Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

Sorry to have been missing from the action for so long, but I have just come back for a brief break in Paris - very enjoyable but phew! prices have really rocketed since the last time I was there. Part of it is obviously the fact that the Euro is riding high, but even allowing for that prices in restaurants set us back on our heels. And I used to warn visitors from abroad that London prices were high…

Enough of that. In one of the entries below headed ‘Cut and dried at last’, or something like that, I commented on the furore over the salaries we are paying top officers. I don’t propose to add to that here except to point out the tyranny of the ‘market’. If officers see their contempraries earning more than them, they want the same even if they don’t need the money. It’s exactly the same process as happens in private industry with directors and CEOs leapfrogging themselves without any relevance to their comparative competence.

Some time ago I read a quote from the CEO of a public company in which he said (among other things) ‘If I see old Joe from a comparable company getting a million a year, then I want at least that or I feel undervalued.’

And, of course, if the company makes a duff choice he has to be receive a ludicrous pay-off plus gold-plated pension arrangements. In local government we haven’t reached that stage yet.

I must point out that the above does not apply to elected members, including elected mayors, because the only ‘market’ for their services is local.

Nevertheless, expect to see an increase in local members allowances under the new unitary regime. Bedford has always been one of the lowest payers for councillors, but now there will be fewer councillors (halved from 74 to 37) so they will have to take on more work, especially in the transition period when we will all be working flat out. I assume the salary of the mayor will go up because Bedford’s is the lowest of all 12 elected mayors (not including the London mayor). I don’t expect your sympathy, nor do I seek it, but with increased responsibility should come increased salary.

So even the lady - by which I mean Madeline Russell - has finally conceded, allowing Bedfordshire on Sunday to run the headline: ‘County Council RIP’

Astonishingly, Madelin was still saying that legal advice was that the county had good grounds to appeal, even after being roundly rejected by the judicial review judge.

At first she was so confident of victory that she persuaded all the districts to sign a letter drafted by the county, agreeing not to challenge the first ministerial decision, way back last summer. When Madeline found she was wrong, that one went out of the window in days.

Then she was confident that the Government would choose the county option after all. Wrong again. Then she believed she would be rescued by the judicial review. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But does she really intend to make the new system work, or is she doing what a will-making solicitor of my acquaintance called ‘trying to control one’s children from beyond the grave’?
We are still hearing that county officers are being instructed to give us any information we ask for but not to volunteer anything. If so that is utterly disgraceful but, sadly, no more than we have come to expect from County Hall.

Thanks to the county council we are eight months behind schedule and have just a year to get the new unitary up-and-running. We will not allow anything to stand in our way.

Nadine Dorries is back on her anti-Nirah hobbyhorse, I see. She is complaining of the county is considering adding £400,000 to its loan (on commericla terms).

In fact the county pledged £2million and todate has only passed over £1.2million and even that was like drawing teeth. THe £400,000 it may now commit still leaves £400,000 of what was pledged unpaid.

The sad thing is that if the county had adhered to its agreement, Nirah would have gone to the City before the credit crunch hit and there were several parties which had shown interest. However, there is also a lot of interest from the Gulf states where the present chairman of Nirah, Keith Edelman, is well known and trusted. It was he who, as chairman of Arsenal, got the Emirates stadium built on time and to budget with money from the Gulf.

I will really enjoy seeing Nadine scraping the egg off her face when - as I and tens of thousands of her voters hope - Nirah’s fund-raising is successful.

I am a bit late in writing about the presentation of knighthoods to four prominent members of the Bedfordshire Italian community on March 30. In the packed ballroom of the Park Inn, Italian Vice-Consul, Piero Veira installed mortgage broker Guy Moliterno, founder of the Autocrash car repair firm, Lorenzo Coladangelo, and market gardener Fillipo Genovese, with the knight’s insignia granted to them by the Italian president for their work in the community.

When I spoke I said that without these accolades Bedford would have had no knights since MP Trevor Skeet got his in the 1990s but I did not get my point across clearly enough. I was told by a number of people in the room that they were also Italian knights.

What I had meant to do was compare the lack of British knighthoods with these Italian honours.

It was an emotional occasion. The knight from Luton broke down in tears while saying how proud his parents would have been. Both died last year. Tears also came to the eyes of Mrs Moliterno as her husband received his award. I offered my handkerchief for her to dab them. On returning it she hoped that my wife would not draw any unfortunate conclusion about the traces of make-up.

I had to excuse myself from the rest of the party as Marlies was cooking my Sunday dinner, but it was a shame to have to leave the glorious spread. Anyway, she believed my story about the make-up. I think.

We have received messages of goodwill from many people since the county conceded defeat but none so warm as that from the education community.

In meeting after meeting, with heads individually or in groups, with school governors and teachers we have been told how welcome is our message that we are determined to drive up standards, that we intend to do so by working with schools and heads, and that our actions will be governed by pragmatism, not theoretical wheezes that look good on paper but don’t withstand the classroom test.