Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

Now that we know the full cost of the county council’s new coat of arms carpet - £1875 + £328 VAT - perhaps the county will give us the important piece of information ie WHEN it was ordered.

If it was any time after the county could reasonably have been aware of the possibility it would be abolished whoever took the decision is culpable and should be called upon to pay for it. So exact date, please. Not simply ‘Before the final decision was announced in March’.

A new Government report by suggests that one way of deterring petty criminals is to make them wear clothing identifying them as such when they serve community service sentences.

I don’t know how much effect it would have on the miscreant, but it might have some benefit for young people on the verge of criminal behaviour. The singer Boy George had to wear identifiable clothing when he was sentenced to community service in New York a couple of years ago so perhaps he should be asked.

But the main thrust of this report is that there is too much concern for the criminal and not enough for the vistim. It’s a point I have been arguing for years. In the past 20 years or so criminal justice has been operating behind closed doors from the point at which criminal acts were committed right through to sentencing except in the most sensational cases.

The immediate reaction of law-abiding readers will probably be ‘Quite right’, but stay a minute. I said in the preceding paragraph that publicity needed to start with the crime committed which means we should go back to the old system of crimes being reported in the media.

Most victims would argue that this would mean unwanted publicity on top of the crime itself and police argue against such information being given out on the grounds of privacy and reducing fear of crime. They, of course, can always see a crime reported when it serves their purpose.

There are two major consequences. One is that not revealing criminal incidents adds to the fear of crime rather than reducing it. For instance, somebody gets mugged and possibly injured. The word gets round on the rumour mill, exaggerating at every telling, and eventually ends up in the public’s mind as several crimes not just one. I know cases where this has happened.

A second consequence is that it allows the police to hush up matters which should not be hushed-up. After this policy came in 20 years ago I forecast that it would not be long before police started concealing unnatural deaths. Sure enough, only weeks later the police tried to conceal the drugs overdose of the son of a prominent local businessman; later they tried to conceal a death in custody. There are other cases I know of but I hope the point is made.

In the rare cases when there is an arrest, the problem continues in the courts. Magistrates’ court cases used to be a mainstay of the local press. Now, because of reporting restrictions, and even more because cases are rarely disposed on in one day, very few court cases are reported.

The result is that there is very little shame in going to court. Every day I pass the entrance to the magistrates’ court in St Pauls Square. Usually there is a knot of young people loafing around, smoking, talking about their cases with no sign of embarrassment. The age at which young people’s names can be reported in a court case has gone up to 18 - it was 16 when I was a junior reporter - making it hardly worth having a reporter in court all day for cases where the accused cannot be identified..

Magistrates and their staff have stopped seeing the media as part of the judicial system. Some years ago a clerk of Bedford Magistrates Court grew frustrated at the number of people who refused to pay their fines and hit on the idea of asking Bedfordshire on Sunday to publicly identify them. The paper did, putting their names and, where possible, their pictures on the front page.

Within a week, most of those named had paid up and so had many who were not listed. You would think that the clerk would have got a pat on the back but not a bit of it. He got a reprimand from the magistrates committee and never did it again.

Publicising crimes, their perpetrators and the consequences is unpopular with the victims, the police and the magistrates, but failing to do so breaches the long-standing principle that ‘Justice must not only be done; it must be seen to be done’. The whole issue needs re-examination.

AN attempt by former borough councillor Tony Hare to sue my PA for slander has been thrown out by the High Court in London. Hare now faces cost of around £30,000.

Hare, a member of Elstow Parish Council, brought the actions against local PR company boss Jacquie Manners of Manners PR, and my PA Phil Lotan following an intemperate and abusive email by Nirah director Ronnie Murning two years ago which contained colourful comments about Hare’s private life. Hare sued Murning who settled out of court for £7,500.

Those winnings will be more than swallowed up by the costs of the court hearing on Wednesday when Manners and Lotan succeeded in getting claims against them struck out.

After the Murning email followed a comment in a private and confidential email by Ms Manners in which she said ‘Phil Lotan agrees with me that Nirah has only three enemies, Nadine Dorries (MP for Mid Beds), Hare and the animal rights lobby’.

Hare denied being an enemy of Nirah and said the email meant he was seeking to destroy Nirah and that he had been the subject of abuse as a result.

Lawyers for Manners and Lotan said the remarks were not capable of bearing a defamatory meeting and in Mr Lotan’s case that he could not recall ever having made them.

