Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

I have reached a personal tipping point over Government interference in my affairs. I have just received a letter from the firm of solicitors which has had my business for more than 20 years telling me it is required to perform some electronic search to identify that my wife and I are who we say we are.

No doubt you, like me, are wearily used to the requirement to provide some form of photo ID and a utility bill for this purpose, but this latest letter mournfully informs me it will have to charge ‘£4 plus VAT for every search into an individual name plus £8 for a company name plus a charge for individual searches against all beneficial owners who hold a minimum of 25% shares in the company, a charge which regrettably we shall have to pass on to you.’

This is supposed to be in relation to money laundering regulations. That is clearly a smokescreen. The more likely purpose is to feed the income tax people’s insatiable desire for information about individuals. What other purpose can be served by demanding the name and details of anybody who has 25 per cent of any company?

Well, they and whatever Government department has introduced this can get stuffed. I can’t stop them doing searches and have nothing to hide but I’ll be damned before I pay for them.

I suspect that over my 20 year involvement with this law firm I must be responsible for earning it at least £100,000 in fees. Not only that, I am or have been a shareholder and/or director of several companies in which the recently-retired senior partner has also been a shareholder and member, all of which have been declared to the Inland Revenue on an annual basis. It knows who I am, where I live, my business and private affairs. They can positively ID me.

And to show how bloody stupid all this, one member of the firm blew his stack when he had to go through this rigmarole to confirm the identity of a particular client. Not surprising, as the client was his brother.

I urge everybody who receives such a demand to refuse to pay up. If law firms find they are having to do this for nothing they will soon let the Government know it is not on. After all, whichever party is in power, the biggest and most powerful group is always the lawyers.

Like most people in Britain I have been watching horrified the news that gas from Centrica - formerly British Gas - is going up 35 per cent and wondering if my memory is faulty over something that happened in the early years of the Thatcher Government which nobody else seems to remember.

My recollection is that she killed a scheme to build a gas pipeline from the North Sea oil platforms to the mainland because of its cost: £1bn. If that memory is right, natural gas has been flared off for a quarter century because there was no way of getting it on shore. I wonder what it would be worth at current prices; many billions I don’t doubt.

John Major can take part of the blame for carrying on with this disastrous policy and maybe Tony Blair although depletion of North Sea oil was well on the way by the time he was elected, but the primary blame lies with Thatcher.

I always did think that, for all her economics degree and housewifely ‘understanding’ of the value of money, she was penny wise, pound foolish. At the beginning of her reign we were a net exporter of manufactured goods; now we are overwhelmingly importers; we had sufficient military resources to take back islands ten thousand miles away, now we struggle to keep comparatively small forces in Iraq and Afghanistan (not that I believe we should be in Iraq; less sure about Afghanistan); we don’t have money to spare for reducing Britain’s crumbling infrastructure or its greenhouse gas obligations. It must have been known that North Sea oil wouldn’t last for ever but she and her successors squandered it with little to show and now we are at the mercy of foreign energy producers.

One day there will be a reassessment of her economic legacy and I suspect it will not be particularly kind.

MONDAY

This was a week, that was! After the activity over the river festival weekend a day off would have been welcome, but it was not to be.

The day should have started with a visit by Barbara Follett MP, Minister for the Eastern region and wife of prolific thriller writer Ken Follett. It is now a year since she first contacted me to say she would like to meet me and visit Bedford.

I had agreed with alacrity but then the county applied for its judicial review and Mrs Follett left a message saying that her visit had best wait until the legal action was over.

Once it was, I sent another invitation and a date was arranged for today. She called off because of some kerfuffle at the House (a poor reason for not visiting Bedford, I’d say). It is now a year since she first acceptedfthe meeting and it has still not taken place.

So I had a moderately relaxed day anyway, apart from an informal inquest on what went on at the festival and a few letters. And in the evening a treasury management meeting about how to invest the council’s money in these difficult days.

