Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

A body called The Chemistry Club has been trying to grab my attention for several monthe with invitations to attend one of their regular events.

As my knowledge of chemistry only extends to what you can do with a Bunsen burner and litmus paper I couldn’t see what was in it for them or me. Eventually an invititation coincided with when I expected to be in London for the evening and included a talk by Francis Maude who will lead the Tory campaign in the next election so I succumbed.

It was held at a restaurant/bar called Sartoria - in Savile Row, obviously enough - and I was among the first there. From the moment I walked through the door it was a slick operation although I still couldn’t see its purpose. My name was ticked off a list and entered into a computer and I was given an identifying badge. before being introduced to a nice young lady wearing a coloured plastic snood. She was to be my link person for the evening. The snood would allow me to identify her across a crowded room.

I had been asked to indicate a few people on the list of guests who I would like to talk to; surprisingly enough, a few of the guests had indicated they would like to speak to me. It would be the job of ‘Inge’ - not her real name - to bring us together.

I peeked over her should and saw she had a sheet of thumbnail photographs, one of them mine, on her clipboard. I fear I was a problem guest to Inge, few of our proposed mutual guests had arrived so I talked to her which, as it turned out, was more interesting than talking to the guests.

She was a university student doing this job in her spare time. She explained that all the guests were ‘researched’ to ensure a balance. Behind a screen I glimpsed a busy operation which appeared to be matching up photographs.

It was only when I had my first introduction - to someone who wasn’t acutally on my list - that I tumbled. Entrance for me was free but his firm - in IT - had paid £6,500 for him to attend ten parties.

In other words, the ‘chemistry’ was that I should have the money and the desire to be a potential customer. I explained to him that I had little or no interest in IT beyond word-processing and my blog and that in any case I did not hold the council’s IT budget, at which point he went off to look for somebody with whom he had better ‘chemistry’.

Poor Inge was having a tough time sorting me out with other guests. It was at least an hour before the first of the people on my list turned up - somebody on to 2012 Olympics organisation - and then we had little to say because he was involved with the London boroughs.

Before long I was bored. Having scoffed enough canapes to stave off hunger I decided I couldb’t be bothered to wait for the buffet or Francis Maude and escaped into the Mayfair night.

I can’t have given £650 worth and I doubt I will be invited back.

The one interesting conversation was with a high-up from Hertfordshire police who wanted to know if I was aware of the developing links between Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Essex constabularies and if so, what did I think of them?

I said I did know and I wasn’t keen. A combined force would be too big and I already felt that about the existing divisional structure. What I would like to see, I said, was a local police force for the borough with a separate regional force to deal with major crime, security and terror offences.

I instanced Bedford, Massachusetts, a town about the size of Biggleswade which had its own police force and fire brigade. Costs were kept down by group purchases with neighbouring towns but the people of the area had confidence in their own force.

This did not go down too well and he was soon diverted to speak to somebody else.

Today - a mere two days after this event - I read that a think tank called Reform is saying that the police forces of England and Wales were too big and cumbersome, that forces should be split up, made smaller and doubled in number. Scotland Yard should lead a national force dealing with serious crime, guns, drugs and people trafficking.

And, you know, I didn’t even see the person who must have been behind me taking notes.

We are near the end of the process of filling in the top jobs of the new unitary council. Phil Simpkins moves up from deputy chief executive to be Shaun Field’s replacement.

Whenn the post of chief exec was advertised there were more than 30 expressions of interest leading to 16 applications. This was long-listed to eight and shortlisted to five, all of whom were interviewed. Three of those were knocked out on day one of a two day process leaving Phil and one other.

Being the in-house candidate is a difficult role because there will always be the suspicion, perhaps unspoken, that the job is that person’s to lose. The insider knows the organisation well but might have made some enemies.

I have to say that Phil played a blinder, coherent and forceful in his vision for the authority; proud of what he had achieved in the past. The runner-up spoke well but Phil was on top form and he was the unanimous choice of the selectors.

Phil is presently finance director. His move up will leave a vacancy which will have to be advertised.

