‘Paul’ is one of the county staff who regularly responds to my comments about the county unitary battle, usually in apoplectic terms.
He has outdone himself today with no fewer than five comments on several different items.
There’ll be no need for central heating in Paul’s home today. In fact somebody could do themselves and him a favour by pouring a bucket of ice water over him before he self-combusts.
As junior ministers go, I think Phil Woolas is a jolly good chap. He used to be the minister in charge of local government until he was switched when the Brown dynasty took over. If he had remained in post I am sure we would not have had this long drawn-out agony over unitary status.
Now he is talking commonsense again. He is suggesting that when we go into restaurants we ask for water from the tap rather than bottled water which will have been imported from afar and probably comes in plastic bottles made from hydro-carbons.
As a long-standing member of the ‘just water from the tap, please’ brigade, I applaud him. Bottlesd water in restaurants is a complete rip-off. The only excuse for buying bottled-water at any time is to have a convenenient bottle to top up from the tap when going on hikes or long drives.
I became a ‘from the tap, please; customer many years ago when my wife annd I were on holiday in France. We had dinner in a restaurant where there was water on the tables in bottles from a well-known company. After we had had eaten and were returning to the hotel, I saw a girl who had been waiting at table go to a public fountain and refill the bottles.
The restaurant was not being fraudulent because it had not charged us for water, but it had certainly given the impression that we were getting bottled water. Ever since I have asked for it from the tap except in countries with a reputation for bad water.
I see that all the bottled water suppliers are up in arms and coming up with fanciful figures of the number of jobs dependant on bottled water. Let them squeal. They’ve had it easy far too long. Drink it from the tap and save your money for wine.
I have taken a modest amount of trouble to disprove the claims of ‘No Petty Politics’ - the lates in the interminable list of pseudonyms county council apologists use to disguise their allegiance. You will find them as comments on the blog entited SoS - a petition for worse services.
I have before me a sheaf of statistics, none of them emanating from the Town Hall.
OVERALL SATISFACTION WITH THE COUNCIL - ALL COUNTY COUNCILS: Bedfordshire bottom with 43% satisfaction.
OVERALL SATISFACTION - SINGLE TIER AND COUNTY COUNCILS: Bedfordshire sixth from bottom.
OVERALL SATISFACTION - BEDFORD BOROUGH COMPARED WITH ALL COUNTY AND UNITARY COUNCILS: Bedford Borough eighth from top; county council third from bottom (this graph pits Bedford’s satisfaction ratings against those for unitaries and counties).
COUNTY COUNCIL CPA, DECEMBER 2007, LATEST FIGURES: Bedfordshire in bottom 40%.
BEDFORDSHIRE SCORES ON FINANCES AND VALUE FOR MONEY: Financial reporting, one point; financial management three points; financial standing three points; internal control two points; value for money two points (all out of four).
overall position, third from bottom which is admittedly an improvement on the county’s 2006 position which was absolute bottom.
Finally, a pie chart of the position of county councils in December 2007 shows that 60.1% of counties were four star, 27% were three star (including Bedfordshire) and 12 per cent were one star demonstrating again that Bedfordshire is in the bottom third.
The county council’s education record is no better. In its comparator group at key stage four (GCSE O-level) Bedfordshire was in eleventh place out of 11.
BEDFORD BOROUGH: One of the top five district councils as measured by the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) and joint top with five other district councils for value for money. There are 238 district councils in the country.
As for the county’s repeated claim to be the fastest improving council in the country, it is easy to claim because impossible to prove.
Close readers of Bedfordshire on Sunday’s borough council notebook will have taken note of the spat between Tory group leader Nicky Attenborough and Lib-Dem leader Michael Headley about the large number of missing Tories at the budget meeting. Was there a split in the Tory group? Headley wondered.
Nicky snapped back that there was a superbug going round.
Among the missing faces were Cllrs Andrew McConnell and Peter Hand. I am happy to reassure anybody concerned for their health as at about that time my wife met them in St Pancras Station. They said they were going to the champagne bar.
It seems that superbugs can be defeated by generous applications of fermented aerated grape juice. Bedford General Hospital please note.
For most of my working life the second question after I say what I do for a living is: ‘So what does that involve?’
It was difficult enough to answer when I was a journalist. How do you sum up a job in which the morning may be spent listening to a politician lying before interviewing an anguished mother about her missing daughter in the kind of house where the carpet sticks to your shoes and going on to a showbiz bash where you hoover up the canapes and champagne while deciding there’s no story?
You can call it ‘varied’ if you like, but it’s a weak word.