As usually happens, we found our in-house investors had beaten many of the professionals’ record. Well done, Barry Keyte.

TUESDAY

We discover that the chairwoman of Mid-Beds Council was turned back by our security on Saturday and we scurry around to find out why. It turns out that she and her husband, who is disabled, had tried to get through at the wrong point although we had special access for blue badge holders.

She was in her chains and they decided against trying to get through the crowds on foot so went home.

We discovered that no special pass had been applied for although one was offered, and the security man, whose English wasn’t very good, had followed the letter of his instructions. Although he might have showed a bit of initiative, he could hardly be blamed. All we could do was apologise.

An application for a £500 grant was received but failed to meet the criteria put in place to protect public money. Refused.

In the afternoon I attend a Service |mplementation Design Team (called ESDIT for short)for children’s services. This is a new form of torture in preparation for unitary government next year in which we take evidence as to how certain things have been done and decide whether they are to be done the same way or changed.

Fortunately, I am only present as an observer on this one and after an hour or so decide to slip away.

Next call is to the I-Kan Centre in Mill Street where I meet Mary Peters, widow of electrical goods dealer Michael R Peters, to look around rthe new centre designed to aid start-upo businesses. A suite will be named after Michael who was one of Bedford best-known and most active citizens. He died last year.
Mary is delighted with what she sees and says: ‘Michael will be so pleased. He is looking down at us you know’.
It has been a long, hot and busy day. I take my leave and go home to sit in the garden and enjoy the cool of the evening.

WEDNESDAY

My PA and I had lunch with two directors of Wells and Young and local PR person Jackie Manners. The directors were somewhat down beat, forecasting that a lot of pubs, even in town centres, would shut their doors in the next year or so.

Wells and Young, however, were in fine fettle, the biggest privately-owned brewery in the country and now Bedford’s biggest private sector employer.

I pushed to line which I have offered many times before that W&Y should be to Bedford what the Iveagh Trust – the Guinness family – is to Ireland. Ie a tremendous benefactor. In particular I was hoping to persuade the company to pass over the Saracen’s Head in St Paul’s Square North to the council to be converted into a foyer and restaurant/café for the Corn Exchange.

They seemed thoughtful. You never know.

In the evening to Chicksands for a celebration of the Intelligence Corps 60th anniversary with a display by the Minden Band which plays at a lot of these events round the county. Perhaps I will try and get them for the next river festival.

THURSDAY

I spent most of Thursday in London at a meeting organised by the Municipal Journal about ‘empowerment’ – the Whitehall buzzword of the moment. Communities and Local Government Secretary Hazel Blears was first on, talking to an audience of about 600 about ‘double devolution’ which means Whitehall handing power down to town halls (that’ll be the day) and town halls down to parish and other community groups. I have my concerns particularly around control of spending, but it is today’s big theme so we will have to see how it pans out.

Speaking of handing power down, Hazel wants to hand police powers to directly-elected mayors. Am I in favour? Yes, I am. Whitehall imposed policing targets have been disastrous. There needs to be democratic oversight of police at a lower level and directly-elected mayors seem a good a place to start. Ray Mallon, alias Robocop, directly-elected mayor of Middlesborough has shown what can be done. His first term targeted crime which fell substantially.

Here in Bedford, community safety portfolio holder Margaret Davey and I agitated, successfully in the end, for a town centre police squad. When we got it three years ago town centre crime fell by about 20%. It is up to the chief constable and her appointees to manage police operations but we politicians hear every day what concerns people most currently the belief that travellers are sticking two fingers up to the law and settled tax-paying residents.

I was the last speaker at a seminar which could only be reached by winding one’s way through the interminable cellars of the hotel where the conference was staged where an agog group of ten was waiting for me to pontificate about directly-elected mayors. As usual, even with audiences of this size, there is a mixture of the curious, those with an axe to grind and those with a genuine interest. One man wanted to know why so few referendums for directly-elected mayors succeeded.