Hare presented his own case after Jonathan Price, for Ms Manners and Mr Lotan, said he needed to understand what allegations he was supposed to be answering.

Mr Justice Eady had to remind Hare several times to stick to the point but eventually allowed him to carry on presenting his entire case. Hare said he was an enthusiastic supporter of Nirah but was concerned about access to the scheme. He complained that he had been linked with animal rights terrorists.

Mr Price spoke only for a few minutes, pointing out that Ms Manners email had been sent to one person and marked private and confidential and she was not responsible for making it public.

He said that Hare had no proof that the words attributed to Mr Lotan were ever uttered.
After a last ditch attempt by Hare to settle the matter failed, Mr Justice Eady agreed with the points made by Mr Price and added a few others, indicating that the issues were minor and the ‘game was not worth the candle’.

He found for Ms Manners and Mr Lotan and ordered Mr Hare to pay £5,000 costs within 14 days and a further £3,000 by Mid-August. The rest of the costs, unofficially calculated as more than another £20,000, would be settled by a cost judge.

After the hearing Phil Lotan said: “We had been advised to apologise because the costs of resisting and losing would be very high but we both felt that the claim was utterly unfair and decided to fight it.”

Usually defendants are on the back foot during libel cases in the British courts and a relieved Ms Manners said: “I felt that we were being bullied into apologising and paying for something which I felt was not defamatory and I am glad the judge has agreed”.

Former Lib-Dem group leader Michael Headley appears to have been the victim of a double assassination.

First he lost the leadership he had held for nine years to party bruiser Dave Hodgson, then he failed to get picked as Parliamentary candidate despite having fought three elections under the banner of the shot duck, or whatever that symbol is supposed to be.

The Bedford Lib-Dem website breathes the usual mealy-mouthed phrases about what a great job he did as party leader but is clearly not telling the whole truth which is that a faction led by Hodgson and his wife Christine McHugh, twice failed mayoral candidate and chair of the group, have been manoeuvring against Headley’s leadership for some time and now appear to have got their way. The Lib-Dems are the second biggest group on the councikl and quite close to the Tories. The all-out council elections in 2009 will offer them the opportunity to become the biggest group although the council will still be hung.

If that happens Headley might be forgiven for feeling bitter that after nine years at the coal-face the cup of power is snatched away.

If that isn’t bad enough for poor old Headley the party decided it wanted a new candidate for the Bedford & Kempston seat and chose one Harry Vann.

As a house husband, Headley doesn’t have the joy of work to take away the sting of dispossession but he’ll have plenty of time for plotting revenge.

I have to say I have not been a fan of Housing Minister Caroline Flint. On my only previous meeting with her, in 2005, she struck me as oozing an ineffable sense of her own superiority.

Still, when she marched through a vocal crowd of Lidlington eco-town protesters, marshalled by Mid-Beds MP Nadine Dorries, I felt a bat’s squeak of admiration for her.

Flint had come to the Marston Vale Forest Centre on Monday to meet local politicians about the eco-town proposal. Representatives of Gallaghers and O & H, the two developers who each have their own scheme, were given plenty of time to outline their proposals. They gave a rosy picture of an area with sufficent transport infrastructure to carry schemes like theirs, a picture recognised by few of the people there. For instance, they spoke of the borough providing an energy to waste incinerator at Stewartby, a dual carriageway road leading to the west of the country (!), the M1 and the A1 and the jobs the eco-town would need to provide if it was not to be another commuter dormitory town.

When it came my turn to speak, I pointed out that the borough had be no means decided to support the energy-to-waste scheme and was examing alternatives of greater recycling, that there were hundreds of acres of brownfield land in the vicinity and no rush of industry to take it. I asked where this mysterious dual carriageway to the west was, and was told it was the A421 which is being dualled, but only to Junction 13. Hardly the West of England.

My concern was that unless there was some certainty of jobs the Marston eco-town would indeed prove to be just another commuter town.

I also pursued the question of whether the homes, between 7,000 and 17,500 of them according to different estimates, would be offset against the Government’s existing targets of something like 50,000 new homes in Central Bedfordshire and the borough. I can’t say I got the positive answer that I would have liked. Flint indicated that it was very likely or most likely that it would, but when I pressed, a civil servant at her side said that at current housing targets it would, but housing need was ever increasing and in five years the target might have moved on. So that’s a No then.

Although the proposed eco-town is mostly in Mid Beds, I pointed out that the ‘island’ between the M1 and A1 was short on infrastructure and that Bedford’s Western bypass, favourably mentioned in support of the proposals, would be of limited use until the link between the A428 and the A6 was built.