It is just as difficult for a directly-elected mayor. Take last week
On Monday Marlies the mayoress and I were having lunch at 30 St Mary Axe in the City, otherwise known as the Gherkin. There were fabulous views from the top restaurant only available to tenants and their guests.
As soon as lunch was over it was back to Bedford by train for an informal meeting of the executive where we discussed the budget and confirmed that we had the numbers to get it through. From there I went to the parlour to thank all those who made the 30th anniversary twinning celebrations a success.
On Tuesday we had a briefing with officers for the next day’s council meeting followed by a working lunch and an afternoon of interviews with museum consultants about how best to integrate a refurbished Cecil Higgins Art Gallery with a new Museum of Bedford. No conclusion was reached and we will ask them to come up with more ideas.
On Wednesday we had a meeting with the designers previously chosen for the Museum of Bedford to discuss some of their ideas which was followed by a briefing from Nirah.
It was also council budget day, the most important meeting of the year. The budget met with the approval of Labour, Conservatives and Independents. The Lib-Dems didn’t argue, just voted against. Unusually for me, I had written my speech because there were a number of points I wanted to be sure to get across.
A long cherished project of mine is to run some council vehicles on recycled cooking oil. On Thursday, after five years of being told it couldn’t be done, I met a firm which was doing just that. It collected used cooking oil from restaurants, canteens and takeaways, purified the vegetable oils and used it in its vehicles. One of the reasons always offered as to why we couldn’t do it was that it would invalidate the warranty on new vehicles. Apparently Cummings, the biggest make of diesel engines in Britain, guarantees its engines for use with all forms of biodiesel.
The sad thing is that when I first broached this we would have been ahead of the game. Now so many people are processing used cooking oil it is becoming a valuable commodity in its own right.
The next meeting was about twinning and the possibility of a travelling trade exhibition to go to Bamberg, Rovigo and some other towns. It will take a lot of organising and is unlikely to happen before 2009 at the earliest, but Bedford has some surprising commercial stories to tell.
That evening Marlies and I went back to London for a symphony by 20th century composer Messaien at the Royal Festival Hall. I had previously asked my musical mentor Michael Blackledge what to expect. He gave a dry chuckle and said I wouldn’t come out humming any tunes but I would hear some interesting sounds. He was right. The symphony, all 90 minutes of it, is played without a break but wasn’t as bad as I had feared. At the end a packed hall roared their approval so long I was afraid the orchestra would perform an encore, possibly a work by the recently late Karl Heinz Stockhausen in which case I would have no choice but to commit suicide. Fortunately the orchestra wanted its supper
Next day I had a discussion with a landscape architect about the need for green space in the Town Centre West redevelopment. I advised him to talk to the developer and architects at the next town centre exhibition in April.
On to Castle Quay to perform the topping out ceremony for the long-awaited development in Castle Lane.
On Saturday after a meeting about unitary government (Ho, hum) to Tooting Bec Lido where my elder daughter Naomi was one of the organisers of the World Cold Water Swimming Championships as well as one of the entrants. She won her heat - if that’s not the wrong word when the water is a chilly five degrees.
We hurtled back to Bedford to don evening dress for the annual Trinacria charity ball, held by Bedford’s Sicilian community. I had to draw the ticket for the top prize in the raffle - a new Fiat 500 worth £8,000. The winner was gobsmacked.
The week ended on Sunday when Marlies and I planted the millionth tree in the Marston Vale community forest after which I went home to watch the Italy England match (depressing - what goes on in the English dressing room at half time?) before settling down to write this blog.
I don’t say it’s like this all the time - I doubt if I would have survived five years as directly-elected mayor if it was - but over two or three weeks it would be a not untypical answer to the question with which I started this entry.
You will have read here and elsewhere that Bedford Borough is equal top out of 238 boroughs in giving value for money.
You may also have read that the county council is equal bottom of unitary councils for the same thing.
You will also have read that the borough council is one of the top five district councils with and ‘excellent’ grading under the Government’s Comprehensive Performance Assessment. The county council is in the bottom third.
The county council is eleventh out of eleven comparator councils in its education results at key stage four, which is when pupils take their GCSE 0-levels.
With these results, wouldn’t the county council’s petition gatherers be somewhat more honest if they explained that a signature for its ‘Save our Services/Salaries) petition is in fact a vote for WORSE services?
Curiouser and curiouser! Now the county is working the commuter trains to London, trying to get people to sign its SoS and there are even reports of them on the London underground.
The Save our Salaries petition asks whether people are in favour of one council - doesn’t mention the county, of course, but it will be presented as support for the county.
If they mentioned the county there might be a very different reaction from the public. If there is one thing that unites people from the three districts it is dislike for the incompetent and spendthrift county council.
