Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

II have been spending a little time with the Sindaco (Mayor) of our Italian twin town of Rovigo. It has lots of similarities to Bedford.
For a start, it is quite an old town but in historic terms it bears the same relationship to the nearby city of Padua as we do to Cambridge. Padua has a famous university and many wonderful buildings; Rovigo also has a university but not so famous. It is a centre for music and has its own opera house (you can’t push the parallels too far). It’s a rugby town and has a rowing and canoe club.
Rovigo may have its opera house, but he and his colleague Giovanna were most impressed by our riverside gardens. In Rovigo, he said, developers would have seized it and built houses over it. I told him there would be a riot if anybody tried that here.
Just like Bedford Rovig has a hung council and the Sindaco has to do his best to keep several opposing factions happy at the same time.
Sindaco Fausto Merchiori, a former school headteacher, had never been to England before, let alone Bedford, but he quickly felt at home. His first official visit was to Goldington Road to see the Blues play Exeter. We gave him an exciting match even if it wasn’t crowned by victory, and when Bedford scored a try he was up on his feet, arm in the air in triumph.
He brought with him one of his cabinet colleagues Giovanna Pinede on what was also her first visit to Bedford although she has been in England several times..
I was pleased to discover that Fausto’s view of twinning was much the same as mine, that twinning is for people and businesses and professionals, not politicians although some exchange among them is inevitable. I said we limited our twinning to Rovigo and Bamberg, although there were towns in Poland, China and India which would have been happy to twin with us. Our taxpayers would look upon it as junketing at their expense.
Similarly Rovigo limits its twinning to Bedford and a German City and a village in the dirt poor African state of Burkina Faso to which the people of Rovigo are encouraged to give aid. Perhaps we might do something like that in Bedford.
Fausto and Giovanna were delightful and sincere people and we hope to arrange a business exchange next year.
And, my goodness, they do work hard. A working day starting at eight in the morning and ending after midnight appears to be not uncommon. I must say I wonder how necessary that is, During the unitary battle there were some long hours worked at Bedford Town Hall but if I had to work those hours regularly I would wonder what our council officers were doing.
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Listening to an analysis of the Bedford economy the other day confirmed a belief I have had for a long time that our experts are barking up the wrong tree when it comes to our skills need.
We saw graphs which showed that when it came to professional, technical and managerial skills we were ahead of the average in the south-east; where we were falling down was on skilled and semi-skilled blue-collar workers.
As even a moment’s thought should show, that is a statement of the glaringly obvious. It is why Bedford, despite having lost most of its industry since the end of WWII has a low unemployment rate. The professional, managerial and technical classes can get employment locally or they can get on the train to London or drive to Milton Keynes.
Bedford’s problem is that we have three of the most deprived wards in the south-east and a fourth on the cusp. It is the low and unskilled who lack marketable skills and ratchet up the unemployment rate in their wards. They are the people who become institutionally unemployed and because they lack skills, employers who need skilled manual workers look elsewhere.
Yet any discussion on educational needs tends to centre around providing more of the people who fill the commuter trains every day. It isn’t an either/or business. Those who can acquire the top educational qualifications should and will be catered for; it’s the other end which causes the problem. Since our manufacturing base melted away there is a limited amount of training which turns off their potential replacements.
And what happens to these low-skilled workers? If there is no work they move into benefits system, young women will tend to get pregnant at an early age; some of the young men, with more initiative or more desperation, will turn to drugs or other crime, and Bedford does have quite a high crime rate.
Fortunately we also have very good further-education at Bedford College which provide training in skills to those willing to learn but somehow we have to reach those in danger of becoming institutionally unemployed.
It has a knock-on effect on the economy in general. Homes in Bedford are cheaper than in the south-east - no bad thing in itself, of course - office and shop rents are also low and any attempt to jack them up produces a flight from our town centre as has recently been seen only too clearly. What we need is a good number of high-earning skilled manual workers earning good wages and money to spend, not just professional skilled and management classes, mortgaged to the hilt and spending what cash they do have on private education for their offspring.

Sometimes wonder how we at the Town Hall ever manage to get anything done given the propensity of Whitehall to put us through inspection hoops every couple of years.
Two CPA (Comprehensive Performance Assessment) inspections, which have given the borough to ‘excellent’ ratings, have taken place since I became Mayor in October 2002. Each one involved a huge amount of preparation lasting a year or more, a period when everything was subordinated to getting a good CPA score. Admittedly, the act of chasing high scores benefited our local residents so some good does come of them but the words ‘being inspected to death’ have become a local government cliché.
CPA has now been abandoned in favour of something call CAA. I don’t know what the initials stand for, something to do with ‘place shaping’ another of those sonorous Whitehall phrases which reveal no meaning, but although the Government told us it would be a less onerous inspection system, I’ll believe it when I see it.
Add that to the hoops we had to jump through to win unitary status and defending the result at a judicial review called by the county and I begin to wonder about the net value to our taxpayers.

We have appointed our chief education officer, and I am going to be very interested in seeing how things turn out because Graham Last seems to be a ball of fire.

We had nine applicants for the job, reduced to a shortlist of three of which Last came Last (I imagine the name Last gave teachers and fellow schoolboys lots of fun in his schooldays). He currently works for whatever the department of education and science is called these days (why DO they keep changing departmental names, it costs a fortune and sows confusion?).