David Cameron’s latest wheeze for local government has me tearing my hair. He is suggesting that there should be a referendum for any proposed council tax over a certain point (which the Government would decide).

That is not ‘localism’ as is the current horrible buzzword. That’s capping by another name. Ask taxpayers whether they want to pay more and you know what answer you are going to get. No council would carry the cost of a referendum when the answer is obvious.

Or almost obvious. My second budget when I became mayor asked for taxpayer view on whether they would be prepared to accept a 15% tax increase in order to keep their bin collection weekly. There was a substantial majority in favour, but that was 15% on their district tax bill - in other words about £12 a year and although it was the highest response we have ever had on a council tax consultation, response was still less than five per cent.

Forcing a referendum on issues affecting them less directly would almost certainly have produced a different result, one saying ‘Not a penny more’.

Far from leading to local dynamism, Cameron’s would produce councils scared to make a move for fear of triggering a referendum. It would be even more difficult to run a progressive local authority than it is now.

Today borough group leaders and I embark on one of the most fateful and vital decisions we will have to make in the run-up to unitary. And one we never throught we would be making, the appointment of a new chief executive to replace Shaun Field.

Shaun has his enemies, although not many in the Town Hall, but his drive to make Bedford an excellent authority and win unitary status has been recognised by nearly everybody. But we are where we are, to use a phrase which has become a local government cliché.

Once his departure became known we received 30 calls for information packs relating to the job and 13 actually applied and today we sift those into the short list. There is a recognition that we won’t get another Shaun but we’ll need a very steady hand on the tiller in the first years of the new authority so it’s a heavy responsibility we bear. We need a serious person for serious times.

I can tell you one person who has not applied and that’s Andrea HIll, formerly chief executive of the county now in the same role in Suffolk. But then the salary we are offering would be pocket money to her.

The county council held one of its legacy events at the Corn Exchange at the weekend during which council leader Madeline Russell showed a previously well-hidden vein of humour by adapting the Lord High Executioner’s song ‘I have a little list’ from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado for the occasion.

It seems to be a favourite among Tories. Neighbouring Conservative MP and former cabinet ministet Peter Lilley achieved a degree of temporary fame by doing likewise at a party conferfence during the Thatcher era. His target then, I recall, was so-called social secuyrity scroungers.

Madeline’s was everybody who had used the county council roughly in recent years, so it was quite a long list. It included borough chief executive Shaun Field, of course. Also BoS reporter and cartoonist Garrick Alder, BoS editor Steve Lowe and BoS itself. All three could be said to be sideswipes at me as I was responsible for appointing Steve, recommending Garrick and I launched the paper itself. And I’m proud of it.

But there was a more direct swipe - at least everybody took it to be so - when she referred to lies in a blog. Now, a lie is a statement made knowing it to be untrue. While acknowledging fallibility I certainly have not done that, but I point out that the saintly Madeline is herself responsible for much of the bitterness of the campaign by making several statements which were certainly untrue.

One was by persuading all the contending parties to sign a letter agreeing that once the decision was made the loser or losers would abide by the decision and work to make the transition as smooth as possible.

When the decision was announced a few weeks later the county reneged on that letter, which it had drafted, and launched the judicial review which delayed the final decision for nearly a year during which it refused to co-operate with the borough or the authorities which made up Central Bedfordshire.

Madeline claimed if the county had won we would have done the same, I told her that I, at least, was not in the habit of signing documents only to renege on them if they became inconvenient. The truth was, that the county was so cock-sure it would win it tried to tie the hands of its opponents in advance.

The other was when she told her group I had admitted not knowing how we would achieve the savings we promised. In fact it was she who said it, not me and I wrote telling her not to put words in my mouth. After those two incidents all trust between us evaporated.

Still, I don’t mind being on her list of enemies. It’s quite an honourable place to be.

If anybody thought that in the final days of the county council it would show generosity to the borough, think again.

There are three bodies involved in gritting Bedfordshire roads: the Highways Authority does trunk roads like the M1 and A1; the county does through routes like the A6, A421, A428 and A603. The borough deals with minor roads in the urban area.