Are you beginning to share my belief that there is an edge of hysteria in the actions of the county council; something not quite rational?
Of course it doesn’t want to disappear into the dustbin of history, no matter how well deserved but the way it is carrying on makes me think it has something it is desperate to hide, so much so that it is willing to spend unprecedented amounts of taxpayers’ money for that purpose.
Look at its SOS campaign - Save our Services, Stuff our Services, or Save our Salaries, whichever you prefer. It hires lots of people from agencies, pays them a few coppers above the minimum wage, puts them in specially designed jackets and shoves them out in the street, ill-briefed to get signatures. The other day no fewer than eight were seen in the town centre alone. More were despatched to other areas and others go anywhere they won’t be thrown out of, such as the hospital.
Members of the staff are ordered to get a minimum of 20 signatures from friends and families - it doesn’t matter if they don’t even live in the county.
They say mad things like the county council will save them £600 in council tax. That would be a 45 per cent reduction on Band D and is several times the borough’s entire proportion of the council tax.
They are instructed to rubbish media revelations of county incompetence by stating that I own one of the newspapers, which the leadership is perfectly-well aware is untrue.
They state that the borough’s chief executive has signed their petition which he, not suprisingly, denies outright.
And there are other examples of flat lies.
Then there is the fact that every letter, every email sent out by the county incorporates a plea for a signature. I suspect that in due course the Audit Commission will have something to say about such wanton abuse of taxpayers’ money.
I suspect there is some skeleton in the County Hall cupboard it fears we will discover when we take over. It’s the only think that makes sense of this mad frenzy.
I sat next to former England and Bath forward Gareth Chilcott the other day. It was at the local branch of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors first annual dinner at which he was the speaker.
He told me that England would hammer Wales in the forthcoming Six Nations game. he suspected by as many as 40 points.
I wonder if he knows the meaning of the word hubris.
His certainty cost me the pint I now owe to Bedford Welshman Nic Davies.
I often get emails about parking in Bedford, especially during this period of redevelopment, in which writers say they don’t like or are afraid of multi-storey car parks.
When remembering what they used to be like, one can have sympathy but in the past four years or so we have spent millions changing Lurke Street, Queen Street and River Street MS car-parks. These days, to quote John F Kennedy, the only thing to fear is fear itself.
Now they all have awards for their security, and in case that isn’t enough to reassure people, here is what a police inspector recently told me: that in the past year there have been only two thefts from and two thefts of cars in our multi-storeys and no crimes against the person.
Contrast that with a few years ago when cars were regularly torched and otherwise vandalised or stolen and it is an amazing turnaround. People have less to fear in the above multi-storey car parks than they have in surface car parks.
Allhallows has not been modernised because it is due to be demolished for the town centre redevelopment, but my message is that. Allhallows aside, one doesn’t need to be fearful of the multi-storeys which are now kept open late when there are events in the town centre.
When the town centre is complete there will be more parking available but it will still be multi-storey and high security.
I have mentioned elsewhere the black propaganda emanating from County Hall’s so-called ‘Save our Services’ campaign.
The following came unsolicited from a member of the public to my office email.
Dear Mr Branston
I am a strong supporter of your bid for unitary status and have been horrified to learn from a friend who works for Beds CC of the despicable and dishonest tactics being used by the County Council to get signatures for their SOS petition. He tells me that the council has asked each of its employees to get 20 signatures and that they have been asked to return them via their managers. He feels that there was a very clear implication in the request he received from his manager that if people did not fill their quota, a very dim view would be taken. This forced and phoney collection of support was bad enough, but then the staff were told that they could add anyone’s name to the list, any friends or relatives, even if they did not live in Bedfordshire and that these people did not actually have to sign anything to show that they did in fact agree! Basically, they were being invited to stick any old name down. The final straw has been that he has today told me that managers have been asked to cancel all their meeting to go out and get more signatures. Is this a good use of council tax payers’ money?
You may well be aware of the dirty tactics being used, but I thought that I should write just in case.
Regards
Angela Brown
This is just one of the many instances we are hearing of disgraceful practices. One which was passed on to me from a reliable source was that somebody working for the county council said while canvassing for signatures that if the county became the unitary authority they would save £600 on council tax.
On a Band D house £600 would be equivalent to a 45% reduction. The notion is so ridiculous that the cavasser must have been briefed with one eye on deniability if challenged. “£600? As if we would say anything so ridiculous”
Add that to the allegation that Bedford chief executive Shaun Field signed the county’s petition, putting in my mouth a statement by county leader Madeline Russell and the claim being made that Bedfordshire on Sunday is pro the borough’s bid because I own it (I don’t) and the message that the county will stoop to the gutter in this battle is inescapable.