Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

Last night was the borough council’s annual meeting, usually an occasion when political rancour is forgotten for an hour or so of flowery compliments as a new Speaker (always the previous year’s deputy), and a new deputy (next year’s speaker designate) are chosen.

The Speaker for 2008/9 is Lib Dem Anita Gerrard; her deputy will be Tory Bob Harrison. For the past few years the roles have been rotated between the political groups. Before then the Independents used to be included but Pat Olney was the last. When I became Mayor the political parties decided to drop Independents from the rotation and have never said why. Perhaps they think an Independent Mayor and an Independent Speaker would be too much of what, from their point of view, is a bad thing.

I also said good bye to my deputy mayor of the past two years, Ian Clifton. Since I was elected in 2002 I have made a practice of appointing a deputy for two terms, first Apu Bagchi, then Shan Hunt, followed by Ian. I have appointed Tory leader Nicky Attenborough in his place. Assuming she keeps her seat when the whole council comes up for election as a unitary, she will also serve two years unless, of course, we decide we can’t stand the sight of each other.

Three of my four deputies will have been people who have opposed me as candidate for Mayor, Shan Hunt being the exception. It’s pure coincidence. The outgoing - in more senses than one - Speaker, Randolph Charles, was also an opponent. Standing for Mayor seems to be a good way of gaining office.

In his quiet and understated way, Ian has been an outstanding deputy. He feels the beat of the rural heart and is an infallible guide to the issues that concern them which is why I made him chairman of the rural affairs committee which I set up in my first term. One can’t necessarily give the parishes everything they want but at least one knows the issues. The rural area always believes it comes second best to the urban area despite the fact that I have allocated £1,250,000 for village improvements since I have been Mayor, but having Ian as their reprentative on my executive has, I hope, shown them they have a powerful voice on my executive.

Ian has alweays been willing to step in, often at short-notice, when I have had to duck out of an engagement, usually because of urgent council business. As I told the council last night, once there was a different reason.

Most requests for me to attend events come through my secretary, the formidable Ruth Lutt. On one occasion there was an email inviting me to a service of rededication of the mayoral mace of a Fenlands council. I pressed ‘reply’ and wrote: “I would rather have my teeth pulled without anaesthetic” and pressed ‘Send’. It was only then that I realised the invitation had come direct into my in-box, but it was too late to do anything other than send a grovelling apology.

There was silence for a few weeks then I received a plaintive little message saying it was not the sort of response they expected from a Mayor but if I changed my mind the invitation was still open. Ian offered to take my place, which I accepted with some relief. On his return he said his reception was polite but cool. But, he said, my estimate of the merits of the occasion was ‘about right’.

Good old Ian. I will still rely on him on rural matters even though he is no longer my deputy. Nicky, who is on my executive as portfolio holder for unitary issues, will no doubt perform an equal function of interpreting Kempston to the wider world.

Bedford’s elected members are among the lowest paid in the country, just as I am the lowest paid elected Mayor. There is a remuneration panel of non-councillors which makes recommendations of members allowances (the same as salaries but much more gentlemanly, don’t you think?) which have started low and resisted every attempt to increase them to a median level with like authorities. The county, whose functions we are shortly to take over, pays more than double what any of our members get.

One reason the pay remains low despite recommendations from the remuneration body is that the Lib Dems always raise a song and dance about any increase above inflation, which produces vicious spiral in that the longer it goes on the bigger the increase needed to bring pay to a median level.

What is ‘fair’ is, naturally, a matter of opinion but it is not for the remuneration panel to decide who is worth their money; that’s for the electorate. The remuneration panel should decide what is the right pay for members - including me - to carry out their responsibilities.

The panel was asked to recommend a fair level of pay for members of the ‘Implementation Committee’ charged with designing the services and machinery of government for the new unitary. According to MP Pat Hall in last week’s BoS this amounts to eight meeting between now and April 1 next year when the new unitary comes into being. That is nonsense, There may be only eight decision meetings but there will be an enormous number of advisory meetings, training sessions and other gatherings. It will be a mega job which is why the remunerastion panel recommended £10,000 for members and £12,000 for me as chairman.

The Lib-Dems did what they always do, taking a populist line and moving all members of the implementation committee be given £5,000, including me. The Tories fell in line.

I absented myself from the council meeting. Although I could have stayed and taken part, I took the view that the public would not expect me to stay and vote on my own allowances. Labour’s Dave Lewis and Colleen Atkins took the same view, the rest of the implementation committee declared their interest but stayed in and the Lib-Dem amendment was voted through.