At the time of writing the borough is down to enough grit for one complete coverage needing about 40 tonnes. It has an order in from Ireland but it hasn’t arrived yet.

The county council has nearly 600 tonnes in store, enough for five days, another 600 tones on order with daily deliveries. So what could be more natural than the borough asking for a loan until its own order arrives?

Sorry, says the county. None available.

Perhaps it needs reminding that the borough’s taxpayers are also the county’s taxpayers.

Oh well. Only another seven weeks to go.

Rip van Winkle, having woken up in Bedford after a 50-year light snooze, knew immediately there was a financial crisis without even seeing a newspaper headline.

In fact he even knew what kind of crisis just by looking in the window of Waterstone’s bookshop in Silver Street. Holding a central spot was a book called The Great Crash about the slump of 1929 by the late John Kenneth Galbraith who died in 2006 at the age of 98.

Galbraith was an economist whose services to America stretched back to the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt’s programme to get the American economy going again, World War II as a ‘dollar-a-year man’ - the name given to people who worked for the Government throughout the war for nominal pay - and right into the Thatcher and Reagan era, thoroughly despising both of them as economic ignoramuses.

Mr Winkle wondered why a recent paperback edition of an old book by a dead economist should hold pride of place in a bookshop window and deduced that the economy must be back in the kack again. So he swallowed a Mogadon and went back to sleep hoping to wake up in better times.

IF you want a topical demonstration of the laws of supply and demand, take a look at salt.

Not the stuff you put on your breakfast egg but the industrial stuff gritter lorries use.

Ordinarily salt is economically inert. Demand is predictable and there is no shortage of the stuff. Before the cold snap it was available at £25 a tonne.

Have a guess at its present price. Give up? Well, I’ll tell you; it’s £100 a tonne. That’s because every council with responsibility for gritting roads can get enough of the stuff. It’s an amazing price swing, even steeper than when oil went through the roof last year.

Salt on the road saves lives, but what does that matter when demand means suppliers can get rid of all the salt they can find at a three hundred per cent mark-up?

You know what’s missing about this week’s snowfall? No Winter Wonderland headline, that’s what.

There was a time when you could rely on newspaper showing pictures of landscapes or towns covered in snow headlined ‘Winter Wonderland’.

It was a cliché on a par with a picture of the Queen at Trooping the Colour or the State Opening of Parliament wearing her crown under the headline ‘Happy and Glorious’. That one disappeared, presumably under the influence of anno domini and disappointment with her family as well as the passing of the age of deference. I suppose that in a modern country seizing-up because of an inch of snow you could use Winter Wonderland only with a sense of irony.

My wife was brought up near the Baltic after the war when people went about their business whatever the conditions and she yearns for snow every year. One of her gripes about Bedford is how rarely we get decent snow. Another even when we do it is here today and gone tomorrow, as indeed this snow has been. To her it’s not winter unless the snow blowers are out every day clearing even the tiniest country lanes.

I remember spending Christmas and New Year with her family - it must have been around 1988 - then driving 600 miles across a frozen Europe to catch the ferry at the Hook of Holland. On the last stretch it was impossible to listen to the radio because aerial wuldn’t function inside a two-inch column of ice. No wonder she jeers at reports of schools closing down, buses not running and people not going to work because of an inch or two of snow. I do, too.

In places where snow is expected people learn to deal with it. Tungsten studded tyres have been banned in Germany because they destroy the road surface but everybody has chains. Except me on that snowy drive across Europe. But I do know to let my tyres down so they are soft, practise cadence braking (a lost art when most cars have ABS), do nothing suddenly, whether accelerating, swerving or slowing. Slow hands, slow feet is the mantra I repeat to myself. That and anticipate, anticipate - but we should do that anyway.

The only really dodgy moment on that drive was when I slid down a hill of sheet ice, across a T-junction with a major road and into a providential farmyard, not more than a couple of miles out from her home. I had the kids in the car. More than 20 years later it still makes me go hot and cold to think of it.