I told him turkeys did not vote for Christmas and most council politicians wouldn’t vote for mayors because of the dilution of their powers. Mayoral campaigns were fraught with lies, damned lies and misinformation from opponents which made it difficult to get the message across.

Hazel Blears (and David Cameron likewise) is a strong supporter of the mayoral model. Perhaps I’ll write to her with a few suggestions about how to counter misinformation during mayoral campaigns.

THURSDAY EVENING

To the Centenary Hall, Kempston to meet waterways minister Jonathan Shaw, an event organised by Bedford and Kempston MP Patrick Hall, partly to get his support for the Bedford-Milton Keynes Canal, partly as a fund-raiser for that project.

Jane Wolfson, one of those who stuck with the project at a time when everybody was saying it was impossible, led a presentation which included a DVD featuring Inspector Morse star Kevin Whateley.

Let me confess that, while I always thought the canal was a brilliant idea, I was extremely sceptical that it could ever be funded, but over the past year or so that scepticism has been replaced by cautious belief, partly brought about by the secondment from the Department of Communities and Local Government of civil servant Richard Wood who has certainly injected some dynamism into the project.

Mr Shaw praised the scheme and the presentation, and the way in which the canal group has fought its way past difficulties. He said that sceptics could be told that he supported the scheme.

Nobody can ever tell how long a minister is going to hold his office, whether as a consequence of reshuffle or elections, that doesn’t mean an iron-cast pledge but it is certainly something and it will be even more if Richard Wood’s secondment, due to end in February, can be extended.

I added a little to the coffers of the project by buying a print of Odell Mill, a building I once wanted to buy. It will go on the office wall.

On Friday I had a series of meetings, about roads and traffic in the town centre; two or three tier schools when we become unitary next year – and whichever way it goes some parents and teachers are going to be upset; discussions on fund-raising for the refurbishment and development of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, the Bedford Museum – to become a Museum of Bedfordshire - and Bedford Art Gallery. The latter is not the same as the Cecil Higgins but we plan for it to be a centre for visiting exhibitions.

That was followed by an update on the proposed Willington Rowing Lake with the first stab at a detailed planning application due to be presented in three weeks time.

On this latter I had to make it clear that I have no planning powers, but it was interesting to chair the meeting with a lot of high-powered locals. It was suggested that there should be some real state-of-the-art, blue-skies thinking out of the box – choose your cliché – but the planner from Woods Hardwick said he had been advised against that because it would inevitably arouse opposition.

So much for the likes of Graham Wright and Tony Mackay, those apostles of modernism. As I said during the row over Riverside Square, it doesn’t matter what you choose to do, somebody’s going to be against it.

I told the meeting it needed to think seriously about keeping traffic down on the A603 and suggested a maglev railway (short for magnetic levitation, the sort of thing they have in Japan – but, one hopes, not like the one that crashed in Germany about a year ago). I hope the idea will be taken seriously because it could provide swift, silent access not only to the rowing lake but to the Eagles ground, Priory Business Park and the proposed Cardington Cross park and ride.

Because of the faulty PA (Public Address system, not Phil Lotan) and the regrettably unfaulty band, many people, including me, were unable to hear the tribute to Marlies and myself from our two daughters, Naomi and Antonia at Saturday’s reception. Those out of earshot could only guess the cause of the gales of laughter from those who could hear when a recognisable shot got home. As a result, I have been asked to include their speech in my blog. So here it is - uncensored.

ANTONIA

When Dad volunteered us for the task of making a speech, he said “say something nice”.

Five minutes later, after the stunned silence was over, we started to wonder what you could say about a couple who had managed to stay married for 40 years.

Dad has a fondly held theory: the more expensive the wedding, the shorter the marriage – so it shouldn’t be a surprise that, 40 years after getting hitched at Kensington registry office and celebrating with a meal in a Chinese restaurant – mum looking rather fetching in a home-made blue and white polka-dot minidress - they are still together.