Every remuneration panel recommendation since I became Mayor has been voted down and one wonders how long they will continue to do the job if this is the response. As few elected members believe they should be doing what can be an onerous job for nothing one may ask why reject the panel’s recommendations. There is a one word answer: Focus, the Lib Dem’s newsletter which they get out at the drop of a hat and which holds an unhealthy fascination for their opponents who read what is usually a pretty twisted picture of council activities with a mixture of rage and fear. I am not an admirer of its content but it’s a nifty political operation.

Having spent half-a-century in the news business, I tell them they should ignore Focus; that 99 per cent of what people read in newspapers, let alone political leaflets, is forgotten within 24 hours. Mind you, I am always careful to add, it is the other one per cent that kills you.

The puritanical Peter Chiswell, Independent from Castle, spoke against the proposed allowance, comparing it with the pensions of war widows and OAPs. That way madness lies. You can no more compare the pay of members with a job which requires considerable commitment with money give to widows and orphans. Their claims, however valid - and they are valid - are on a different basis. One could question, for instance, why a dustman, doing a dirty unpleasant job, should be paid so much less than the Prime Minister who sits in as nice office in a salubrious part of London supported by fawning civil servants, or even why the Prime Minister, carrying the cares of a nation on his shoulders, should be paid so much less than the chief executive of Suffolk County Council.

Or indeed I could ask why I, as Mayor of a highly regarded council of a 153,000 population borough which has fought a successful battle to become a unitary, should be paid £13,000 less than the Lib-Dem Mayor of second tier Watford, recently upgraded to Good but still below Bedford’s ‘excellent’ and with a population of only 80,000.

The fact that I am worst paid elected mayor grates because it is only human to think one should be paid as much as other people doing the same job. But until the last trump sounds and all wrongs shall be righted, that’s the way it will continue to be unless the political parties get sufficient steel in their spine to turn a blind eye to Focus.

The county council has grudgingly annd belatedly fulfilled part of its commitment to Nirah by loaning it another £400,000 (only another £400,000 to fulfill its commitment) but there were still some members gnashing their teeth against it. As I have to point out every time I write about Nirah, it’s not a gift, it’s a loan at commercial rates.

The BBC as usual presented the case for the prosecution, saying Nirah had not got complete planning permission. That was never a condition for the £2 million loan pledged by the county of which it has only delivered £1.2million. Nirah’s outline planning permission is dependent only on negotiations with a land developer on access. That negotiation is almost complete.

Lib Dem councillor Susan Gascszak was threatening to complain to the district auditor saying the loan might breach European rules, adding that if the project was any good it would be financed by business. I have never known a Lib-Dem who had much knowledge of business, and if Gascszak had been the exception she would have known that nobody would finance a unique project like Nirah until it had outline planning permission. The county’s attempt to renege on its commitments in 2006 delayed the project by nearly a year so by the time Nirah had its outline planning permission - albeit with a proviso - the credit crunch had struck forcing the project to seek funding overseas.

The ‘business would have support it if it was any good’ idea, backed by Gascszak and Mad Nad Dorries, is disproved by the Eden project. It cost £100 million to build, almost none of it coming from the business community. £70 million came from the public purse and the Millennium Fund and the rest from bank loans.

Eden now delivers between £80 million and £100 million - almost as much as its initial capital requirement - to the Cornish economy every year. If people like Gascszak and Dorries had had anything to do with it, it would never have happened. But they would be crowing that they had saved public money, no doubt.

Sometimes it’s a real struggle to be green.

We have lived in the same Victorian semi-detached for 28 years. We have also lived with a boiler which, while it has been reliable, is no longer among the most efficient.

We are planning to have it changed to seomthing greener and a couple of months ago I went to the Eco-homes exhibition at Earls Court to see what was on offer. I was interested in three different methods and gave my name, email address and phone number to each of them. They all promised to contact me. None has done so, not even after I phoned two of them and got another promise that they were interested and would be in touch as soon as somebody had returned from holiday. So I have given up. I will get a condensing boiler which will be more efficient than my present leviathan but not as efficient as the others were said to be.

Then a local heating engineer called at my home, sucked his teeth in the approved manner and expressed concern about the suitability of my microbore pipes which have been there as long as the boiler. They have only given trouble twice, once early on when a joint failed, and once when a carpet-layer drove a nail through one of the pipes.

I telephoned the technical trade body and asked whether there would be any problem with combining a condensing boiler with this type of pipe and was blithely told ‘none at all’. Its not the first time i have heard doubts expressed about about microbore pipes and it seems that it has taken on an assumed truth without anybody bothering to check it.

