than a few days without newspapers.

New Year’s eve was spent in a restaurant high above Rome with fantastic views over the city and the worst food I have ever eaten in an Italian restaurant. When midnight came the city blazed with fireworks which almost made the £120 a head worthwhile. But maybe not quite. Every time one got up to dance the waiters cleared the plates whether or not they were empty. I had three plates of dessert and never got more than a mouthful or two from any of them. Which was a pity because the desserts were a good deal better than what had gone before.

So that was the holiday that was. Back to the battle for Bedford’s future.

So, it’s back to the blogface after Christmas and New year which should please reader Eileen Boyce as she has been missing me.

Not that there is much to blog about at that season of the year. By and large the local political world shuts down and builds up its energy levels for the next couple of months during which the budget is prepared. Meeting follows meeting. All the political parties jockey for position and headlines.

As soon as I got back today I was into meetings, one about the budget, one about the town centre west redevelopment, one about the auditors visit and another about best value - the test by which we are judged. As Bedford got the top score of four for value for money we don’t have too much to worry about - except how to keep it up.

The budget looks exceptionally difficult this year. As usual the Government has capped it at 4.9 per cent and at this juncture we look as though we will just scrape in.

To those of you who say that this is still above the official rate of inflation I point out that the inflation rate is an average, which means that some things will be higher, and others lower. If nothing was ever higher than the rate it would keep declining, which is a nice thought but impractical.

Last year we scraped in below the rate of inflation but there is always a contest between trying to keep council tax down and maintaining the services people have come to expect.

And for the third time in my five budgets, the biggest problem is going to be concessionary fares.

The Government is very good at making eye-catching announcements - like pensioners and the disabled will have free bus travel anywhere in England - without pointing out how it is to be paid for. What the Government does is announce a global grant including a sum for concessionary fares that will be shared by the local authorities. If that doesn’t meet the cost the local authority will have to find the balance.

Enter the bus companies. They say how much they will charge for providing this service. Last year Bedford and Stagecoach - the biggest bus provider - came fairly easily to an agreement which gave our concessiuonary passholders one the best schemes in the region. This year Stagecoach says it wants an extra £850,000 a year, equivalent to 11 per cent on council tax.

Remember what I said earlier about the Government capping increases at 4.9 per cent? And that’s to cover ALL the services the council provides. Clearly there will have to be hard negotiations. Equally clearly, if Stagecoach does not modify its stance some discretionary services will have to go. At the moment our concessionary bus pass scheme is considerably better than the Government pays for. I don’t know if that can continue.

Stagecoach plays hard ball. We will have to do likewise.