Like all couples, they have had their arguments (many of them in the car when mum was trying navigate), but to us they always presented a united front: any difficult questions being met with ‘ask your father’ by mum and ‘ask your mother’ from dad. According to Mum, the closest they ever got to divorce was when she worked for Dad in the early days of BoS – a sentiment that many of the paper’s past editors will feel some sympathy with.

Even when she no longer worked for dad directly, mum maintained a vital supporting role in BoS, the business that has occupied much of the past 40 years and that feels to us like a third sibling. In the earlier days of the business, I recall that holidays were often spent prising him out of phone-boxes – because obviously, the paper would collapse if he couldn’t issue orders from Majorca. Not surprisingly, he was a fairly early owner of a mobile phone, generally to be found in the footwell of the car with a flat battery. Ah, not much has changed…

NAOMI

Mum got her own back on dad for being chained to the office even when he was on holiday by taking him to visit her family in Germany. Dad doesn’t speak German. Try, if you can, to imagine him virtually silent for days in a row. Difficult isn’t it? He took a succession of dogs for long walks – losing the dog on one memorable occasion. Those of you familiar with his ever-disappearing mobile phones won’t be surprised.

Mum hasn’t grasped mobile phones either, though I hope we have finally cured her of the habit of keeping her mobile phone in her handbag at all times – turned off, so the battery doesn’t run down. Computers too can be something of a mystery, give or take her addiction to Freecell, but give this woman a drill, a saw, a screwdriver or pretty much anything in B&Q and she knows exactly what she’s doing.

The house on The Embankment was bought from a couple in their sixties who had been living there with two parents: the amount of work that needed to be done was massive, and, as a young couple with a big mortgage, mum did most of it. One day I came home from school to find that she had spent the day ripping out ancient gas fires and had found a whole Victorian oven range behind one. I never asked – were you Corgi registered Mum?

Over the last few years, of course, BoS has left the family and Dad has been the elected mayor of Bedford. As he acknowledged when first elected, his decision to stand was not popular with Mum, who would have preferred to spend retirement going on long adventurous holidays rather than at official functions. Nevertheless, she has supported him – even to the extent of tolerating a second term - and I think it is a testament to their marriage that they have managed to steer their way through the last few years, carrying out roles that are often stressful and time-consuming – irrespective of your views on elected mayors and this one in particular.

They have stuck together through thick and thin – possibly fat and thin, in Dad’s case – and we hope that we’ll be here in 20 years’ time to toast their diamond wedding. In the meantime, we’ll have to make do with rubies.

To all our German friends & relatives wir wollten unserer Eltern auf ihre vierzig jaehrige ehe gratuliern, wir bedanken uns das sie so geduldich durch diese rede still gebleiben haben – es war nur eine ganz kurze zusammenfassung uber ihre leben zusamm – und jetzt – trinken wir

[Toast - to Frank and Marlies].

When I arrived in Beijing in 2001 it was not long after the announcement that the 2008 Olympic Games were to be held there.

A marathon was under way on the route from airport to hotel and sniffing the yellowish, sulphur-polluted air I remarked to my wife that the runners’ lungs would be shredded by the time they reached the finish line and I hoped they would have cleaned up their act by the Olympics.

If Beijing was bad - and it was - elsewhere it was even worse. On the road from Xian to see the terracotta warriors, the smog was so bad that at one point we came within half-a-mile of an immense coal-fired power station before it loomed out of the murk - mist being far too benign expression for the eye watering atmosphere.

I remember as a child in London the last great smog in the early fifties when you could quite literally not see a yard in front of you. In my charmless way I would wait in the street until footsteps came near before issuing an unearthly chuckle. If any of the people to whom I gave a heart attack are reading this, let me apologise now.