I am pleased to be able to report to you that gradually relations between us and the county council are thawing. There are signs of co-operation despite reports that officers were instructed to answer our questions but not to volunteer information.

Perhaps Andrea’s defection and the news that Madeline Russell will not be seeking election to the new Central Bedfordshire is having its effect, And about time too.

My Paris jaunt was eye-opening, not to mention wallet-opening.

It is some time since I was there apart from about half-an-hour on November 14, the opening of the St Pancras Eurostar terminal, and a brief stop on the way to Switzerland earlier in the year. In all my visits I have never been to the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre, the Pompidou Centre or the Musee d’Orsay. We - my wife and some friends - packed all four in during the week, plus the charming little museum of Montmartre.

Apart from this last, one can’t possibly speak of ’seeing’ these museums; they are just too vast and, in the case of Versailles, we neglected the precaution of buying an advance ticket so 90 minutes was spent in a queue. If the French want to show off their vaunted efficiency, having two ticket boxes open to deal with a 200 yard queue is not the way to do it.

Our first call was to the Pompidou; close up it has not worn that well with some of its famous inside-out structure showing the effect of the weather. We went to the top floor for the Louise Burgeoise exhibition - her constructions opened Tate Modern in MIllennium year. As ever, I liked her gigantic spiders. If we could afford one it would be great to site it above the new fountain in Church Square.

Most of the rest of her stuff was a waste of space, particularly some crude drawings of men and women in sexual congress. I have seen better on lavatory walls. She’s in her nineties so maybe she’s forgotten what sex is about.

The best show was that of the Impressionists and post-Impressionists in the Musee d’Orsay. Lots of famous and not so famous paintings by great artists and not so vast that you can’t get to see the best bits.

I walked past the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Tourists were 12 deep in front of it and I’ve seen the post card.

Restaurant prices in Paris have gone through the roof. The top end was always expensive, but now the medium level is also pricey and prix fixe menus seem to start at about £24. All menus say ’service compris’ but at one restaurant with a service charge of 15 per cent our waiter made no bones of the fact that he expected more. I thought it was just because we were English until I noticed other diners folding in 20 Euro notes as they paid their bills.

At another highly recommended restaurant they served up asparagus overcooked to a mash. It was rejected but came back a few minutes later with the spear that had been mashed taken away. It was rejected again and another starter chosen, but it was still listed on the bill (I refused to pay).

Our government is getting a hammering over price increases, but Paris is proof enough that the soaring cost of food is an international phenomenon. Never mind, there is no shortage of reasons for kicking the government.

Even the delicatessens were relatively expensive. In the food department of the Galleries Lafayette you could have any paté you liked as long as it was foie gras. One counter after another was stuffed like a Strasbourg goose with jars of the stuff, perhaps because there is a movement against it in other countries. In Chicago it is illegal and some British restaurants are not serving it for fear of ‘animal rights’ activists.

Against that transport is dirt cheap. We were staying in the outer suburbs say equal from London to Luton and bought a week’s ticket for about £20 which covered both the suburban trains and the Metro. We never once had to show our ticket on the suburban line. It reminded me of the days before privatisation when British Rail appeared to have given up any attempt enforce fares. I suspected at that time it was being softened up for privatisation and I am wondering if the same is about to happen in France. Or maybe it has happend but they haven’t got round to putting in the barriers yet.

It’s a long time since I blogged, and that has been partly because of lack of local politicaL drama, partly because I have had a week’s holiday in France since the last time. And, of course, last week’s electoral dramas put anything going on in Bedford into the pale.

Had it not beenn for the fact that we are now going to be a unitary, Bedford would have been in the thick of it. Not me, because I am in post to 2011, but a third of the council would have been up for election. Labour will be breathing a sigh of relief that the elections were cancelled; they would have had six members facing the electorate and with this year’s Tory steamroller, who knows how many would have kept their seats.

Even if all the sitting Labour members had lost their seats to Conservatives it would have remained a hung council and it is equally possible that the Lib-Dems might have inched nearer the Tories, so maybe Conservative group leader Nicky Attenborough is another one not too displeased at the elections being cancelled. It is a fact that both Labour and Conservatives would rather lose a seat to each other than to the Lib-Dems.

Speaking of dramas, I wonder if Ken Livingstone is regretting rejoining the Labour Party instead of staying indpendent? There is no doubt that the backing of a political party gives a candidate more resources; the problem is that you go up or down with it, and this year’s down was very deep.