Among other points made was that any such development should be planned as a whole, and not piecemeal. Nadine pointed out that local people did not want the eco-town, others that there was already planning pressure on the area and a carefully planned development would be the best way of dealing with it.

There were many nods of agreement, but cynical old me thinks that short-termism is so rife that whatever good intentions the scheme starts out with, the end result might be very different. The Government has said it wants the scheme to be self-financing from the beginning, but if it really wanted front-end planning and infrastructure - including schools and medical facilities - it ought to provide the seed money but I doubt it will.

Caroline Flint then went off to speak to spokespeople from the protesters. I wonder what she told them.

‘Robert’ in his comment to my previous blog on the subject of the County Council’s magic carpet, has hit the nail on the head.

Not only has this specially woven but soon-to-be-redundant carpet, which includes the county cuncil’s coat-of-arms and motto, turned out to cost more than twice what the county first admitted to, it appears it was ordered AFTER the Government said it was ‘minded’ to declare two unitaries in Bedfordshire to replace the county.

The county council, in its weaselly reply to the question of when it was ordered, says only that it was ordered before the final decision in March this year, ie more than three months ago. But the Government’s ‘minded to’ decision was given a year ago. Even if the county had been confident it would overturn that decision, it was still reckless to undertake this expenditure at a time when the odds on its abolition had increased significantly.

Next we need to know who ordered it. That person ought to be presented with the bill.

As for the doubling of the price in a week, it only confirms what I have said previously, you can’t trust a word the county council says. If £1,675 was the cost - about which I reserve judgement until the invoice is made public - what was the point of halving it? Did somebody at County Hall really believe that that would make a difference to people’s judgement? It indicates that deception has become a way-of-life in the Cauldwell Street bunker.

The amount of money involved may be miniscule but it betrays the county’s arrogant contempt for the taxpayer. As Robert says, we can only wait fearfully to see how many more skeletons are rattling around County Hall.

Work on the transition to unitary status is in full swing and members of the borough council are staggered by the amount of work that has to be done to get us ready for the transition in less than ten months time. The amount of damage the county did by refusing to talk to the borough duringe the unitary battle is evident.

This no doubt pleases the county’s wreckers very much, but what does it say about their commitment to the people of Bedfordshire that they were prepared to do this.

I was at a meeting of leaders of the new authorities last week where they were incredulous when I told them that the county was refusing to give us details of their staff, their salaries and the jobs they were doing until just two weeks before we and Central Bedfordshire take over. The county quotes the Data Protection Act, the first line of defence of secretive bureaucrats, but that is nonsense or it would be just as illegal two weeks before April 1, 2009. In any case, we have talked to the Data Protection Commissioner’s office and they are adamant that there is no reason why we should not be given the information.

The county is also refusing to give information on contracts with outside suppliers and much financial information is being withheld. We are beginning to suspect that when we do finally get that information there will be a financial black hole of which the real cost of that carpet will be no more than a symbol.

The one bright spot is that the Department of Communities and Local Government has come to realise that every word of what we have been telling them for months about the activities of the county council is true. Let’s hope that they decide to put a stop to it or, even better, send one of their people to County Hall to oversee the transition.

Have you seen the picture in Bedfordshire on Sunday of the new, specially-woven carpet for the debating chamber at County Hall? It is quite clearly a specially-designed deep pile number with the county’s logo and motto woven into it.

According to the county council it cost £800. Really? Only that for a 12ft by 12ft individually designed and woven carpet? I am surprised. My guess would be about ten times as much.

The more important question is when was it ordered? I don’t know how long it takes to design and weave a special carpet but I suspect that a less arrogant council would have had plenty of time to wait and see the result of the unitary process, and certainly enough time to cancel when the first decision was announced a year ago.

I hope the media will not let this one go. It may be a mere sprat in comparison with the whale of money the county spent during the unitary fight but it is, shall we say, a sympton of the leadership’s cast of mind. A Freedom of Interst request should be tabled forthwith..

Sorry there have been no blogs for a little while. My wife and I were on a round Britain cruise (in a rustbucket called Andrea - where have I heard that name before?).

As on-board internet access cost £1 per minute I decide that, as an economy measure, I would refrain from using it during my holiday.

I accept that some of you will think £1 per minute is a small price to pay for receiving my thoughts while others will argue that a penny a minute is too much. Whichever side you are on, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible (cue pictures of swans on the river and a potters wheel for those old enough to remember).