That great smog gave rise to the Clean Air Act which ended the great London Particulars, as the pea-soupers were known to the Victorians. An item on tonight’s news in which the Beijing atmosphere was tested and found wanting for six days out of seven shows that China has failed to meet the challenge.

Running through the China smog I experienced, if not quite as bad as a London Particular, must be the equivalent of smoking a pack of untipped Gauloises a day. To an athlete dreaming of Olympic glory maybe it’s worthwhile, but I wouldn’t run through it whatever the reward.

AFTER the carpet the booze up.

Bedfordshire County Council will be 120 next year and leader Madeline Russell says she thinks that calls for a party.

120 is an odd cause for celebration for a council. A century or century-and-a-half, possible. Even 125. But 120?

Still, it helps get rid of any spare change the county might have.

Don’t spill any red wine on that £2000 rug, will you Madeline?

IPSOS-Mori is a well-known polling company and Ben Page works for it. He’s quite a lad, is Ben. He was called upon to speak to a number of crusty old Tory worthies and at the end of a typically sharp and combative speech he said: “Have I annoyed some of you?” When a number of hands went up he said: “Good” and sat down.

A couple of years ago Ipsos-Mori was commissioned to see whether directly-elected mayors were better known in their authorities than council leaders. The answer was fairly stunning with about 17 per cent being aware of council leaders but recognition of directly-elected mayors hovering around 72 per cent with 80 per cent plus for the top ones.

Page told me that when people were asked to name their council leaders the results were even worse. Only about six per cent could do so. “And remember,” he said, “Four per cent of the population works for the local council”.

While I can imagine that some people working for the council don’t know who the leader is, it is still pretty startling. I asked how many people in mayoral authorities could name their mayor. He said confusion between elected mayors and ceremonial mayors chosen by councillors made it difficult to analyse and he couldn’t remember off the top of his head, but he thought it was about the same percentage drop from the higher base, in other words about 11 per cent.

That would mean that an average of 61 per cent of people in mayoral authorities could name their elected mayor.

Anti-mayor politicians claim a directly-elected mayor is less democratically accountable than a leader working with a cabinet. In my view, democracy depends on knowing who to kick out when you are dissatisfied and it seems that ten times as many people in mayoral authorities know who to kick compared to non-mayoral authorities.

And remember, corruption shuns the light.

David Cameron hit a few of the right buttons when addressing the Local Government Association conference at Bournemouth on Thursday, among them promising to lighten the burden of inspection which bedevils local government.

I do not say it doesn’t serve a purpose; while preparing for a Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) soon after I took office, problems were found in two departments and speedy action taken to put them right. So successful was it that one of them achieved the highest performance score among district councils and was made into an exemplar.

The trouble is the length of time it takes to prepare for a CPA. There have been two since I became mayor; those and the preparation for the unitary battle has meant that at least as much of my six years in office has been spent trying to please Whitehall as in the regeneration and development of the borough.

One comment by Cameron got a muted cheer: that he intended to abolish the Standards Board of England and Wales which, he said, had just become a forum for nitpicking and petty complaints.

I agree with that; ever since it was introduced a few years ago councillors have been making complaints about real or imagined slights by other councillors, most of which are rejected or not even investigated. One against me, for instance, was from the animal rights people that I had ignored an invitationn to attend one of their public meetings. But the number of silly complaints has been falling and I wonder how genuine complaints about serious matters will now be dealt with, for instance those against former councillor Tony Hare. All but one were dismissed but the complaint that was upheld resulted in him being suspended for six months.

Issues such as these cannot be dealt with by a local standards committee - it does exist - because there would be allegations of bias. The Ombudsman can only administer a reprimand. When a councillor does something really beyond the pale it needs an unbiased tribunal to deliver a punishment that really hurts.

If Cameron is going to abolish the Standards Board something else needs to be put in its place - in which case why abolish it?