When the interview was over there was no hesitation from the interviewers and none from the stakeholders panels. This was our boy - using the word ‘boy’ figuratively as he is about 60 and on first sight looked if bit like the cartoonist Low’s wartime hero Colonel Blimp. Nothing blimpish about Graham, though.

He is strongly in favour of going into a two tier system and there can be little doubt that this is the way we shall be going.

I asked him what his answer to complaints about lack of maths and English and foreign languages among school leavers. His reply was very interesting. He said that if easier courses were on offer - he instanced media studies to great laughter from my colleagues - it was not surprising that pupils jumped at them. His solution would be to try to convince them that the more difficult subjects would, in the end, be more valuable.

I had to point out to my colleagues that I personally have no time for media studies. In half-a-century in journalism I have known only one competent journalist come through the media studies route.

Asked which he saw as most important, GCSEs in the right subjects or ‘contextual added value’ - more government gobbledegook meaning that that children from deprived backgrounds doing moderately well might have achieved more than children from privileged backgrounds showing the same improvement.

He said: “No employer ever gave anybody a job because of contextual added value.” That’s my boy. Cut through the bullshit and get down to the nitti-gritty.

Two directors for the new Bedford unitary were appointed after two days of interviews on Monday and Tuesday.

Frank Toner, presently working for Slough Council, will be in charge of Adult Services, which means social services for adults. Why, I wonder, does a perfectly seviceable title like ‘Director of Social Services’ have to be changed to a phrase which could cover anything from pornography to cremation?

Mr Toner will have a ‘children’s services’ equivalent, Chris Hillyard which will include education as well as social services for children. Among Mr Hilyard’s objectives will be ‘a happy childhood’ for every child’. Amen to that, but I don’t believe councils can arrange happy childhoods. That may involve many things over which the council cannot control. The best they can offer is circumstances which give the majority of children the opportunity to have a happy childhood, It’s one of thoce vacuous Government slogan like “Every child matters”

And how can there be a happy childhood when round every corner somebody from health and safety lurks to stop them climbing trees, lighting fires in the woods or damming streams, indeed anything which might caused skinned knees or the occasional bruise.

Next week we will be taking another step towards completion of our top team when we appoint a chief education officer for which there is a large group of applicants.

The gypsies and travellers public meeting at the Harpur Suite was as well attended and vociferous as expected, but people were relatively good humoured and gave the gypsy and traveller representative, Cliff Codona, a reasonable hearing.

But there was no mistaking the determination of those present to make it clear that they had had enough. They were sick of travellers making mugs of the local authorities by exploiting to the full the laws which were put in place to look after their health and welfare.

All the old complaints were brought out: that they left a mess wherever they went; they made playgrounds and sports pitches a no-go area; they used woods as lavatories; they harboured criminals.

Both Patrick Hall, MP for Bedford and Kempston, and I made it clear that these strictures did not apply to all travellers; that some minimised the nuidance of their presence, cleaned up their site and bagged up their rubbish to be collected. Unfortunately the activities of the minority - if they were the minority - tarred all travellers with the same brush.

Patrick pressed his plans for emergency sites to be laid on; I pointed out the inconvenient truth that you couldn’t simply declare a site a temporary stopping place, it had to have planning permission. He suggested a blocked off road near Wells and Youg’s new distribution plant. I came in for criticism from one woman who said I was unChristian in saying that I didn’t think Wells and Youg would be too pleased at having a traveller’s encampment near a vast quantity of booze and would probably have to double security. Well, I’m not a Christian so that was water off a duck’s back, but as Patrick said, there’s no point in being in denial. The woman got slow hand-clapped.

The Government came in for criticism for refusing to amend its laws to provide a better balance for the settled community. I revealed that I was in the process of setting up a gyspsies and travellers section to be operational on unitary day April 1, 2009 asnd that we were actively looking for sites for a transit camp. But at even a sniff of a camp residents from miles away would be ready for a planning battle to stop it happening.

Chief Inspector Mark Everett explained why the police couldn’t use a part of the law on every illegal camp. There had to be a risk of violence or of seriously inconveniencing neighbours.

Feelings were certainly aired and there will be a drive to deal with some of the views expressed and I promised that it wouldn’t be worth travellers illegally camping in the borough unpacking in future.

This last week saw some welcome grasping of the nettle with regard to travellers. The police gave a group of travellers on Goldington Green 24 hours to move.

This bunch had been on the Green several times. Owner of the Lodge, Goldington, Owen Tollman, had complained about the mess they were making, their dogs and their children getting into his garden and generally making his and his wife’s life a misery. The police used a regulation known as section 61 to move them off.

One group went to a car park at Mowsbury Park. They too were given 24 hours to move and did so. The others got on to land at Longholme Way which is due to be hardened against incursions such as these. Some of the work had been done but the borough’s staff were waiting for bollards to arrive. The police said they could not use section 61 because they were not inconveniencing anyone and there were no houses nearby. My response was that they were inconveniencing anybody who wanted to walk a dog there.

Still, let’s be thankful that two groups were moved out. I asked th police how many traveller groups were illegally parked in the borough last week and was told six.

A meeting on the traveller problem is to be held at the Harpur Suite tomorrow (Thursday). I am expecting a large number of people to say ‘Enough is enough’ and I agree with them. Some travellers are reasonably civilised but there is a hardore who are little more than outlaws living off crime and putting two fingers up to those whose taxes continually have to pay to clear up the mess they create.