I spent most of last week at the Local Government Association conference in Bournemouth, the biggest such event of the year. All the top government and opposition speakers attend, and in this case we had Boris Johnson - before he was hit over the head by his former Ray of sunshine - local government minister John Healey, his boss, Hazel Blears, secretary for Communities and Local Government, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, the latest leader of the Lib-Dems.

All of them were extolling the virtues of taking local government away from the cold, dead hands of Whitehall, to which it is tempting to ask of Cameron and Blears, why didn’t your party do it before?

The mantra was not just devolution from Whitehall, but devolution from the Town (or County) Hall. Decisions, they were saying, should be taken at the lowest possible level. A White Paper on this subject is due within a few days, so there is not much point in commenting without knowing the details.

••••••••••••••••••••

BoJo was as entertaining as one would expect. The problem with his speeches is that one is so entranced by his mannerisms, his apparent bumbling and his jokes that he could be declaring war on Monaco for all anyone would remember ten minutes later.

He referred many of the questions to his colleagues including his deputy Ray Lewis, obviously not realising that even as he was speaking The Guardian was busy cutting the ground from under Lewis’s feet.

••••••••••••••••••••

LIB-DEM leader Nick Clegg was rather a disappointing speaker although he may well have been the only one who really believes in the devolution revolution. He was also the only one of the main speakers who didn’t mention directly-elected mayors.

David Cameron, who put up a sparkling and confident performance, was in favour of them for city regions. When I asked where that left comparatively small councils like Bedford he said he thought we were of a size which would suit a directly-elected mayor and that he believed in letting authorities choose the system which supported them best. But he did not think mayors suited rural districts.

So it looks like the minority who would like to go back to the old system will have to wait awhile, especially as Hazel Blears - another good performance - also gave her support to the mayoral system.

Cllr Lynne Faulkner (Tory, Wilstead) has a high regard for her own intelligence, shared by few of those who know her. I suppose it was to be expected that when given the freedom of a blog she would put her foot in it. How? Let me count the ways.

She recently came back from an unofficial long-weekend in Wlocawek, our former twin town in Poland complaining that we lavish hospitality on Bamberg despite the fact that there are few Germans in Bedford while our Polish population has increased dramatically in recent years. So far, so ignorant. But she also connected the fact that Marlies, my wife, is German with our relationship with Bamberg.

It’s always dangerous letting people like Faulkner loose with a keyboard because they don’t think before they write. Take the last point first: Yes, my wife is German. She comes from the northernmost state in Germany - Schleswig-Holstein, which borders Denmark - while Bamberg is in Bavaria, Germany’s southernmost state. They are separated by about 1000 kilometres of German countryside. It’s a bit like accusing somebody from Southampton of favouring Inverness.

Our twinning with Bamberg predates my becoming Mayor of Bedford, and Marlies becoming Mayoress, by a quarter-of-a-century. Many thousands of people - children, dancers, sportspeople, teachers etc - have taken part in exchange events. In contrast, when we were twinned with Wlocawek there were hardly any takers for exchange activities other than councillors.

The purpose of twinning is to allow people of one culture to experience the lives of another. Bedford’s Poles don’t need to experience Polish culture, they know it already. The same applies to Bedford’s Italian community. I am sometimes asked why we don’t twin with southern Italy from where most of our Italian community hail; precisely because of that. So we exchange with Rovigo in the north.

I have previously pointed out that twinning is for the man, woman and child in the street, not just for councillors enjoying municipal hospitality. If the only people availing themselves of twinning are politicians it has failed; that’s why I ended our twinning links with Arezzo and Wlocawek.

Faulkner complains that I ignored a report on twinning from a committee on which she sits. It’s because the committee concluded its enquiries and made its report without bothering to ask me about my twinning policy which rendered it pointless.

Being accused of deliberate bias towards Bamberg because my wife is German is defamatory of both of us. Faulkner has now withdrawn the blog, although without publicly apologising. She should be more careful in future. Others might not be so forgiving of stupidity.